Socialism and woke extremism won’t save the UK |
In his famous political tract – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, published in 1852 – Karl Marx proffered the generalization that “history repeats itself – first as tragedy, then as farce.”
Marx saw Napoleon’s demise as tragedy. Having been born in the German Rhineland – which Napoleon had temporarily dragged into the progressive orbit of the French Revolution – Marx, like all progressive German political thinkers of the 1840s, was bitterly disappointed by Napoleon’s defeat in 1815.
From this perspective, he viewed Louis Napoleon’s coup in 1851 – in which Napoleon’s authoritarian and inept nephew overthrew the second French republic – as an unseemly farce.
Observers who witnessed the recent initial Your Party conference in Liverpool could easily have walked away believing that old-style socialism and contemporary left progressivism had descended into the realm of farce.
What occurred in Liverpool, however, went beyond farce and degenerated into utter absurdity.
The Your Party is a new revolutionary socialist and progressive leftist party created earlier this year by two refugees from the UK Labour Party – the old-style socialist Jeremy Corbyn and the progressive leftist activist Zarah Sultana.
The new party seeks to fuse Corbynite socialism with woke progressivism – with the aim of attracting enough working class votes to enable it to implement its revolutionary political program.
Things, however, did not go well at the Liverpool conference. A bitter clash between the two party co-founders, Corbyn and Sultana, took place on the first day of the conference – which proved that Corbynite socialism and left progressivism are ideologies that have reached their use-by date.
Corbyn was driven out of the Labour Party in 2024 because the party had long ago, under Tony Blair, rejected his brand of socialism – and Keir Starmer regarded him as an embarrassing anachronism. Corbyn’s mentors were Michael Foot and Tony Benn – and under Blair he had vegetated on the back bench.
Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015 by default, as a result of the party’s electoral defeat and a restructuring that allowed members – rather than members of parliament – to elect the leader.
Corbyn signed up thousands of new members, who elected him leader. The vast majority of Labour MPs never supported Corbyn – and his........