Friday, 25 October 2019

Toynbee wants a purge before an election?

I missed the first item by P Toynbee until I read about it in the Times, where it was condemned for its superior tone and its inability to understand dissent:


Labour MPs who help Boris Johnson to victory will not be forgiven


Things are already shaping up for a revenge campaign then:

Any Labour MPs or Tory remainer/soft Brexiteers who rejected May’s deal need to say which of these magic new ingredients could possibly sway them now....[Corbyn] would be right not to expel them. (And in that spirit, he should suspend destructive trigger ballots currently wasting the energies of Labour MPs who should be out canvassing, not wooing their own members.) [the latter because K Starmer is fighting reselection?]
Labour MPs who help Johnson to victory, by backing his Brexit to satisfy their constituents, will find themselves unforgiven even if not expelled. Each Johnson act that passes, each budget turn of the screw, will belong to them in perpetuity, no way back...[sosheis assuming an elcltionvictory ifhe gets Brexit done?] ...Flint rightly says Labour MPs who take that course will be “brave”. If they were, like Hoey, actual Brexit believers, that might be so. But those such as Flint, who think democracy commands that they must obey their leave constituents’ wishes, look a bit less brave than other leave-constituency MPs such as Sunderland South’s Bridget Phillipson, Redcar’s Anna Turley or Wakefield’s Mary Creagh, who vote against leaving the EU while warning their leave voters of Brexit harm.


The suspicion that Johnson might indeed pull it off and get rewarded with a majority is what has pushed her into full campaigning mode today?

when the searchlight eventually does fall again on public services, as it likely will in a general election, that may do Johnson and his party no favours. Take Brexit out of the immediate battleground and what’s left? Only the true state of the country and its services after nine long years of funding starvation perpetrated by Conservative governments.

Toynbee goes on to make some excellent points, especially about the damage done to the NHS by Tory austerity. But her conclusion is typically baffling:

Are these tales of privatisation, neglect and cost-cutting the kind of thing Johnson wishes we would all focus on intently once Brexit is “done”? (Not that it ever will be.) If he thinks close coverage of the state of public services is his winning ticket in an imminent election, he may be in for a shock.

Despite her own obvious commitments she is still putting Brexit above all else -- I continue to ask why it means so much to her. She wants it taken out of the battleground but promises it will never be done. She is sure Labour will recover from its dreadful vagueness and dithering Remainerism and look credible again, and be able to force the agenda on to social issues -- but she can't do this herself! She wants a purge.

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