Look Right, Look Left, Look Left Again and Keep Looking Left

Others have said it before (www.conservativehome.com/its-time-to-make-a-radical-offer-to-the-old-coalfields), I've said it before (conservativehome.com/never-give-up-on-the-conservative-coalfield-challenge) and I'll say it again, it is imperative that Conservatives keep up the fight in the cities, the industrial north and the coalfields. These areas are the traditional strongholds of the Labour vote and with Jeremy Corbyn emboldened by his increased mandate to lead the Labour party, the importance of our job to oppose them in these regions takes a renewed significance

After his first win there were jovial tweets, Facebook posts and blogs about how his leadership is great news for the Tories and how we will be in Government until, well, until forever. A brief look at social media will show you that this is happening again. I agree, his leadership will leave his party in the Westminster wilderness for the foreseeable future but Westminster is only one aspect of how we're governed. Local Government is a completely different matter where the unstoppable rise of the left in the Labour Party can be translated into power in the Town Halls. Significant spending decisions and priorities are decided locally and with increasing devolution this is set to increase and without fierce opposition from local Conservatives they'll have it all to themselves.

A microcosm of this may well be unfolding already in Leigh, Andy Burnham's constituency which is set to become a significant signpost of Labour parliamentary candidate selections to come. Leigh is a very traditional Labour stronghold. When Labour's Henry Twist became Leigh's MP in 1922 it has been a Labour held seat ever since. Leigh is not overtly political but has a very large and stubborn core of Labour vote which successive Labour MPs have relied on to see them safely returned to Westminster time and time again.

Out on the doorstep you meet many of these core Labour voters who mostly do so out of habit, they simply can't see themselves voting for any other party. Some, of course, will pause and consider the implications of supporting a Corbyn led Labour party but most won't. It is this cohort which need to be persuaded to think again before X marks the spot on the ballot paper. Failure to engage with voters who will passively vote Labour whoever the leader is will see Corbyn sympathisers gaining power in Local, Mayoral, County elections across the industrial north. 

This means a lot to me and my neighbours who happen to live in Leigh. We are in Greater Manchester where Andy Burnham will be the Labour Candidate for the Mayor of Greater Manchester.  As I predicted (tory-story.blogspot.co.uk/corbyn-wont-run-country-but-he-can-ruin) a Corbynite has become Manchester Mayoral candidate and if you don't consider him a Corbynite then consider who was the only senior shadow cabinet member to stay loyal to Jeremy Corbyn during the summer coup. If he's elected this will trigger a by election in Leigh, one of Labour's safest and most treasured seats. It would be extraordinary if Momentum didn't put every effort into selecting one of their own to be Labour candidate if a by election were to take place and the signs are they are preparing now. 

It can't be coincidence that @momentumleigh twitter account was created on the day that Andy Burnham won Labour's candidacy for the Mayoral election. Shortly afterwards the Facebook page was launched. True enough Momentum are gearing up to make sure they have a continued presence in Westminster for some time to come, this just marks the beginning with talk of deselections across the UK. But to get to this point Constituency Labour Parties must be populated with compliant hard left members, these members go on to become candidates, then Councillors and could go on to lead Councils and influence our everyday lives in so many ways.

Conservatives are rightfully entitled to a moment of mirth. Corbyn's grip on Labour will see them in the wilderness for many years to come but once the dust has settled we must allow any complacency to evaporate. The hard work ahead is to stop the left wing take over of our towns and regions. With many comparisons with the 1980's and the Militant take over of cities like Liverpool, there is one crucial and significant difference. In the 1980's Labour had a leader which despised the hard left and expelled them. In 2016 and for a good many years to come, Labour have a leader who embraces them and will not stop them from doing everything they can to get their hands on power. It's never been a more critical time to be a Conservative activist.

Conference Security or Job Security?

To Tory onlookers, like me, it is very amusing watching the Labour party lurch from one crisis to the next. At the time of writing their latest was their debacle over security providers to the Labour Party Conference. To paraphrase Jeremy Corbyn's predecessor it ended in a 'grotesque chaos' only to be rescued at the very last moment with the appointment of OCS. Having been intricately involved with Party Conference security with the hotel industry at party conferences I still remain unconvinced that OCS can validate security 
clearances  in time but I sincerely and absolutely hope they do.

I really don't care what trouble Labour NEC's dogma gets its own party into but I really do care about the negative impact on ordinary workers their dogma brings. Ironic that this conference is in Liverpool, the very city where the Militant Labour council leaders callously used their own workers as bargaining chips in a vile political game in which even they admitted they were making 31,000 council workers redundant was a tactic to buy time. 

Party conferences are excellent news for the hosting town. They are planned well in advance, they bring vast amounts of business from across the UK and internationally. Businesses serving a party conference forecast over a year in advance the supplies they will need, the services they will  use and, above all, the hours of payroll which need to be budgeted for. Workers in conference venues, restaurants, hotels and a myriad of other places will be given extra shifts, extra workers recruited and jobs secured, all because of a few days of party politics. 

Most reading this will have attended conference and will know just by looking around how busy it is and the amount of staff that are being employed directly and indirectly. Even at the periphery, public transport gets a boost, businesses get unrivalled publicity and the host town gets recognition as a provider of major conferences which could secure future business and secure yet more jobs.

In short, party conferences are excellent news for workers and from my own personal experience I know this all too well. If there were needed yet more reasons why only the Conservative Party are the party of the workers you will not see any reference to workers from Labour MPs and activists. We have heard about the Labour Conference's importance as its "Sovereign decision making body" from Labour's John Woodcock and even Unite's Len McClusky, whose first concern should be his membership, prefers to pick fights with fellow Union Boss Tim Roache of the GMB. While Labour boycotts and the Union barons bicker it is the workers who are caught in the cross fire, just as they were in this very city 31 years ago. 

Will their in fighting mean they won't get that overtime? Will their jobs be less secure without the big business of a party conference? Not one Labour MP or Union leader has said the conference must go ahead for the sake of the workers and it would never occur to them to do so. Why is this? Because they only care about there sorry selves, their self promotion and self preservation and have the thinnest veneer of compassion for the conference workers. These are the workers who have been looking forward to a few more hours, more pay. These are the workers who have been looking forward to a bit more hard earned spending money than they would normally have though the dignity of a pay packet.

The true workers' party are the Conservative Party and as a Conservative I passionately care and I am very glad the conference workers in Liverpool now have a little more certainty about whether or not they will have work to do at the end of September.

Vote Labour, Get SNP ... Again

Jeremy Corbyn will not quit without a fight. Labour have a history for not having the courage of their convictions and waiting for someone else to make the difficult decisions for them. In Government they left the difficult decisions to the Coalition to rebuild the shattered economy. David Miliband was rumoured to challenge the unpopular and failing Gordon Brown but it never happened. Now in opposition there is still no challenger to take on the 'mighty' Jeremy Corbyn. They have done all they can safely do without damaging their careers by resigning their shadow positions and voting in a meaningless non-binding motion of no confidence. Labour are now in unprecedented territory. There are no political giants in the Labour Party like Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins to go off and form a new party so where does Labour go from here. It would not be difficult to imagine the complete disintegration of the Labour Party as we know it and this would all fit with my previous article that project Corbyn is full steam ahead (tory-story.blogspot.co.uk/project-corbyn-makes-its-move).

 

Despite reports of Angela Eagle being given the support of the Parliamentary Labour Party to Challenge Corbyn for the leadership the message is that she is giving Jeremy Corbyn more time to do the right thing. What she fails to see, or does not want to see, is that Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters believe he is already doing the right thing by waiting for a challenge and letting the members decide. This is his deep felt philosophy and shy shouldn't it be. He was elected by the membership with a huge mandate. In his mind it would be crassly undemocratic to have the will of thousands of members overruled by 172 MP's so he's going nowhere. 

Knowing a contest is inevitable, the delay in challenging his leadership gives Momentum ample time to organise his election campaign and mobilise his supporters. Even a casual glance at Momentum's website and social media shows they are in full swing recruiting supporters, getting new members to join and relentlessly promoting Jeremy Corbyn to the mass membership (twitter.com/PeoplesMomentum).

Jeremy Corbyn will win the leadership challenge. Labour PLP know that and probably explains the delay. Given his almost certain victory we would then see the complete disintegration of the Labour Party as we know it and this is the rub. Jeremy Corbyn doesn't want the Labour party to carry on as we know it. He and his supporters want it to carry on as they want to know it. With 172 MP's having no confidence, his return as Labour Leader with a fresh mandate can only mean mass resignations from the Labour Whip. In Parliamentary terms this would convert all those Labour MP's into independents. The rump of the remaining MP's may not be sufficient to be the largest party in the House of Commons. That honour would fall to the Scottish Nationalist Party, especially if they form a coalition with others.

This would be a planned low point for project Corbyn. What would follow in the party would be a throng of deselections in the constituencies and refusals by others to defend their seats as a Labour MP in the General Election. The Left Wing will then make it's final and decisive move and become Labour candidates with many becoming MPs and re-establish the party as the official opposition, or even in Government. Never say never.

I agree wholeheartedly with the Prime Minister when he said to the Labour leader "For Heaven's sake man, go!"  But it is equally, if not more so, a failing of Labour MP's to stand up to him and remove him by mounting a challenge and is the danger to the nation. With Jeremy Corbyn refusing to go we could well see Angus Robertson at the despatch box as Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, with an SNP Shadow Cabinet at his side and his SNP shadow ministers on the front bench. The spectre of the 2015 General Election was Vote Labour get SNP. Under Jeremy Corbyn this might yet come to pass.

Project Corbyn Makes Its Move

It would be tempting to think Jeremy Corbyn is currently hunkering down in the Winchester with a cold pint and waiting for it all to blow over. This, however, could be project Corbyn transitioning to the next stage and all it going to plan. His Shadow cabinet has always been a rainbow coalition of the hard left, soft left, Blairites and moderates. Jeremy Corbyn's complete polarisation from David Cameron placed him on the remain side of the EU debate and it was absolutely clear to even the casual observer that this was a not a decision of conscience but one of political calculation. 

His EU campaigning was lacklustre, indifferent and apathetic and his true Euro scepticism was only just below the surface. He ignored the open and vocal criticism following the Brexit result. The resignation of Hilary Benn did not have to result in his sacking. For the sake of unity he could have been kept Benn in the Shadow cabinet forcing to resign in protest instead. Protesting to his boss in a private phone call would have been a clear sign to the Labour Leader that he was not about to resign on his own accord. If his magnificent speech in Parliament over military action against Daesh did not make him resign then an expression over his lack of confidence would not have done.   Instead Jeremy Corbyn seized the initiative and he would have been abundantly aware his sacking would lead to mass resignations leaving either the ultra loyal, such as Emily Thornberry or career driven like Andy Burnham. And this plays right into Corbyn's hands. 

The Labour Party rules are clear about what any potential challenger needs to do when there is no vacancy but there are no rules instructing the incumbent leader to do anything. Some comparisons are being made with Tony Benn's challenge of Neil Kinnock's leadership in 1988 but there are few similarities. This was a Labour Party which had just expelled militants, not welcomed them with open arms, this was a Labour Party which voted by block votes. Today's Labour party is one where the members have the say and Jeremy Corbyn has a massive mandate from the membership which has since been swelled by ever more Corbynites. A challenge to his leadership is bound to lose and will embolden him to pursue with ever more vigour his hard left socialist agenda. 

Before he was elected leader I wrote about the dangers of a Corbyn leadership (tory-story.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/corbyn-wont-run-country-but-he-can-ruin.html)and it maybe entering the next stage of project Corbyn. A blood letting of the moderates will give Jeremy Corbyn the space he needs to appoint a cabinet of his preference rather than one of political expedience. In my previous piece I was, and still am, very concerned that locally this will be bad news.

Labour will from this point be seen as a hard left party with an ultra socialist agenda. There will be more resignations and, at constituency level there will be deselections as the energised Momentum  makes real progress in taking over the Constituencies and selecting ever more left wing candidates. With Andy Burnham declaring is unequivocal support for Jeremy Corbyn the first visible sign of Project Corbyn part 2 will be his election as a Corbynite Mayor of Greater Manchester in charge of Police and Justice, Transport, Health and Housing. 

Project Corbyn will eventually run it's course and wither but until then it has never been a more critical time for a strong unifying leader of the Conservative party to make sure we stay in Government and spare the country from the extremes of a left wing administration. The new Conservative Leader needs to have broad appeal as possible, I wrote in Conservative Home (www.conservativehome.com/never-give-up-on-the-coalfields). Ordinary, non-political, working people from all backgrounds must be able to identify with Conservative policies and this may not be any of the candidates so far being touted.

Jo Cox MP

They're on the take, all in it for themselves, they do nothing. These are things politicians, whether amateur or professional, hear all the time and we know it is wrong. We know that we seek election because we want to serve those who give us the privilege of representing them on the Council, in Parliament or wherever but this is often overlooked in favour of louder less complimentary commentary. But when challenged you soon discover that these negative sentiments are based on very few MP's who have been in the news for the wrong reasons or even on just one MP (maybe their own) who needs to buck their ideas up. There are hundreds of MPs and the vast and overwhelming majority are there for the right reasons. I would hazard a guess that before the astonishingly tragic events in Birstall few would have heard of Jo Cox just as few have heard of many MPs and some don't know their own. What I hope and pray for out of this tragedy is now that everyone knows what a dedicated Member of Parliament Jo Cox was that she can now be the exemplar of what it is to be a brilliant constituency MP and that the overwhelming majority of MP's are dedicated to serving their constituents.