How to Spot Someone Trying to Wreck the Labour Party by Voting for Jeremy Corbyn

It's hard to see exactly why so many people in the Labour Party are so worried about the prospect of veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn winning the leadership election. After all, as one hectoring article after another has reminded us, Corbyn is inherently unelectable: he's an out-of-touch radical, he repels ballot cards like a human leafblower, nobody in their right minds would ever vote for the man. So, it stands to reason that he won't win. Simple.

The problem is that Corbyn does seem to actually be winning, with some polls putting him 20 points ahead of his nearest rival. Clearly, something's gone wrong with the logic. But the Labour leadership is unlikely to ever admit that people might prefer to be represented by someone who actually believes in something, rather than some mad, plasticky, blue-eyed demon, a walking advert shrieking in their faces about aspiration. So they've taken the other option: they are saying that the only reason Corbyn is ahead is because some of the voters supporting him aren't actually real voters.

According to their theory, among the hundreds of thousands who have signed up as Labour supporters since the last election are a number of far-left entryists, invaders who have come to pollute the Labour Party with strange and foreign ideas such as socialism. Whether through malice or idiocy, they are swarming over the horizon in their bid to elect the unelectable man, creating a logical contradiction so powerful it could tear apart the fabric of the Universe. (The obvious conclusion – that if there are enough leftists out there to take over the party and install their candidate as leader, there are also enough to put him in number 10 – hasn't really been considered.)

There are already calls from within the party – such as from the frontbench MP John Mann – for the election to be halted due to these dangerous levels of democracy. This isn't likely to happen, but the party will certainly have to carefully check all new members, so entryists can be identified and their votes discounted.

But how can we identify them? Who are they, these shadowy and unreal voters, these fleeting spectres, who don't really believe in the values and principles of the Labour party? (Those values and principles being, in full: "1. We're technically not the Tories. 2. Get money.") How can you tell who's a real, enthused, committed party supporter and who's a malicious intruder, when all you have to go on is a name and a three-pound donation? This is not an exhaustive guide. But if the Labour Party pays close attention to anyone who fits a few of the descriptions below, we might all be saved from disaster.

You know what young people look like: they're the curious and childlike creatures with the taut, supple skin covering their barely-formed bones. Young people know what young people look like, too: the chief activity of young people consists of using their phones to take thousands of near-identical photos of their own faces, endlessly replicating themselves in one smirking contortion after another, and then chucking these pictures into the crowded, bottomless pit of the internet. They also use these same phones to complain about capitalism. It's as if these ungrateful tots don't realise that their phones were actually made by capitalism, in the same way that the black hole of misery and alienation that is swallowing up an entire generation was actually made by capitalism, and all the other concrete factors that led them to oppose capitalism were actually made by capitalism.

Young people support Corbyn because they're too dazed from a lifetime of digital narcissism to realise that the country actually wants to be led by a wooden plank with a face drawn on it. None of them can be allowed to vote.

The history of socialism is one of steadily receding facial hair, from the vast beards worn by Marx and Engels, to the modish goatees of Lenin and Trotsky, to Stalin's austere moustache, to Mao's unblemished, defoliated sphere. Jeremy Corbyn, whose beard covers the entire bottom half of his head, is clearly fighting against the forward motion of history. Every other leadership candidate has the polished, frictionless sheen of a creepy waxwork; this is how you can tell they're sensibly oriented towards the future. Any man with facial hair is undoubtedly some kind of loony-left wrecker. Shave them at gunpoint.

The ideal Labour Party supporter is positive, upwardly-mobile, the owner of an exciting small business, the head of a hardworking family, and, if at all possible, a Qatari oil billionaire. These people know what they want: a party that rewards hard graft, speaks to people's bigotries and encourages everyone to zip around the country in little raspberry-pink Fords bought on credit. It's those pesky poor people who want to ruin all this for everyone, with their needling cries for trifles such as decent housing or hospitals that won't kill and bankrupt them; it's clear from these selfish concerns that they don't have the best interests of the party at heart. Unless it wants to become dangerously out of touch, Labour needs to expel anyone without a six-figure salary.

Disgusting.

@sam_kriss

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