How the Left is stuck in the first stage of grief – and what that is doing to the Corbynist agenda

It is silly season at present, and therefore it is very telling what each of the major parties is putting forth as policy announcements. The Tories are releasing a whole bunch of policy papers regarding Brexit in the hopes that the dodgier bits of it will fly by most pundits and the public (this has mostly worked thus far); Labour are recycling old bits of policy that people hated the first time round in the hope that post-2017 general election and all that Glastonbury Corbyn love, people may like them now (this has mostly not worked).

The big one they have re-released this summer is around all woman train carriages. You would have thought that, given the opprobrium this policy garnered the first time out, there is no way this idiotic idea would ever see the light of day again. The fact that it has been aired anew says a lot about where the Labour leadership is at present. In the five stages of grief regarding the fact that Labour did not in fact win the 2017 general election, and that not only are the Tories still in charge but have it on their own terms to do so for the next five years, the Left are still in stage one: denial. Jeremy Corbyn is the real prime minister, don’t you know, and after the “brilliant defeat”, previously disliked policies can be re-examined in a new light as a result.

Now that women only carriages have been brought up again by the Labour frontbench (and can I digress here, very briefly, to say how terrible a policy that is), one wonders what else will be unearthed. Perhaps Corbyn will get cocky enough to suggest that the party’s official position on Trident ought to be looked at yet again, or even changed by edict of the dear leader himself. Maybe nationalisation of everything will make its way into the next manifesto. I wait with bated breath.

In the meantime, everyone dumps on the all women train carriages concept, including any union willing to talk about the policy. Of course, I might suggest that the Labour frontbench could have directed their energies towards, you know, attacking a lot of the Brexit policy that the government has put out over the last few weeks a lot more vigorously than they have done, but why bother doing that when telling the nation that segregating the genders on public transportation is the progressive future, right?