Join the debate so you can affect what happens nextInitially highly vexed by Barbara Ellen’s piece on why she has left the Labour party (Since when was moderate a term of abuse?”,Comment), I then tried to rationalise why someone clearly clever would ditch their political party of choice so readily. Surely she has been around long enough to know that political parties ebb and flow and morph continuously and rely on their members to not only praise the party when it is in tune with said members’ views and aspirations, and but also to stick around and debate when the contrary applies. Ellen castigates Labour and compares Corbyn and his team to “nightmarish fifth-form debaters”,but her decision to leave the party would seem to me akin to a fifth-form debater storming out of the classroom when the debate is not going her way.
Whether Corbyn is electable is irrelevant a few weeks into his success in the recent leadership election. Ellen seems to challenge the validity of the £3 voters who chose JC in their thousands. The leadership election process enabled those of limited financial means to cast their votes alongside the more affluent party members. Since it seems to be the less well-off who are suffering the most at the hands of the Conservative party’s ideological barrage across all walks of life, surely Labour’s less well-off deserved to be section of the decision-making process of electing a unusual leader.
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Source: theguardian.com