Corbyn Makes His Move

You have to feel a bit sorry for Paul Mason: an intelligent, thoughtful & imaginative chap, basically honest, a bit didactic & earnest, much taken with some of Karl Marx's insights, groping around for a 21st C application for them, would like to be consistent ... but the Real World somehow doesn't fall as neatly into his categories as he'd eagerly wish.

So now Corbyn's made his move - well, a move, he had to do something now or be condemned to utter, contemptible irrelevance - and Paul would like to think this immediately confirms everything he's analysed and was hoping for.  "Corbyn has taken a brave step. Now he must rule out any ‘Labour Brexit’".   Hmm.  Let's see how much Little Paul's enjoying it a fortnight from now.

So what to make of Corbyn's roll of the die?  It's clearly reactive, and no great stroke, that's for sure: comfortably within anything Cummings will have considered.  Team Boris is still drawing everyone else onto the battlefield of its own choosing.  (Which, incidentally, makes all the sillier Mason's opening contention that "Corbyn just got inside everyone else’s decision cycles" - a reference to the thinking of the great John Boyd that will be familiar to many readers.)

I think we may assume Team Corbyn, rattled by initiatives coming from elsewhere (Lucas, Kinnock, Hammond etc) felt the urgent need to slap something on the table.  With a couple of blatant attempts to shield their SNP flank as a preparatory step (but weakening their own Scottish legion in the process), their own effort looks very much like an attempt at a low-risk, win-win, no-regrets type of affair.  If it works, and Jezza is wafted into No.10 by this strange backdoor method, well, he's in!  No telling what he might do with executive authority whilst pretending to be arranging a GE and an A50 extension. 

If it fails, well, Boris gets to crash out (as the Leninist / Stalinist faction always wanted) with only his fingerprints on the deed; revolutionary purity is retained; and maybe it brings down Swinson in the process as an added bonus.  Indeed, you'd have to say on balance they are hoping for and expecting the latter, because by insisting on Corbyn being PM, they've actually blown it from the start, as well they know.

Now Swinson: there's an interesting thing.  The Corbyn outriders are busily saying this'll be the end of her, what with rejecting the saintly Jezza overtures out of hand like that.  Now I have no particular insight into the LibDems (does anyone here?): but I'd say her immediate reactions were spot-on, and that she'll be infinitely less discomfitted by this - maybe indeed, not bovvered at all - than Lucas was by her mighty BAME faux pas.  Why would Swinson wish to submerge her position as leader of the largest unequivocally Remain group of MPs in Parliament for a bit-part in a complex Milne-plot?  (The SNP - a group that really can see some win-win possibilities - are clearly banking on No Deal followed by IndyRef2.)  It'll be Lucas, Fish-woman and Grieve who'll be squirming at being told what to do by Labour.

Meanwhile, Team Boris will be barely distracted.  Nobody shows any sign of getting ahead of them, or turning their flanks - still less "getting inside their decision cycle".  The fact that Corbyn has given up his distant reverse-slope position for a brief foray in the open, well, it's no great stroke.  Let him spend a few weeks in the woke version of a smoke-filled room with Lucas et al, and see how clever he feels at the end of that.

CU said yesterday that Sept and Oct could be fun.  August still has some life in it yet!

ND