Alan Simpson

How Labour plotters plan to ‘heal’ everything

Labour is plunging into a fresh leadership election just 10 months into Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The pretext for the challenge…

Labour is plunging into a fresh leadership election just 10 months into Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The pretext for the challenge is “in order to ‘heal’ the Party”. It is nothing of the sort, but the fantasy is worth humouring.

Those puzzled by the attempts to exclude Corbyn from the contest can rest assured: this too is part of the plan to ‘heal’ the Party. The plotters might even big-up the plan as one to to heal Europe (and then the world).

Corbyn’s would-be assassins know that Labour does bear some responsibility for the disastrous EU-referendum Campaign. Blaming Corbyn is just the neatest way of avoiding a recognition that the Labour-In campaign was rubbish.

BREXIT won, not because Corbyn wouldn’t pose for a snog with Cameron, but because

BREXIT lied about most of the issues (but convincingly), and

Labour offered no credible alternative vision.

In the absence of ‘total football’

Both Corbyn and John McDonnell wanted a much more adversarial approach – challenging all the social and environmental measures the Tories consistently have watered down, opposing TTIP outright, putting an EU-wide Robin Hood tax on the agenda – but the Labour love-in machine would have none of it. And so we ended up with Britain’s biggest international debacle since Munich … that was until Euro 2016.

And re-writing the outcome of football’s Euro-2016 is at the core of the plotters ‘big idea’.

Those who followed the competition may harbour the illusion that Portugal won, beating France in the final,1-0. Many also have awkward recollections that the England performance was often abysmal: a bunch of over-paid dilettantes, barely able to even pass the ball to each other. (Obviously unconnected to the current state of the parliamentary Labour Party.)

But the plotters have a plan to put everything right. Party General Secretary, Ian (Plotini) McNicol obtained legal advice saying that the outcome of Euro 2016 was completely invalid. A judicious reading (of alternate lines) of the FIFA rule book suggests that many of the teams should not have been allowed in the competition in the first place.

Portugal should be excluded because of rumours it only joined FIFA on a £3 ‘supporters’ fee. England’s humiliating defeat by Iceland is to be erased from the record because Iceland is so far away that no one can possible pretend it is in Europe. And besides, Iceland definitely didn’t get the 51 nominations from member states that it needed to get into the competition.

The Germans are a trickier problem. However, (post-Corbyn, and with a vote on Trident renewal coming up) the Plotters are considering a mini-nuclear strike on Frankfurt, with an “Allez les Bleus” slogan painted on it.

This would distract two contenders in one go (and scupper both sets of plans to pinch the financial ball from the City of London). It would also silence critics who say England’s strike force couldn’t hit a barn door with a brick.

Russia and the Ukraine are to be neutralised by putting them in the same Group; forcing them to play all their games against each other…on the island of Elba. The competition would then proceed to ignore them.

The beauty of rigging the rules

The Plotters have been amazingly creative in this rules revising process. They took advice from a passing street trader saying that most of the other teams in the competition should be disqualified. It also secured the backing of former Labour/FIFA President, ‘Sepp’ Blair.

‘Sepp’ has a few may problems of his own at the moment, what with questions of ethically dubious earnings and the small matter of avoiding an international court, but the Plotters are keen to assist. In return for Labour MPs remaining silent, and refusing to vote for any punitive action or court referral, ‘Sepp’ has promised to disqualify most of the remaining teams.

The only allowable survivors would be Wales, and Labour plotters definitely want them in. For Wales is an integral part of the ‘healing’ process.

Wales played above themselves, behaved like a real team, worked for each other, and made themselves and their supporters feel there was something triumphant about a willingness to raise your game way beyond the levels anyone thought possible.

Wales may have brought the Corbyn spirit into the competition, but Labour’s ‘healers’ can live with this … because when Wales played England, they lost.

It may have been the jammiest victory in the competition but, against Wales, England won!

This is the only result that will be allowed to stand. History books will be corrected and England will once again reign supreme. The whole of Europe can rejoice.

This is the Plotters’ ‘healing’ rescue plan in a nutshell; a brilliant, inspired piece of shenanigans that will do nothing to restore ‘the beautiful game’, but massively shore up the the zone of self-delusion within which the underperforming hide.

Back home, Labour’s parliamentary hit squad may know that their team abandoned game-changing talent and vision long ago. But what do they care? As long as Corbyn gets crushed, who cares if the Party is ignored and a haemorrhage of members follows?

The plotters possess no total-football programme; nothing that remotely meets the challenges of climate change and social fragmentation. The legacy of New Labour obsessions with control of the Party is much narrower: a win is a win … whatever the means. For those who long ago abandoned transformative ‘democracy’ that’s about as far as ‘healing’ goes.

Alan Simpson

Alan Simpson