The Last Gasp

Compared with the EU Referendum the 2017 UK General Election has been conducted in a spirit of considerable decorum. But then, compared to the EU Referendum, The Jeremy Kyle Show is conducted in a spirit of considerable decorum.

The Conservatives had two ideas at the outset: Jeremy Corbyn can't be trusted with the Brexit negotiations; and, Jeremy Corbyn can't be trusted. (It's one idea really.) In terms of positive campaigning, we have Theresa May's proud adoption of the "bloody difficult woman" nickname (an equivocal compliment at best) and her eleventh hour promise to do away with some of those pesky human rights. Otherwise, the strategy was to keep reminding people that the "leader" of the Labour Party is someone that the Great British Public already dislikes. If Corbyn is unthinkable then May is inevitable.

More significantly, the attacks on Corbyn have largely been matters of fact & record. He's opposed to the use of nuclear weapons and would not authorise a retaliatory strike. He is a Republican sympathiser (both Irish and, for that matter, English) and does not condemn the IRA. He is anti-Israeli and more comfortable than is entirely proper in the company of some of Israel's extremist enemies. He is ideologically wedded to a significant expansion of government spending based on tax-raising calculations that are at best back-of-envelope guesstimates. While Boris Johnson certainly went too far in describing Corbyn as a "friend of Britain's enemies" who "opposed shoot-to-kill" you can say quite a lot against Corbyn without actually having to make stuff up.

Yet precisely because Corbyn is seemingly willing to stand by so many of his past statements, it makes it difficult to use other innuendoes against him. Corbyn is opposed to "shoot-to-kill" in the sense of state-authorised assassination, but he has been unambiguous in his approval of the use of lethal force against terrorists during an incident. He opposes Israel but condemns anti-Semitism: some regard that as an implausible distinction but he doesn't seem to be lying.

On the other hand, there is too much that we don't know about May. Her stated policies - taking apart human rights legislation, taking away free lunches in primary schools, charging directly for social care provision - are, frankly, the stuff of The Left's most paranoid nightmares, yet these are the very measures which the Conservatives hope will enthrall your vote. Not to mention the free vote that they are offering on fox hunting: Sordel doesn't have strong feelings about that one, but it's hardly the most pressing business to which Commons time might be devoted.

Looking at Theresa May it's difficult to argue with the feeling that she has run a "Hillary Clinton" campaign: assuming that she will be elected on the basis that she is clearly the lesser of two evils without offering any sort of social vision around which voters can rally. Public approval of Mrs. May was tepid at the outset: she will be breaking ice to swim in it now.

Whoever wins this week there are dark days ahead since neither Labour (consistently behind in the polls & with an ungovernable parliamentary party) nor the Conservatives (with a badly wounded leader & recovering from a nasty scare in terms of their poll decline) are in the best shape to govern Britain.

On balance, it seems that the most likely winner of this election will be the E.U.

The Blame Game

The Independent had some interesting results on public opinion regarding the party leaders. The idea was to compare how much of a net drag the leader's popularity was on the party. Theresa May scored a healthy +6%: of those who liked either her or her party, more liked her than liked her party. Jeremy Corbyn, in marked contrast, scored -24%: of those who liked him or his party, far more liked his party than liked him.

If you were planning the campaign for the Conservative Party, you would probably push May into the spotlight, and this is of course what the Conservatives have done. As campaign planner for the Labour Party you would probably bind & gag Corbyn and lock him in a broom cupboard, yet Labour has also pushed Corbyn into prominence: he, Diane Abbott & John McDonnell have become the three-faced goddess of the Labour campaign.

Partly this is probably recognition from the party leadership that if Corbyn doesn't speak for himself then none of the moderates are likely to speak on his behalf. But it also seems highly likely that the Parliamentary Labour Party - seeing inevitable & swift defeat racing towards them - is isolating Corbyn so that he can become the scapegoat of their collective failure.

Unfortunately for them, this may backfire.

Corbyn cannot win this election, but to a certain extent he doesn't need to. Since the election was announced, Labour has stubbornly risen in the polls from a low point of 24% (probably an outlier) to a high of 32%. Even allowing for errors and the fact that Labour historically performs better in polls than elections, that suggests a 5% rise against a very popular government during a period when most Labour MPs have either been sitting on their hands or publicly saying that Corbyn is poison on the doorstep.

Moreover, the visuals of the campaign are playing into Corbyn's hands. The Prime Minister, attempting to sit on her lead and disinclined to take any risks, has thus far underperformed to what in another election would be an alarming degree. So far, the stories about Theresa May have been about an unconvincing performance as human being on The One Show and an attempt to eat chips sponsored by Photoshop. Her disciplined focus on the phrase strong and stable (which will probably help to win her the election but does nothing to endear her to journalists) only reinforces an impression of tedious stolidity.

Corbyn, however, has made some running. Appearing to cheering crowds of the faithful, he has reinforced the impression that those who like him do so less grudgingly than May's supporters. The likelihood of a landslide against Labour is now all but discounted: Corbyn could come away with a win by showing a roughly equivalent performance to Ed Miliband, which is what current predictions suggest will happen.

After all, there is a lot in this election that is not Corbyn's fault. He cannot be held to account for the collapse of UKIP or the good will currently extended to Theresa May by those who backed Brexit. He's hardly responsible for the fact that the Liberal Democrats (last bastion of the self-proclaimed 48%) are languishing at a dismal 8% of the vote in current predictions. It's difficult to see what he could have done to strengthen Labour in Scotland, where the battle lines seem to have been drawn on The Union & the EU.

It's not entirely impossible that both of the antagonists in this gladiatorial competition will come away with a win.

And whom will Labour MPs (such that remain) blame then?

"Have You No Sense Of Decency Sir?"

Amongst the electrifying moments of political history, one of the most memorable is surely Joseph N. Welch's response to Joe McCarthy. Welch, Chief Counsel to the U.S. Army at a time when it was being investigated by Senate Committee on Investigations, had turned the table on McCarthy wth allegations of cronyism. In response, McCarthy sought to blacken the name of a young attorney in Welch's own firm who had previously been a member of a professional organisation deemed to have Communist leanings, prompting Welch's famous rebuke: "Have you no sense of decency Sir?"

Sordel doesn't have a vote in U.S. elections but can hardly be imagined to be a Republican sympathiser in general or someone who would make common cause with Donald Trump. That said, it has become increasingly clear that someone needs to ask Trump's opponents Welch's question. Have they no decency? Is there nothing to which they will not stoop to blacken the man's name?

For years we were rightly told by Democrats that there was something troubling about the so-called "birther" lie that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya rather than Hawaii and was therefore ineligible to become President. To be sure, it was problematic accusation since what seemed like a nice legal point also had a discernible undercurrent of racism. But where a person is born is rather beyond their control. Had Obama been born in Kenya, it would not have amounted to a fault, merely a technical disqualification.

Donald Trump, however, has been branded "a self-confessed molester of women", someone with an incestuous passion for his daughter, a crook, a "vile misogynist", a "Russian stooge" & someone already convicted in court of public opinion of treason.

There are those amongst these accusations which are thin in the extreme: for example, an Australian politician's claim that Trump is a "self-confessed molester of women and [has] green-lighted sexual assaults" is obvious nonsense. Trump never said that he had personally grabbed women by the pussy, made it clear that consent was granted ("they let you do anything"), claimed this dubious privilege only for a "star" (not your regular working stiff) and can hardly have been said to give the green light for anything in a private conversation. Trump may, in fact, be a molester for all Sordel knows (there have been occasional stories but surprisingly few for a man who was going about shaking hands with completely the wrong part of a woman's anatomy) but all Sordel knows in this case is pretty much all that you, Constant Reader, know.

If any of these allegations against Trump were true, it would be a big deal, but it has become increasingly clear that the anti-Trump movement doesn't care.

Consider the treason allegation. In some fanciful minds (not all those who use the term, but certainly some) Russia decided to "turn" a TV celebrity notably lacking in even the most elementary espionage skills (such as discretion), ran him in a presidential campaign that he seemed all but certain to lose and then "rigged" the election so that they could have their man in The White House. Prima facie evidence of collusion is very, very, very thin and it is important to bear in mind that - even if the Russians did, as supposed, hack the DNC servers and leak the results in a bid to turn the course of the election - those leaks actually had virtually no effect on public opinion during the Presidential election, being completely dwarfed in importance by a great many other factors. Among those factors was another leak: the leak of Trump's "Pussygate" conversation, which no one seems to object to in the least despite the fact that there was a clearer public interest for the publication of the DNC leak than there was for the Pussygate one. (And yes, a leak orchestrated on the basis of an illegal operation by a foreign country would, of course, be different from a leak by a U.S. citizen but nonetheless, there is a double standard at work here.)

It is not Sordel's business to determine whether Trump is, in fact, a Russian sleeper agent or a misogynist etc. etc. That's not my point. My point is that with Trump a psychological point seems to have been crossed at which what people are prepared to say about a sitting President is no longer innuendo about where he was born or what religion he follows in secret. Now it's everything you can possibly say about another human being, whatever the evidence. Often the people who say these things hardly seem to believe them, resorting to the childish excuse that "they started it." If you value Truth at all, then your valuation should not change depending on how much your opponent lies.

What route is there forward for the U.S. now? What businessman will ever stand for the Presidency again? Why would next election's losers ever hold themselves to a higher standard than the last election's losers? Whatever happened to the fundamental decency of the Left?

Or are they just all Joe McCarthy now?

Ghosts of the Barely Civil Undead

If the media consensus is to be believed the UK currently finds itself in middle of an election campaign that has been greeted with public apathy. Presumably, voters are bored for the same reason that shooting fish in a barrel never caught on as a spectator sport: rather than sportingly let her opponents get a head start in the renewed race for number ten, Theresa May called the election when she already had a considerable poll lead.

Unfortunately, bored journalists looking to make a story out of nothing have two sources of potential headlines close at hand: Tony Blair & George Osborne.

Blair's so-called return to politics is, of course, nothing of the sort. He has been a constant feature of the political landscape for the last year: he campaigned against both the Brexit side of referendum & Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour with all the determination of a man who has been on the wrong side of public opinion before and will be damned if he doesn't place himself on the wrong side of it again. Blair is not so much back as ever with us like the poor, and that era of foreign wars of which he was a principal architect.

Osborne, on the other hand, has been licking his wounds since last July. He is a man with a very particular claim to fame, having lead a campaign that failed to secure a Remain vote in the referendum despite having all three governing parties (&, for that matter, the SNP) on his side. As if that failure was not feather enough in his cap he is then reputed to have attempted to have May removed from her post at the Home Office as punishment for her failure to support his campaign more full-throatedly, laying the ground for a splendid reversal of fortunes of the sort more usually found in Game of Thrones.

Last September, it was reported that Osborne was attempting to cast himself as "the Tory opposition to Hard Brexit" and "revealed" that he was "considering a return to front line politics". All very "Tony Blair", who has been threatening something similar in an attempt to hold the media spotlight.

Now, however, Osborne has availed himself of a pulpit somewhat different from the anonymity of the back benches, as he has become the editor of the London Evening Standard, a paper that was described at one point as "a mouthpiece of the Conservative Party" but which has now recovered some measure of independence by trashing May's campaign (by no means unfairly) for its reliance on sloganeering above policy detail.

So here we have two senior politicians - both, in some measure, great successes & stupefying failures - who have decided to bring the force of their debatable insight to bear upon the leaders of their respective parties. Blair is trying to work up some enthusiasm for tactical voting & a progressive alliance; Osborne is sniping at the woman who sacked him, arguably in the hope that he can speed the Wheel of Fortune's inevitable turn towards the moment when he can inherit the party to which he is currently showing disputable loyalty.

Yet neither of these men wishes to serve. They airily speak of returning to politics, but not the politics of constituency surgeries, just the politics of enjoying an unelected vantage point for commentary. They are perfect representatives of the political class that played duck & cover when the EU referendum backfired: the class of which Boris and Cameron are also such perfect examples. They know all about cars just as long as they are kicking someone else's tyres.

And when it comes to unelected vantage points for commentary, the line forms behind Sordel.

Lore Of The Excluded Centre

People have a tendency to put cast their ultimata by using that very useful small word: or. "Back me or sack me." "Put up or shut up." "Go big or go home." But The Labour Party currently has got itself into a position where ors no longer seem to count for anything.

Things began badly when the Parliamentary Labour Party discovered that it wouldn't back Jeremy Corbyn and couldn't sack him either. Let's be clear: if Corbyn was on fire and the greater proportion of his MPs had uncomfortably full bladders then they would burst before they assuaged the least part of his discomfort. Backing Corbyn was out of the question, but the manoeuvres to remove him backfired almost beyond belief. Corbyn now has a tame Shadow Cabinet and a renewed mandate; his opponents have given up their cabinet positions (with such dubious eminence as these conferred upon them) and been forced to slink to the back benches where - due to the paucity of MPs willing to sit any closer to their leader than absolutely necessary - they are presumably packed like a small wardrobe towards the end of a particularly populous game of Sardines.

Next, they decided that they wouldn't shut up, but weren't going to put up either. None of Corbyn's most vocal detractors actually stood against him in the leadership election with the consequence that the job of running against him fell to a man more anonymous than his surname; a man, in fact, whose only discernible political achievement had been to trip the hapless Angela Eagle as she stretched out for the prize. The Labour Big Beasts hung back, hoping to dine on another's kill, and all that is left for them now is dispute the pickings of Owen Smith's lean & hungry carcass.

Now it is left for them to go big or go home. But going big is going to be difficult: a vote of No Confidence is difficult to top, and the near unanimity with which the Parliamentary Labour Party attempted to remove Corbyn looks considerably more fragile today.

And, given the difficult conversations that they face with their constituency party members, Labour MPs can't go home.

So it comes down to that most famous of literary disjunctions: "To be or not to be." True, collective self-destruction seems to be option for which Labour MPs have boundless appetite, but this seems to be a case where even making their quietus with a bare bodkin can hardly spare them a proud man's contumely.

Owen Goal

If we believe the polls (which, of course, we shouldn't) Owen Smith is all-in & drawing dead in his bid to replace Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Smith has hitherto not troubled these (or any other) pages, but has nonetheless been anointed as the brightest & best that the Parliamentary Labour Party has to offer which, unfortunately, is not hard to believe. In an article based on interviews with constituency party members The Guardian sheepishly revealed that no one really had a word to say about Smith whose main drawback is also his key virtue: anonymity. The assumption by Labour MPs, for better or worse, is that the least known of them is probably also the one least hated by Labour's members.

Although Smith is regarded as "soft Left" however, there is nothing soft about the approach that he is taking as his campaign ratchets up. And this is a problem.

His lines of attack are familiar: surrounding himself with women, he has branded himself as the sexual equality candidate while female Labour MPs have pushed the narrative that Corbyn is not doing enough to quell the abuse that his less evolved supporters are flinging at them. Surely the next step will be for Smith to reveal Jewish endorsements while saying that Corbyn has failed to confront the anti-Semitism of the Left. He will pose with British soldiers while saying that Corbyn is weak on security. He will appear at Battersea Dogs' Home to criticise Corbyn's lack of a full-voiced opposition to mistreatment of animals.

And the problem in all this is not for Corbyn but for the very people who want to unseat him, because Smith is effectively re-running the tactics of the failed Remain campaign: relentlessly attacking the very voters whom you expect to deliver your victory.

Brexit voters were treated as credulous & racist. This is the strategy used during the EU referendum campaign, and in that context it is worth remembering that MP Jo Cox was actually murdered: powerful proof that at least some Brexit adherents seemed to be exactly what the Remainers were claiming.

Yet an event that might have been expected to swing the entire course of the Referendum, in the end, did not turn the tide, and possibly for the same reason that Smith's strategy is doomed. People's attitudes had been hardened by weeks of abuse, to the point at which they were no longer willing to give any credence at all to the people who were trying to persuade them.

Right now there is no accusation that could be flung at Jeremy Corbyn that people are likely to believe: especially if they continue along the same lines as today's tale of a Watergate-style office break-in. It looks at first appearance like a stunt at best and a blatant smear at worst.

It may well be impossible for Smith to engage with the Labour rank & file but for sure he will not do it by pursuing his current path.

A Laboured Analogy

The Parliamentary Labour Party makes for a lousy boyfriend.

For a start, he always expects you to pay for his round, and he's always playing Lord Bountiful: treating everyone who comes into the pub, whispering to you that all this "networking" is really going to pay off down the line. Though whether it will be paying off for the both of you, or just for him, is a bit difficult to tell.

Then, he always seems to be gossiping about you with his friends. He tells them that you're a bit dumb, and boring, and whiny ... even that you're a bit anti-Semitic, which he seems to think makes him look enlightened & tolerant in mixed company.

Worst of all, he's always making a spectacle of himself chasing after other women. Every few years you'll find him making a play for some stray piece of skirt, even though he knows full well that she prefers the posh boy with the nice car from up the street. He'll put on his best suit, which doesn't even fit him, take her up West and, from what you've heard, make out that you and he broke up years ago.

Of course, once she's dumped him (like she always does) he's back, telling you that he should have listened to you more and say if you let him back then it'll all be different this time. He'll even go to the restaurant you choose before the pub on Friday night. Except, when you do choose, he sits there sulking through the starter and then says that he'd be eating his favourite bhuna by now if he'd made the choice for you.

Then he says that no real girlfriend would have made him eat this filthy Greek muck in the first place: you only do it to annoy him and if he wanted to eat goats cheese he'd have been a goat. And he's had it with you and your fucking stupid ideas of where to eat and you'd better get your coat you dumb bitch because he's off for a bhuna and if you don't like it you can lump it, see?

And when you tell him that you haven't even had your moussaka yet and you were looking forward to it he tells you: "Look, the moussaka's off, no moussaka, this restaurant's a bust. All of my friends keep telling me: there is no fucking moussaka, okay? I'm not sitting here to find out whether some fucking moussaka that doesn't even exist warps into existence and appears on a plate in front of you, because I'm pretty sure that if I get to the pub by nine tonight then that girl from up the road is going to be there, gagging for it."

But this time you tell him: no, she's not gagging for it because she's going steady with that other guy, and the other guy says he's keeping her until 2020 so you can whistle for your bhuna, Parliamentary Labour Party.

And he just looks at you. That look. That look that says "if I have to eat Greek salad one more time and look at your stupid face I'll kill myself".

So that night you throw a brick through his window, obviously.