I must, with respect, disagree with my blogging colleague - I fancy she would be offended if I called her a comrade so I will resist the temptation - Francesca Preece  over the conclusion she has reached in her blogpost on Bob Crow, and how the left need to get their house in order.

For what it’s worth, I am pretty close to sharing her basic view on Brother Bob, whose appearance on prime time telly can wither a Labour poll lead faster than exposing a gentleman’s wedding vegetables to a brisk south-easterly whilst asking him to contemplate Silvio Berlusconi’s sex face.

And I agree, the story about Crow bedblocking a housing association property intended for the disadvantaged is, if it’s true, a pretty poor state of affairs. And yet Francesca puts me in the very awkward position of having to take issue with something unpleasant that has been said about the RMT leader because Bob Crow is not “the left’s” fault, any more than, say, the English Defence League is the responsibility of “the right”.

For a start, who heads “the left” and can therefore be held responsible for the house husbandry that Francesca feels to be so necessary? The RMT does not affiliate to the Labour Party, so it is hard to see how, for example, Ed Miliband could drag Bob in for a dressing down, which is a pity because I imagine that an exchange of views between the Communist and the President of the Oxford Union Debating Society would have been richly comic to witness. The fact is that “the left”, in as far as it exists, is a loosely defined fluid mass of individuals and organisations who believe – and this is a crude but basically correct analysis – in higher taxation and greater investment in public services than their counterparts on “the right”.

“The left” and “the right” do not have houses, association-owned or otherwise, to keep in order as they are not established groups or hierarchies. Like Middlesex and Amy Winehouse’s next album, everyone sort of knows the basic area you’re talking about when you mention the terms “left” and “right” whilst acknowledging that neither really exist in the same way that Labour and the Conservative Parties do.

Some choose to misunderstand this in order to engage in “whataboutery”, using Crow and other bogeymen as useful idiots to undermine Labour’s basic message on inequality, as soon as Labour decides on what this actually is and what they plan to do about it. Bankers’ bonuses? Ah, but what about union fatcats? Cuts to public services? Ah, but what about the fact that every public servant, bar the odd nurse, spends their days setting fire to crisp fifties and swilling a brandy around a bell-bottomed glass? Whaddabout? Whaddabout?

If the pointless debate on the Alternative Vote from both the “yes” and “no” camps has taught us anything, it is that punter, pundit, and politician alike don’t buy into a campaign on the basis of who can build the bigger strawman, or claim the biggest arsehole is on the other side. And in this spirit, I would like to point readers in the direction of David Hencke’s blog, and the cost to the taxpayer of the Tory councillor pictured with the champagne. 

Whaddabout that then?