Every club should be like Labour – you can’t join as a new member unless you’re already a member

Instead of allowing their leadership vote to be infiltrated by outsiders, it would all be much easier if they just let Rupert Murdoch decide

Mark Steel
Friday 31 July 2015 08:29 BST
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Jeremy Corbyn could be about to pull off a shock victory over the mainstream candidates Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall 
Jeremy Corbyn could be about to pull off a shock victory over the mainstream candidates Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall 

It’s outsiders that have caused it. The only explanation for the madness that’s taken over the Labour Party, according to MPs such as John Mann, is people from outside are joining Labour, so the leadership election should be cancelled.

Presumably John Mann would change the rules, so no one was allowed to join the Labour Party unless they were already a member. That should stop these scheming non-members from trying to infiltrate the party through the trick of becoming members.

Then Mann should be put in charge of other organisations to keep out troublemakers. If you apply to join a snooker club, he could be there to ask “are you already a member of this snooker club?” If you said you weren’t – which is why you’d like to join – he’d say, “Get out. I know your game pal, you want to turn us into a canoeing club.” That way it would stay pure and wholesome.

A section of the Labour Party, along with much of the press, has worked out the only way Jeremy Corbyn can have attracted the support he has is by groups such as Militant infiltrating the party, as they did in the 1980s. This shows how conniving Militant can be, because the most common age of people joining Labour at the moment is 18. So the last time they tried to take over the Labour Party they must have been minus 12.

This shows the lengths Militant are prepared to go to, radicalising people decades before they’re born, just so they can carry out their malicious plan to commit Labour to a policy of nationalising the gas companies.

You might wonder why Militant left a 30-year gap between infiltrations, but maybe they’ve been infiltrating other groups apart from political parties, such as groups of gardeners. Now there’s an allotment society in Hemel Hempstead committed to placing their courgettes under a workers and peasants revolutionary collective.

One Labour MP, John Cryer, warned of the influence of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) over the leadership vote. This group achieved an average of less than 0.1 per cent of the vote at the general election, so the 400,000 people eligible to vote in Labour’s election could easily be swayed by this persuasive faction.

Then the TUSC could use this influence to undermine other areas of the democratic process. Once they’ve taken over the Labour Party, they could swing the result of X Factor, so the winner is a trade union official at Darlington bus depot, singing “No to rearranged shift patterns on the 5A to Bishop Auckland” to the tune of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”.

There are other theories as to why Corbyn is doing so much better than commentators predicted. One supporter of Tony Blair explained at the start of the election why Liz Kendall would win, then explained the first poll showing Corbyn ahead was “a ploy by the Liz Kendall campaign”.

There have been three more polls since then, all showing Corbyn ahead and Kendall last, all of which are clearly ploys by the Kendall campaign. Some people have criticised her for giving answers such as “I think the economy is really important” in TV interviews. But when you’re spending all day making up polls showing you coming last as a special ploy, it doesn’t leave much time for working out answers to questions. We should be a bit more patient.

Everyone sensible agrees it would be madness to make Corbyn leader, because no one could ever win an election with his policies. For example, he argues the railways should be renationalised, and you’ll never win votes with ideas like that. The last Labour leader to fight an election promising to renationalise the railways was Blair in 1997, promising “there will be a publicly owned and publicly accountable railway system under a Labour government”. Presumably he followed this up by saying, “That’s why anyone whose heart says you should vote for me needs a heart transplant.”

Because the most important job for any political leader, as we’re told every day, is to “stay in the centre ground”. You could argue a true leader tries to change the centre ground, but that’s romantic nonsense. So a sensible Labour leader in the year 1500 would have said: “It’s all very well Jeremy Corbyn promising to stop burning witches, but that will lose us the election by abandoning the centre ground.”

Another reason it would be ridiculous to make Corbyn leader, say his opponents, is the Tory press would be brutal towards him. This is a fair point, as The Sun and Telegraph and Mail would be scrupulously fair to any other Labour leader. They’ll never stoop to publishing photographs of Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper chewing food.

It’s only fair to choose the leader Rupert Murdoch suggests, as this is far more sensible than allowing the vote to be infiltrated by outsiders.

There is one other possible reason for Corbyn’s popularity, which is that it’s inspired by the same sense of outrage that swept Scotland for the SNP, and makes Caroline Lucas the most popular MP, and means the speech by the SNP’s Mhairi Black has been seen by over 10 million people online. That still can’t compete with the globally acclaimed phenomena that is Kendall’s speech called “I think the economy is really important” obviously, and there’s a rumour that Liz’s speech is to be sung by Rihanna as the theme for next year’s Olympic Games.

But there are millions of people in Britain who feel the current centre ground is in an atrocious place, and they see in Corbyn someone who agrees with them. The sensible response to this is to tell them if you go through life supporting ideals you believe in rather than something that might, but probably won’t, win over accountants in Nuneaton, you’re a romantic idiot. Either that, or it’s outsiders; or Castro; or aliens; or a ploy by Liz Kendall.

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