Labour: and so the disaster continues

Labour is now so gripped by paranoia that it’s gone on a purging frenzy so sudden and aggressive that even the most hardened Soviet apparatchik would probably tell this lot to calm down and have a few slugs of Vodka to steady the nerves before continuing to rigorously investigate who gets rejected and whose vote should retrospectively be cancelled.
The sinister-sounding ‘verification team’ had, as far as I or anyone else knows, rejected 1,200 applications up until today. Now we learn that they have rejected around 3,000 including a former Labour council leader.

Everyone except Labour itself saw this debacle brewing on the horizon. Economy class voters (o sorry, ‘supporters’) paid their £3 for one purpose and one purpose only – to vote for Jeremy Corbyn. All they had to do was support the party’s “aims and values.” Presumably it is now the job of the verification people to determine that some-one sufficiently supports a highly contested set of aims and values that are being debated, tossed about, reshaped and remoulded right as we speak by the pitiful leadership candidates and the even more boring and bland brigade of candidates competing to be Corbyn’s sidekick (sorry, his deputy).
So what did poor Councillor Joan Twelves do?
Well, I’ve never heard of the woman, so I’ve no idea, but I’m guessing she didn’t defect to UKIP or anything drastic. Did she tweet something unflattering? Did she say publicly that she’d back Corbyn? Did she buy a Tory a pint in the pub once? The list of potential offences is endless; God only knows what crime she committed for the verification team to say ‘Sorry, m’dear, you ain’t a comrade anymore.’ This, according to Harriet Harman, is what it means to be “rigorous.”

It has been alleged that 1 Tory MP and a number of conservative media commentators were among those who tried to apply for a vote and have been kicked out. Indeed, if they were trying to sabotage it, you won’t find a stronger Tory voice criticising this than me. We should certainly be told who the MP is and the Conservative party should deal with this matter seriously. Same goes for any Tory councillors. But what about these media commentators? Are writers and commentators for certain publications banned by default? Are they going to snoop through the entirety of a columnist's archive? Are Labour sympathisers like Dan Hodges – proud to be Labour but deeply critical of just about everything that’s been going on – to be disqualified? And is there no place for a conservative-minded commentator at all in the select segments of the public Labour is actually prepared to tolerate, for all its big show of openness? Part of me wishes I’d tried to obtain a vote (which I would not have used), to see whether the verification team accepted me or found that I operate a little-known blog that a microscopically small number of people have read? I really should have tested these guys’ metal.
The real question that this exclusion of dubiously-branded ‘conservative’ commentators and other alleged “infiltrators” (you couldn’t make this stuff up) begs, is whether it proves that, despite its criteria of commitment for the easyJet membership option, Labour’s aims and values are already a done deal? Is Corbynmania not really happening at all? Hey, you never know, the verification team might even kick Liz Kendall out: she’s a Thatcherite compared with Mr Corbyn. All right, all right! I know that’s a stretch, but this drama is now so utterly ludicrous that anything’s possible. It’s not lawyers who can fix this, because this isn’t a matter of law; this is a daft idea that’s blown up in to something ugly, horrible and unstoppable.