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I wanted to write another whimsical piece this week, about my fallen apple tree. I hate losing trees. It seemed to me a perfect symbol of this miserable ‘winter’ that, with hundreds of trees to choose from on my land, with bloody hawthorns and leylandii and ubiquitous ash, the storms chose to pick on a beautiful gnarled twisty old apple tree, whose fruit is even now bubbling away in the barrel where Brother Bertie and I sent our apple juice to ferment.

But no. Try as hard as I can to avoid the news, I just can’t escape it. Today, I have been living in the past and playing at some new ghost stories for Brother Bigfoot, but a brief glance at Twitter – I know, my own fault – did it.

There I saw that today, a bunch of Tory ministers went up t’north and, with the usual Tory efficiency when dealing with anything north of t’Watford Gap, arrived on the wrong side of a collapsed t’bridge. They shouted their worthless sympathy across a yawning chasm at the distant, suffering northerners – a perfect symbol of Tory policy towards the north for the past 50 years.

You can imagine the dialogue: ‘I say! I do hope your ferrets are OK, old chap? Has this flooding floated all your coal out of the bath? It’s OK, we’re here to help! I say, why are you all laughing?’

Here’s another symbol: since 2010 the Conservatives have been cutting back the flood protection budget in as perfect a condemnation of free market capitalism as you could wish. Cut now, pay later. Reduce state investment, state protection, state oversight, state planning and what happens? The state ends up bailing out – sorry – the resulting shambles. See banking crisis for details. Talking of which…

The Conservatives this week called off an enquiry into the culture and practices of bankers, ending any chance of reform to the rich white boys’ club that took the world to disaster.

Is any of this or more occupying people this evening? No.

It’s the splits in the Labour Party, driven by a small minority of Labour MPs who seem to believe they should choose the party’s leader, not its membership and the wider public (does any other party offer non-members the chance to have a say?).

One of these MPs has reportedly suggested targeting Corbyn, not the Conservatives, for the next year so he is removed and the Labour Party can return to normal. Normal being a cowardly bunch of power-at-any-price conmen and women led by such inspirational moral figures as Lord Mandelson and Tony Blair. The sort of visionaries who lumbered the NHS with massive debt by expanding the Tories’ lunatic Private Finance Initiative, a sort of devil’s hire purchase scheme. The sort of democrats who defied international law and their own people to take Britain into a horrifically costly war. The sort of people who believe it’s right to risk women’s and children’s lives in bombing campaigns.

Among the people who are taking it upon themselves to overturn the Labour Party’s democratic wish is the utterly appalling Simon Danczuk, who has this week been suspended by the Labour Party, not for being a Conservative as you’d expect, but for allegations about his conduct to women. Unusually for a man in this position, he faces allegations which won’t make him any more despicable than he already is, if proven.

These are the people who, presumably, joined in the widespread condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn when he attended Stop the War’s Christmas ‘do’, but kept their mouths bravely shut when they heard about the guests at Rupert Murdoch’s Christmas house party – David Cameron, George Osborne, Rebekah Brooks, John Whittingdale (whose Cabinet job it is to regulate the media), other Tory Cabinet members and a gaggle of right-wing columnists.

I imagine the minority of Labour MPs doing everything they can to sabotage their democratically elected leader are now queuing up to criticise the junior doctors who are to strike next week. In the BMA vote on strike action, of 37,155 balloted, 28,316 (76%) took part. Just 564 voted against a strike. Which, to an anti-Corbyn Labour MP’s democratic reasoning, must count as an emphatic reason to condemn the junior doctors’ strike. Watch this space.

As I type, Jeremy Corbyn is in his House of Commons office, fluffy white cat in his lap, his alleged shadow cabinet reshuffle and the resulting split in the Labour Party the topic on every media commentator’s lips.

I’m writing this before any announcements because that’s the point: what matters is opposing injustice.

Anybody who is in the Labour Party who doesn’t want to strain every sinew to end the gross social injustice perpetrated by the wretched servants of Murdoch, international billionaires, bankers, corporations and all the other apostles of the unregulated free market should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

They don’t think Corbyn can win a general election. They’re probably right. What they don’t know is whether Corbyn could win an election if everybody pulled together to defeat the Tories. They’ll never know that, because they’d sooner have Tories than Corbyn. And what could be more shaming than that?

They think they can win. They’re probably wrong. People are sick of identikit politicians. And anyway, what would it matter if they did? Will they protect the NHS from big business? Regulate the drug prices that are crippling it? Revise the social care policies that are breaking it? Will they end the academisation of education? Nationalise the railways and power utilities? Restore rights in the workplace? Regulate the banking industry? I don’t think so. So what’s the point of them?

I know. Same old same old. But it matters, and I feel protective of Corbyn because for the first time in decades he offers something different to the free market hegemony that’s dominated politics since 1979, to our great cost and to the loss of Britain’s family silver.

It’s the people who are dismissing him that make me support him more: people secure in their own position and giving not a fuck about anybody else; people hungry for advancement at any price; people who don’t understand that politics is principle; people who dismiss him as an idiot and bray their own brightness.

What Corbyn proposes is right and fair. Not many disagree with him for that. We on the Left are told 100 times a day about ‘lofty ideals’. No, they dismiss him because ‘it won’t work’. But they forget that ‘it’ – state intervention, nationalisation, consultation, democracy, sharing – is precisely what got us out of the mess of the Second World War and created the economic boom that enables them to ignore injustice and suffering and snort their contempt for the policies that got their sorry fat arses where they are today.

Now then, about that apple tree…