Labour: fiddling while Labour burns?

Any number of Labour observers, headed up by their no doubt increasingly-stressed MPs, are concerned about the weight the party will have to throw around in the next Parliament, what with the dire predictions of electoral destruction--not to mention the resurfacing Cameroonian plan to axe fifty constituencies which will apparently squeeze Labour even further.

From my interested and, if I may say so, reasonably well informed viewpoint, Labour appears to have fallen into full victim mode. Bullied by segments of its own membership in the courts, cowed by the iron grip it has given its own leader, its MPs ignored by their own party leadership and, it seems, membership: I don't really know which bit of Labour is Labour any more. The party is a victim and the diagnosis is quite possibly terminal confusion.

It seems to me that a medicine that would have an immediate effect would be clarity. (My wife takes that for her hay fever, a-ba-doom-tsh). No organisation so divided can hope to coalesce suddenly around an issue, unless Theresa May suddenly decides we should go to war with Germany. But in order to coalesce somebody needs to put the markers down, and that puts Jeremy Corbyn and what we might call the 'official' Labour party leadership in the driving seat - for evidence of their relative power, see the little tsunami of ineffectual resignations that so delighted us during July. Besides, who else in a political party can send up the flare that will draw together the surrounding boats?

We turn, then, with eager gaze to Jeremy Corbyn. This, surely, is a moment for him to seize. I've written before that I don't mind Jeremy Corbyn. I am glad that somebody like him has been able to ascend to the summit in our system, suggesting that the epoch of the spads has yet to take hold totally. I agree that much of the media hostility is unjustified. I don't see him as a messianic guaranteed winner, but I don't think he's the unelectable millstone of lore. Given a cause, some clear messages, and a reasonable electoral wind I think he could confound the doommongers.

Will he do it? Can he seize that moment? A government, led valiantly by Mrs May into the jaws of Brexit, with a small majority; Europe, the issue that destroyed the last Tory government and leader after leader for a decade; an economy on the brink of dreadful post-Brexit statistics; and surely the opportunity to grab the agenda from a new government, to detect the weak spots left, or caused by, the exit of David Cameron.

What's coming through? What am I, as a relatively engaged observer, picking up? Challenges to Theresa May about her One Nation agenda, her commitment to real equality, to protecting the positives of EU membership or even just getting a good deal? No, I'm afraid not. It's really just Owen Smith's non-dick non-joke and today the monumentally uninteresting call for a "digital Bill of Rights". And, for good measure, he's decided to ape a recently-defeated leftist US election candidate. Inspiring stuff. (After all, no previous US politician has successfully adopted a grassroots, internet-driven strategy that we could cite instead, have they?) Mind you there are other echoes of Bernie about Corbyn, but I'm not sure those are necessarily desirable.

Am I blaming Corbyn? Not entirely. Of course there is a persistent media narrative hampering him. But he's not without his platform. And he's not without his position. And he did make it into the news, even if he fell away quite quickly, with his "Digital Bill of Rights" (I can't bear to abandon those quotation marks, as though they can protect us from the inanity of it all). He has his choices and his opportunities. And it seems to me that he just isn't making the best of them.