Testing the water or trying to make it happen?
The Labour right appears to be briefing coordinated stories to the right-wing media this evening, with both the Mail and the Telegraph running anti-Corbyn stories in what looks to be either an attempt to provoke a response or, more likely, some bizarre testing of the water by Starmer’s allies to see what kind of response there would be from their target Tory voters to Jeremy Corbyn’s permanent expulsion from the party.
As usual, Starmer’s cronies are of course chasing the type of entrenched Tory voters that read those papers, rather than those who abandoned Labour in 2019 because of Starmer’s referendum betrayal.
The Mail – in a piece co-written by former Jewish Chronicle hack Lee Harpin, who cost that right-wing rag a lot of money in libel payouts – is touting right-wing former Labour MP Mary Creagh to challenge Corbyn for his Islington North seat:
The idea of challenging Corbyn is not new, of course. Creagh’s fellow right-winger Lisa Nandy said she would travel to Islington to campaign against him in the next general election if he stood as an independent – but she seems to have cooled on the idea after thousands of current and former Labour members said that if she did, they’d travel from all over the country to campaign there for Corbyn (and others said they’d travel to Wigan to campaign against her).
Perhaps Creagh, already dumped by Wakefield voters in 2019 for siding with Starmer over a new Brexit referendum, is seen as having nothing much to lose – except of course her dignity, if Islington North’s voters do the expected thing and vote for the MP who has served them and knows them for decades.
The Telegraph, meanwhile, is claiming that Corbyn is about to ‘establish [his] own party’ because Labour won’t restore the whip to reinstate him as a Labour MP:
Much as Corbyn’s still-huge support base would love it if he did, there is no indication that any such decision is imminent – and the ‘hopes fading’ are entirely in the mind of those briefing the Torygraph. Corbyn has long been under no illusion that Keir Starmer ever intends to put him back on the Labour benches, not least because Corbyn would be his most threatening leadership rival if he did – despite his ‘political interference’ in the matter being a blatant breach of the EHRC report Starmer is supposedly sworn to implement in full.
No, it appears Starmer and co are taking a page from the Blair playbook via his adviser Peter Mandelson or some other dreary throwback and floating things they might want in order either to see how they ‘play’ with the public – or in the hope of triggering them and saving themselves a troublesome task.
How typical of the Labour right, particularly the Starmer-right variety, that they haven’t the spine to grasp a nettle or the imagination to solve a problem and instead prefer this anonymous briefing nonsense.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.