We've all seen the tantrums Labour right-wingers have been throwing ever since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the party. From Tony Blair claiming he'd rather see Tories in Downing Street than a a Labour Party that has re-embraced democratic socialism, through outright abuse from the likes of Tom Blenkinsop and Michael Foster, culminating in perhaps the most futile act of political foot-stamping the British public have ever seen when the self-serving Anyone But Corbyn coup plot was resoundingly beaten in the summer of 2016.
Now that Labour are in a much stronger position and they're actually leading in the opinion polls, Labour right-wingers are trying to whip up another internal party conflict in order to damage the leadership as much as possible.
Their latest accusation is that a nasty gang of hard-left Corbynistas are trying to "purge" the Labour party of "moderates", citing the deselection of local councillors in Haringey Council.
You really don't have to go far to find echo chambers full of Labour Party right-wingers wallowing in self-pity, howling about "Stalinists" and relentlessly attacking the political party they claim to support.
In order to hold this warped "purge" narrative together the Labour right-wingers need to discard two essential features of what is actually going on in Haringey.
The Labour controlled Haringey Council has been attempting to carry out one of the biggest privatisations of public property and social housing the UK has ever seen. The Haringey Development Vehicle is a plan to sell off £2 billion worth of public property including social housing, public libraries, schools and other public buildings, and it's intensely unpopular with the local community. It's especially with those residents who stand to have their homes bulldozed, and who face exile from their local area by a council that openly admits that "the HDV Business Plans prioritise a single move for residents rather than Right of Return".
In order to whip up their wrecking narratives about "Stalinist purges" Labour right-wingers are deliberately ignoring the reality that the HDV is opposed by the two sitting Labour MPs, by the trade unions, by the opposition parties on Haringey Council, by large numbers of local people, and by a significant proportion of local Labour Party members.
The people pushing this warped "purge" narrative are wilfully ignoring the fact that the right-wing Labour councillors who got themselves deselected were the ones who outright refused to pause the HDV project in order to deal with the concerns, even when asked to pause it by the two local Labour MPs.
In reality the deselection of candidates in Haringey has very little to do with Jeremy Corbyn or Momentum. It's all to do with opposition to the HDV, not that you'd believe it if you believed the howling about "Stalinist purges" and the torrents of abuse against "Corbynistas" from the Labour right-wingers.
The truth is that Labour councillors who supported the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup plot have survived reselection because they also oppose the HDV, while all of the "purged" councillors happen to be the ones who came up with and continue to support the HDV plans, and point-blank refused to even pause the process to iron out the faults.
The next thing to note is that the re-selection process was not done by a secretive cabal of Corbyn supporters, but at the ballot box. The reality is that these Councillors have been deselected because they support a massive and highly controversial privatisation agenda. It isn't a Corbynista putsch at all, it's actually a demonstration of internal Labour Party democracy at work.
If these councillors didn't want to get "purged" then perhaps they should have listened to the concerns of local people, and local Labour Party members, instead of completely ignoring them and pushing on with their massively controversial privatisation/social cleansing project?
It just goes to show how utterly desperate the Labour right are becoming that they've wilfully forgotten about the way they orchestrated an anti-democratic coup plot against Jeremy Corbyn in the summer of 2016, and now they're intent on reversing reality completely in order to pretend that a local revolt against a highly controversial privatisation scheme is some kind of outrageous Corbynista coup.
They knew that their HDV plan was a massive display of contempt for local people, but they pushed on with it because they thought that they were untouchable. And now that local people have fought back a bit, and shown them that they're not actually untouchable, they're having a massive tantrum about it and resorting to their tired old Blame Corbyn tactics.
Perhaps the most disgraceful thing about this tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorising from the Labour right-wingers is that we all saw their Anyone But Corbyn plot to take over the Labour Party from within back in the summer of 2016, and now they've got the absolute gall to reverse reality and smear others by pretending that they're doing what they actually tried to do themselves.
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