Doing It From The Bottom Up

I must confess that I've been a bit dismissive of John Cruddas and his Deputy Leadership campaign in previous postings here and here.

On this issue, it would only be right for me to take the unusual step of crediting my spoofster, who has consistently portrayed my true feelings of mind-numbing ambivalence far more honestly than I've done myself.

When asked, for instance, "whether Cruddas is on the right, blairite wing of the party", I was credited with having responded: "I don't think everyone neatly fits into categories and labels... also the Blair/Brown dividing line, the old/new Labour one and the left/right one are not identical. Some people in Compass are very "new" Labour but leftwing, some Brownites are new Labour, some are old Labour rightwingers, and some are more traditional leftwingers". You can see why the spoofster has a reputation for political wit and repartee. There are some contenders whose politics we know we know, some whose politics we know we don't know, but some whose politics we don't know we don't know...

Doppelganger has also suggested that it be great if comrades took time out from listening to Jon Cruddas and did some canvassing and leafleting.... although you can see the inconsistency in his position when he had previously heaped praise on Cruddas for having really worked at regenerating his CLP.

When I came out in favour of the candidature of She Who Must Be Obeyed, on the grounds of a more convincing coiffure than Cruddas as well as not being associated with Compass, my impersonator covered his bets skillfully by indicating that Cruddas would still be a preferable candidate to the greasy spick Miliband.

So... where is all this taking us? Well I've been mighty upset by Jon's recent mouthings about Party membership. At a time like this, when the Party is in dire financial straits, we need comments about declining membership like we need a hole in a Trident submarine.

Jon has been very selective in his use of the figures - he talked about the huge drop off in membership since 2000 as though it was continuing at the same rate and could therefore be extrapolated to show a membership of zero by 2013. In fact, membership was fairly stable in 2005/6 and the just under 200,000 members we have now are here for the long haul. Both of these facts are plain to see from the following membership projection:

One reason why Labour candidates should shut their mouths on issues like this is, if course, that they offer an opportunity to the Lev Davidovich media campaign to steamroller along behind. I was shocked to see this clip on the BBC news the other night. It's the sort of filth that Channel4 specialises in, but not what we expect to pay our licence fee for. Nor indeed our Labour Party membership fee.