This super-viral Corbyn Tweet illustrates why the Westminster establishment class hate him so much

Jeremy Corbyn's clapback at Richard Branson for having sued the NHS because they wouldn't privatise services into his hands is already one of the most mega-viral political Tweets of 2019.

Branson's Tweet is absolutely dripping in privilege. It's easy to delude yourself into "truly believing" that "stuff" like money and material possessions aren't a big factor in happiness when you're a billionaire who rakes in huge profits at the public expense by snapping up former public services on the cheap and then renting them back to the public at twice the price.

If you've never had to worry about how the hell you're going to put food on the table, pay your transport costs, provide your kids decent shoes and bags so they don't get bullied by materialist little shit-heads at school, or find the massive sums your profiteering slumlord is charging you to like in an absolute hovel, then it's obviously easy to pretend that money and material wealth are irrelevant to happiness.

If you have ever experienced the stress, anxiety, hunger, and crushing depression of extreme poverty then you know that it's vapid over-privileged blibber-blabber, especially when it's coming from a guy who gets paid millions whichever way the dice fall.

He either snaps up lucrative NHS services to profiteer on, or he sues the NHS for £millions if they say no.
Of course it's easy to pretend that money and material circumstances aren't important factors in life if you're a billionaire still counting your loot from the time you sued the NHS.

When Corbyn snaps back at Branson, he's quite clearly standing up for the rest of us.

But within the Westminster Establishment bubble, Corbyn's behaviour is absolute political heresy.

For the last four decades the conventional political wisdom is that political leaders need to suck up to corporate fat cats and billionaires in order to win their approval, to bag multi-million donations from wealthy elitists to bankroll their party operations, and to demonstrate their subservience to billionaire right-wing propaganda barons like Rupert Murdoch, Jonathan Harmsworth, and the oddbal Barclay brothers.

By actually standing up to corporations, the mega-rich, and the right-wing propaganda barons, rather than licking their boots, Corbyn is outright defying the Westminster bubble groupthink.

Some of them hate him for this because they honestly believe that the role of politicians is to relentlessly serve the interests of corporations and the already extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else (Tories and their depraved Lib-Dem austerity enablers).

But others, especially those of the Blairite persuasion, are terrified of what it would mean if he actually succeeded.

It would mean that it was never actually necessary for Labour to sell out to Rupert Murdoch, or to suck up to greedy profiteering pillocks like Alan Sugar and Richard Branson, or to kick down the door to NHS privatisation, or to bring in £billions worth of rip-off PFI economic alchemy schemes, or to set the school privatisation agenda in motion, or to dangerously deregulate the financial sector, or to whip up anti-immigrant rhetoric and xenophobia, or to abstain on Theresa May's despicable and unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment", or to pathetically imitate Tory austerity fanaticism in 2015.

If Jeremy Corbyn succeeds by making Labour a genuine grass roots-funded democratic socialist party that's not beholden to billionaires to bankroll their operation, it'll mean that all of the sell-outs and betrayals between 1997 and 2010 weren't even necessary in order to deliver the good stuff that they pathetically groveled to the rich for permission to do (minimum wage, Tax Credits, Sure Start, NHS reinvestment).

It'll mean they sold their souls for no reason.

Which is why the Labour right seem to hate Corbyn with even more venom than their right-wing, orthodox neoliberal, austerity-fixated, wage repressing, public service annihilating, disability persecuting, welfare vandalising, school privatising political opponents like the Tories and Lib-Dems.

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We need to talk about Sarah Teather

In order to actually understand why so many left-wing and socially progressive people are horrified at the elevation of Jo Swinson to the Lib-Dem leadership, it's useful to look beyond her outrageous voting record, and consider the fate of Sarah Teather.

Sarah Teather

Teather, who was the youngest MP elected to the 2005 parliament, was once touted as a potential future leader of the Lib-Dems, and for around two and a half years she served in the Coalition government, but then she finally did the decent thing and resigned in protest.

The specific issues she raised were the xenophobic anti-immigrant policies being pushed by Theresa May's Home Office, David Cameron's imperialist war-mongering in Syria, and the continual assaults on poor, disabled and vulnerable people orchestrated by Iain Duncan Smith through relentless vandalism of the social safety.

She was sick of rubber-stamping this bombardment of Tory malice, and one day she finally got up off her knees, did the decent thing, and resigned, explaining how her party's collusion with the monstrous Tory agenda left her feeling "desolate" and "depressed".

It can be argued that her resignation came far too late (which is exactly how I felt at the time) but the reality is that at least she eventually did the decent thing, and doing the decent thing ended up costing her her political career.

She was marginalised and ostracised, just like the minority of other decent Lib-Dems like Charles Kennedy who recoiled in horror at what the party had been enabling, and she left politics entirely in 2015.

Jo Swinson

Swinson remained an ultra-loyal government minister throughout the Austerity Coalition, and in 2013 she had her opportunity to stand up and and oppose over the issue of anti-worker Tribunal Fees (which was such a despicable policy it was ruled unlawful in the Supreme Court in 2017).

Swinson now loves to claim that she fought back against these outrageous £1,200 upfront fees, designed as a barrier to the justice system to protect bad bosses from paying compensation to the low-income workers they've been exploiting and abusing.

But the reality is that she actually voted in favour of the anti-worker attack she now claims to have opposed, and even praised the policy in interviews and press releases at the time.

As Employment Minister in the Austerity Coalition she could have made a real impact by resigning over this attack on workers' rights, but she chose not to, because to resign as a government minister would have meaint forfeiting her six figure ministerial salary, her ministerial car and all the perks.

But more importantly she would have put herself on the blacklist of disloyal Lib-Dem MPs, meaning she'd be permanently out of favour with the Lib-Dem hierarchy, which would have delivered a massive blow to her ambitions to one day lead the party.

She put her own material circumstances, and her own political ambitions above the right of millions of British workers to seek justice from bad bosses when she voted to unlawfully scrap it., and now she lies through her teeth to pretend that she didn't.
The contrast

Had the Lib-Dems chosen someone like Sarah Teather to lead their party then it would be possible to see it as an act of contrition, a demonstration that they want to move on from the terrible crimes they committed against the British people between 2010 and 2015 (similar to the way the election of the anti-war campaigner Jeremy Corbyn illustrated the Labour Party membership's contrition over the devastating invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003).

But the Lib-Dems didn't choose someone from the principled sidelines. They chose one of the worst and most unapologetic workers' rights-attacking, austerity-enabling, wage-repressing, welfare-vandalising, public service-slashing, bought and paid for nasties from the worst period in their political history.

They cast Sarah Teather adrift for her disloyalty to the party leadership and their neoliberal agenda, and they've amply rewarded Swinson for her slavish loyalty.

It's absolutely horrifying to see so many self-declared "centrists" falling for the absurd Lib-Dem portrayal of the rise of Swinson as some kind of new dawn for the party, when in reality it's nought but their reward to her for her slavish subservience to the old order.

Had she ever actually stood up and fought for the rights of ordinary people during the Austerity Coalition era, she would have been marginalised by the party leadership, ostracised, and almost certainly prevented from trying to win back the seat she lost to the SNP in the 2015 Lib-Dem wipeout.

She would have suffered the same political fate as Sarah Teather.

If the Lib-Dems were willing to demonstrate that they were actually sorry and genuinely intended to change, then they'd still have a lot of work to do to earn back the trust they burned to ashes in return for a tiny taste of 2nd hand Tory power, but at least we could accept their intentions in good faith if it involved picking a new leader who either stood up and opposed austerity fanaticism (or who became an MP after the austerity-collusion period ended in 2015 at the least).

But as it stands now their insincerity is absolutely obvious.

And it's especially obvious given the fact they've picked a leader who was slavishly loyal to Tory austerity fanaticism, and insists on repeatedly deflecting from criticism of her voting record with absurdly dishonest claims that she opposed sicking and unlawful anti-worker legislation that she actually voted in favour of!

If they'd elected Sarah Teather as their new leader instead of marginalising her for her disloyalty, then I'd understand people giving them a second look.

But the election of Swinson is spit in the eye of everyone who suffered the dire consequences of all the austerity fanaticism, and wage repression, and privatisation mania, and attacks on workers' rights, and disability persecution, and infrastructure under-investment, and social security vandalism that she wilfully rubber stamped in return for keeping herself in the Lib-Dem inner circle.

So despite wracking their party to the edge of destruction, the Lib-Dems still insist on demonstrating that self-serving expedience is a virtue to be rewarded in their ranks, while displays of integrity and moral decency are aberrations that need to be punished and driven out.

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Nick Timothy: Blame the Irish, don't blame me

If you're not a politics nerd you may not even know who Nick Timothy is, nor how he played such an instrumental role in causing the current Brexit chaos.

Nick Timothy

He's one of those Rasputin type characters who skulks around in the political background giving terrible advice, while other more prominent figures take the blame when it all goes wrong.

He was one of Theresa May's top advisers during her time at the Home Office (where she dreamt up "Go Home" vans, the unlawfully racist Hostile Environment, brutally misogynistic spouse immigration rules and all kinds of other shockingly inept and hard-right authoritarian nonsense) and then during her time as Prime Minister too.

Nick Timothy is widely credited as the adviser who insisted that Theresa May completely eschew political consensus and then draw her ridiculous red lines to completely rule out any form of membership of the Single Market and Customs Union.

He's also advised her to call her snap "hubris" election in 2017, and advised her to continually hide herself away in Tory safe spaces, chicken out of the leadership debates, and make their disgraceful "Dementia Tax" a central feature of the campaign!

As a result of this idiocy the Tories squandered their 20+ point lead in the space of seven weeks, and pissed away their parliamentary majority, leaving them begging and bribing the bigoted DUP sectarians into propping up their absolute shambles of a government.

Oracles of ineptitude

Shortly after the 2017 general election meltdown Timothy was understandably sacked, and soon took up residence as a columnist for the dreadful Barclay brothers' Daily Telegraph propaganda rag, which he uses to settle old scores and blame everyone else for his own messes.

Essentially he's like the Tory version of Labour's John McTernan. The shadowy adviser who oversaw Labour's annihilation of their own Scottish heartlands in 2015, when they lost 40 of their 41 seats with an absolutely useless pro-austerity and rabidly British unionist campaign, both of which were widely regarded as unacceptable Tory collusion.

But somehow both of these useless characters are still given well-remunerated public platforms to spout their lamentable nonsense, as if they're infinitely wise political oracles, rather than two of the most inept political advisers in living memory.

Blame the Irish

Timothy's Telegraph column could, and probably should, be sub-headed "How everyone else is to blame except for me".

In this week's instalment he desperately seeks to blame the Irish, and specifically the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar for the Irish border deadlock with a claim that Varadkar is "playing fast & loose with peace in Northern Ireland"!

This is an extraordinary claim from one of the masterminds behind the "red lines" that created the Irish border deadlock in the first place.

Ruling out regulatory alignment with the EU was always going to end up contradicting the Good Friday Agreement, and endangering the open border between the Republic of Ireland and the North.

That's why political commentators at the time accused Theresa May of lobbing peace in Northern Ireland onto her raging Brexit bonfire.

We could see that she'd put herself into an irresolvable bind, but she was so relentlessly stubborn that she just ploughed on belligerently until this impossible contradiction eventualy destroyed her political career.

Thick Nimothy

○ Nick Timothy was Theresa May's main adviser when she decided to run Brexit as a closed Tory shop exclusively for Tory party advantage, rather than seeking some kind of national consensus (under which we would probably have already left by now).

○ Nick Timothy advised Theresa May to put herself in an impossible bind by drawing ridiculous red lines all over her shambles of a negotiating strategy.

○ Nick Timothy advised Theresa May to call her hubris election.

○ Nick Timothy helped Theresa May throw away her parliamentary majority and render herself utterly reliant on the DUP sectarians with nonsense like "Dementia Tax" and the endless repetition of "Strong and Stable government" from within the Tory safe spaces she sealed herself within.

And now this absolute nincompoop is attempting to shift blame away from himself by cynically whipping up anti-Irish sentiments!

He's not alone

Brexit has already gone spectacularly wrong. The government missed their own self-imposed Brexit deadline in March 2019 and ended up pathetically begging the EU for an extension because we'd failed to sort our shit out in time.

And now we're heading full throttle towards a "no deal" Brexit meltdown administered by Boris Johnson and the most shockingly right-wing Tory cabinet in history.

When it all comes crashing down, the people responsible will obviously resort to the same kinds of Timothyisms:

It's not our fault ... it's the EU ... it's the Irish ... it's the civil service ... it's Merkel and the Germans ... it's the pessimistic Remainers ... it's the social liberals ... it's the EU citizens in the UK ... it's left-wing bloggers ... it's Corbyn and the Labour Party ...

It's always everyone else to blame except for the people who actually did it!

And to think that the Tories are the political party who endlessly bang on about the importance of taking "personal responsibility"!

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Watch Jo Swinson lie through her teeth

The new Lib-Dem leader Jo Swinson has been getting a staggeringly easy ride from the mainstream media, and from smug blue tick Twitter "centrists" over her disgusting track record in government.

One of the commonest excuses that Lib-Dem tribalists wheel out is that the Lib-Dems somehow "moderated" the Tories by ... errr ... voting through all of their malice in order to avoid resigning as ministers in the 2010-15 austerity coalition.

Even when Swinson does receive a light grilling over her votes in favour of monstrous stuff like Bedroom Tax, rip-off tuition fees, and disability benefits cuts, the mainstream media hacks who are supposed to be holding her to account just let her lie through her teeth about other stuff.

One of Swinson's favourite lies is that she supposedly opposed imposing upfront £1,200 Tribunal Fees on workers seeking compensation from bad bosses who had exploited or abused them.

Jo Swinson VOTED IN FAVOUR of unlawful Tribunal Fees designed to protect bad bosses by pricing their exploited & abused workers out of the justice system.

If she actually opposed them she could have resigned as [checks notes] Employment Minister (!!!) in the Austerity Coalition. pic.twitter.com/eAOexqiIXI

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) July 28, 2019

Swinson repeatedly claims that she opposed these fees, and even opportunistically joined in the celebrations when they were declared unlawful by the Supreme Court and scrapped in 2017.

But the reality is that Swinson actively voted in favour of this unlawful Tory assault on UK workers' right to seek justice against abusive and exploitative bosses.

Not only did she vote in favour of the policy, she also promoted the policy in press interviews and press releases.

If she knew that this policy was a despicable assault on workers' rights, yet she publicly promoted it and wilfully voted in favour of it, instead of resigning as Employment Minister over this scandalous policy, there's only one sensible explanation.

She decided against taking a stand because to do so would have meant giving up on her six figure ministerial salary, giving up her ministerial car and other perks, and giving up on her ambition to one day lead the Lib-Dem party.

She put her own personal enrichment and career prospects above the legal right to access the UK justice system for millions of British workers.

Yet instead of apologising for this disgusting decision, she resorts to revisionist lies that she opposed it all along.

And this Tribunal Fees situation perfectly illustrates what's so wrong with the Lib-Dem excuse that they somehow "moderated Tory excesses" during the austerity coalition.

The reality is that their new party leader had an absolutely golden opportunity as Employment Minister to stand up for British workers by resigning from her post in protest, but she chose not to for the benefit of her own career prospects.

And just like Swinson's revisionist lie that she opposed the unlawful tribunal Fees that she actually voted in favour of, the general Lib-Dem excuse that they "moderated the Tories" is also a revisionist fabrication. 

Choosing to govern with the Tories gave them the opportunity to moderate their malicious tendencies, but more often than not Swinson and her Lib-Dem colleagues wilfully rubber stamped the absolute worst of it, because to actually rebel would have cost them personally.

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Why are Twitter censoring criticism of Saudi Arabia?

With over 10,000 Tweets to my name I'd never been blocked by Twitter for 'misconduct' until today.

The offending Tweet I've been locked out of my account for was a sarcastic criticism of Donald Trump's sickeningly cosy relationship with the brutal, misogynistic, homophobic, head-chopping, terrorism-spreading, democracy-repressing, journalist-dismembering Saudi Arabia war criminals, putting it in contrast with the hate and lies he continually spreads about the socially liberal and progressive Muslim figure Ilhan Omar.

My Tweet was posted in reply to one by Medhi Hasan, which provides the context for my sarcastic reply.

And here's my response that Twitter have deemed to be so unacceptable that they've blocked me until I remove it:

I've already had one appeal rejected (they don't tell you why, just as they don't tell you what rule you've supposedly broken when they put you in Twitter purgatory in the first place). But I'm appealing again.

And suffering this Twitter censorship for the 'crime' of criticising Saudi Arabia has made me determined to redouble my efforts to criticise this disgusting regime, and the western politicians (like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Emmanuel Macron) who support them.

 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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The S*n welcomes you to the new Teletubbies era of political discourse

Just look at the absolute state of the front page of The S*n.

Doesn't it make you embarrassed for Britain that this ridiculous rag is Britain's best selling newspaper?

Doesn't it make you cringe at the pathetically subservient mentality of the hacks who came up with this Teletubbies level of vapid pro-government political discourse?

And doesn't it make you pity the readers of this pathetic rag that they allow themselves to be condescended to like a bunch of pre-school toddlers?

Doesn't it just perfectly illustrate that significant swathes of the mainstream media don't exist to hold powerful establishment figures to account, but to actively cheerlead for them, whitewash their faults and failings, and protect them from scrutiny?

Doesn't the text claiming that Johnson "gave Corb a roasting" just prove how gullible Murdoch's propaganda hacks assume their readers to be given that in the parliamentary debate they were referring to Corbyn asked Johnson 10 specific questions, all of which were answered with absolutely nothing but bluff, bluster, and smears?

Even the ideologically straitjacketed propagandists at Pravda in Soviet Russia or Der Stürmer in Nazi Germany would have been ashamed to produce such a pathetically infantile and ridiculously sycophantic piece of pro-government propaganda garbage.

But this embarrassing gibberish really is the state of mainstream media 'journalism' in 21st Century Britain.

The Tories are gearing up for a massive Facebook data-mining drive

If Remain campaigners had any kind of strategic sense, one of their primary objectives would have been to demand proper regulation of online campaigning to prevent the kinds of abuses that happened during the 2016 EU referendum from ever happening again.

Three years down the line and the shockingly incompetent Electoral Commission has done nothing to clamp down on social media dark ads, data-mining, or any of the other lies and cynical trickery that helped Leave fall just over the winning line in 2016.

Amazingly they've left it entirely up to the social media giants to decide how much to regulate themselves, which has resulted in Facebook voluntarily logging political adverts on their site.

If it had been left up to the Electoral Commission, we'd still be completely in the dark about what Boris Johnson and the Tories are up to.

When we look into the ads the Tories have been releasing to coincide with Boris Johnson several things become clear.

Data mining

The first is that these ads are simple data-harvesting scams which pose as feedback forms for telling Boris Johnson what you want him to do (yes of course he'll personally read all of your messages), but in order to press send you must provide your address, postcode, and email, as well as agreeing to let them bombard you with Tory propaganda for the rest of time.

If you remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal, you'll probably recall that one of their big innovations was linking people's online presence with their real life location, then grading them into psychological types to be sent political messaging that they've been calculated to be susceptible to.

How individually targeting online adverts at known individuals in specific geographic locations, down to their exact postal address, isn't classified as local campaign spending, and subjected to stringent local campaign spending rules, is a question that only the lazy and inept Electoral Commission could spend three years absolutely failing to answer.

Beta testing

There are literally hundreds of these Boris Johnson adverts, but only a few thousand pounds has been spent on actually pushing them into people's Facebook feeds.

If we look into the data Facebook makes available we can see what kind of people they're targeting (mainly male, mainly middle age and above, mainly English) but the scale is so small it's unlikely to make a blind bit of difference at the national level.

So what are they up to?

It seems pretty obvious that they're trying out all these different iterations of very similar adverts in order to determine which are the most effective with particular social profiles so that when their campaign gets properly underway they can hone specific tailored adverts to certain defined demographics and psychological profiles.

Just think about it. It must have taken a team of people a vast amount of time to create scores of videos, the data-mining website, the database, all the links, then upload literally hundreds of adverts onto Facebook.

Why would they invest all of that time, money, and effort in order to only spend a paltry few thousand pounds actually pushing the adverts into people's Facebook feeds?

Election?

The Tories are quite clearly gearing up for a massive social media propaganda drive, and the announcement of Dominic Cummings (the Vote Leave boss who openly admitted that they wouldn't have won without the £350 million for the NHS lie) as a chief Boris Johnson aide increases suspicion that there's going to be a snap election.

There's no guarantee of course, because a snap election would be an extraordinary gamble given that Labour are leading in the majority of polls, and the far-right ultranationalist Blue-kip demographic has abandoned the Tory party for Farage's latest outfit as quickly as they flooded in to support Theresa May's vapid "Brexit means Brexit" nonsense in 2017.

But political parties don't generally hire campaign strategists and beta test hundreds of online propaganda ads unless they're up to something do they?

Conclusion

We really should have done something to clamp down on online political campaigning over the last 3 years.

It's utterly extraordinary that it's only because of Facebook's voluntary self-reporting that we know what the Tories are up to at all.

And with EU referendum cheats like Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings now pulling the levers of power, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that they'd allow any kind of clampdown on the "wild west" social mediascape they've benefited so handsomely from is it?

Anyone calling for another EU referendum gamble without removing these two from power first is quite clearly playing an extraordinarily dangerous game of Russian roulette with the nation's future, and allowing a pair of provably dishonest Brexiteers to load the chamber of the gun in their own favour.

Still, "boo Corbyn", "hooray Lib-Dems", "another referendum now" ... that's the trendy Remainer groupthink isn't it?

Screw worrying about trivialities like absolutely nothing having been done to clamp down on all the cheating, lying, and social media dark ad trickery that helped deliver the Brexit vote in the first place!

Credit to Rowland Manthorpe for drawing attention to this latest blitz of Tory propaganda ads. Follow him here on Twitter.

 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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The Panorama Labour anti-Semitism polemic is a disgrace

The BBC's Panorama report is a sickening hatchet job.

1. The "documentary" states that at the time of Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader complaints about anti-Semitism were almost non-existent, but the obvious reason for this was that until Jeremy Corbyn became leader, anti-Semitism was widely tolerated within the Labour Party and the Labour ranks. Consider the absolute lack of action when Tony Blair's spin doctor Alistair Campbell created anti-Semitic attack posters portraying a Jewish political rival as a pig and a Fagin character.

2. The "documentary" allowed a guy called Mike Creighton to assert that new Labour Party members joining the Labour Party after Corbyn's election as leader brought with them a "worldview" that "allowed anti-Semitism to arise". The reality of course is that after this membership surge occurred the level of anti-Semitic views within the Labour ranks actually fell dramatically.

This is likely due to the fact that Corbyn attracted a lot of socially progressive left-wing anti-imperialist people back to the party, which diluted the bigoted views of the kind of people who approve of the right-wing economic neoliberal orthodoxy and the imperialist war-mongering that caused the humanitarian catastrophes in Iraq and Libya.

 3. The "documentary" makes absolutely no mention of this dramatic fall in anti-Semitic views within the Labour ranks. Neither does it mention that rates of anti-Semitic views are lower within Labour than in other parties like the Tories and Lib-Dems, and lower than the general population too.

This is the kind of context that's absolutely vital in giving a reasonable impression of the true scale of the problem.

4. The "documentary" includes claims from someone called Louise Withers Green that she interviewed Jackie Walker. Walker claims to have never even met this person and that the claims about her are fabricated. 

Walker was provided no right to reply to dispute the claims about her.

5. The "documentary" allowed Labour's former Chief Disputes Officer Kat Buckingham to claim that the right-wing controlled Labour disputes team were bringing "civility back into proceedings" and another former member called Dan Hogan to claim that "we had a really good team". 

What they had actually been up to was the orchestration of a mass purge of thousands of left-leaning Labour members for "crimes" like once retweeting a Green politician, admitting they voted for other parties long before they joined Labour, and liking the Foo Fighters too much! 

This hyper-partisan purge was aimed at reducing the Corbyn vote and throwing the 2016 leadership election in favour of Owen Smith, hardly what anyone would describe as either "civil", or "good".

6. The mass purge failed, and Corbyn was re-elected leader with an even bigger mandate, but the thousands of purged members demanding readmittance created an unmanageably vast backlog of disciplinary cases, meaning that legitimate cases involving anti-Semitism got buried under the pile. 

The documentary made no mention whatever of the extraordinary Anyone But Corbyn purge and the essential role it played in creating the massive backlog of disciplinary cases.

7. When the right-wing head of the NEC Ian McNicol was finally replaced by Jennie Formby, she insisted that serious cases like anti-Semitism accusations be sped up. The "documentary" sought to portray her as a terrible sinister figure for wanting to change the disciplinary team responsible for orchestrating the purge, creating such a massive backlog of cases, and sitting on extremely serious cases - including anti-Semitism accusations - for years!

8. Formby, who is currently undergoing treatment for cancer, was afforded no right of reply.

9. Unike Formby the former right-wing General Secretary of the NEC Ian McNicol (the guy who oversaw all of this rank incompetence) was allowed a say, in which he claimed that "to try to interfere politically within the [disciplinary team] is just wrong", which would be an entirely fair point had the  right-wing faction of the party he represents not recently made very public appeals to Jeremy Corbyn to interfere politically by reversing the reinstatement of Chris Williamson. Apparently it's wrong for the General Secretary to interfere by making sure the party can't be sued for discrimination over its disciplinary decisions, but somehow right and entirely justifiable to demand that Corbyn personally interferes to expel someone they don't like! 

10. The documentary claims that "one by one party officials tasked with investigating anti-Semitism left their jobs" as if they simply weren't replaced, when the reality was that they were replaced with a larger and more competent team tasked with dealing with the massive backlog their incompetent predecessors had created.

11. Perhaps the most glaring problem of all was the use of a ridiculously doctored quote from Seumas Milne that was deliberately cut mid sentence to dramatically alter the meaning.

Here's what the documentary quoted: 

"something's going wrong, and we're muddling up political disputes with racism."

and here's the full sentence:

"But if we're more than very occasionally using disciplinary action against Jewish members for antisemitism, something's going wrong, and we're muddling up political disputes with racism"

So what Milne was actually raising concerns about was Labour anti-Semitism procedures being used to hound Jewish people out of the Labour Party, but the documentary makers deliberately cut the sentence in half to shear it of context and radically alter the meaning.

As yet the BBC have made no explanation of why the quote was doctored in this way, let alone an apology.

John Ware laughing and joking about being one of the worst
anti-Muslim bigots in the British mainstream media.

12. The "documentary" maker John Ware is a former S*n journalist, and renowned anti-Muslim bigot who laughs and jokes about being recognised as one of the five worst Islamophobes in the cesspit that is the UK mainstream media. 
It's extraordinary that the BBC decided to commission such a person to produce a show about the subject of bigotry in politics.

13. The general tone of the entire "documentary" was to give an entirely uncritical hearing to numerous disgruntled former staff members as they completely absolved themselves of blame for the appalling mess they made, excused their theft and destruction of confidential documents, smeared the leadership, and disparaged the hundreds of thousands of left-wing socially liberal members who have joined the party since 2015.

Conclusion

I could go on with more criticisms, but I can't be bothered to spend all day critiquing such a venal, politically partisan, one-sided polemic masquerading as a serious BBC documentary.

Anti-Semitism and all forms of racism and bigotry need to be confronted wherever they occur, especially in an anti-racist organisation like the Labour Party, but hyper-partisan hatchet jobs like this are clearly not the answer, because doctoring quotes and giving platforms to staggeringly incompetent people to whitewash their incompetence does not help to fight anti-Semitism at all, it actually diminishes the fight by making the entire scandal look faked for political purposes.

If you wish to complain to the BBC and demand answers, especially over the blatantly doctored quote, the repeated factual inaccuracy, the dreadful lack of context, the entirely uncritical hearing provided to disgruntled ex-staffers to absolve themselves of responsibility for the mess they made, and the despicable unapologetic Islamophobia of the producer, here's the complaints form: BBC complaints.

 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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