My fat finger hit the send button prematurely when I posted this before, plus I got my italics in a mess. Please ignore and consider this version instead.

Ahem:


This is a below-the-line comment on a Guardian opinion piece written by Andy Beckett (the part in bold is a quote from Beckett's article):

'A leader who effectively expelled his predecessor from Labour in parliament despite Corbyn’s 40 years of dedication to his constituency and 10 consecutive large local majorities.’

To say this is a mistake doesn’t do justice to the enormity of the damage this will cause party and country.

What the country needs, above all else, is unity - unity of purpose and unity of vision.

It’s bad enough that Keir didn’t support Jeremy through the expensive [extensive??] character assassination deployed against him by the right wing press.

Jeremy Corbyn is not an antisemite.

To deny him the chance to stand for Labour furthers this outrageous injustice yet more and ostracises swathes of loyal supporters, many of them the abandoned young who found a natural home under Jeremy’s leadership. These are neither ‘extreme’ nor the ‘loony left’ as the tabloids would also have us believe; they are, like our founder (after whom Keir has the honour to be named) simply socialists and socialism should be our raison d’etre - our vision, not the unmentionable word it has become under Keir’s leadership.

The right wing of the Labour Party (a relative term) threw Jeremy under a bus by refusing en masse to join his shadow cabinet: arguably, they thereby threw the country under a bus by helping to condemn Labour to inevitable election defeats. Your Yvette, your Nandy, your Watson & co., assisted ably by that horrid cabal led by John Mann and the highly disreputable Margaret Hodge with their dishonest and confected antisemitism campaign, did more to ensure that than the Tories and the Mail could ever do. Of course, that's exactly what they wanted. No price was too high to pay for getting the lefties out and refashioning the party in their own expedient image. What was once a proud, left-wing party that rebuilt this country after the war in the face of Tory opposition is now a party in which, if you say that you're a socialist, you're in danger of being booted out.