SOME days ago there was a verbatim quotation attributed to Labour grandee Lord Peter Mandelson all over the social media and mainstream media outlets, saying: “…I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of [Corbyn’s] tenure in office. …Every day I try to do something to save the Labour Party from his leadership.”

Since then, it has been exposed that Mandelson, Tony Blair and Co. were part of a deliberately orchestrated “soft coup” by the party’s right wing to oust Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.

The time is long past for some plain speaking from within the party about this abomination that is “New Labour”.

Mandelson’s statement (and we’ve heard it from him before) and this latest coup attempt are nothing less than sabotage, pure and simple. If anyone from the party’s left were behaving in this appalling anti-party way towards their party’s leadership, they’d be expelled immediately.

Some pertinent history: In the 1990s, the Labour Party was captured by a small coterie of ruthless “entryists” who have absolutely no relationship to socialism and the historical traditions of the Labour Party, and whose neoliberal credentials were nailed unmistakably to the mast when Mandelson spoke openly about being “intensely relaxed about the filthy rich” – a club that (surprise surprise) many of them have long since joined themselves.

Let’s never forget that New Labour and Tony Blair were Margaret Thatcher’s self-proclaimed “greatest political achievement”.

The key question for Labour Party members is: Is the current Labour Party bureaucracy remotely capable of dealing fairly and even-handedly with these matters involving sabotage?

The jury is still very much out on this – but one thing is clear: if precisely the same rules were applied to the New Labour entryists that were applied in expelling Militant entryists from the party in the 1980, Mandelson, Blair and their ilk would be unceremoniously out on their ear, pronto.

And there are huge numbers of loyal Labour Party members, like myself, who, in that eventuality, would be cheering from the rooftops. And finally, I say to the Labour Party apparatchiks: now purge me, if you dare.

Dr Richard House

Stroud