Midterm madness? I hope so

Unite Vs Labour, Jones Vs Danczuk, Hodges Vs Unite, Balls, Jones, and Miliband, Miliband, Miliband….

Aren’t we all having lots of fun?  As the temperatures soar, the heat in the Party is on. Our blood is up. We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. We may disagree about what it is we’re not going to take. We may disagree about who are opponents are. But of one thing we’re sure – they sit in our own ranks. The enemy is most definitely within. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because we did the whole thing this time last year.

Labour are quite proud of our levels of unity as compared to the Tories, and for quite some time, we’ve been right to be. We got over the leadership sniping as the Tories fell into theirs and we have seen a discipline from the PLP that at times has left activists upset, but was aimed at stopping the kind of headlines we’ve seen over the last week.

Now we have seen is that the shark-like UK press have been waiting for this and any other moment to attack us and we seem ready, willing and able to give them every opportunity, we may better understand that need and desire for discipline.

Are these our options? Must it be all out internal warfare or capitulation through political expedience?

Well it will be if we continue to act as if the purity of the Labour opposition means more to us than the difference we can make in Government. Or the horrendous difference that this nasty, mean-minded government is making to people up and down the country.

Owen Jones was right that the move to seven day waits for benefits will be disastrous for those living hand to mouth. He has my whole-hearted support on that issue. But is the key person to be having that argument with a minor Labour backbencher? Shouldn’t this be a fight we should be refusing to dignify with the minority in our own party who support it and take properly to the Coalition Government. At the moment, viewers of the Daily Politics have been led to believe this is an intra-Labour fight that the Tories and their Lib Dem lapdogs are avoiding scot free.

This is as much true of the right as the left. For the last two days, the daily email from Progress has had a “what we are reading” section which only had links to stories about Falkirk. Never mind the extraordinary goings on in Egypt; never mind  the A and E crisis in the NHS; never mind the devastation that the changes to Housing Benefit has caused.

I am the last person to say we shouldn’t talk and write about internal Labour Party issues. A quick look through my history on this site will prove that. But a certain amount of balance is required. Most Labour members, most union members, most Progress members want us to focus on fighting the Tories and electing a Labour government and getting rid of the shower in power. We all need to ask ourselves if that is the majority of our focus and if not, do we have our priorities straight?

If this is just a case of Midsummer madness then fine. Let us sort it, get it out of our systems and get ready for a successful conference season. But we can’t keep doing it. Labour may not be perfect. The frustration of a large coalition – as our party is – is that no one will ever get the perfect party they want. But we need to recognise that this is the better option. We need to come back together to fight for the option over the terrible Tory alternative. We need to take the warning of our falling poll lead to come together to fight the real enemy.

Because the long campaign has already started – and at the moment, too many of us are expending too much of our energy in making the Tories job much too easy for them.