While I felt my essay, highlighting the positive reasons for staying with Jeremy Corbyn would be enough, my feeling that all the politics being within the Left camp which I felt a month ago has been reinforced; last year when Yvette Cooper realised she was losing she rebooted her campaign with a restatement, as she saw it, of the differences in economics & startegy, in retrospect we can see an act of respect for the membership. Smith as his campaign goes down the toilet, takes a different direction. He attacks Corbyn’s supporters otherwise known as the membership and remains silent when people outside the party attack it and its members.
Smith is echoing the calls from some in the PLP who are now asking for unity, even arguing that he is a unity candidate. He is not! His silence if not acquiescence with the smears of anti-semitism, his silence and acquiescence in the externally sponsored attacks on the Chakrabarti report, his attacks on the legitimacy of the membership and smears of entryism, his support for the purges and purgers, his sexism, his laddishness and his nob gags all make him unsuitable to lead and incapable of unifying the party. Furthermore Neal Lawson in his open letter to the Labour Party identified the lack of a body of work as a critical failing, the campaign has exposed this, unlike Cooper last year, he has no political hinterland to dig into. Frankly his supporters need to consider apologising to the membership for nominating him and putting us through this farce. If there isn’t a better candidate, then they need to shut up; unity is fighting the Tories.