#rupert read

The Climate Emergency: How Humanity Can Avoid the Fate of Dinosaurs

Sorry for the silence, my friends, I’ve been working on a new book – a book for young children told in the voice of my dog Pepy (woof!) – but I didn’t stop working as Senior Editor at Impakter magazine, also contributing articles (yeah, I confess, there’s been a break of several weeks, but I was wrapped up in writing the first draft of my Pepy book …). Now a new article is out, so, as usual,…

If you’re not sad, if you’re not afraid, you’re not paying attention.

This is the fifth of fourteen sections of our essay 'Do You Support the Aims and Values of the Labour Party?' which can be read in full on our Wordpress blog.

In a strange way, Corbyn’s victory last September could have been an opportunity for Labour’s centrists. Under Blair’s leadership the Labour Party was associated in the public mind with spin and deceit. Under Brown and Miliband Labour was generally seen as been a less successful version of the same product. But Jeremy Corbyn is generally seen — even by those who think him an idiot — as being unpolished and honourable.

If the high-profile Labour centrists threw their support behind him, gave him a fair chance and decided to try and make his ideas work, whilst being open and honest about the fact that they believed they wouldn’t, it could have been the first step towards rebuilding public trust in the party. A willingness to listen to, rather than manage, public opinion would challenge the public perception of Labour’s centrists. But many in the Progress/Labour First Tendency were vocal about their unwillingness to treat the membership’s choice with respect.

John McTernan, a key advisor to Blair and Chief of Staff during Scottish Labour’s 2015 general election thrashing described the MPs who nominated Corbyn as “morons” and that he “can’t see any case for letting [Corbyn] have two minutes in office”.  McTernan is the kind of behind-closed-doors operator who, in another age would have been manipulating events from inside a smoke-filled room. He doesn’t seem to realise the difference between an inside-voice and an outside-voice, and the importance of at least pretending to respect those inside his party who he disagrees with.  Similarly, Simon Danczuk (at the time a Labour MP) told the Telegraph that efforts to work against Corbyn would begin “as soon as the result comes out.”

It should be incredibly obvious that to win people’s votes, you need to make them think you respect them and their opinions. McTernan and Danczuk should have put a little bit of effort into hiding their contempt.

This immediate distrust of Corbyn seems widespread. There were objections in his first meeting of the Parliamentary over Corbyn’s reluctance to offer unconditional Labour support to the ‘remain’ side of an EU Referendum vote, before Cameron’s renegotiations. This is despite him making the sensible point that “Labour can’t just give Cameron a blank cheque”.  More than anything else, the biggest sign of Corbyn’s ‘weakness’ as a leader is how willing he has been to compromise with the Parliamentary Labour Party — he signed the blank cheque within days.  By turning fire on Corbyn, people like McTernan ignore their own side’s weaknesses. Dan Hodges, a centrist advisor who used to describe himself as ‘a Blairite cuckoo in the Miliband nest’ reported an MP commenting that it would take time to build the resistance to Corbyn because “there are too many of the New Labour MPs who simply have no connection with their constituencies.” Perhaps that’s why they lost?

We can sympathise with the MPs and supporters of the Progress/Labour First Tendency who don’t have faith in Corbyn — as Green Party members we have similar thoughts about Rupert Read. Read is a prominent Green campaigner, who has been an excellent voice for Green policies on the whole, and, as a key member of the Green House think-tank has done a lot of technical thinking behind Green Party philosophy. However, his personal philosophy (particularly on immigration) is different from what we believe the Green Party’s should be.  Earlier this summer we were relieved when Read announced that he wouldn’t be standing for the leadership earlier this summer, as we felt that he would have had an outside chance of winning, and that a Read-led Green Party could be pulled into areas we don’t want the party to move into. In a theoretical world where Rupert Read was elected leader, we would have behaved respectfully towards him and his mandate, rather than trying to pick fights over even the sensible things he proposed.