Bring It On? I Don’t Think We Need An Invitation

A great woman once said to me, “never bring a fart to a shit fight” - or in plain English, do not come unprepared if you’re planning to go into battle with a tried and tested opponent. 

A not so great woman, Carolyn Harris MP, who is also Keir Starmer’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, had some words of bizarre criticism for the left of the Labour Party. They went something like this… 

“All this nonsense about so and so and so and so is going to challenge him for the leadership – bring it on, because it’s nonsense.

(They are) just making themselves look silly.

Talking on Zoom, that’s all they are doing, talking to each other on Zoom.

Come into the real world my loves and let’s talk about the damage that’s been done and the repair work that we’re doing”. 

Harris wasn’t finished there. Once she had finished denigrating left-leaning Party members the hyperbole went into full flow. 

“When I see these articles – I’ve actually done it this morning – when I see these articles which say so and so, so and so is going to be challenging Keir for leader and we need a left-wing candidate - That’s the time I think god, we’re getting it right.

We must be doing it right because this is what it’s all about.

You’ve got to move on haven’t you?

We had that project, it failed abysmally, we were a laughing stock, let’s make no bones about it.” 

And just to prove she has utterly lost the plot she ended with..

“And we lost them (right-wing MPs) because we were selling a vision that nobody wanted to buy.

Keir had to come in, get rid of all that nonsense and start putting together a credible opposition and come forward with credible policy when we are in a strong place to deliver on it”.

That’s “nonsense”, “silly”, “a laughing stock”, “come into the real world my loves”, and my personal favourite, “bring it on”. 

There are, of course, quite a few problems with what the Labour MP for Swansea East is saying. 

Let us start with the “nonsense” of a leadership challenge, because I’m guessing Harris doesn’t spend a great deal of time communicating with the left of the Labour Party. We’ll see how much nonsense that is in May. Do they think we’ll just sit here and watch them slowly burn the project to the ground? No chance. We worked hard to get eight points ahead of the Tories, and they worked hard to destroy that lead.

Even when we was eight points ahead they demanded to know why we wasn’t twenty points ahead. They insisted we would be at least twenty points ahead with ABC (Anyone but Corbyn).

Harris wants to talk about looking “silly”? She should know all about looking silly, having to serve as Starmer’s head groveller. But what about this? Did Harris feel silly using a homophobic slur towards a gay former employee? Did she feel silly going on to describe it as “office banter”? 

Note to Harris: Homophobia is not banter, it is a hate crime. 

This happened in 2018. Jeremy, being the ever-supportive leader that he is, gave Harris the benefit of the doubt, and backed his MP. 

This was a mistake. Had a prominent left-wing MP came out with a homophobic slur, it would be the end of their career, and we all know it. 

She describes the left as a “laughing stock” - but she describes Keir Starmer as “socialist to his core”, and “not the establishment - far from”. 

Who’s laughing now? Starmer is as much a socialist as I am on the payroll of Vlad Putin’s Kremlin social media troll farm. Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it, unless you’re Louise Mensch.

There’s nothing more heartening than an MP telling us lower-classes how we need to “come into the real world”. 

This is how they tell us we aren’t allowed to have any hope. That we’re not supposed to have aspirations for our children to grow up in a better world than the one that we have grown up in. 

It’s very easy to say they were trying to buy a vision that nobody wanted to buy. Unfortunately, a vast majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, did a better job of selling the vision of our rivals - by smearing and degrading the twice-elected leader - which made our vision lack credibility and substance. 

If Harris wants to know why we’re in opposition she need look no further than the mirror. That’s not the Keirleading Daily Mirror, but the one that offers you a reflection. 

Assuming Harris lives in the real world, she will see how the “socialist to his core” Starmer is behind in all of the polls, and trails by 20 points in this one from IPSOS MORI. How embarrassing can it get for the Brylcreemed Barrister? They forget, before their sabotage, I repeat, we was eight points ahead of the Tories. 

After the gains made in 2017 the next natural step was for Labour to form the next government after the following general election. But the saboteurs made sure that wasn’t the case, when they played their part in the biggest ever smear job of a British politician that you will will ever witness. 

And that is unforgivable. 

The wealth of the few is always expected to be vigorously defended by the Conservative Party, it is not expected to be funding the Labour Party. 

The day-to-day struggles of the many have been abandoned by this rotten Labour Party, because some fucking focus group in trendy North London believes sucking up to Murdoch, Rothermere, big business, and Boris Johnson, is the golden path to electoral victory. 

Tories will vote for Tories, they won’t be voting for a centrist pretending to be a Tory. 

Lib Dems won’t mind voting for a pretend Tory - Clegg, Clarke and next Prime Minister Swinson springs to mind - but going by the Lib Dems own polling it would appear Starmer has already won their socks and sandals. 

So well done Sir Keir, you managed to win over a handful of Lib Dems while alienating the entire British left, and believe me Keith, we really are the many. We’re not just a tick in a box on Election Day, we will no longer blindly vote for a Labour candidate. 

So they want us to “bring it on”. This is coming from the PPS, one of the top aides to the Labour Party leader. She carries the word of Keith forward to the masses. 

Can you imagine if the Labour Party put this much effort into fighting the Tory government? We’d already be in the 4th year of a Labour government. But they chose to pick a fight with the left, because they are cowards. They see us as an easy target, because if they’re not criticising Johnson, and if they pose no threat to the status quo, the media will give them an easy ride.

Jeremy Corbyn would serve up one defeat after another to the Tory government - more so than ANY previous opposition leader. He forced countless U-turns out of THREE different Tory Prime Ministers, yet they called us a weak opposition? 

Keir Starmer just serves out one suspension notice after another - to Labour Party members guilty of thinking they joined a democratic socialist political movement. 

The centre, the right, the traitors, call them whatever you wish, but the fact remains, they have always underestimated the left, and this will be their undoing. 

We have no fear - we have absolutely nothing to fear, and nothing to lose.

As we’ve seen with Starmer’s dreary social media campaigns, they’ve already surrendered any chance of online credibility and influence. It doesn’t help when the party leader needs to invest in hundreds of thousands of anonymous fake followers to make him look important, rather than impotent.

I never did work out why Starmer deleted all of his liked tweets between 2018-19. Strange that. Let’s hope someone didn’t keep the receipts. 

Carolyn Harris isn’t from the hard-right of the Labour Party, she’s not a Phillips and she’s not a Cooper. She was of the soft-left, and has done some laudable campaigning in the past, but she has found herself a new home in the centre ground. That’s her choice. If she thinks the solutions to the “real world” problems we face are to be found in challenging the left to a scrap them who are we to deny them of this opportunity m?

Team Starmer seems intent on continuing a civil war that they cannot win, in the long run. They may win battles, but they will not win a war.

Starmer’s style of leadership is easy to predict. Pick a common sense socialist position on something, and he will pick the opposite position. Starmer is an awful politician, and he is indeed a wet wipe. He will sit on the fence until he can see a popular position, and then he will attach his support to it. He did the same under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and he still does it now. 

This indecisive dithering may well play out nicely with his fan club, they call it being “forensic”, but in the “real world”, it’s not cutting through, against the worst government in living memory by some distance.

I repeat, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour were EIGHT POINTS AHEAD of a government not half as bad as Johnson’s gathering of corrupt imbeciles. This was because Mr Corbyn still had control of Labour’s Brexit position, and the impact of the popular ‘For The Many’ manifesto.

But that was the trigger point. 

They couldn’t risk a Corbyn government, we can’t be having broadband communism, or adequately fed children, and the thought of the establishment having to pay a bit more tax would’ve been enough to force monotone Keith into a key change, almost. 

They want us to bring it on? What are they going to do? Bash us with a flag?

It’s not like we really need an invite, is it? 

There’s a global pandemic going on right now. Team Starmer really need to try and focus on holding the government to account, because people aren’t fooled by their acquiescence. 

But Starmer knows he is fully complicit in the Tories devastating failure of a response to the Coronavirus crisis, so the best thing he can do is attack those who call out his complicity. 

When the Labour Party launch an inquest into why they failed to make huge, unprecedented gains at the local elections in May, they will do well to remember this moment. 

They invited us to “bring it on”, and bring it on, we will. 

All the best. 

Rachael x

Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts, if you want to chip in towards improving my ongoing campaign, and it would cause you *no hardship*, you can do so here: