"But look at the nasties we expelled" is no rebuttal of complaints you purged the innocent

The Labour coup-plotters have been circulating that list of appalling people who have been thrown out of the Labour Party for stuff like racist, anti-Semitic, foul mouthed and violent abuse and for openly bragging about having voted for UKIP whilst being a card-carrying member of the Labour Party as if this list constitutes a rebuttal of the complaints about the Labour purge.

This list absolutely does not rebut the complaints. Nobody has a problem with the policy of withdrawing the membership awful abusive people or people who openly support other political parties whilst pretending to support Labour. But if the system malfunctions (or is deliberately misappropriated) resulting in countless people being hurled out of the party for "crimes" such as liking the Foo Fighters too much or having voted Green years before they even joined Labour, then bragging about the legitimate cases is no answer at all to the concerns about the punishment of innocent people and the lack of due process.

The absolute lack of concern about innocent people getting caught in the intensely hypocritical Labour social media dragnet and this spate of  spurious excuse-making from members of the Anyone But Corbyn camp is telling.

If the system the coup-plotters are defending sweeps up and punishes innocent people, then it's morally unjustifiable. It absolutely doesn't matter how many sinners they boast about having caught if the original complaint was that their system is punishing innocent people for trivial offences when members of the party elite have been allowed to get w]away with much much worse (like calling Labour members Nazi stormtroopers in the national press, or donating two million quid to a rival political party).

Many Anyone But Corbyn campaigners have been prepared to deflect attention away from the punishment of innocent people because as far as they're concerned most of the cases people have been complaining about are Corbyn supporters, therefore they're already guilty of thought crime anyway and they're therefore undeserving of natural justice.

This attitude is deeply problematic because as John Adams (lawyer, author, diplomat and 2nd President of the USA) said, if the people get the idea that they'll be punished whether they do bad things or not then the result will be chaos.

When Anyone But Corbyn campaigners like Luke Akehurst and Tom Copley are prepared to pretend that the expulsion of some guilty people constitutes a rebuttal of complaints about the punishment of innocent people it creates the impression that they really don't care about things like guilt and innocence or natural justice at all.

Just a few months ago the Chakrabarti Report into the way that Labour deals with abuse recommended that Labour stop retroactively trawling people's social media accounts and that they respect natural justice by giving people the right to appeal.

The NEC agreed to abide by the findings of the Chakrabarti Report, then they turned around and set in motion possibly the largest social media trawling operation in British political history. Not only did they ignore the recommendation that they avoid social media trawling, they've also ignored the advice on natural justice by expelling hundreds of people with no explanation of what the specific breech of the rules is that they stand accused of, but just a few vague hastily typed adjustments to identikit expulsion letters.

It's astonishing that these people want to oust Corbyn in the hope that their faction of the Labour Party can one day become the legislative authority of the United Kingdom, yet they're displaying such brazen disregard for the concept of natural justice, and for the fundamental importance of avoiding the punishment of the innocent.

It really doesn't matter how many "nasties" they brag about having caught. If they don't respect natural justice and the rights of the innocent, they're clearly hopelessly unfit for government.

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