Persevere and Prosper

The entire Executive Committee of Wakefield Constituency Labour Party has resigned, in protest at the refusal to allow the shortlisting of a potential by-election candidate who was a "Corbynite", or indeed of anyone from Wakefield. How is the Labour Party defining a Corbynite? Like all of the Red Wall seats, Wakefield voted for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour before Keir Starmer changed its Brexit policy and caused a General Election to be held at all in 2019.

A Corbynite, who would probably be a local trade unionist and who certainly appears to be so in this case, would be a lot more popular than a Starmerite, who would wish to re-join the EU in order to cement yet further the rule of the liberal bourgeoisie by means of permanent austerity at home and forever war abroad.

To those of us to whom the Labour Party could not die too soon, a Starmerite candidate would of course be ideal. In the Corbyn years, all the talk was of the talent going to waste on the backbenches. Now that those people are on the frontbench, then the party is trying to recruit candidates who had never even voted Labour, if at all, because of an apparent dearth of talent.

Even in spite of itself at times, the Corbyn phenomenon brought into politics some very clever young men, mostly. The Labour Party and even the Labour Left no longer want them, so anyone else could do a lot worse if they were looking for candidates who were sounder than the Government on Brexit, Greenery, cancel culture, identity politics in general, and gender self-identification in particular. Economically, why would local parties full of pensioners and farmers object to proposals that would give far more money to pensioners and to farmers?