Exeunt Corbyn

Waaay back in 2000-whenever-it-was, when the world made a smidge more sense, I joined the Labour party to vote in the leadership election. You could call me an entryist, but I'd pretty much always voted Labour and been on the cusp of joining for a while. I voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader and Tom Watson as deputy. Watson, if you're not aware, was a veteran of Gordon Brown's fairly centrist government, but I knew him for his work opposing the Digital Economy Act and the Murdoch phone hacking, and he seemed like a good egg.

Corbyn and Watson were principled politicians from opposite ends of the party, and ultimately that was why I chose them. After seeing Ed Miliband fail to beat the Conservatives on their own turf I felt Labour needed an injection of actual socialism, to remember what a democratic socialist party was supposed to be fighting for. But I also felt a wholesale rejection the Blair/Brown ideology would be a mistake.

Labour needed to grow, to accept it was a coalition of many views that shared a common goal. I hoped that Corbyn, who wasn't expecting to have this job so late in his career, would act more as a spiritual leader, working with Watson to empower people from across the leftist spectrum, putting aside their differences and working together to create a force that could properly dominate British politics.

Anyway…

Here we are…

Jeremy Corbyn is probably not an antisemite, but he seems utterly incapable of dealing with the fact that some people he admires hold antisemitic views. It is a genuine tragedy that there is no clear way to criticise the right-wing Israeli government's appalling actions in Palestine without criticising the existence of a Jewish state, but that doesn't excuse people from being racist assholes. The left is not immune from racist assholery – if anything its susceptibility is more pernicious because it thinks it's immune.

If you're leading a party that identifies first and foremost as democratic socialist, then you're going to have a lot of Jewish people around, because leftist Jews have always been a key part of the movement. And you're also going to have a lot of pro-Palestine people around. So it's your job to bring them together, to find that common ground.

On this, and countless other issues, Jeremy Corbyn was a terrible leader. He may have been a lovely man, a righteous man, a moral man, but he was a shite leader.

Corbyn has been suspended from the Labour party for being a whiney bitch about the report into antisemitism under his watch.

Tom Watson stood down at the last election and has left politics because he couldn't be arsed with the hassle and abuse he was getting from within the Labour party.

I left the Labour party after it became clear they weren't going to properly oppose Brexit, though I donate occasionally and support them in elections. In hindsight I should never have joined as I'm unable to separate my beliefs and ideologies from the need to get elected and be in government.

I have a few friends who are active Labour members from across the spectrum. Some of them appear to have gone fucking insane over the last few years, if their Twitters are anything to go by, like rats fighting for scraps of meat off a rotting corpse. The worst part is they are experts at attacking someone a few steps to the left or right of them, but absolutely hopeless at dealing with the gaping maw of awfulness that's been in power for the last decade. The left has neutered itself.

What this country needs is a progressive coalition with the sole goal of attaining political power. Everyone from the LibDems to the Marxists needs to be included. We will never agree on everything, but that's OK. We just need to agree on enough, and educate each other about our differences. And then we can kick this minority interest Tory party to the kerb where they belong.

I don't know who is the best person to do that, but it clearly wasn't Corbyn. Get over him, learn the lessons and move on.

Is my take.