The millionaire Labour Party donor Michael Foster has written an appalling diatribe for the Daily Mail entitled "Why "I despise Jeremy Corbyn and his Nazi stormtroopers" in which he bitterly criticises Jeremy Corbyn and smears the people who support him as Nazi stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung).
The Daily Mail!
Thankfully the majority of the British public rejected the Daily Mail's appeals for them to embrace fascism, giving Mosely and his blackshirts a kicking they never recovered from at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 and then making enormous sacrifices to eradicate the threat of fascism on the content during the Second World War.
It just goes to show how much contempt Foster has for the general public that he'd insult hundreds of thousands of ordinary people as "Nazi stormtroopers" in a newspaper that cheered for Hitler even long after he'd ruthlessly purged the leaders of the Sturmabteilung who had helped him into power because he no longer needed them and saw them as a threat to his own power.
As far as the Daily Mail were concerned the Stormtroopers were a great thing when they helped Hitler into power, but they were soon forgotten about after Hitler had them disbanded and all of their leaders rounded up and killed, because the Daily Mail and a large swathe of the Westminster political establishment continued cheerleading for Hitler and his fascist movement right up until the outbreak of war.
That notorious brick again
In a desperate attempt to slur hundreds of thousands of people as a mindless army of Naziesque thugs Foster decided to harp on about that brick that was supposedly thrown through Angela Eagle's constituency window.
Anyone with any interest in the facts knows that the notorious brick was not actually thrown through her office window (as ubiquitously reported by the mainstream press) and claimed by Michael Foster. the damage occurred on a communal stairwell in the building where the office is located, while her office window round the corner (complete with Labour Party stickers) remained completely untouched.
People who care about facts will also know that there is absolutely no evidence at all that the vandalism was committed by a Jeremy Corbyn supporter. In fact the damage was consistent with an attempted break-in.
People will also know that Angela "integrity" Eagle's team were also caught out lying about a number of other things too, including suffering homophobic abuse at a meeting she didn't even attend and an event getting cancelled because of "threats" when in reality the venue owner pulled the plug because he didn't want a political meeting in his hotel.
Anyone still recycling the notorious brick propaganda is clearly doing nothing but demonstrating their preference for baseless propaganda and their scant regard for stuff like facts and evidence.
The first court case
The author of this hyperbolic diatribe Michael Foster was the Labour Party donor who took the National Executive Committee to court in order to try to get Jeremy Corbyn excluded from the leadership contest. Thankfully his attempt trash the Labour leadership election by excluding the main candidate was thrown out of court, but he's clearly still bitter about it.
Foster's failed attempt to deny the Labour Party membership the chance to vote for or against their party leader demonstrates his contempt for the concept of democracy, which makes his subsequent ranting about democracy more than a tad hypocritical.
Democracy and the rule of law
Foster tries to polish his credentials as a democrat by claiming that "To me, respect for the rule of law is fundamental to a democracy".
"Once political parties believe they are above the law" he warns "it ends with all opposition silenced, whether it is my grandparents in Dachau, or the Left in Erdogan’s Turkey rounded up and held uncharged in prison".
Interestingly he has nothing to say about his beloved New Labour lying to parliament and ignoring international law to enforce regime change in Iraq and allowing illegal US kidnap-torture flights to transit through British territory. He also has nothing to say about how New Labour allowed mass unlawful spying on innocent British people with no parliamentary scrutiny at all.
I guess when it comes to Blairites it's a different story. Foster obviously thinks it was fine for them to behave like they were above the law because it was bound to end up with Britain being the land of milk and honey with all disseners warmly welcomed and politely debated (rather than being slurred as Nazi stormtroopers simply for daring to have a different opinion).
Effective opposition
Foster also wheels out the tired old "effective opposition" trope when he says "effective opposition to a Conservative Government’s austerity programme will never be made to work by the divisive and blinkered extremes of a Corbyn-led cadre of second-rate minds".
It's almost as if the guy genuinely believes that Ed Miliband did such a great job of opposing austerity with his hopelessly ineffective and uninspiring austerity-lite posturing and his decision to whip his MPs into abstaining on Iain Duncan Smith's retroactive workfare legislation to cover up his unlawful treatment of unemployed people (you know, the botch job that was later declared unlawful by the courts for violating the human rights of its victims).
It's as if Foster actually believes that Harriet Harman did such a great job of opposing austerity by whipping Labour MPs into abstaining on the disgusting Tory assault on the poorest people in society dubbed the "Welfare Bill" isn't it?
We all know the truth though. Foster thinks that the only way for Labour to get elected is by offering watered down Thatcherite slop in the hope of an endorsement from Rupert Murdoch like the one Tony Blair got. It doesn't matter that this tactic has failed twice now after the right-wing press failed to take the bait and savaged the Labour candidates, Foster is still insistent that seeking to win Rupert Murdoch's approval with watered down Thatcherism is the only route to political success.
The second court case
Michael Foster openly gloated about the Appeal Court ruling by three judges (one of whom was a very close ally of the UK government during the Blair years) that the Labour Party establishment were allowed to retroactively rewrite the rules to remove the eligibility to vote in leadership elections that they had promised new members on the sign-up page.
Foster repeats the utterly bizarre claim that the decision to disbar the 130,000+ members to have joined the party since January 12th was an effort to block "arriviste" entryists from subverting the Labour electoral college.
As far as Foster is concerned it's necessary to retroactively ban someone who has been an active member of the Labour Party for 25 weeks because they're some kind of filthy entryist infiltrator, but hawking the right to vote in the leadership election to non-members who stump up £25 is fine because they're not entryists at all!
Delusion
Foster is clearly so chuffed about the decision to retroactively disenfranchise 130,000 Labour Party members that he actually seems to think that Owen Smith "now has a real chance of winning".
The polls say otherwise, putting Smith 20 points behind Corbyn with Labour members. The flood of local Labour Party constituencies voting to back Jeremy Corbyn says otherwise (Owen Smith is currently third in a two horse race behind no preference!). Owen Smith's tired unpopular rhetoric and his succession of pitiful gaffes says otherwise. The fact the Labour Party membership has more than doubled since Jeremy Corbyn burst onto the scene in the summer of 2015 says otherwise.
Thinking that Smith can win the leadership isn't even the most delusional thing about it. If blatantly rigging the leadership election does end up handing Owen Smith a marginal victory, just imagine the ammunition the rigged election will hand to the Tories and the right-wing press.
Remember how they savaged Ed Miliband for supposedly stabbing his brother in the back by taking him on in a democratic leadership election? Just imagine what a field day they'd have with Owen Smith winning a leadership election that has been so brazenly rigged in his favour.
Hypocrisy
Foster goes on to whine that the court decision to uphold the Labour Party's right to ignore basic contract law and rob full members of their promised right to vote "caused the mask of reasonableness of the Corbynista leadership to slip even further. Suddenly the most holy of holies, the NEC, was labelled a shoddy organisation".
There's quite a lot wrong with this statement. The most glaring thing is that Foster is claiming that it's fundamentally unreasonable to complain that an organisation that decided to declare ideological war on 130,000+ of its own party members is "shoddy", yet it's apparently fine for him to publicly accuse hundreds of thousands of people of being "Nazi stormtroopers" in the Daily Mail simply because he doesn't like their political opinions!
Foster's warped definition of reasonableness is searingly hypocritical, but another thing stands out too. The claim that the NEC is "the Holy of Holies" is utterly bizarre coming from a man who actually took the NEC to court because he didn't like their decision to allow Jeremy Corbyn onto the ballot!
If they're so damned holy, then how on earth could he take them to court because he didn't like their decision?
As far as Foster is concerned it's utterly unreasonable for Corbyn supporters to criticise an organisation as "shoddy" for retroactively stripping people of their right to vote because of a fear that they're going to vote in the wrong way, but it's perfectly respectful to their Godlike authority for him to ... err ... drag them through the courts because he didn't like their decision!
Cry-bully tactics
Another demonstration of Foster's hypocrisy is his reliance on cry-bully tactics. He whines pitifully about people calling the coup-plotter MPs "Blairites" (which an awful lot of them blatantly are) yet he feels perfectly entitled to call all Jeremy Corbyn supporters "bullies", "arrivistas", "a divisive, aggressive holier-than-thou cadre of hard-Left socialists", "bullies and arm-twisters", "economically illiterate people", "a mob", "second-rate minds", "the extreme left" and "Nazi stormtroopers" who are guilty of "wave after wave of inappropriate, democratically damaging and wrongful actions".
After spewing a load of bile like that all over hundreds of thousands of people Foster has the absolute gall to claim that he's somehow the victim of bullying.
This cry-bully tactic of launching a savage bile laden tirade against all "Corbynistas" and then crying that some nasty unidentified people have said nasty things to them is an increasingly common strategy in the Anyone But Corbyn camp. Alex Andreou used the exact same tactics in his Acid Attack article against Jeremy Corbyn and people who support him last week.
Bonkers meta-conspiracies
Foster repeatedly asserts his Jewishness throughout the article (as if that makes calling your political opponents "Nazi stormtroopers" anything less that the most disgusting kind of smear) and towards the end of the article he wandered off into bonkers meta-conspiracy mode.
He brought up the fact that a lot of Corbyn supporters describe the Anyone But Corbyn coup as being a pre-planned conspiracy, which is hardly a tinfoil hat level conspiracy theory given that coup-plotter MPs were so hubristic and confident of success that they actually briefed the Daily Telegraph about their plot to overthrow Corbyn two weeks before their effort to bully him into resignation was even launched.
Foster's meta-conspiracy is that anyone pointing to the clear undeniable evidence of a Blairite conspiracy to overthrow Corbyn is a raving anti-Semite because of "the ancient racist rhetoric is that Jews don’t act alone, the malevolent Jew always conspires".
The guy is obviously completely crackers if he thinks that clear evidence of a pre-planned Blairite coup plot against Jeremy Corbyn can be dismissed simply by smearing anyone who dares point to it as some kind of knuckle-dragging anti-Semite.
Lies
I've already mentioned Foster's willingness to keep repeating the notorious brick lie, but he tells a much more serious lie in the article when he claims that "If MPs declare their opposition to Corbyn, bully boy McCluskey threatens to target them with deselection" which is an outright lie.
If Jeremy Corbyn wins the leadership re-election he won't be personally deselecting anyone but he would clearly have a huge mandate to bring in democratic re-selection so that local Labour Party members can vote on whether to re-select their MP or replace them with someone who is more likely to actually serve their interests.
Once again this dishonest accusation just goes to show what a hypocrite Foster is. He was perfectly happy for Neil Kinnock to go around hurling people out of the party and deselecting god MPs like Dave Nellist for daring to have socialist principles. He was happy for Tony Blair to weed out as many genuine socialists as possible and replace them with the appalling hoards of centre-right Blairites who have far more in common with the Tories they pretend to oppose than with the Labour Party members and voters they pretend to represent.
As far as Foster and his ilk are concerned, ideological purges are perfectly fine if they're the ones carrying them out, but if anyone dares even hint that local Labour Party members should have a choice over who represents them, then they start shrieking as if letting ordinary members have a say is the kind of thing only a "Nazi stormtrooper" could possibly support.
The Labour Party brand
At one point in the article Foster accuses Jeremy Corbyn of "stealing the Labour Party brand", which is a very telling accusation. Foster doesn't see the Labour Party as an organisation with an ideological purpose, it's simply a kind of marketing exercise with no objective other than the pursuit of power for power's sake.
Towards the end of the article he really gives the game away by expressing his desire to see Corbyn overthrown so that his brand of traditional centre-left socialism can be "consigned to a footnote in history".
What cheek this guy has of accusing a socialist like Jeremy Corbyn of stealing the Labour Party "brand" when the Labour Party was founded by socialists and run by socialists by decades before it was usurped by a bunch of Thatcherites in the 1990s. The likes of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Alistair Campbell and John McTernan turned the Labour Party from a democratic socialist party into an empty political brand that became ever more indistinguishable from the Tories. As a consequence Labour lost 5 million voters between 1997 and 2010.
As far as Michael Foster is concerned the Labour Party now belongs to millionaire donors like him and the centre-right MPs parachuted into the party during the New Labour era. And he has the gall to accuse Corbyn of "stealing the Labour Party brand" because he's trying to take it back from the people who gutted it and turned it into an unprincipled, apathy inducing, neoliberal riddled husk and give it back to the descendants of the ordinary people who built it up in the first place.
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