If Neil Kinnock Says You'll Lose, You'll Lose. But so what?

I see that Neil Kinnock now says that Jeremy Corbyn is certain to lose the next election. Well, if Neil says you���ll lose, you���ll lose. He's the expert.

Meanwhile, New Labour���s medium-sized beasts and not-very-grandees are writing openly about a new SDP-style split from Labour, following the path trodden by the Gang of Four back in the 1980s.

Which part of the word ���Doom��� don���t these people understand? As I wrote here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/01/whatever-happened-to-the-labour-party.html nearly six years ago, journalists have a very poor understanding of what happened to Labour in the 1980s, exemplified by the moronic belief that New Labour was a turn to ���the right���, when in fact it was the opposite. It was an embrace of the new world order, liberal in economics and social and cultural politics,  open borders, mass immigration, low wages, corporate greed, vast debts, rule by supranational bodies, wars against sovereignty, for ever and ever.

The same cluelessness pervades coverage of the Tory Party, in which David Cameron���s quite open espousal of virulent social radicalism, globalist warmongering, affinity with the EU���s aims and fanatical warmism is minimised, and his alleged ���Euroscepticism��� , traditionalism and patriotic conservatism (for which there is no evidence at all) repeatedly trumpeted.

It is in fact quite funny watching political journalists pinning the label ���Eurosceptic��� on anyone who happens to be passing ��� Philip Hammond, Theresa may, Michael Gove, . Do they do this to make an utterly dull job feel more interesting? None of these people has any intention of supporting a British exit from the European Union, or ever did.

Of course, as has been many times pointed out here, ���Eurosceptic��� doesn���t mean anything fixed anyway, and is just a term, applied to those who in opposition make critical noises about the EU, and in government do its loyal bidding.

But in any case, the 1980s Labour party split over the European issue (which led to the breakaway) is now an incomprehensible remnant of political archaeology, or even palaeontology.

Despite a handful of MPs who can see that EU membership prevents the adoption of any seriously socialist programme, the Labour Party now contains no significant opposition to the EU. We���re told that Jeremy Corbyn once opposed membership, though I can find no direct record of him ever having said so in person (rather than through membership of groups which adopted this position at one time) . But if so he has chosen to keep very quiet about it now. This, for him , is not like the nuclear issue, a matter of principle so important that he will damage himself and his party to maintain it.

Not that it matters. I suspect Mr Corbyn knows that only a colossal economic collapse, far worse than 2008 (and not wholly impossible) could lift him into office, and under circumstances where nobody could be anything but unpopular.  It would be like being Ramsay Macdonald. If he has any sense, he���d rather lose.

And yet he carries on, acting his hopeless part with a certain amount of quiet valour. He was lawfully and correctly elected to his post, quite against his own expectation as well as against anyone else���s. What else is he supposed to do, now he has won it?  He can���t really say he never wanted it in the first place. He is plainly not a stupid person, and even has a sense of humour, a reliable sign of a sense of proportion. His recent interview with the Independent on Sunday, in which he described his relationship with his cat, seemed to me to be crammed with dry humour, as did a recent confession that he was, in fact, once a geography teacher. He knows why people laugh at him, and I suspect he shares the joke.

In this he is very unlike the man he is often compared with, the unfortunate Iain Duncan Smith. IDS���s inability to grasp the absurdity of his position was painful, even tragic to behold. I remember once calling on him soon after he was elected,  and sinking into a mixture of utter despair and profound boredom within 90 seconds. He had no idea what was going on or what to do, or of the hopelessness of his position. Worse still was a ghastly encounter in his chilly, painfully brightly-lit Blackpool hotel suite, just before he was ousted, where he sat alone on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled because there was no point in staying. He still didn���t grasp just how doomed he was. And I just felt very, very sad and embarrassed.

Mr Corbyn, by contrast, is well aware that he has been dealt a ludicrous hand of cards towards the end of his political life. He must lead a Parliamentary party which loathes and despises him, while the actual members like and admire him. Despite all his unlovely policies on Ireland and the rest, Mr Corbyn rather creditably doesn���t return the loathing of his parliamentary colleagues, having been brought up by ethical socialists almost indistinguishable in their morals from nonconformist Christians of the old sort, peaceable, patient, declining to render evil in return for evil, avoiding rancour.

I do find this admirable, whatever else I think about him. He will carry the burden for as long as he has to. A putsch against him is by its nature very difficult, as he is constitutionally strong and his enemies are constitutionally feeble and stand for nothing coherent anyway. Their only major revolt was staged in favour of bombing Syria, which the government turned out not to want to do very much anyway.

Their only hope is some really bad local, Euro or by-election results, or a catastrophic Parliamentary performance.  These may not in fact arrive. As it is, Mr Corbyn���s decision  to use underarm bowling against David Cameron has been more effective than most are prepared to admit. David Cameron���s flashy First XI style always looked a lot better than it was, a lot of elegant strokes but not many runs and hardly any boundaries It only works against dud fast bowling.  Against Mr Corbyn���s slow, accurate straight underarm balls, trickling annoyingly along the ground towards him,  he can only play a dull straight bat, from which the balls dribble away again after meeting the wood with a muted thunk.

Sometimes people even notice that Mr Cameron isn���t actually answering the questions very well (he never has) and that his home crowd is cheering because they have been ordered to by the whips, not because he has said anything especially good. They may even notice that PMQs is actually rigged so heavily in favour of the Premier that surviving it one a week doesn���t really prove anything at all.

But Mr Corbyn���s constituency in the country is so small and weak, and so easily portrayed as unpatriotic and disastrous (because in some ways it is these things, though the government is too in its own way) that it cannot, in normal times, hope to win a general election.

But then, nor could the New Labour lot who chafe at his leadership. And they know that there���s nothing they can do, in policy or organisation or leadership terms, which will alter that. Their clothes, and their big donors, and their media friends,  have all been stolen from them by the Tories. Nor is there any reason to believe that they will ever be able to steal them back.  By adopting the pursuit of office at all costs and accepting that this meant pursuing a neo-liberal globalist agenda at home and abroad, Labour discovered the problem with having your wishes granted. There���s always a catch.  Remove principles from politics, and turn it into a pursuit of office for its own sake, and you allow others to do the same to you  as you have done to them. All that triumphalist sneering, dishonest  propaganda of 1997 and 2001 has now come back, and it is being used against them. And what can their answer be?

In a contest in unscrupulous electioneering and raising mountainous sums of money, and in manipulation of the media, the Tories were always bound to win in the long term. They saw what New labour did in the era of Lord Cashpoint and Peter Mandelson, then they copied it. Now they are new Labour, and New Labour, like the husk of ex-person in ���Invasion of the Body Snatchers��� is an ex-party with no function in British politics.  Let them split if they want to. Whatever happens, they won���t bring back the lost days of Blair. His mantle now lies on David Cameron���s shoulders. And then? Well, here���s a treat in store.  Al ���Boris��� Johnson waits to be the Heir to the Heir to Blair. He can do it. Wait and see.