Share The Values?

Rachel Reeves may imagine that Jeremy Corbyn flooded the Labour Party with at least 150,000 heaven-knows-whats who, despite comprising a body bigger than the Army, had never previously been so much as visible to anyone, including each other. But when it came to the sorts of connections that she seems to fear, then no Labour Leader since the death of John Smith has had fewer of them than Corbyn.

Tony Blair drifted from being a hanger on of the International Marxist Group at Oxford to being a hanger on of Eurocommunism. Gordon Brown rose prodigiously through the Labour Party in Scotland when it was largely controlled by unions that were heavily influenced by the Communist Party. Ed Miliband was Ralph Miliband's son. Keir Starmer's involvement in the publication that had introduced Pabloism to Britain was his only political experience until he joined the Labour Party no earlier than December 2013. 

Corbyn has simply been a Labour Party member since 1965, having first been elected as a Labour MP before Christian Wakeford was born. Factions and tendencies that attached themselves to Corbyn's Leadership campaign and then to his Leadership did precisely that. They attached themselves to him, not he to them. People who had ever so much as spoken to their newspapers were denied Labour Party membership, or expelled from the party even after many decades. That happened under Corbyn. The idea is beyond preposterous that there were ever 150,000 or more of them, never mind that those had all retained membership until the Starmer Leadership.

If it is entryism that you want, then look to the Eurocommunists, to the Pabloists, and to the six Conservative MPs who have joined the Labour Party in the last 27 years alone, an average of one every four and a half years, always without having recanted any part of their previous records. Peter Temple-Morris was ennobled. Shaun Woodward was put in the Cabinet. Quentin Davies was made a Minister and then a Peer. And consider the case of Robert Jackson. On defecting from Michael Howard's party to a warmly welcoming Blair's, then he stated that he wanted to be in a party that was led by a Christian. Did someone say something about anti-Semitism?