Labour party

While launching her campaign to be returned as MP for North West Durham, Laura Pidcock revealed the barmy self-righteousness that has taken over the Labour party. This is how she wrapped up her speech: 'I know it has been a long time coming, but we are on the path to justice. And because people know that it is perfectly possible that Jeremy Corbyn could be our prime minister, you can be sure that absolutely everything, absolutely everything, is going to be thrown at us in the next few weeks. People will say some of the most hurtful things about our people and our communities and our political representatives. Please forgive them, please forgive them, for they know not what they do.' https://youtu.be/FJYiFHSehPM The first three sentences are normal enough.

Nicola Sturgeon says she wants to form a “progressive alliance” after the election to evict Boris Johnson from 10 Downing Street – which in practice means an arrangement with Labour to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister (this could be a formal coalition though Sturgeon told me she would prefer a less constraining arrangement). And she also says that in the event parliament is hung, on 13 December, there is literally no chance she would sustain the Tories in power – even if Johnson did a dramatic vote face and agreed she could have her cherished referendum on independence for Scotland. Which means that a vote for the SNP can be seen as a vote for Corbyn to become PM.

In the past few minutes, Tom Watson has announced that he is stepping down at this election. In a surprise letter, the Labour deputy leader says his decision is 'personal, not political' and that he is 'not leaving politics altogether'. In the meantime, he wants to spend more time campaigning on public health. https://twitter.com/tom_watson/status/1192169894479122433?s=21 There are some curious lines in this letter, and Jeremy Corbyn's response. The Labour leader picks up Watson's comment about not leaving politics, and writes: 'I am proud and glad to have worked with you over these four years and I know this is not the end of our work together.

Anti-racism campaign Labour Against Anti-Semitism (LAAS) has today issued its position on the General Election. LAAS, responsible for exposing a litany of anti-Semites in Labour’s ranks, warns party members that ‘Jeremy Corbyn is unfit to be Prime Minister and that the Labour Party is unfit to be in government’. It says Labour poses ‘the greatest risk to our democracy and to the safety and security of the British Jewish community’. As such, they urge the general public to vote ABC: ‘Anyone but Corbyn’.  Other positions are available, most notably from Labour MPs who once spoke of Corbyn in the same terms as LAAS. But where are they now?

The December election that now looks inevitable will be, as all elections are, a test. A test of a decade-old government that isn’t entirely sure what its achievements in office have been. A test of the public’s continuing appetite for Brexit and its tolerance for parliamentary histrionics. A test, too, of whether the country is ready to return to majoritarian government or whether volatile voter intentions and hung parliaments will be with us a while longer.  None of these is the most important metric. That dubious honour goes to the anti-Semitism test: will the UK put a party of Jew-haters into power? All of us will have to confront that test and each and every one will be judged on how they measure up.

The stronger the prospect of a general election, the easier it will be for Boris Johnson to get through the week that Britain was supposed to be leaving the European Union. He had said he would rather 'be dead in a ditch' than miss the deadline, but is now taking a two-pronged approach to distracting everyone from the fact that Thursday will come and go, and Brexit will still not have happened. The first part of this plan is to make sure that it is clear parliament is to blame for missing the 31 October deadline, rather than the Prime Minister who placed so much emphasis on it. So the repeated message from Johnson and his allies is that 'this parliament is broken' and that the 'country is being held hostage'.

Nothing in Caroline Flint’s CV would have marked her out as someone who would end up marshalling 19 of her fellow Labour MPs through the ‘aye’ lobby to vote for Boris Johnson’s deal. One of the original ‘Blair babes’, she went on to become Gordon Brown’s minister for Europe. She campaigned for Remain in the referendum but this week she ended up telling MPs that ‘the EU is not God’ while fending off accusations that she is the devil. One commentator called her ‘a heroine for those seeking to turbo-charge Thatcherism’. He didn’t mean it kindly. When we meet in her office, on another one of the supposed Brexit make-or-break days, she is preparing for further battle.

It must feel pretty lonely being Caroline Flint right now. The Labour MP has made herself unpopular with her comrades by backing Boris Johnson’s deal to leave the EU. Flint campaigned for Remain but accepts that her Don Valley constituency voted 68 per cent Leave. In the former mining towns of her South Yorkshire seat, Flint points out, the figure was closer to 80 per cent. ‘The voices in our mining villages remain unheard, despite their support for Labour over many decades,’ she records in her Labour case for respecting the outcome of the 2016 referendum.  Both Flint and her case have now felt the ire of the progressive Brexitariat, the analysts, academics and activists who frame elite debate on EU withdrawal.

Another female Jewish MP has left the Labour party, apparently bullied out of the movement she has worked in for decades. Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside, announced in a letter last night that she 'cannot advocate a government led by Jeremy Corbyn' because he 'is not fit to be Prime Minister'. She complains that 'anti-Semitism has become mainstream in the Labour Party' and that the leader 'has attracted the support of too many anti-Semites'. It is a damning letter, and one that has widely been tweeted by the colleagues Ellman has left behind as proof that something needs to change in the party. The problem is that we've seen this before: the same MPs made the same sort of comments when Luciana Berger quit earlier this year.

The left no longer exists as a coherent political force in France. Embarrassed in the 2017 presidential election, the Socialist party has continued to disintegrate, polling just 6.2 per cent of the vote in May's European elections. That was marginally fewer votes than Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise, which mustered a distinctly modest 6.3 per cent. The far-left leader polled well in the first round of the presidential election but as one French commentator wrote this week, his mistake was then to 'to revert to his original culture, that of the radical left'. As for the Socialist party, since 2007 their membership has plummeted from 260,000 to 102,000. But that is what happens when middle-class politicians alienate their traditional working-class voters.