Labour flops in the locals as MPs prepare to Garrotte Brexit

 While the local election results have left Labour scrambling for rationales, what happened yesterday continues to chart a course for the future. As I have long argued, Labour cannot win national power on its own, and Theresa May cannot deliver hard Brexit. The collapse of UKIP in England and Labour in Scotland is leading us ever closer to a bitterly divided and divisive culture.

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤

During the past week, Labour has been getting its spinning ducks in a row, just in case the Local Election results didn’t produce the Conservative wipe-out it expected. The idea was obviously that, should the Tories emerge with even a scintilla of government credibility today, the Corbynista-Momentum machine will blame The Tory Plot Against the Underdogs based on the new ID requirement for voting.

Others will reach a different conclusion: maybe they might think, ‘Take away the voting fraud, and Corbyn Labour is nothing like as strong as we thought’.

And spookily, that does seem to be a possibility…..because Labour made hardly any gains at all in the marginals, and in most cases the Conservatives broadly hung on to what they had.

This was true in Barnet, for instance, where the Labour Group’s leader blamed his failure on “the Tory nonsense about anti-Semitism on the Left”. I’m still trying to work out his leap of logic re that one, but then Labour went in hard on the Windrush thing – so perhaps the Party should take a lesson from that, viz – lots of voters saw it as a storm in a teacup.

Indeed, as more details bubble to the surface on piss and Windrush, the cases concerned look like over-zealous (or just plain stupid) civil servants and border officials not engaging their brains. This is standard issue HMRC and Whitehall behaviour, although they were probably egged on by Tough-Moll Theresa while she was busy building the foundations of a fascist State at the Home Office.

_____________________________________________________

The local election result could take an enormous amount of heat off May, but probably not for long: Conservative whips have (allegedly) informed Two Gun Theresa – she in the corner wearing the Dunce hat – that the government does not have the votes to stop some kind of  restrictive EU customs union being forced upon her by Parliament.

Put another way, the dullards we elect to represent us – across all Parties – are hell-bent on ignoring what a majority of us voted for…..viz, complete trading independence from the frite-eaters in Brussels.

Further to my post of Wednesday, this highlights what the Leaver MPs from all sides of the House are up against: we always knew that – at one time or another – the British People were 6-4 in favour of Leave, but the Commons was 4-1 in favour of Remain. Now we see this ignorant, self-serving élite pulling out all the stops to keep us firmly moored to the Titanic.

Storey by storey, the Brexit construct is being razed to the ground.  First the fishing grounds, then the border controls, now the trading terms: Brussels is doing exactly what it did to Greece….and our political class is as spineless as the one in Athens.

The question here is – and perhaps the Whips have in fact said this, I don’t know as yet – whether the 60-70 rebel Brexiteers do in fact have the power to vote down a zoft-soap Brexit in a key Commons debate. There are, probably, more than enough Tory, Lib Dem, SNP and Labour Remainers to carry the day with or without the Moggies.

The missing intials in that observation are UKIP – which failed yet again, and was almost wiped from the local government map. The early signs are that almost all the votes went to the Tories….more evidence (as if we needed any) that mathematically, Labour cannot form a government on its own. You read it here first.

As of today, the pressure is back on the Corbynista/Momentum team, whose reaction to any ideas about electoral alliance usually involves a huge volume of sputum being hurled at those who suggest them.

Most commentators have been focusing on the potentially terminal splits in the Tory Party. But Labour isn’t doing that good a job of hiding the fact that its own house is in a state of anarchic disorder.

Unite Union leader Len McLacklustre (under clouds over his own reelection) has launched a swingeing attack on Labour MPs who dared to utter the words ‘Hard Left anti-Semitism’, while at the same time issuing other statements pledging to stamp out this anti-Semitism that seemingly doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn has rejected Len’s claims of anti-Semitic slurs against, um, Jeremy Corbyn by non-Momentum orientated Labour MPs…even though Len continues to call himself “an unswerving supporter of our Leader Jeremy Corbyn”.

This is all very confusing. Len is smearing while rejecting smears, and Jeremy says the smears Len is rejecting must be rejected, but Len says he is right behind Jeremy. No doubt Owen Jones thinks everything should be smashed.

Don’t miss the next thrilling episode of our ongoing drama serial LABoraTORY, in which two rival sets of mad scientists vie to produce the Elixir of Lies that will finally sweep them to power, and Brussels back into Whitehall.

______________________________________________________