Labour MPs prepare for leadership contest after Corbyn loses confidence vote
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Of
the 172 MP's who voted in favour of the "No confidence" in
Jeremy Corbyn motion in yesterdays (28th June) vote, not all were
from the "Blairite" rump of our party. Some were from the
centre and a few from what is described as the left. This fact has
been seized upon by the television and media, with the same eagerness
as a starving man would grasp a crust of bread. The coverage of the
result of the "No confidence" motion, on BBC Television
news and on the Sky News programme, was clearly bent towards their
long standing drive to remove Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour
leadership and to further this ambition, our screens were filled with
a stream of anti Corbyn figures, including David Blunkett, Alistair
Campbell, Jack Straw, Chris Bryant and a few others, all repeating
the well scripted line that "Jeremy is a decent man and will
hopefully do the right thing for the party and resign". In a
departure from the scripted text however, Alastair Campbell had the
outrageous conceit to state that "Jeremy Corbyn is destroying
the Labour party". Coming from the person who, along with Tony
Blair and Peter
Mandelson,
created the grotesque "New Labour" to further their own
ambitions, abandoning ordinary people to the "markets" and
business interests
and thereby destroying everything that the Labour party had once
stood for, the remark was itself crass and hypocritical. However, in
order to achieve at least a veneer of balance, both channels had a
sprinkling of new shadow cabinet members and Trade Union people to
support Corbyn and the party leadership, albeit that the interviewer
tried their best to promote the "Corbyn should go shouldn't he"
media line.
A
common link between those MP's supporting the no confidence motion,
goes
back even
before the leadership election of last year.
The simple fact is that none of the 172 actually wanted Jeremy Corbyn to be the leader in any
case,
their
support in the election being
spread between Andy
Burnham
and Yvette Cooper. Corbyn
was the "token" candidate of the Left. The candidate on the
ballot paper to show that the PLP was offering a balanced list, where
in fact it was no more than a cynical ploy to maintain their own
comfortable "status quo" of a centre right cabal. The
mounting fear during the campaign that Corbyn might in fact win,
turned to stunned dis belief when on the first ballot, Corbyn
received 60% of the vote. The realisation that they now had a leader
that only a minority of the PLP actually wanted, persuaded many of
them to join the growing coup plot which had been hatched even before
the election result was declared.
The "Anyone but Corbyn" or the "Stop Corbyn"
campaigns in addition to the unofficial smear and sniping from
backbench MP's encouraged and orchestrated by a hostile media, grew
in intensity fuelled by Dankzuc, Hunt,
Johnson, Brown, Kinnock,
Mann
and others, with some openly stating that
in the event that Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party,
they would launch a coup to remove him from the leadership "within
days".
Yesterdays
vote of no confidence, was the culmination of that coup. The
expectation amongst the conspirators, was that following the result,
Jeremy Corbyn would succumb to the intimidation of the PLP,
(something that the PLP are very good at, intimidating anyone who
dares to oppose their collective view on any subject) and resign
immediately, leaving them free to have their "coronation"
of which ever candidate they could agree on, but without the pressure
of having a leadership election which they feared. It is strange how
the democratic process can instil such dread in people who claim
to be democrats, supporting the will of the electorate. In this case,
they have again miscalculated the mood and the reality of the main
players in this drama. Firstly, their arch enemy (the reality, no
matter what these two faced hypocrites may say publicly) has refused
to resign. Corbyn has invoked the party rules stating that to remove
an incumbent leader, there must be a leadership challenge from a
candidate with at least 50 nominations from MP's or MEP's. Secondly,
the coup organisers seemed to have expected a large proportion of
Corbyn supporters in the party membership, to have softened their
stance, a proposition that the conspirators are telling
media at every opportunity. Again they are wrong and must be rather
worried at the support on social media,
in the press
and at rallies around the country in support of Corbyn and highly
critical of the coup and its organisers. It also
seems
that a number of the 172 MP's are now worried that they could face de-selection by their Constituency
parties.
It
is
now inevitable that a leadership election will be held on a time-scale drawn up by
the National Executive Committee of the Labour party. The problem for
the PLP is that should the Labour party members re elect Jeremy
Corbyn as party leader, the coup organisers
will be back in the same position as they were last week. The
question for them is where do they go from there?
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