Time to ditch the labels and unite

13 Jun

Since last Friday morning we’ve seen many of the MPs who failed to support Jeremy Corbyn as leader and so called columnists of the left who wrote him off come back to the fold eating various degrees of humble pie. The likes of Polly Toynbee and Nick Cohen have admitted they were wrong and many Labour MPs have declared that Jeremy Corbyn now has a mandate to lead. Many of us knew it all along and it would be so easy to say “I told you do” but this is not the time.

First of all it’s important to remember that we’re all part of the same movement. We may say that those we deem to the right of the party had moved too far to the right and they have said that we’ve moved too far to the left. They’re wrong, but we need them to keep us honest.

What is important is to convince those who haven’t believed that what they’re seeing isn’t a blip. Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and co have been seen by the public, who are sick of austerity, to be genuine. They’ve presented a well costed, although not perfect, manifesto people can get behind. Remember, the reason they didn’t believe in Jeremy is that they didn’t believe the party could sell this manifesto to the public. They’ve believed since Blair’s “Third Way” that you have to find a compromise that you can sell to the public, or more correctly, to Rupert Murdoch. Times have changed.

Thanks to the power of social media, the ability to talk directly to the electorate, rather than through the medium of Uncle Rupert’s office, means that we’re able to present an authentic voice and persuade the electorate of the merits of a Democratic Socialist agenda rather than just pander to the usual right-wing agenda. We’ve seen how effective that’s been even without the assistance of a large portion of the Parliamentary Party. Now we need to amplify that voice.

We are now at a crucial stage. I’ve seen all over social media those members who’ve been fighting by Jeremy’s side for two years deriding the “Blairites”, “Right wingers” and “Traitors” while those who withheld their support apologising with reservations to the “Corbynistas”. This has to stop. The labels have to stop. They’re not “Blairites”, they’re not “Right Wingers” and they’re certainly not “Traitors” and the rest of us are not “Corbynistas”. We’re Labour. We’re part of the Labour Movement. All of us. We’re Comrades fighting against the Tory privileged class.

Yes I know that I have been one of those to use these labels, indeed my party membership was suspended for some rather nasty things I said during the failed coup last year. Rightly so.  I apologise unreservedly to any of my comrades I insulted at that time. Passions ran high in the wake of the EU Referendum and many of us on both sides got seriously carried away. Let’s put it behind us and please, I beg of you, can we put the words “Blairite”, “Brownite”,  “Red Tory” and “Corbynista” behind us.

The people, united, will never be defeated.

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