Let's Get This Party Started

I love, love, love the idea of a few politicised moneybags from the Blair years, sore that a mass membership party with strong trade union backing no longer needs them, setting up on their own with MPs of whom no one had ever heard. Any MP who might join this new party needs to walk down any street in his or her constituency with Jeremy Corbyn, and see which of them more people recognised.

And I love, love, love the idea that, in order to be approved by the Electoral Commission, this new party would have to write up its aims and objectives. Bullet points of Blairism, which did fine when it took over one, and briefly both, of the two main parties, but which no one could be so deluded as to believe would have any support simply as itself. And that against both the Government and the Official Opposition, which already had more than 80 per cent support between them. I mean, no one could be that deluded. Could they? Could they, really?

The Lib Dems remain organisationally strong in a lot of places, and in any case they opposed the Iraq War and the Blair Government's trademark assaults on civil liberties, so this outfit would take over neither their organisation nor anything more than half of their shrunken vote, and probably not even that. At best, it would have more Peers than Councillors, and more Fleet Street columnists than MPs, especially once those who had been elected as Labour MPs had lost their seats. 

The people who are planning this move set great store by those "Corbyn Is An Anti-Semite" rallies, if they can be so described. But those are attended by fewer people than would protest against an unwelcome road scheme in any country town, for all the saturation coverage that they are afforded by media that routinely ignore enormous demonstrations.

Labour and the Conservatives are both going to make gains at the forthcoming local elections, and Labour is going to do so on both sides of what is in any case the rather exaggerated English cultural divide, sweeping the board in London while probably also taking overall control of North East Lincolnshire, which is Grimsby and Cleethorpes, and while possibly even taking Plymouth directly from the Conservatives.

Brexit, you see, has nothing to do with how people vote in elections. A lot of people still need to learn that one the hard way. All right, not a lot of people. But some very noisy people. Including those behind this latest variation on the theme of a new party. Bring it on.