Crunch time for Labour Vote for Corbyn

by Daphne Liddle

BALLOTS for the Labour leadership contest have been sent out and the voting is under way; whatever the result the party will never be the same again.

The front line of the class struggle is now out in the open as the working class has a real chance to reclaim the party it founded and built from the agents and minions of the ruling class who have dominated the highest levels for decades.

Critics of the New Communist Party policy of supporting Labour in elections said not long ago that what is happening now was impossible. But our assertion that the Labour Party is still a potentially strong weapon for our class is vindicated.

That is not to confuse it with a revolutionary party or imagine that we can gain a workers’ state through parliamentary elections.

But Labour can certainly play a big role in helping to create a revolutionary situation by drawing the working class, especially the youth, into political activity.

The great Afro-American writer Alice Walker said: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” This is very true of millions of young people in Britain who have been alienated from politics by mercenary careerists spouting sound bites, clichés and platitudes that have no meaning because there is no ideology behind them.

The Corbyn campaign is telling our young working class people they do have potential power.

Corbyn has spent his life “walking the walk”, putting his constituents first, never pandering to the myth of “middle England” or trying to win elections by appeasing the class enemy.

Corbyn has always been there, along with other stalwarts like John McDonnell, Katy Clark, Diane Abbott and the late Tony Benn. But the ruling class media have done their utmost to deny their existence and only ever mentioned them to ridicule them.

Now those media barons are regretting treating Corbyn like a joke when his nomination for the Labour leadership was accepted.

The right-wing Labour leadership are in a panic. And some of the worst are the sell-outs who began with a left wing working class perspective but betrayed every principle they ever had along their way to build their career.

They have been arguing among themselves, trying to claim that a Corbyn leadership would make the party “unelectable” — while Ed Miliband demonstrated in May that it is a Labour Party that acts like a weaker version of the Tory party that really is unelectable.

Rivals Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham have both promised more left wing policies under pressure to capture some of Corbyn’s support — but it is blatant opportunism with no sincerity behind it.

Acting party leader Harriet Harman is reported to have considered attempting to halt the leadership election. She claims concerns that whatever the result the losers will refuse to accept it, leading to months or years of litigation leaving the party with no leader. So she has now instructed lawyers to ensure that the leadership election cannot be subject to a judicial review in the High Court after the result is declared on 12th September.

Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor and friend of Tony Blair, has now quit the Burnham campaign to advise the Labour Party full time on the running of the contest — he’ll hardly make an impartial referee.

As hundreds of thousands of new members and supporters have joined the party since Corbyn’s nomination as members and supporters the current Labour leaders are claiming fraud that Tories have signed up a £3-supporters to boost Corbyn’s vote and make the party “unelectable”.

A handful of Tories might have bothered but the vast majority of those “new” members are former Labour members who left the party in disgust at its continual swing to the right and especially over the Iraq war.

Others are young people who have found a political leader they can believe in for the first time. At a mass rally in Newcastle last week Corbyn said: “There’s no God-given right for political parties to exist — they have to mean something to people.” This is what right-wing Labour cannot understand.

And it looks as though history is about to sweep them aside as the irrelevances that they really are.