The fact that David Sainsbury was even allowed to continue as a member of the Labour Party after breaking party rules by making a huge £2 million+ donation to the Liberal Democrats was an affront to justice after tens of thousands of grassroots members were systematically purged from the party for supposed "crimes" such as admitting they'd once voted Green years before joining the labour Party, retweeting Tweets non-Labour politicians, or even being too enthusiastic about how much they like the band Foo Fighters!
The desperate anti-democratic effort by embedded Labour Party right-wingers to topple Jeremy Corbyn by purging as many suspected Corbyn supporters as possible failed, but somehow Sainsbury was allowed to get away with funding a rival political party.
In the wake of Labour defying the political pundit class by winning seats and eradicating the Tory majority in Westminster, David Sainsbury has announced his decision to quit injecting cash into political parties.
They have very little enthusiastic support at the grassroots level and only really exist in order to promote the lie that the only route to political power is to weakly imitate Tory policy, no matter how far off into the bonkers hard-right realm of privatisation mania and ruinous austerity dogma they wander.
Their right-wing capture of the Labour Party succeeded for a while under Tony Blair, and to be fair Blair's prescription of neoliberalism-lite was a lot less damaging than the bonkers privatisation chaos served up by John Major's dead duck government between 1992 and 1997, or the ruinous hard-right austerity dogma the Tories have been forcing on the nation since 2010.
The big problem for the centre-right of the Labour Party is that despite a savagely biased media campaign against him, Jeremy Corbyn has demonstrated that there's very much more public appetite for a genuine democratic socialist alternative to Tory neoliberalism than for the kind of centre-right Tory-lite policies favoured by Progress.
The Guardian coverage of Sainsbury abandoning Progress is an absolute delight to read as their correspondent cries bitter tears of frustration for the demoralised centre-right Labour Party faction.
The Progress sympathisers at the Guardian even quoted the Progress director Richard Angell spouting desperate misrepresentations and outright anti-democratic contempt by claiming that there is lots of work to be done in "renewing the ideas of the centre-left" and "stopping a hard-left takeover in constituencies".
When he refers to "centre-left" he's actually talking about the pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, pro-PFI, pro-globalisation centre-right faction of the Labour Party.
And when he talks about "stopping a hard-left takeover in constituencies" he's talking about the deeply embedded right-wing of the Labour Party doing absolutely everything in their power to prevent local constituency Labour Party members choosing the election candidates that they actually want, in favour of parachuting in even more useless and unappealing centre-right Progress-approved candidates who think that the purpose of politics is to imitate, rather than to oppose the Tory party.
An awful lot of Progress types are blatant anti-democrats who regard Ed Miliband's decision to democratise the Labour Party as a terrible unforgivable mistake (rather than easily the best thing he ever did). They detest the majority of Labour Party members and the millions of people who flocked back to the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn presented a proper manifesto to undo some of the Tory damage, rather than weakly imitating the Tories like Labour did in 2015.
A lot of Progress people would rather that Labour existed in the political wilderness of a largely abandoned centre-right territory (the Tories have veered off to the hard-right well beyond Ukipper levels of fanaticism, the SNP occupies the centre ground, Labour under Corbyn occupy the traditional centre-left and the Lib-Dems won a pitiful 7.9% of the vote on their centre-right rabidly pro-EU platform).
I'm not a Labour Party member, but if you are a Labour Party supporter who wants to counter the toxic anti-democratic scheming of this centre-right pressure group, my advice is to join or make a donation to the centre-left group Momentum.
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