The Labour Party, the party of the workers.  It was founded around 1900, having grown out of the trade union movement.  It voted to sponsor political candidates for election to the British Parliament at Westminster, and almost immediately there was an election (in October 1900) at which two of the trade union-sponsored candidates found themselves elected; one of those was Kier Hardie.

Let’s face it, at its founding, the Labour Party was pure ‘leftie.’  Socialist, union-financed, even verging on Marxism is how left it was.  It took almost a quarter of a century, but the UK got its first Labour Government in 1924.  It’s Prime Minister?  Ramsay MacDonald.  Admittedly, there was a lot of political jiggery-pokery going on to give Labour this power, because in fact the Tories had a bigger share of the seats and the Liberals decided to give Labour a go.  Nevertheless, Labour was in.  Sadly, that government lasted a mere nine months before the Conservatives won a landslide election after the collapse of the Liberal Party (not for the last time, either).

More or less after that, Labour became the Opposition, and from then on governments were either Conservative or Labour or coalitions.  However. after Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in 1979, a job she held for 11 years, Labour’s left-wing stance seemed to fall out of favour with the public, and it turned out that the party were willing to do anything, anything, to win re-election.

Step up, Tony Blair.  This man essentially ruined the Labour Party but made them extremely electable.  Indeed, he remained PM for ten years himself, followed by three miserable years with his puppet Gordon Brown at the helm.  You didn’t hear Labour complaining about that, did you?

(*Gordon Brown projected the image of a Labour Prime Minister in the true Harold Wilson fashion, but he didn’t listen to people and the now infamous recording of him berating a potential voter was the end of his political career and the end of Labour.  Ed Miliband took over; he couldn’t get them elected.

Step up, Jeremy Corbyn.  Nobody, not even Corbyn himself, believed he would win the election for the Labour Leadership within the party, who wanted to continue the ‘centre-left’ policy that had worked so well for the Blairites.  Astoundingly, Corbyn not only won the election but won it a second time when the Party didn’t seem to believe what had happened.

Corbyn, a true left-wing politician, looked set to shake up the party and return it to its ‘labour’ roots.  This he has found especially difficult, since the ‘centre-left’ are still trying to destroy the party’s founding roots and turn it into a sort of a pink Conservative party.

Step up, Chuka Ummuna.  He has just made a speech in which he accuses Jeremy Corbyn of driving the centre-left out of the party, as though he has some sort of expectation that the centre-left has a right to be there.  Ummuna is a privately-educated law graduate who plays the cello; I feel certain that he has never worked a day down the mines or sweated in the heat of a steelworks in his life!

Part of Ummuna’s beef with Corbyn stems from the fact that they briefly stood against each other in the 2015 election that Corbyn won.  Ummuna withdrew from the race, citing the fact that he could not cope with the additional scrutiny that a leadership candidate must endure – meaning he must have had an affair, or otherwise has something to hide.

Rumours have begun to circulate that Ummuna, and others, are contemplating the formation of another party, although they have all denied this.  Quite frankly, I wish him good luck.  Go form your party, you sure as heckadoodle are not Labour.  Although I suspect that the party name he would want to choose has already been taken – The Conservative Party.

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