With Friends Like These…

There’s plenty of justifiable criticism to be made of Corbyn, from those of us to his left, and most of it in terms of his actual politics, rather than the manufactured trash regarding his appearance, style and lack of ‘leadership qualities.’

Almost every back-stabber and turncoat (waves at Owen Jones) – as well as his outright enemies – has praised Corbyn as a man of principle and integrity; while bemoaning his lack of leadership abilities. What exactly, one can only wonder, do you consider leadership qualities to be, if not principle and integrity?

Again, I could spend a week criticising Jezza’s politics and not run out of things to say but when I hear “ah but he just couldn’t win a general election; he just isn’t a leader” well, that tells me absolutely nothing about him and everything about you.

It tells me that you’re an unthinking swallower of the media consensus; that a slick suit and superficial charm are what you think makes a leader; that you are happy to let your political enemies tell you what and how your leader should be.

You whine and you moan about spivs, con-men and liars; remote, privileged toffs who know nothing of us; who care nothing about how we live and how we die. You turn from your TV in disgust at the fiddling, the corruption and the sheer unmitigated self-interest and greed. You yearn for an honest man. You pray for a champion who will restore your party to its former proletarian glory. You want socialism! Or say you do. And then comes Corbyn…

A man whose cumulative parliamentary expenses for the last hundred years amount to fifty pence, a Refresher and a packet of fucking crisps. A man who lives in a normal house, on a normal street, and whose front garden gives an alibi to working class men all over the country: “It’ll be all right for another week, love. I mean, you seen Jezza’s?”

You’ve finally got your champion; you’ve got a leader who understands your life, lives your life and even looks like the kindly teacher we all had. And yet you moan because he dresses like a normal geezer. You bitch because he doesn’t wear a tie. You take the piss out of his allotment and you sneer at his bike.

Because the media do.
Because the established political class do.
And you swallow it.

You’re too stupid, you’re too blinded by establishment propaganda to recognise normal when it passes you on the street! This is your ordinary bloke – not in it for himself – that you always claimed you wanted. But you complain because he doesn’t dress, speak and act like those you claimed to despise. You fool.

And now they’re doing him in. They’re queuing up like a bunch of prison rapists in the showers – but with less integrity – to stick in the blade. When the posh boys, along with their establishment and traitors in the Parliamentary Labour Party, line up to shank the guy in the exercise yard, while the guards are locking the gates and the governor is urging them on, isn’t it just a basic expression of class solidarity, of decency, to join the prison riot?

His own MPs – the careerist chancers you were bitching about just last week – are now, suddenly, an infallible barometer of the electoral mood? Fuck you. You’ve bottled it. A shiver scuttled around Corbyn’s ‘friends’ looking for a spine to run down, eh?

And what did you expect anyway? A socialist of some sort finally leads the Labour Party and you thought, what? That The S*n would scatter rose petals down his garden path? That he and Dave would chuckle amiably together as they exchanged matey bantz across the dispatch box? That it’d be easy?

Let me tell you, in all seriousness, as someone who knows more than a little about conflict – when they come for you like this, when they hate you like this, you’re doing something right.

It isn’t people like Corbyn who lose Labour elections; it’s people like you.

Now, grow a pair and fight for Corbyn; because he’s spent his entire career fighting for you.