Don’t believe the hype.
Despite all the tall talk and the set-piece protests, a general election is the last thing the Labour Party wants right now, or at any time in the foreseeable future come to think of it.
How do we know this? Well, they could’ve supported Jo Swinson’s pre-emptive confidence motion, tabled the moment Johnson took office, but they didn’t have the nerve. The embarrassingly low turnout at the recent national rally also shows that Corbyn fatigue has well and truly taken hold.
Whatever Boris Johnson’s faults may be, his first Commons session as Prime Minister shows that he’s willing to go there, as our American friends say.
The look on Jeremy Corbyn’s face said it all as Johnson stood at the despatch box and went through the list, beginning with the Labour leader’s paid appearance on Press TV and ending with his now viral Invasion of the Body Snatchers jibe. John McDonnell didn’t escape the blonde whirlwind either, with a reminder of his sacking by Ken Livingston now part of the official Hansard record.
Within the space of five minutes, Johnson tore up the cultural rulebook and exposed the hollowness, vacuousness and moral bankruptcy of the Labour front bench. Their preferred weapon of virtue signalling class politics was neutralised at a stroke, leaving them all but defenceless. I might’ve felt sorry for them, were they not such a dangerous and downright vindictive group of people.
For reasons passing understanding, for many years it’s been an established tradition of public life that the political left should be allowed to run rampant while their litany of grievous insults and breathtaking hypocrisy goes largely unchallenged. Meanwhile, anyone who’s not them must meekly accept their abuse and repeatedly apologise for a whole host of phantom failings. For decades now, our public life has been poisoned and distorted by this toxic brand of shrieking secular puritanism, which serves no useful purpose other than to drown out the measured voice of the pragmatic majority.
This is exactly why Donald Trump has terrified the American establishment, and why Boris Johnson has adopted the same unapologetic approach here. Whatever the sneering commentariat might say, neither man is a fool and they both understand what the word leadership actually means. By simply daring to punch back and speak up for the silent majority, both Johnson and Trump have showed that the cultural and political bullies blighting our lives are not some morally superior strain of humanity; they’re simply people with agendas just like the rest of us, and very often they’re a lot more flawed, self serving and mean spirited than the average citizen.
Disruptors like Trump and Johnson refuse to play a rigged game by bent rules, and in doing so they leave an entrenched political, media and academic establishment in a state of shocked disarray. The problem for our cultural and political elites is that they’ve been cheating and winning for so long that they don’t even know what a straight game looks like.
As a result of the middle’s newfound self confidence, the Labour Party is caught in a trap of its own making. Either it abandons its addiction to hectoring identity politics, or its traditional voter base will jump ship in favour of Boris’ populist lite brand or Farage’s full fat variety. Alas, Jeremy Corbyn’s Damascene conversion to the cause of Remain suggests his party is either unwilling or unable to adapt to a rapidly changing political landscape.
Labour say they’re not scared of Boris the buffoon…oh yes they are!
Image courtesy of Thomas Norstead at Freeimages.com
