The Fake Left

Thus is Shelly Yachimovich sometimes described in her own country. This week, that low-watt light bulb of a Leader of the Israeli Labour Party had the pleasure of meeting David Miliband.

One trusts that she explained to him her concern solely for the Jewish poor and not for any other sort, and her genuine inability to see that her strong support for the lavishly preferential funding of West Bank settlements, seldom or never inhabited by Labour voters despite that party's having been more responsible than any other for their existence, contributed directly to the plight of poor Jews in Israel, on whom that money might otherwise have been spent.

Miliband would then have held up his hands in horror at the slightest concept of concern for any sort of poor person, although he would have been in a bit of a bind when it came to settlement funding. Ordinarily, he is fanatically hostile to the public provision of services and amenities, having used his position at the head of Tony Blair's Policy Unit to devise endless schemes to slash and burn such things. Many of those are now being implemented by the Coalition, since it is unrestrained by Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. But some of them are too vicious even for David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg.

However, we are talking here about the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, neoconservatism's ultimate special case. The same American politicians who fight like tigers against social healthcare at home fight even more ferociously than that to ensure its continuation in those settlements, at the American taxpayer's expense. David Miliband is exactly the same.

But on the general matter of seeking to alleviate poverty and of supporting the guaranteed public provision of the means to a civilised, humane society, we cannot doubt that Miliband referred her in no uncertain terms to the agenda of his party within the Labour Party, made up of his Movement for Change, of Progress, and of Labour First, the controlling influence within which is that of Luke Akehurst, a prominent Israel First activist with close links to the arms trade.

As with the Hard Left 30 years ago, where the future Blairites were in fact located at that time, taking over the process of parliamentary candidate selection is considered key. Labour First's Ellie Reeves spells this out openly: such selection is purely a matter for the National Executive Committee, with Constituency Labour Parties having no role whatever.

She and Akehurst are among the Labour First stalwarts on the NEC, of which what is supposedly the CLPs' section has become a carve-up between the organised slate of the David Miliband Party on the one hand and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, the Hard Left pioneers of this strategy from way back, on the other. Purely an internal Marxist contest, between those who favour economic means, and those who favour cultural means, but with no difference as to their ends.

Anything recognisable as the Labour Party has been systematically excluded, and can reasonably be assumed to have no remaining existence. Has it any? If so, then where, exactly?