‘Moderates’ were never moderate – but Establishment media helped create massive, hypocritical fiction of ‘nasty left’
The terms ‘moderate’ and ‘centrist’ have always been a joke, terms used as part of an Establishment media to support their fiction of a ‘hard left’ in the Labour Party – and to paint as ‘extreme’ policies like decent jobs and wages, adequate NHS funding and public services for the public good instead of profit.
The viciousness of the Labour right has never been far below the surface – and sometimes not at all, as when right-wingers tried to ‘break Corbyn as a man’ in 2016 – but the sheepskin has been well and truly removed since the general election result.
Right-wing MPs who survived their own sabotage of the party’s election prospects shamed themselves during the first meeting of the ‘PLP’ [parliamentary Labour party] after the election, again launching a vicious assault on Corbyn in what one MP described as:
an absolute disgrace by people who are determined to wreck Jeremy personally and even the policies that nobody disputes the people of this country approve of.
There has also been extensive psychological warfare against the majority of Labour’s membership, with shameless ‘gaslighting‘ as the right-wing architect’s of Labour’s losses in leave seats blamed Corbyn, Corbyn’s popular policies and the Labour left for the defeat.
Language of extermination
But the language of the ‘moderates’ has hardened now into outright talk of extermination – and a tweet by peer and former Blair minister Andrew Adonis illustrates its disturbing nature:
Labour’s left majority of members will not consider Tony Blair’s time any type of ‘democratic socialism’ and with reason.
Appallingly, Adonis’ tweet is neither unusual nor even particularly extreme. Some right-wing, quasi-Tory MPs who have sat festering on the back-benches and were thwarted in the 2017 general election have used language that would not have been out of place in 1990s Rwanda and other horror spots.
We have to eradicate the Marxist cancer
General Leigh of the Pinochet dictatorship
The reaction
The response to Adonis’ tweet has largely formed three streams worth mentioning. Some are rightly pointing out that what Adonis called ‘Corbynism’ is merely socialism – and democratic at that:
Others have responded with defiance, pointing out that the prospect of a decent society and prosperity for all has changed the political narrative however much the relics of Blairism might wish it otherwise :
And others have pointed out correctly how disturbing such language is – and how the Labour right created the damage they are now trying to blame Corbyn for. Former Crewe and Nantwich MP Laura Smith was withering:
Nobody aligned with the so-called ‘moderates’ or the referendum-obsession with which they drove away Labour voters in so many leave towns – let alone those who waved through Tory cuts to the most vulnerable before most people had heard of Corbyn – can be allowed anywhere near the Labour leadership if the poor and vulnerable of this country are to have any hope of genuine change.
Adonis, for what it’s worth, seems to think Labour would have done better in the general election if Keir Starmer was leading:
Andrew Adonis is a former LibDem parliamentary candidate made a peer by Tony Blair in 2005. He last won an election as an SDP councillor in Oxford in 1987.
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