What was Alan Sugar ever doing in the Labour Party?

In case you missed it, the unelected Peer Alan Sugar has been having a massively undignified meltdown on Twitter that must surely be making people wonder how on earth such an angry, arrogant, bile-spewing anti-socialist ever ended up making his home in the Labour Party in the first place.

Sugar's meltdown began when he posted an absolutely vile photoshopped image of Jeremy Corbyn alongside Adolf Hitler. After a sustained barrage of criticism over this crude undignified smear-job he eventually deleted the tweet, but he didn't stop there. His next piece of anti-Labour propaganda was a widely ridiculed "poem" about how much he hates Jeremy Corbyn.

Sugar's pathetic "poem" prompted John Prescott to retort with a satirical Tweet proposing a Sugar Tax of £10,000 every time Alan Sugar posts a stupid Tweet or says something ridiculous.

This is where Alan went into full-meltdown mode, posting a bizarre series of abusive tweets in reply to Prescott and numerous other people who criticised his behaviour.

Sugar's vile Twitter rampage included repeatedly using insults like "stupid idiot", "loser", "tosser", and "non-achiever", resorting to misogyny by telling a woman to get a face lift, bitterly attacking the Labour left, and sneering repetition of the grotesque right-wing fantasy of natural economic justice.

This extraordinary temper tantrum of abuse and right-wing vitriol raises the questions of what an angry right-winger like this was ever doing in the Labour Party in the first place, and how the New Labour mob ever considered elevating such a person into the unelected House of Lords.

Sugar's Twitter rant demonstrated that he has masses of contempt for those who want to make Britain a slightly fairer place so that more people have the chance to rise out of poverty to have successful and productive lives.

It's absolutely clear from the bile that he spat at anyone who dared criticise him that Sugar also has a very right-wing arrogance, believing that his wealth somehow makes him better than other people.

He's spectacularly short-tempered and abusive with people he considers to be below him because they're not as loaded as he is.

One person politely pointed out that instead of actually turning up to debate and vote in the House of Lords where the New Labour mob put him, Sugar has barely lifted a finger to influence the political system. His laziness is so extreme that he's only bothered to vote in a pathetic 1.4% of Lords votes since 2015.

Sugar's response to this was an incoherently furious anti-Corbyn rant, attacking "red lefties", declaring himself politically infallible ("all I say is correct"), and refusing to engage with the actual question of his lamentable House of Lords attendance at all.

The really sad thing is that Sugar rose up from working class roots himself to become rich and famous, but he's now intent on kicking the ladder down to impede the life chances of others from his kind of background.

Alan Sugar's Twitter rants don't just expose the fact that he's a bitter and angry person who resorts to abuse and insults when challenged by people he considers to be beneath him, he's also demonstrating the awful ladder-kicking attitude of so many (but obviously not all) in the baby-boomer generation.

There's nothing more repulsive than seeing people who made it good during the greatest period of social mobility the UK has ever seen deliberately turning against their own class and actually endorsing the Tory party and their policies of erecting huge social mobility barriers, slashing education funding, overseeing an explosion of precarious low-paid jobs and the longest sustained decline in the value of UK workers' wages since records began, slashing in-work benefits, and condemning hundreds of thousands of kids to lives growing up in dire poverty.

But that's exactly what Sugar did when he endorsed Theresa May at the 2017 General Election.

If someone is prepared to abandon the Labour Party and then explicitly endorse the most right-wing, social mobility wrecking, infrastructure under-funding, poverty increasing, hope destroying government in living memory, it's absolutely clear that they never really had any interest in the traditional values and objectives of the Labour Party at all.

If the Labour Party moved so far from their democratic socialist roots that they were attracting right-wing self-servers like Alan Sugar during the New Labour era, it's no wonder at all that they ended up driving away traditional Labour voters resulting in a 4.2 million collapse in the Labour vote between 1997 and the final New Labour flop in 2015 (13.5 million down to 9.3 million).

After Jeremy Corbyn steered Labour back towards the centre-left territory they traditionally occupied, and the likes of Alan Sugar returned to their natural Tory home, the Labour vote has bounced back up by 3.6 million to 12.9 million at the 2017 General Election (the biggest increase in the Labour vote since Clement Attlee's radical transformative government won the 1945 post-war election).

So Alan Sugar can sing from the Tory song-sheet and spew his arrogant Twitter abuse as much as he likes. Labour has gone back to representing the people rather than mega-rich donors, and there's nothing he can do about it except lob impotent insults at people he detests for the fact they won't bow and scrape before him just because he's loaded and an unelected Lord put there for life by a political party he now despises.

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