Saturday 16 July 2016

Why are the Labour coup plotters fabricating evidence of abuse?


One of the things that makes me really sick about the Labour coup plotters is the way they're prepared to lie about abuse in order to score political points against Jeremy Corbyn.

I don't doubt that there are some people sending abusive messages on both sides of the conflict, everyone's seen the kind of abuse that gets hurled at me on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page for expressing my political views. To pretend that there are no abusive idiots amongst the 500,000+ Labour Party members would be to deny reality because there's always going to be a minority of abusive idiots in any large cohort of people, However there's a huge difference between objecting to real abusive and intimidating behaviour, and just making stuff up to score political points.

It's already clear that Angela "integrity" Eagle wasn't even at the meeting where she supposedly suffered homophobic abuse, now it's clear that the venue for the Angela Eagle meeting in Luton was changed at the last minute because the hotel found out it was a political event and told them they weren't welcome, not because of "threats".

The fact that Labour coup plotters and their cheerleaders in the mainstream press have continued reporting these fabricated examples of "abuse" long after they've been disproven just goes to show how some people are not prepared to allow trivial things like facts and evidence get in the way of the propaganda war they're fighting.


The brick through the window of Angela Eagle's office is another example. There is absolutely no evidence of who did it or for what reason, but the right-wing media are using it, alongside the fabricated examples detailed above as a weapon to attack the entire left by association.

Seeing right wing media use fabricated abuse to smear the left is particularly galling considering it's not all that long since a young Tory party activist was bullied so savagely that he ended up committing suicide. Oh how quickly people are prepared to forget when they've got an agenda to push.

One thing that the majority of the mainstream press are completely unwilling to mention is the fact that numerous death threats have been made against Jeremy Corbyn. The reasons are obvious: Not only is Corbyn not making a huge song and dance about the death threats in order to score political points against the Blairites, he's also got very few supporters in the corporate mainstream press, so even if he did try to brief the press about the abuse he's been receiving, few of them would bother to report it.


the fact that Corbyn has been subjected to death threats hasn't prevented the hard-right media from arguing that a victory for "Corbyn is a victory for hatred and death threats" (I'm not linking to that appalling Telegraph article, so if you want to see it find it yourself). Since Corbyn has had numerous death threats made against him, it's clear that using "Telegraph logic" a defeat for Corbyn is a victory for hatred and death threats too, therefore whatever happens, the only winners in "Telegraph logic" land are the tiny minority of people who are making death threats. 

More worrying even than the fact that extreme-right sites like Brietbart and the Daily Telegraph are using these incidents, several of them fabricated, to attack the left in general is the fact that the Labour Party hierarchy have used fabricated evidence in order to justify their complete lockdown on local party democracy.

Every decent person accepts that abusive and intimidating behaviour is unacceptable, but the correct course of action is to report in to the police and let them deal with it (unless it's fabricated in which case the police could well prosecute for wasting police time). The correct response is not to drip-feed complaints to the right-wing media and use it as an excuse to instigate a staggeringly anti-democratic shutdown of local party democracy.

The coup plotters simply don't seem to care that referring to the hundreds of thousands of new Labour Party members as "entryists", "dogs", "infiltrators" and "trots", then feeding crudely fabricated accusations of abusive behaviour to the press in order to suit their own internal party political purposes is incredibly harmful to the Labour Party, and the left in general. It's like these people are living in an ideological vacuum where the sole purpose is to remove Jeremy Corbyn as leader of their party, with no consideration of how their bitter, divisive and in several cases provably dishonest smear campaign is playing out to the wider public.


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