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Blue Labour is no longer laughing

YESTERDAY’s meeting between the four Labour Party leadership candidates and acting leader Harriet Harman is unlikely to stop efforts to discredit the electoral process now underway.

Despite failing in their efforts to sabotage the ballot, some MPs, discredited former leaders and ministers will continue to cry stinking fish on the very process they once so warmly advocated.

For them, the one-member one-vote franchise for deciding Labour’s leaders was never a matter of democratic principle.

It was a gimmick to fool people into thinking they could exercise a real choice when faced with candidates who all share the same pro-austerity, pro-big business, pro-militarism outlook.

Some on the left, including the Morning Star, believed that the voting and other structural reforms were primarily intended to kill off any meaningful collective trade union involvement in Labour Party affairs.

However, the upsurge in popular anger and protest since the May 7 general election, together with Jeremy Corbyn’s bold decision to stand for election on the basis of his principled left-wing record, reminds us that mass struggle can challenge the status quo and with the right conditions and orientation can overthrow it.

That is what Corbyn’s campaign now threatens to do. Ideas, like facts, are stubborn things and will not easily be banished by procedural manoeuvres. The appeal of his policies to trade unionists, environmentalists, peace campaigners and all who fight for social justice has upset the best-laid plans of the mice who believe that Labour’s mission is to administer capitalism and help the poor instead of abolishing exploitation and ending poverty.

Corbyn’s policies may be unacceptable to the extreme pro-austerity, pro-big business and pro-Nato militarist elements in the Parliamentary Labour Party, but they strike a chord with many people outside the Westminster and Whitehall bubble.

To the horror of those MPs who wanted to attract only new members and supporters who share this dismal vision, socialists and progressives have flocked in their hundreds of thousands to the party instead.

Not surprisingly, quite a few of the recruits have previously been supporters and even members of the Green Party or left-wing groups such as Tusc, the SWP and Left Unity.

The Communist Party and other left-wing organisations have made clear their opposition to “entryism.”

The only organised infiltration of the Labour Party has come from some cynical, anti-democratic elements in the Daily Telegraph and the Conservative Party — and from a tiny attention-seeking “communist” sect whose 28-or-so members are unlikely to tip the balance of votes in favour of anyone.

So the electoral battle in the Labour Party and the wider labour and progressive movements continues, as does the need to focus on the policies that can win back Labour’s lost millions.

In particular, more discussion of Britain’s future in or out of the European Union would be useful. For example, what do Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall think of EU policy in relation to Greece? Do they support the enforced pauperisation and privatisation of a whole nation and its economy?

And how would Corbyn propose to overcome EU opposition to “people’s quantitative easing,” which contravenes Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty, and to nationalisation purchase and management policies which do not conform strictly to commercial criteria?

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