Labour Leadership Election? A Futile Displacement Acitivity

Jeff Randall typically has come up with the best opinion piece so far about the total dearth of quality, both in terms of its tainted, lightweight candidates and its inability to interest the country, in the current Labour leadership election sham.

So far, observing the battle for Labour's captaincy has been like watching a 0-0 draw between reserve sides in a Sunday pub league. Lots of huffing and puffing, but no goals, little excitement, and a gloomy acceptance among supporters that it really doesn't matter who wins, because the players are simply not good enough, and no amount of post-match lagers can change that.

Of course, Randall soon homes in like a well-targeted cruise missile on the real weakness underpinning the current incarnation of the parliamentary Labour party foundations and leadership: rank, institutional, barefaced, epic hypocrisy. Only, it's not just Dianne Abbott's hypocrisy he rightly lambasts (as I did here a while back) but the hypocrisy of that entire rotten political organisation. But what he does to the Milibands is priceless. Of Mili Major (Dave), before writing him off: "Offer him a platitude and he will contrive a soundbite."

For Mili Minor (Ed): he manages to muster only a cursory put down for the ugly one with a voice like a defective waste pipe, as if he just isn't worth it (he isn't):

This week, he said that he wanted Labour to become "the party of small business". Too late – Mr Brown already tried that. He began with lots of big businesses and turned many into small ones.

Boom! Two targets with one bomb.

The bottom line, of course, is that everyone has just had a complete bellyful of the whole package: the lying, the spin, the waste, the arrogance, the pocket-lining, the risible incompetence at every level and, it almost goes without saying, the huge levels of hypocrisy that have outraged so many for so long but who have only recently had the chance to show their displeasure. That gulf, between the Labour leadership's public pronouncements and private behaviour, grew so fast under Blair that the leader of the people's party was somehow able to leave office a millionaire many times over. But even all that is trumped by people's contempt for Labour's diabolical economic record in government (again):

Labour's problem is that none of the candidates can accept the real reason for the party's abysmal performance at the ballot box. As research by Demos, the think tank, revealed this week, the public is sick of borrow, tax and waste. The days of bribing voters with their own devalued money are over.

Let's hope "the public" really is that sick of it and has seen through the oldest Labour ruse of all (bribing voters with their own money). And let's hope public memories are a bit longer this time. My view is that this leadership campaign signals the death knell for Labour, for the reason implied in Randall's opening: it is now a party of alley cats, fat cats and pussy cats led by a bunch of common or garden careerist donkeys.

That lack of real new leadership will kill it.