Damned

22 July 2016

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. State, categorically, that something bad is unacceptable, clamp down on it when evidence of rule breaking is found - and STILL get castigated for being perceived as ineffective? Politics is a funny old game, especially the current Labour Party’s version - of finger pointing and flinging poo.

Until last year when Jeremy Corbyn was elected, things seemed safe, predictable, boring even. Now the parliamentary Labour Party’s raison d’etre is a piecemeal, unfocused, but point-by-point dissection of a man’s political evolution. We live in an age of easy access to things that the ignorant would consider to be facts, things which do not require explanation or interpretation but which, without context, are completely meaningless. Eager people lap it up; misery loves company.

Many people are thinking that one event in particular shaped this year and all successive years: the untimely death of one man. A singer, composer, actor, style and lifestyle icon…

Bowie, David Bowie.

Apocalyptic! Some say he’s the Fourth Horseman, though that’s twisting things a tiny bit.

Now, there’s such a thing as responsibility, endeavouring to understand a situation and all its players. Unfortunately the Labour party’s voluntary fracturing exhibits no evidence of this.

Deserting one’s posts then blaming the leader of one’s party for a failure to vote against, or at least to defend, one’s party’s principles? I’ve only one word for it.

Despicable. Ok, thinking about it, two words: despicable and classless.

Under normal circumstances a shadow minister tasked with overseeing opposition to the government would do their very best to mobilise against the full range of harebrained schemes the Tories, er… incumbents cobbled together from whatever pot of idiocy these things are stirred in. Opposition depends on team players.

Much like Monty Python’s ‘fearless’ knights though they ran away. Not in a comedic style but in a tragic ‘let us run away then blame it on our leader’ manner. Responsibility requires sacrifices, demands that respect is earned. The Labour party’s response: restricting supporters from voting, demanding a frankly ridiculous sum of money (lots of £25 sign ups totalling >£4.5 million), and suspending all branch meeting until the election - it’s classless.

Blaming Flappy Bird’s WallyWorld* constituency office attack on their leader, then suspending the entire branch (at a time when all meetings are outlawed anyway): classless.

Expecting that their leader should shoulder the blame for the alleged, or real, subsequent intimidation and death threats: it’s utterly classless.

Revisiting a utopian ideal, anyone who considers themselves ‘normal’ would say it’s a noble thing to aim for a classless society. Well, we got one.

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*Some names have been changed to protect the challenged.