What you need to know about the seven Labour splitters

In this article I'm going to detail some essential facts on the 7 Labour splitters who are trying to keep Tory austerity dogma, public service cuts, and wage repression policies alive by splitting the Labour vote.

The seven are a diverse bunch with differing political backgrounds, but they do have several things in common. One is that they've continually expended far more time and effort on attacking their own party than on stuff like explaining Labour Party policies, or criticising the Tory government over the countless scandals and outrages they've inflicted on the British public since 2010.

Another thing that these 7 have in common is that every single one of them refused to oppose Tory austerity dogma in 2015 when the Tories passed the biggest package of social security cuts of all, cuts that are ruining people's lives to this day, especially those who live in the unfortunate areas where the Tory Universal Credit fiasco has been rolled out.

All seven of these supposedly moderate MPs also abstained on Theresa May's outrageous Hostile Environment legislation, even after she bragged about how her new rules could be used to "deport now, hear appeals later". Since then these rules have been used to deny jobs, housing, social security, banking services, and even lefe-saving health care to black Britons without the correct paperwork. Many Black Britons were even deported to their deaths overseas as a result of this despicable Tory legislation.

What could be more moderate than helping Theresa May deport black Britons to their deaths?

One other thing to note is that they've all colluded to join a breakaway faction called the Independent Group, but in order to hide who is funding them they've registered their website in Panama, and registered the organisation as a private business rather than a political party in order to evade declaring their funding to the electoral commission. Any politician who is willing to subvert the accountability rules in order to evade scrutiny like this should definitely never be trusted or taken at their word.

Chris Leslie

Many people would put Chuka Umunna down as the most significant of the Labour-splitters, but that honour goes to Chris Leslie who was one of the leading architects of Labour's ludicrously unappealing and self-defeating austerity-lite policy at the 2015 general election.

Had Labour opposed ruinous Tory austerity dogma 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!

Yes Brexit is a Tory instigated, Tory administered shambles that couldn't have happened without the Tory party, but it didn't happen in a vacuum, and Chris Leslie's idiotic pro-austerity posturing in 2015 is one of the main reasons the Tories actually won the majority that allowed them to set about inflicting this chaos.

Chuka Umunna

Chuka is an extraordinary self-serving chameleon of a politician. Before David Cameron and the Tories even called the EU referendum Umunna was a vocal opponent of Freedom of Movement, and then after the referendum he vehemently opposed a 2nd referendum on the final deal, and even argued that Britain should quit the Single Market.

But once Umunna saw the anti-Brexit movement as a useful vehicle for attacking the Labour leadership and furthering his own career he conducted a polar political switch to pro-EU radicalism!

Then there's the nonsense about anti-Semitism. Chuka Umunna was one of the MPs who sat on the Home Affairs Select Committee that called for clarifications of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and declared that "no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party".

None of this stopped Umunna later attacking Labour for proposing the IHRA clarifications that his own committee admitted the need for, and describing the party as "institutionally racist".

The only thing that's reliable about Chuka Umunna's political positioning is that he'll abandon it in an instant if he thinks it's in his personal advantage to do so.

Mike Gapes

Gapes is best known for the fact that he voted in favour of the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, and then consistently voted against inquiries into the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Gapes has never apologised for his role in the Iraq invasion, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, or the creation of a lawless terrorism breeding ground which Al Qaida and ISIS have used as a base to spread their murderous fanaticism throughout the middle east for 16 devastating years.

Aside from triggering carnage in Iraq, Gapes is a big fan of the anti-democratic, homophobic, misogynistic, head-chopping, terrorism-spreading, journalist-dismembering tyrants who run Saudi Arabia. He's enjoyed several jollies in the Kingdom at the tyrants' expense, and opposes calls for Britain to stop selling them weapons because they keep using them to commit war crimes in Yemen with.

Luciana Berger

Luciana has suffered an awful lot of anti-Semitic abuse, to such an extent that three extreme-right fanatics have been jailed for abusing her and sending her death threats. On this she has my sympathy because alongside Diane Abbott, Sadiq Khan, and Jeremy Corbyn she's one of the most abused and threatened politicians in Britain.

What I can't stand is the way that cynical propagandists have taken these barrages of extreme-right abuse against Luciana in order to use them to attack the left with.

Berger was parachuted into the super-safe Liverpool Wavertree constituency where she had no connection and no knowledge of the local area whatever (to the point of not knowing who Bill Shankly was!). She was living at the incumbent MPs home at the time she was selected, and the incumbent MP's wife was in charge of running the selection process!

Berger isn't personally responsible for the extraordinarily corrupt selection procedure that put her in place, but she's certainly the beneficiary of the kind of anti-democratic Blairite constituency rigging that Labour is finally putting behind it.

In the end Berger's repeated threats to quit the Labour Party to join a new "centrist" party eventually resulted in a vote of no confidence from her local constituency.

The reaction of Labour right-wingers and the mainstream media was to claim the vote of no confidence was motivated by anti-Semitism and to ridicule the idea that it was actually motivated by her repeated threats to ... errr ... join a right-wing split away from the Labour Party.

The really sad thing about Berger is that she's done some really good work on mental health awareness. If she'd have just worked with the Labour leadership rather than constantly attacking and undermining her own party she could have made a real positive difference to people's lives.

Instead she's focused her efforts on scheming and plotting with Chuka Umunna and Chris Leslie in order to damage the Labour Party, keep the Tories in power, and ensure continued austerity-driven cuts to mental health funding, youth services, community groups, adult education and countless other services that do wonders for people's mental health.

Angela Smith

Until the day she quit Labour as one of the seven splitters Smith was perhaps most famous for bitterly opposing Labour's manifesto pledge to renationalise the water companies despite the remarkable 'coincidence' that she's also accepted a load of freebies from the water industry lobby!

But on the very day she became a splitter she made an extraordinary blunder that will no doubt be her defining political legacy. On the very day she cited "racism" as one of her reasons for quitting the Labour Party she described British Asians as being "funny tinged".

FFS. This ludicrous woman has just quit Labour citing "racism" and now she's describing British Asians as having "funny tinged" skin on national television!

Brilliant when the racist rubbish takes itself out isn't it?pic.twitter.com/nwde0RLnnL

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) February 18, 2019

She also claimed the cost of four beds at the public expense for the one-bedroom flat she'd declared as her second home!

Ann Coffey

Few people have ever heard of Ann Coffey. During the 2009 expenses scandal it was revealed that Coffey was claiming £1,000 per month at the taxpayers expense to fund the mortgage on her second home, and a further £160 per month on a cleaner.

She has done valuable work campaigning against child sex exploitation, but then she also made a remarkable call for the scrapping of the right to trial by jury for rape accusations.

She doesn't seem like all that bad a person, just someone who is politically confused and a bit of a money-grabbing expenses pisstaker.

Gavin Shuker

Gavin Shuker (AKA "Gavin who?") is most famous for being one of the tiny minority of Labour MPs who opposed gay equal rights, in fact he resisted gay rights so vehemently that he threatened to quit Ed Miliband's cabinet if Labour supported Gay Marriage.

Thankfully the bigotry of religious extremists like Gavin was overcome in a free parliamentary vote thanks to the fact that around half of the Tory party was less bigoted than he was and sided with the majority of Labour, Lib-Dem, SNP, and Plaid Cymru MPs.

Gay equality remains one of the very few positive things the Tory party have achieved since 2010, and it's absolutely telling that Gavin was one of the bigots who tried to oppose it.

Due to his constant attacks on his own party his local Labour constituency eventually upheld a vote of no confidence in him, meaning Shuker was highly likely to have been deselected as Labour's representative in the Luton South constituency at the next election. So it's pretty clear that he only decided to join this splitter rebellion in order to jump before he was pushed.

Conclusion

A pro-austerity right-winger who helped wreck Labour's chances at the 2015 general election, a shameless self-serving opportunist who changes his political principles more often than his underpants, an unrepentant war-monger who detests the idea of political accountability as much as he adores the tyrannical regime in Saudi Arabia, a private water industry shill who spouts racism on national television, a hangover from the Blairite era where people with no connection to the local community whatever were parachuted into super-safe Labour seats, an egregious expenses scammer who opposes the right to trial by jury, and an anti-gay bigot who jumped before he was pushed, all jumping ship to an incredibly dodgy opaquely-funded private company masquerading as a political party.

Good luck to any political illiterates who imagine that this useless lot are worthy of their political support.

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