The brocialist misogynists who want to get rid of Harriet Harman are living in the past

You could not make it up. The mother of the house and an elder stateswoman of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, has found herself threatened by self-styled Jeremy Corbyn supporters in her own constituency: they passed a motion against her at a party meeting last night.

In the motion they said someone else should stand for Labour locally if she became speaker of the House of Commons after John Bercow steps down. There is more than an ugly hint of misogyny about the move.

The Corbyn supporters who passed the motion are not the many young people who joined the party with such enthusiasm when he was first elected leader, fired up by an idealistic socialist vision they thought would bring a more modern equal society.

They are the old far left who have taken over the Camberwell and Peckham local party. For the most part, they never traditionally belonged in the Labour family. They were members of the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Alliance for Workers Liberty, among others.

The criminal barrister, Nick Wrack, who put forward the motion in Harman’s Camberwell and Peckham party, was a member of the far-left TUSC (Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition) party and stood against Harman in 2014, polling only 292 votes to Harman’s 32,614 . He was most aggrieved when he tried to join Labour after Corbyn became leader and was not allowed to because he had stood against her so recently. After a sustained campaign which he ran himself, he was admitted.

It is his ilk who have taken over, and you only need a few of them to alienate ordinary members – 26 to be precise, the number who voted for the motion, out of a local party of thousands of members.

We should not worry too much about Harman. She is battled-hardened, and has already come out fighting. The local party has no power to put up another candidate.

But is odd that the left, who now control the NEC, the body which governs the Labour Party, are having these fights to vanquish “the Blairites”, an enemy which barely exists anymore. Few Labour members would consider themselves such today.

But Harman’s opponents are as averse to the modern world as those old men who spend their weekends dressing up and re-enacting the battle of Hastings.

Take the motion to the Labour conference next week from Dundee Labour Party to bring back Clause Four, famously abolished by Tony Blair when he founded new Labour. Few people under 45 remember Clause Four, which was written in 1917 and committed the party to public ownership of everything – and yet some on the old left would dearly like to bring it back as a “final triumph over Blairism”. 

Or the decision by the NEC to wind up Labour Students on the eve of an election because they are a breeding ground for “Blairites”. Led by the head of Momentum Jon Lansman, it was clearly a vindictive move, but obscure to anyone but those who have a grasp of the minutiae of student politics going back decades.

Or the party’s abolition of some all-women short lists in winnable seats in order to help “favoured sons” which was condemned by the leader of Unison Dave Prentis.

These moves look anti-woman and anti-young people because they are, and behaving in this way is unlikely to win the party an outright majority in any impending election. Corbyn’s satisfaction ratings are already through the floor.

There’s a sense the left has the levers of power, but still feels powerless against the realities of today’s socially progressive world, where women – among others – want equal rights.

If Labour is serious about winning, Corbyn needs to condemn the misogynists of Camberwell, and embrace the young people, who are marching today against climate change. Those are the ones who are really fighting for the future.