I personally don’t buy into the billionaire press-owner narrative on Jeremy Corbyn, after all it is not really difficult to understand why they would not want him or a government led by him in office. However, whether one does or not there is surely no comparison to be made between the Labour leadership team at national level and the sorry shower that we have sneering down upon those they imagine to be their lessers from the ivory towers of Planet Lampton?Guy may defend Corbyn from criticism when it comes from those outside of his party, but he has rather less enthusiasm for him within the context of Labour’s internal debate. Certainly less enthusiasm than he has for his local leader, who at the time of the first post-Miliband leadership contest supported Liz Kendall because Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham were apparently not right-wing enough for him.To be fair, even Liz Kendall may not have been right-wing enough for some of his party cohorts in Isleworth ward, whose unabashed and oft-paraded views and statements would probably get them thrown out of the EDL for racism, but who for some reason are tolerated, feted and even celebrated by local Labour as a consequence of their devotion to the Dear Leader and his coterie in the ward. Guy never comments on the activities of these people and won’t again this time – not, I believe, because he isn’t uncomfortable with them but because he is scared to upset his boss. And he is not the only one, of course. The Conservative “opposition”, whilst at intervals going through the motions of opposing some of Curran’s excesses on an organisational level (they can’t oppose him on an ideological level as they are barely the width of a fag paper apart), maintains a permanent silence on the matter of Curran’s thuggish and bullying approach to dealing with dissent, either because they are frightened of him or because they aspire one distant day in the future to emulate him.Quite why anybody would be frightened of Curran is entirely beyond me, although one must afford him some credit for versatility in his approach. During my last encounter with him, at the 2014 local election count, he stood in my face and demanded to know why I had criticised him for his dissolution of the borough tenants’ group HFTRA, protesting vehemently that his plan was to replace them with something bigger and better (“HFTRA Mark 2” in his own words). As of yet, more than four years on, the borough’s tenants remain unrepresented. His machismo on this occasion though stands in rather stark contrast to his reaction when confronted on his own doorstep by a diminutive pensioner, whereupon he ‘phoned the police and had the man arrested for allegedly intimidating and harassing him.We are unlikely to have a Marxist Britain with or without Jeremy Corbyn, and we certainly don’t have a Marxist council in Hounslow. Love it or loathe it, Marxism is a political ideology founded on a set of honestly-held beliefs and a strategy for the economic empowerment of citizens based upon a dialectical view of social transformation. Hounslow by contrast is a nepotocracy founded on blind loyalty to, fear of or dependence upon the favours of an autocratic leader who hands out sinecures to those who do his bidding and ask no questions. In Hounslow it calls itself “Labour” because Labour is the Pavlovian prompt that most people here happen to respond to when voting, but it could just as easily be given almost any other title without requiring any change to its nature. Call it what you will - I certainly call it many things myself – but the regime in Hounslow ought not to be dignified by association with any political cause.
Phil Andrews ● 2511d