According to the circus that opposes the Leader of the Opposition, it's all about power.

Jeremy Corbyn, they say, would not be able to command a sufficient parliamentary majority to form a government, and so he should be replaced. The levels of personal ambition betrayed (betrayal is an unavoidable stain on the circus) by the current Wilson leadership campaign are impressive, but it appears to me that all we Labour Party members are offered is empty promises of an overnight change. Switch your bank account in a day, switch your party leader as though he were a football manager after an unsuccessful season. Welcome to the twenty-first century realpolitik.

When a goal is difficult, people sometimes wryly observe that "you can't get there from here." I see no narrative in Owen Wilson's policies for how society will slowly be restructured to provide the fairer country that all Labour supporters aspire to. Rome wasn't built in a day, and the Labour Party must acknowledge that the journey back to government can only be gradual. The Conservatives successfully focused on people's “aspirations” in the last election but the aspirations to which they alluded were the venal desires of those who, when more becomes available, want it all for themselves. My kind of socialism wants to see the pot more equitably shared out, and is prepared to agree that those whose need is greater should get some priority.

Even ignoring that to get there from here we must, in the real world, pass through all points between, it seems to me that an even worse betrayal by Corbyn's opponents than that of their party is the way they are betraying the parliamentary process itself. By focusing solely on electability they implicitly suggest that the Opposition has no power. This ignores Jeremy Corbyn's most significant parliamentary success to date, which is that he has shifted the “Overton Window,” the range of acceptable political ideological debate, far more than most have realised in the last year.

Now we are finally governed by a Prime Minister whose personal integrity indicates (despite her draconian rule at the Home Office) that she might be amenable to moral argument, the value of Corbyn's achievement is of real potential to those whom the cruellest policies of the past six years have hit worst. Sadly, there is  much repressive legislation to be repealed or replaced but thanks to the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, the Rt. Hon. Jeremy Corbyn, it is something that can legitimately be discussed.

Jeremy Corbyn has something that few other politicians do: the trust of a large number of people, many of them disadvantaged and formerly hopeless. For the Labour hierarchy to stab these new members in the back in the worst possible way, by denying their aspirations would be the kami kaze destruction of a disintegrating party. He may not yet be a fully effective leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, but he carries hearts and minds with him in a way that hasn't been seen in a long time, and Labour will ignore that at their peril.

His opponents would betray the people of this country by waiting until they achieve a distant goal before allowing the poor to once again enter the promised land of secure existence. Corbyn's way offers them some hope for the first time in a long time. The Opposition's duty is to oppose, and that should be the first responsibility of today's Labour Party, not the pie in the sky of an election victory in four years.



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Yorkshire Stuff
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A director of the Python Software Foundation for eight years and its chairman for three, Steve wrote Python Web Programming and several popular Python classes. He plans to spend a lot more time in the UK from now on.
Past answers to random questions: Unlike a dog, how can a turtle ever be naked? It might have executed a shell escape ...
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