The 7 right-wing pro-austerity Labour splitters have even less integrity than Ukippers!

Seven of the most right-wing pro-austerity Labour Party MPs have quit the party in order to establish a new opaquely-funded "centrist" party designed to keep Labour out of power, and prevent them from ending ruinous Tory policies like austerity dogma, public service cuts, and wage repression.

The seven are Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Gavin Shuker, Mike Gapes, Angela Smith, Luciana Berger, and Ann Coffey. They're the same old faces, the internal wreckers who always expended far more time and effort attacking their own party, rather than explaining Labour Party policies, or criticising the countless failures of the Tory government.

One of the splitters is Chris Leslie, who was one of the Labour right-wingers who came up with the ludicrously unappealing austerity-lite policy of pathetically imitating Tory austerity dogma at the 2015 general election, rather than vehemently opposing it.

Had Labour opposed austerity in 2015 rather than pathetically imitating it Ed Miliband would probably have won, austerity would be over, Corbyn would still be an obscure backbencher, and there would be no such thing as Brexit!

It was Miliband's lack of leadership (in not telling Chris Leslie, Ed Balls, and the other pro-austerity Labour right-wingers to naff off with their rubbish Tory-lite strategy) that got us in this mess in the first place, yet the other six splitters are throwing their support behind Leslie in the hope that their faction can keep Labour out of power and keep Tory austerity dogma alive.

Another of the splitters is Chuka Umunna who is the living embodiment of directionless self-serving opportunism. These days he parades around as a "people's vote" advocate hoping to soak up support from the stop-Brexit activists, but before this miraculous conversion he opposed Freedom of Movement even before the EU referendum, was adamantly opposed to a second referendum, and publicly advocated Britain quitting the Single Market.

And it's only six months since Umunna vehemently denied that he was plotting to form a breakaway party!

This is a shockingly dishonest guy who has crept from the most Europhobic hard-Brexit fringe of the Labour Party in 2016 through to the Europhile stop-Brexit fringe, lying and deceiving all the time, and then out of the door. Yet somehow some people actually see Umunna as a hero, rather than the brazenly self-serving charlatan that he so obviously is.

The parliamentary voting record of this group of seven is absolutely clear. Every single one of these splitters refused to oppose Tory austerity dogma when they had the chance in 2015 and every single one of them abstained on Theresa May's disgusting "deport now, hear appeals later" Hostile Environment policy that led to the Windrush scandal. 

Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that not a single one of the seven splitter had the decency to call a by-election after quitting the Labour Party.

These cynical opportunists have cynically ridden into Westminster on the Labour brand, using the unpaid support and activism of thousands of ordinary Labour members to get there. And now they're selfishly turning their backs on these people in a desperate last-ditch effort to prevent Labour coming to power and bringing ruinous Tory austerity dogma, public service cuts, and wage repression policies to an end.

Even the Brexity Tory MPs Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless had more integrity, because when they quit Cameron's Tory party to join UKIP in 2014 they both called by-elections out of respect for their constituents.

The fact these 7 pro-austerity Labour splitters have even less integrity than Ukippers tells us everything we need to know about how untrustworthy they are, how much contempt they have towards their constituents, and how much they fear the concept of democratic accountability.

There's also the very real risk that these 7 splitters will decide to vote in favour of Theresa May's hard-right Brexit shambles purely because Corbyn and the Labour Party will be opposing it (which would be breathtakingly hypocritical given all the abuse they've lobbed at Corbyn for the last 2 years for supposedly "enabling" Tory Brexit).

Anyone who buys into the splitters' pro-austerity politics, their brazenly self-serving nonsense, and their outright contempt for democratic accountability must be as politically clueless as they are delusional.

But sadly we know there are lots of political dupes out there who will vote for any old shit given the right branding (how else is it possible to explain the popularity of the economically illiterate, billionaire-bankrolled, bloated spiv David Cameron before his Brexit gamble backfired so spectacularly?).

The Labour splitter group will almost certainly end up a total failure like the SDP in the 1980s, but there's a serious danger that they'll nick just enough Labour votes to keep the Tories in power at the next election. Thus more ruinous austerity dogma, more education cuts, more privatisation mania, more ideologically driven defunding of public services, more systematic abuse of sick and disabled people, more tax cuts for the rich, more social security cuts for the working poor, more collapsing local government services, and more wage repression for ordinary working people.

But to the splitter group and those who support them, all this damage and suffering be a price worth paying in order to maintain the political status quo.

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