“RED TORY” anyone?
Just to make myself popular with my lefty friends, I’m asking, who is the real Red Tory?
(“Red Tory” has) been used, particularly on social media, as a derogatory term by some members on the political left of the Labour Party to refer to MPs and Labour Party figures who do not show sufficient support for Jeremy Corbyn …(Wikipedia)
Normally centrists, social democrats and—gag reflex—sell-out Blairites are the Red Tories, right? Okay. But whisper it and blush: Tony Blair took two million people out of poverty, all but eliminated rough sleeping. More nurses, shorter waiting times. Sure Start. Not utopia, plenty of mistakes, but something, some kids no longer hungry, the upset minimized for patients in A&E, some roofs over heads.
Compare/contrast with Jeremy Corbyn. By way of some unfathomable miracle, he’s on the verge of gifting the UK to the most right-wing, utterly incompetent Tory circus, er, ever; plummetting the UK into an ultra-neo-liberal Brexit dystopia for at least a generation; allowing the Tories to govern without anything approaching sufficient action on the climate crisis.
So: who is the real Red Tory?
It’s been a real magic act, to combine indecisiveness on both Brexit and anti-semitism like this; to have let so much time elapse since the general election of 2017 without preparing the country for the transformative 2019 manifesto; to have failed to make Labour a big tent that could welcome non-members; to have ignored poor polling and gambled the entire future of the UK in a general election anyway; to have permitted a situation wherein a shit-show Conservative Party will likely win an election, with ease, because the main opposition party is as good as (or worse than) absent.
It’s everyone else’s fault, of course: the Corbyn leadership and its supporters always wriggle until they have found a way to insist on that. Which will be handy on December 13th, when rather than apologize they will scramble (correction: they will carrying on with the scrambling that sadly, shockingly, is already underway behind the scenes) to keep their sweaty grip on the levers of The Labour Party, to control the coronation of Corbyn’s successor.
Despite all the above, here I am, three days before election day, praying that things aren’t as bad as they look. Praying that Labour can pull something off.
It’s just that … I’m angry. And heartbroken. What’s happening today in UK politics is a knife stuck in my Thatcher-era PTSD. I’ll never be able to understand how Labour haven’t been brave enough to think about the vulnerable people it’s meant to care about and nail a gaping, open goal. How is it possible that Corbyn, surely seeing how he was only losing ground since 2017, didn’t have the honour to stand aside? How could MPs, members, the NEC betray country to the extent that they didn’t at least seriously try to oblige Corbyn to stand aside in time?
Because while it would be nice to be able to blame the Tories for homelessness, the NHS crisis and Brexit going forward through 2020 and beyond, it will be just as much or more about what Labour didn’t do as about what the Tories have done. The Tory charlatans will not in any sense have won the December 12th election, Labour will have lost it. Boris Johnson is going misappropriate a vote against Jeremy Corbyn and use it as a mandate for a hard Brexit. What a tragedy, what a sad parody of democracy.
Put simply, when, in decades to come, historians write about 2019, there’ll be a strong case for saying that friction was introduced at the UK/EU border, that as such manufacturing and agriculture were sacrificed, that the UK lost its seat at the EU table and its influence in terms of shaping a global future (security, tech, climate change), that young UK citizens were deprived of a wonderful gift, their right to work and travel and study anywhere within the EU, that the rug was pulled from under UK collaboration in EU science and innovation, that huge (decisive?) impetus was given to Scottish nationalism—and all of that, all of it and more, because too many voters just could not swallow a stubborn man who, despite overwhelming evidence that he was failing, refused to make way for someone (anyone) better; a man who ultimately put his high-sounding principles above peoples’ lives.
But then, I should get off my high horse, let them lump me into “it’s all their fault” bin with everything and everyone else; let them say I’M a Red Tory.
