I've always been vaguely in favour of Jeremy Corbyn (although I didn't vote for him, because we need to support our smaller parties), but I have also criticised him for being so devoted to his principles, and so unwaveringly resistant to any form of compromise, that he cannot win enough popular support from his enemies to be elected. And when it comes to politics, being elected is actually pretty important, surprisingly. So even though I like the idea of parties splintering into smaller factions, because it harms the two-party system that I hate so much*, I can't really support today's decision. All these people that I agree with (including Chuka Umunna! The next Prime Minister if he hadn't been put off by the media attention and let Jeremy Corbyn lead Labour instead!) have taken their excellent, admirable opinions, and run off into the wilderness with them. They're never going to win, or gain any power at all where they are now. They might as well have all gone and joined the Green Party. I love the Green Party, and I voted for them last election, and I remember lots of my Facebook friends taking those quizzes where it lists the policies and you pick your favourites and then get told which party you really support, and they all got the Green Party too. And did the Green Party win? You tell me. In my constituency, they lost their deposit, getting fewer than 500 votes, even though preventing that was the entire reason I voted for them. And now Chuka Umunna, the British Obama, the saviour of British politics, has as much chance of political relevance as they do.
As a negotiating tactic, I guess it could make a point. Maybe Conservatives will desert their party and join too. And in any parliamentary vote, our new Independents will still vote against the government just as they did under Labour, so things aren't going to change that much. And, as Robert Peston explained on Facebook, shared by some guy I vaguely knew eleven years ago, there might actually be
more debate within the Labour Party now, because seven MPs have voluntarily declared themselves The Evil Traitorous Enemy of the People™ and so the MPs still in the Labour Party can now speak out about Jezza's fence-sitting and diplomatic shrugging without drawing the full ire of Twitter's perpetually furious community.
Nevertheless, I'm not optimistic. When Jeremy Corbyn first became Leader of the Opposition, utterly decimating a tragically Umunna-less field of competitors, many people decried that this was the wrong decision, that taking the party further left wouldn't win a general election, and that the same tactic had been tried in the 1980s and had failed miserably. Now, Labour seems to be going the exact same way that it went in the early 1980s. The SDP was formed in 1981 according to Wikipedia; if these trends of cyclical history continue, we're in for another 16 years of right-wing governments. I don't want that. I voted Green. That's terrible news. This is not the way to get these demonstrably incompetent smirking hoorays out of power. So I have to tell these laudably-principled heroes and heroines the same thing I think when I see a social media post from any of my rabid Corbynite friends: fuck your principles; actually win something and then we'll talk.
*The only fact I know about politics that is a fact and not just an opinion: the way the first-past-the-post electoral system inevitably creates a two-party system is called
Duverger's Law.