Danczuk Disses Democracy

Democracy. Some people find it difficult to talk about. Others find it difficult to do. And then there are some who don’t want anything to do with it, unless it gives them the result they want, and into that last category comes Rochdale’s nominally Labour MP Simon Danczuk, who has declared that, unless the Labour leadership contest result is to the liking of Himself Personally Now, he won’t accept it. So he wants it stopped.

Moreover, if veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn was to win, Danczuk has declared that he will work to help remove him from power, such is his deep and sincere respect for the Labour Party, its members, and the wider democratic process. The thought enters that this is a politician who would have been comfortable with Francisco Franco, the Greek Colonels, or António de Oliveira Salazar.

After all, as the old Frost Report gag went, why bother having a General Election if you already know which Generals are going to be elected? And Danczuk is serious about not accepting a Corbyn victory. Asked whether he would campaign to get Jezza removed, his reply was unequivocal: “Yeah, if not before. As soon as the result comes out”. There’s the winner of this month’s Dan Hodges loyalty award.

There’s more: “Am I going to put up with some crazy left wing policies that he is putting forward and traipse through the voting lobby to support him? It's not going to happen is it? So I would give him about twelve months if he does become leader”. There’s loyalty for you. He’s even had the brass neck to say that the election should be stopped, claiming that there has been widespread entryism.

However, and here we encounter a significantly sized however, while Danczuk has claimed that as many as a third of the new supporters in his own constituency should not be voting, talking of “Having seen the list in relation to Rochdale and hearing the horror stories”, the Guardian has told that “the full list will not be officially available to all four candidates for about another 10 days”.

That means either Danczuk has not seen a final list yet, he’s been given access to some kind of work-in-progress, or someone on his team is indulging in some highly creative retelling. Everything else he is putting up is a smokescreen of hearsay and conjecture. As the Guardian has also pointed out, “Labour has hauled in its four leadership campaign teams for a meeting at party headquarters in an attempt to put a stop to complaints from some of the camps about the credibility of the contest”.

It’s blindingly obvious that any entryism would not be sufficient to change the result of the leadership election - which leaves only one reason for Danczuk’s droning on, and that is that he does not want to accept the result of a democratic process, unless it results in a candidate that he finds acceptable being elected. As a result, Danczuk is being given a justifiably hard time in his local media.

Remind us, Simon, how that authoritarianism thing has worked out in the recent past.