With the two main parties without a leader in permanent, effective service — David Cameron threw himself on his sword, and Jeremy Corbyn pointing a gun at his party comrades’ foreheads — Great Britain is beginning a long and painful goodbye to bipolarism, to governability and to the joys of the plurality system. For Corbyn, Wednesday was a day of passion and unspeakable pressure.
But if, in the Tories, the divide is experienced at the level of professional and career attention-seeking behavior level (in the end, they are always in agreement, in their presuppositions), in Labour the divide is a deeply ideological one. And it’s become a civil war: disintegrating, cruel, merciless. For three days they’ve tried to exercise a violent pressure against Corbyn in an attempt to induce him to leave because of exasperation. They’re banking on his kindness and his presumed fragility. A technique reminding us of those interrogations aimed at breaking the victim’s resolve.
The internal putsch — which saw Corbyn brutally discharged by 172 members of parliament against 40 who remained beside him, after that already three quarters of his government had left him in a vote of mistrust by scrutiny — obviously a secret one — continues. He hasn’t given up. He knows he’s got on his side the base of the party which elected him with a majority never seen before. He knows he’s got the unions, who see in him a barrier against the attack carried out for some time against workers’ rights by both major parties, flown into a centrist mixture which makes their policies mostly indistinguishable.
