Saturday 8 September 2018

An open letter to the self-styled Labour "centrists"


Dear self-styled "centrist" Labour politician,

With the prospect of democratic reselection of Labour MPs (to weed out the corrupt, self-serving, lazy, incompetent, and the deliberate internal wreckers) looming on the horizon you Labour right-wingers have agreed amongst yourselves that your new propaganda line is that everyone in Labour needs to unify to fight the Tories.


The problem of course is that we all remember what you lot did in the wake of the Brexit vote in 2016.

On the day of the worst Tory cock up in decades you Labour right-wingers didn't come together with the rest of the party to criticise the Tories over their decision to gamble the entire future of the UK in order to nick a few votes off UKIP, and their utterly reckless failure to draw up a contingency plan in case their extraordinary gamble backfired.

No, you decided to use this once-in-a-lifetime Tory cock up to launch a pre-planned coup against your own democratically elected party leader meaning the entire summer of 2016 was spent on a bitter internal battle, rather than in condemnation of the Tory Brexit farce.

You lot were so confident of successfully removing Corbyn that you even briefed your mates at the Daily Telegraph about your plot to oust him three weeks before the Brexit result came in!


Nobody summed up the idiocy of this anti-Corbyn coup better than your stalking horse candidate Angela Eagle who went from praising Corbyn for campaigning against Brexit on a schedule that "would make a 25 year old tired" on June 13th, to claiming that he campaigned with "an ambivalent half-heartedness" in her resignation letter just 14 days later.

And now the very same Angela Eagle is calling on everyone in Labour to unify to fight the Tories, without any mention of the fact that she was one of the Labour Coup-plotters who utterly squandered the best opportunity to fight the Tories in decades in 2016, or showing the slightest contrition for having acted in such a divisive and damaging way at such a crucial time in British political history.

The tragedy is that you lot really seem to think that us ordinary folk have such short political memories that we'd just forget the last three years of your divisive and destructive internal wrecking.

You really seem to think that we're stupid enough to forget the way you lot squandered the best chance to fight the Tories in decades to launch your spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup.

You really seem to think we're stupid enough to forget the way you've spent the last three years rudely and arrogantly slagging off hundreds of thousands of ordinary Labour Party members as "trots", "dogs", "rabble", "entryists", "Stalinists", "Nazi storm troopers", "cultists" ... and conducting vast purges of left-leaning Labour Party members for crimes like once retweeting Caroline Lucas or liking the Foo Fighters too much!

You really seem to think that we're stupid enough to believe your reality-reversing nonsense that you're the poor innocent victims after your backstabbing, your efforts to "break Jeremy Corbyn as a man", you're barrages of insults, abuse and condescension against ordinary Labour members, and your failed attempts to rig both of the Corbyn leadership elections by ruthlessly purging thousands of left-leaning Labour Party members.

If you really cared about unity, why on earth didn't any of you speak out against the purges and all the abuse at the time?


The reality is absolutely obvious to anyone with a few brain cells to rub together.

If you lot were genuinely motivated by a desire to unify and fight the Tories, you would have unified to fight the Tories when it would have counted the most, in the wake of the Brexit vote. 

But you didn't show unity then, you launched a staggeringly divisive and destructive internal civil war instead.

Now that the prospect of democratic reselection of Labour MPs is looming on the horizon you've suddenly had a massive change of heart because nothing frightens you as much as the prospect of having to justify your actions to the ordinary Labour Party members you've spend the last three years insulting, smearing, defying, and purging.

So now you're desperate that everyone unify and fight the Tories, rather than holding you lot to account for your actions and replace you with people who will actually fight the Tories!

My advice, if you want it, is simple: If you get on board now, show some genuine contrition for your divisive and destructive actions in the past, and show that you're intent on expending every effort on opposing the Tories rather than on continuing to defy the will of the Labour Party membership, then maybe that will be enough to save you from the democratic reselection you're so afraid of.


But if you resort to yet more gratuitous insults and abuse towards ordinary Labour Party members like Joan Ryan (trots, Stalinists, communists) and Chuka Umunna (dogs), you're clearly just making the situation worse for yourselves by insulting and abusing the very people who you're going to have to justify your actions to when it comes to democratic reselection.

The tragedy is that if you'd taken your own advice in the past, you'd never be facing the prospect of democratic reselection now because Corbyn never wanted it this way, and it's even possible that it's not too late for you now, if you'd just get with the programme instead of continuing your internal wrecking. 


But there's little doubt at all that most of you will have forgotten this unify to fight the Tories argument within a few days in order to return to plotting and smearing, because it seems that many of you couldn't stick to a principle, even if your parliamentary careers depended on it.

I honestly wish some of you would follow through on this 
unify to fight the Tories argument you've come up with, because all it takes is a bit of humility to understand that the vast majority of Labour Party supporters actually want genuine democratic socialism, not the kind of pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-war, anti-welfare, unregulated neoliberalism that's dominated UK politics for so many decades.

But you've spent so long wrapped up in the "how can we get rid of Corbyn?" groupthink that even a tiny bit of humility and realism about the direction Labour is moving in is probably beyond you.

So all the best in developing a sense of humility, and coming to terms with the reality that Labour has returned to democratic socialism, and that it's headed towards becoming a genuine grass roots organisation where members have a real say, rather than just serving as campaign fodder to help people like you get elevated into the unaccountable "jobs for life" brigade.


Best regards and good luck for the future,

Tom (AAV)


 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.




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