A matter of life and death

I've always liked to think of myself as a rational man. I'm not superstitious beyond saying hello to magpies and to be honest I say hello to most wildlife and farm animals I see when I am out.  There is a herd of highland cattle in a field I pass on my daily bike ride to whom I always say hello as well, and there is a buzzard who lives in a small copse who gets a greeting if I see it.

I'm not religious, I don't believe in any higher force. I don't think everything happens for a reason. I do think we can explain why some things happen, but that is not the same thing at all. In fact I believe that everything has a rational explanation, just that we haven't yet worked out what some of these explanations are.  I suspect that our ignorance far outweighs our knowledge and much of what we think we know are actually theories which have yet to be proven, E=MC² being a case in point, as it seems to work in some instances and not in others.

I don't believe there is any such thing as the Bermuda Triangle, I think the nonsense talked about Roswell and Area 51 is just that, nonsense. I don't believe that aliens have landed in remote rural areas of the USA and impregnated unsuspecting young women (I'd look closer to home for the reason for that).  I don't believe the world is controlled by the Illuminati. I don't even believe the Illuminati exist other than in the minds of those with too little to do and a desire to find someone to blame for their current situation.

And I don't believe in conspiracy theories.

At least I didn't until very recently. My stance was always that someone would give the game away, Some disaffected ex-employee would sell his or her story to the Sun.

But now I seem to have been proved wrong. The leaked report from the Labour Party destined originally for the EHRC but later suppressed, would seem to indicate that there was indeed a major conspiracy within the Labour Party to destroy the political ambitions of the then leader Jeremy Corbyn and the left in general. It seems incontrovertible despite protestations from the likes of the malignant goblin that is Luke Akehurst who said on Twitter "I've read the whole of the report and there is no evidence in it of anyone working against the party." Ignoring for the present the slightly wild claim that he had "read the whole of the report", all 800+ pages of it, if you examine what he says he refers to the 'party' and technically he is correct. Those who plotted to sabotage Corbyn were not attacking the Party they were trying to take it back. It was not an attack from outside, it was an internal coup, facilitated, it would seem by employees of that party, presumably at the behest of those politicians who resented their loss of influence, not to say power.

That large numbers of the PLP were unhappy that Corbyn had become leader was well known.  It is difficult to hide mass resignations and leadership challenges. What was not known was that the Party machine was working along side them to plot his downfall.

Details of their actions are available now, so I won't dwell on them but I will say I was always suspicious that all was not as it should be, but dismissed my suspicions because they fell into the conspiracy theory category.  This plot seems to have worked because those involved successfully kept it secret.  It was a relatively small conspiracy and involved few people, basically only those who stood to gain from its success.  Who of them would have blown the whistle? Indeed the fact that it has been uncovered now, when effectively it is too late to do anything about it is instructive. Corbyn is banished and discredited.  The right wing of the party is back in control, and bugger the 251,000 who voted for Corbyn after he squeezed his way onto the ballot in 2015 and the 313,000 who did so the following year after a challenge to his leadership.

The party wanted him and huge numbers of them worked their cotton socks off for him and his policies with not the slightest inkling that forces within the Party were undermining their every move.

I feel incredibly let down.  This was the Labour Party.  The party of the people. For the many not the few. Except it wasn't.  It was for the few, not the rest of us. We could have had a decent stab at socialism.  Now that will never happen in my lifetime and for that I will never forgive the plotters and those on whose behalf they plotted. To paraphrase Bill Shankly, politics isn't just a matter of life and death, it's much more important than that, although for many today it really is a matter of life and death and that is sufficient reason to get very angry.