It's too dangerously early to lift the lockdown restrictions

There are four deeply concerning factors about the Tory rush to ease lockdown measures, re-open schools, and try to return to business as usual.

High Death Rate

The future consequences were hard-baked and unavoidable when the Tory government decided to pursue Boris Johnson’s deranged ‘superman of capitalism’ strategy of letting the virus spread like wildfire in the crucial early stages.

Letting the virus spread uncontrolled in the exponential growth phase left the UK with two horrifically unappealing choices. Either continue letting the virus spread out of control and cause an absolutely vast death toll, or implement a much longer lockdown than the countries that actually took the situation seriously from the beginning.

Under huge public pressure the Tories eventually ditched Johnson’s ‘superman of capitalism’ lunacy to bring in a late lockdown, but this decision to save lives was clearly made against their initial intention to prioritise the economy over people’s lives.

As a result of the late lockdown the UK daily death rate (324) is still way higher than Italy (87), Spain (2), Germany (24), and France (52) all combined, but the Tories insist on undoing the lockdown measures as if we’re in a similar situation to our European neighbours, when we’re not.

The shockingly high UK death rate was caused by the Tories being too slow to introduce lockdown measures, and now they’re being too hasty to end the prolonged lockdown measures that were necessitated by their ineptitude in the first place.

Sidelining the science

Multiple scientists, including members of the government’s own scientific advisory group, have publicly declared that it's too early to ease restrictions, because the viral reproduction rate is still too high.

The Tory government completely bypassed scientists to change the clear and unambiguous "Stay At Home" message to absolutely nonsensical gibberish like "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands", and now they're ignoring the scientific concerns again to push ahead with their bid to return to business as usual.

It makes an absolute mockery of the Tory government’s repeated claims to have "followed the science" when it's now clear that they're simply ignoring the science that contradicts their political agenda.

If the death rate rises again because of this Tory refusal to listen to the concerns of scientists, the decision to kill those people will obviously have been a political one.

Inadequate preparation

The Track and Trace app is unfit for purpose and riddled with problems and delays.

Countries like China and South Korea managed to get Track and Trace apps up and running within weeks, but the Tory government has created a hopelessly delayed shambles.

Then there's the fact there's still not even adequate protective gear for medics and other front line workers, let alone enough to support the culture of mandatory mask-wearing that’s become commonplace in the countries that really got their infection rates down.

It could be argued that the sensible course of action would be to wait until the Track and Trace app is fixed, and until the supply of PPE is adequate, but that would be to assume a level of competence that this dreadful Tory government simply doesn’t possess.

They’ve had over four months since the first reported UK case in January 2020, and it’s still an absolutely chaotic mess. It would take a dangerously large dose of over-optimism to imagine that it would only take them a few more weeks for them to find the competence they’ve been so sorely lacking for months.  

The problem of course is that it’s just not safe to relax the lockdown unless this hopeless shambles of a government somehow becomes competent, which it certainly doesn't seem capable of.

Undermining the rules

If lockdown isn’t to result in another spike in the death rate a few weeks down the line, it’s absolutely crucial that the majority continue following the social distancing and self-isolation rules.

The fact that Dominic Cummings has not been made to resign over his multiple flagrant breaches of self-isolation and 'Stay At Home' measures means that huge numbers of people are obviously going to conclude that if the rules don't apply to him, then they don't apply to me either.

The Tories haven’t just refused to punish Cummings for his brazen rule-breaking, they’ve actually been running a series of utterly absurd excuses for him, to the extent that they’ve been refusing to tell people to respect the 14 day self-isolation rules if the question is posed in the context of Cummings’ rule breaking.

Boris Johnson has decided to elevate the career of a single Tory adviser over the public health of the entire nation, and the longer Cummings is allowed to stay, the worse the damage is going to be.

Conclusion

The UK death rate is higher than the four largest EU states combined, the concerns of scientists are being ignored, the infrastructure simply isn't in place yet, and the partisan political decision not to sack Cummings is catastrophically undermining the social distancing and self-isolation rules that people must follow if the lockdown is to be lifted successfully.

It will take several weeks for the consequences to become clear, but if the death rate stops falling, or rises towards a second peak, we'll know that the Tories are entirely to blame.

And if the Tories do end up pushing thousands more people into early graves, we'll have to be extremely wary of their cynical efforts to offload the blame onto scientists, public health professionals, or the public.

 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.

OR

If he'll lie about coronavirus to make himself look cleverer than he is, why would you ever trust anything else he says?

It would clearly take days to unpack all the excuses, and blame-shifting, and deceptions, and lies, and open admissions of guilt, and refusals to take responsibility, but one thing in particular stands out from Dominic Cummings' press conference.

Cummings claimed to have predicted coronavirus on his blog last year by saying "only last year I wrote explicitly about the danger of coronaviruses".

This is a demonstrable lie.

He didn't predict coronavirus last year. In fact he edited his blog to make it look like that's what he did on the day he arrived back in London from his lockdown defying jaunt up to the north east. pic.twitter.com/kEdaVN5yrs

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) May 26, 2020

 

But what he didn't seem to realise is that it's possible to look up what changes have been made to his blog posts, and when these changes were made.

It turns out that Cummings didn't predict coronavirus at all. What he did was retrospectively edit his blog to make it look like he predicted it, when he actually didn't, and he made these sneaky changes on the day he got back to London from his jolly jaunt to spread the disease up to the north east!

Obviously there are plenty of other very serious issues to consider, like the multiple admissions that he broke self-isolation and lockdown rules; the Prince Andrew level absurdity of the excuse that he drove his car 30 miles to a local beauty spot to test his eyesight; the outright refusal to apologise; the blame-shifting; the fact that of all the inaccurate media coverage he railed against his own wife's account of their coronavirus experiences was by far the most misleading and inaccurate; and the fact that he was somehow handed the 10 Downing Street garden and airtime on the BBC's main channel to make a speech that he openly admitted that he was making in a personal capacity.

However the fact that he sneakily edited his blog post to make himself look like some kind of great predictor, then lied about it on national television, is clear proof that the arrogant con-artist simply cannot ever be trusted on anything else he says.

If he's willing to lie to the nation about an issue as serious as coronavirus, purely to make himself seem smarter than he actually is, what else is he willing to lie about?

 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.

OR

The gammons are incredibly easy to please aren't they?

Tory tax-dodger Michael Ashcroft has gone viral on Twitter posting a quite frankly deranged diatribe combining World War Two nostalgia and hard-right tabloid talking points.

The gammons absolutely lapped it up because WWII fetishism, spewing hate at minorities, and blasting anyone who dares criticise their beloved Tory lords and masters combines three of their absolute favourite things.

In this article I'm going to run through the whole thing, highlighting what a load of historically illiterate and quite frankly bigoted cobblers it is.

Firstly it's always important to establish what the source is. In this case it's the Tory tax-dodger Michael Ashcroft who is safely hiding away from the coronavirus crisis in the tax haven of Belize.

This is a guy who conned his way into the unelected House of Lords with commitments that he would end his non-dom tax status and begin actually paying his fair share of taxes in the UK, which he clearly never did.

Just look at his smug Tory face and ask yourself why the gammons love a Britain-hating tax-dodger like this so much.

Perhaps it's because somewhere deep beneath their faux patriotism, they also hate Britain too?

 

And why is it that the people who fetishise WWII the most egregiously always seem to be the baby boomers who weren't even alive when it happened?

The "Your Country Needs You" slogan was the most famous poster campaign from the First World War, so top marks to Ashcroft for getting his wars jumbled up whilst pretending to be a lover of British history and a patriot.

Probably the most famous Second World War slogan was "Careless talk Costs Lives", which was nice and clear. But imagine if the government had decided to replace this clear and intelligible statement with garbled gibberish like "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands", which sounds more like the kind of thing a stroke victim would say before collapsing, than a government information campaign.

There would definitely have been complaints.

The thing with this coronavirus/Blitz analogy is that it completely falls to bits when you look at the contrasting government responses.

Back in 1940 the government threw everything it had at defending Britain from the Blitz during the Battle of Britain.

At the beginning of the coronavirus crisis Boris Johnson deluded himself into believing the world would celebrate him as the "Superman of Capitalism" for deliberately allowing the virus to spread, and then he told a confused looking Phillip Scholfield about how he was being advised to let the virus "move through the population".

It's easy to imagine that the British people would have asked questions like "why aren't you doing enough to prevent these air raids?" if the government policy of the day had been to allow the Nazi bombers to move freely through our skies!

In reality the air raid sirens didn't actually apply to everyone.

It was the job of people like Air Raid Wardens, anti-aircraft gunners, police, the fire service, the ambulance service ... to stay above ground and deal with the consequences, while the general public were expected to make their way to air raid shelters.

A similar situation exists now, with NHS and care home workers, the emergency services, retail staff, delivery drivers, bus drivers, utilities engineers and many others expected to work through the crisis.

You'd have to be dangerously mindless and politically illiterate not to have questioned who is affected by the lockdown measures and who isn't, or come to your own conclusions about who the essential workers in our economy really are.

A transparent dig at transgender people to rile up the gammon.

Why is it that the hysterical anti-trans droolers are so utterly obsessed with toilet facilities, to the extent of demanding that trans-women expose themselves to danger by using the male facilities?

And a comparison with the social norms of the 1930s and '40s shows us that all LGBTQ+ people were subjected to horrific systematic discrimination, imprisoned, sent to mental institutions, and even tortured with barbarism like chemical castration.

Are we really going to accept this maudlin nostalgia for the good old days when queer folk were routinely persecuted by the state?

And now a dig at vegans.

This WWII/Coronavirus analogy has just descended into simple-minded minority bashing hasn't it?

But if we try to actually consider the analogy, the reality is that even eight decades ago, and fighting a desperate war for survival, the British government managed to provide the public with portable gas masks.

The current Tory government failed so badly at providing sufficient ventilators that they ended up sending Covid-19 infected patients back to die in care homes so that their deaths wouldn't be recorded in the daily death stats.

Another dig at vegans!

First: Vegan milk is a good thing. If you haven't tried almond milk before, give it a go. I'm not vegan, but I actually prefer it to ordinary milk these days.

Second: If the UK government could have got away with replacing the milk in some people's rations with manufactured ersatz milk, they would have been absolutely delighted. If some 10% of the population wanted milk alternatives instead of milk, that would have meant less demand on farmers, and more dairy produce to share between the rest. A win-win for everyone, and a boost for the war effort too.

But let's all hate vegans eh? 

 Bloody hell!

He's finished with the LGBTQ+ community and the vegans, so now he's going after 'the blacks'!

He's clearly having a dig at skin tone plasters here, as if they're some kind of assault on decency and common sense.

A white person's reaction to skin-tone plasters tells you all you need to know about their attitudes.

Some will say "oh, that's cool", and easily grasp the fact that it's a good thing that non-white parents will now have the option of using plasters that don't imply that their kids' skin is the wrong colour, and wonder why this simple innovation didn't happen a lot sooner.

Others will adopt a culture war attitude and treat the concept of choice in plaster colours as if it's some kind of barbaric assault on Western Christian culture, even though they'll endlessly point to extravagant (to the point of being confusing) levels of choice elsewhere in the economy as evidence that their beloved capitalism is a good thing!

The fact is that the UK government spent the pre-war years rapidly building up stockpiles of weapons and ammunition because they saw the threat of Nazi expansionism coming.

In contrast the Tory government were repeatedly warned that stockpiles of medical equipment and protective gear were shockingly inadequate in the case of a viral respiratory disease, but they ignored the warnings, because ensuring adequate supplies for an emergency contrasted with their crackpot "let's cut our way to prosperity" austerity agenda.

Yet another astoundingly weak analogy that actually ends up making his beloved Tories look worse, if you know anything about the subject at all, which he apparently doesn't.

The gammons absolutely love this kind of ignorant, history-rewriting, minority-bashing, pro-government drivel don't they?

Conclusion

Digging beneath the inaccuracies, the brazenly inaccurate historical revisionism, and the multiple examples of minority-bashing, the core messages here are don't dare to be different, and don't criticise your government, no matter how badly they screw up.

But this also falls down spectacularly when we remember that widespread public dissatisfaction led to the departure of Britain's first war leader Neville Chamberlain, and his replacement with Winston Churchill.

If Britain was the kind of intolerant, fanatically right-wing, history-rewriting, dissent-crushing, minority-persecuting, leader-worshipping, autocracy that Ashcroft and the gammons so desperately want it to be today, Churchill would never have become Prime Minister, we would probably have lost the Second World War (or negotiated peace with the Nazis), and we'd have been just about as bad as the Nazis were anyway.

Aside from the fact it's almost always baby boomers doing the most egregious WWII fetishism, it also often tends to be people who have far more in common with the ideology of the Nazis than with the Allies doesn't it?

 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.

OR

Thangam Debbonaire's bizarre fallacy-laden and deeply disingenuous 'Landlords above Workers' diatribe

One of the huge problems in modern political discourse is political inertia.

Even though it's obvious that a mistake has been made, people, and especially politicians, are incredibly reluctant to admit their errors. So they just keep on doubling down on shocking errors of judgement and catastrophically ill-considered policies, rather than taking the ego hit and just admitting that they were wrong.

Labour's new shadow housing minister Thangam Debbonaire has provided an absolute masterclass in this kind of political inertia with an absolutely laughable, disingenuous, fallacy-laden, post-hoc, bad faith, straw man jumble of gibberish to defend her widely derided policy proposal of 'Landlords above Workers'.

In this article I'm going to offer a point by point examination of the muddled thinking and fallacious reasoning underpinning her attempted justification.

Here's the original article detailing Debbonaire's lamentable speech if you want to read it in its entirety first: ‘Cancel the rent’ policy would be “un-Labour”, says Debbonaire

Assuming the coronavirus shutdown lasts for six months, a two year rent arrears repayment schedule would require a 25% increase in payments on top of already extortionate rents, for the entire two year period.

What kind of Labour Party proposes people pay up to 125% rent for two years during the worst economic downturn in centuries?

Just when the economy needs extra economic demand the most, to boost production and keep people in work, Debbonaire wants to introduce a policy to erode away the disposable income of millions of private tenants, and stymie economic demand in the process, purely in order to ensure landlords are practically the only economic demographic in post-Covid Britain not to lose a penny from this crisis!
When she announced it people rightly called this 'Landlords above Workers' policy out as the absolute drivel it is, but she's now doubling down and using some ridiculously duplicitous and fallacious reasoning to defend it.

The other four points on the plan range from good, to OK. Eviction bans are good. Universal Credit is an unsalvageable mess, but an increase in payments in the absence of a complete replacement is a fair enough proposal. Increasing Local Housing Allowance makes sense, but it's hard to account for where the money comes from if the devastating Tory austerity cuts to local government funding aren't reversed.

The big problem people are having is with her 'Landlords over Workers' policy proposal to extract workers' disposable incomes for years after the crisis is over, purely to ensure that landlords are completely insulated from any of the economic consequences.

It's the criticisms of this particular policy that her speech is supposedly aimed at addressing.

To describe this proposal as just "controversial" is somewhat of an understatement.

Within weeks of her appointment she's created such a mess that she's united two of the three main Labour factions (socialist left, and soft left) against her, and landed an open letter with 4,000+ signatures on her new leader's desk!

Fantastic work eh?

At the time of her appointment I asked whether she was up to the task of handling what would obviously be one of the most important briefs in the post-crisis economy, but I had no inkling she'd be spectacularly proving my concerns justified within a matter of mere weeks.

In the early days of its history the Labour Party led the 1915 rent strike. Their major electoral breakthrough came in 1922 on the back of years of campaigning on housing policy. Over the following decades the Labour Party has imposed rent restrictions, championed tenants' rights, cleared slums, and built millions of affordable social housing units.

The idea that it's "surprisingly un-Labour" to defend tenants from impoverishment and exploitation is an extraordinarily ahistorical claim.

It's somewhat of a straw-man position to claim that everyone opposing her 'Landlords over Workers' policy is demanding an across-the-board cancellation of all rents for everyone, and with no compensation whatever for landlords.

Some of her many critics may adopt this more radical position, the majority certainly wouldn't, and the actual "Cancel the Rent" letter proposes no such thing, so it's an incredibly cheap shot to attack the much more radical stance because she thinks it's the easiest to deride, rather than the actual contents of the letter that she's apparently railing against.

But even if we ignore the bad faith, is the fact that some people might get what they don't really need a reasonable argument in favour of literally millions of people suffering a severe economic punishment that they absolutely don't deserve?

Why is a few wealthier people potentially getting what they don't need such a shocking concern that it justifies dumping millions into rent arrears, destitution, and the penury of onerous repayments necessitated by crisis they absolutely didn't cause?

Ah yes! What could be more representative of the kinds of desperate situation ordinary people are facing than ... erm ... an MP on a six figure salary renting a flat in London that's entirely paid for at the public expense anyway?

I'm sure this personal anecdote will really chime with the millions of people thrown into economic turmoil by this crisis, who have been left desperately trying to figure out how to pay the rent, the rip-off utility bills, the food, and all the other expenses.

They turn to Labour for a sign of hope and a promise of support, and the Labour Party housing minister is blethering on about a purely hypothetical scenario involving her grace and favour flat in London in order to elicit sympathy for her landlord!

Then there's that bad faith deceptiveness again. The "Cancel the Rent" letter actually asks that rents and utility bills are cancelled 'at the tenant's request' if they're suffering a coronavirus 'drop in income'.

In order for her rent to be cancelled under such a scheme, she'd have to fraudulently make a claim, knowing that her income hasn't actually dropped, and that the cost of her rent is immaterial to her anyway, paid as it is from public funds!

Alack! Alas! why will nobody think of the sanctity of contracts? is the kind of drivel you'd expect from the opaquely funded hard-right think tank wonks who are on perpetual rotation on the BBC politics circuit, not a Labour Party shadow minister!

The idea that the sanctity of contracts over-rules the public good isn't just 'un-Labour', it's positively Tory.

Just think about the assertion that "even if it's a rubbish contract, with a rubbish landlord who is charging far too much, it's still legally binding" and consider how awful that must sound to potential Labour voters.

And the bit about "no such thing as cancelling contracts" is just legally illiterate gibberish (which is sure to impress her new boss Keir Starmer QC!).

From the Tory government's retroactive redrawing of student loan conditions, through their cancelled contracts for Chris Grayling's imaginary ferries, to their emergency renationalisation of the railways just a few weeks ago, there are countless precedents for governments amending or tearing up contracts.

Once again, a "general waiver" is simply not what the "Cancel the Rent" letter is actually calling for.

"You have to think about who you are going to target" - if only the authors of the "Cancel the Rent" letter had thought of that eh?

And as for compensation, there are several potential solutions. The most obvious is to just give landlords a mortgage holiday for the duration of the rent cancellation.

For landlords who own properties outright, they should surely be declaring their rental income to the tax man anyway, so it would be fairly simple to create some kind of compensation scheme similar to the measures for self-employed people, so that losses up to a certain limit are covered.

It's quite frankly bizarre that she's so sympathetic to the idea of landlords suing their impoverished tenants, and suing the government, in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, rather than incandescent with rage at the very idea of it.

Once again, it's shockingly disingenuous to claim that the "Cancel the Rent" letter is talking about an across the board rent cancellation, however it is fascinating to learn that wealth extraction out of the legitimately productive economy via landlordism has soared to the incredible sum of £7.2 billion per month!

Here it is in black and white. Don't expect anything even remotely radical from a Labour government to deal with the UK's ridiculously dire housing crisis.

Their housing minister is profoundly reluctant to help struggling tenants even in the midst of an unprecedented economic meltdown, and she's busy salting the policy garden and deliberately lowering expectations of what any future Labour government would offer in terms of housing policy.

Well yes, in an ideal world we'd like to ensure everyone has enough money upfront to pay the rent, but we're not in an ideal world, the government is not ensuring this, and the proposal people are criticising Debbonaire for involves extracting tenants' disposable income, over the course of years, to cover their coronavirus rent arrears.

It's beyond obvious that these arrears simply wouldn't accrue at all in this ideal-world scenario she's just conjured out of nowhere, so the policy she's attempting to defend with this ludicrously disingenuous diatribe wouldn't even be necessary!

Once again, more disingenuous drivel. The proposal she's railing against isn't an across the board rent cancellation, and nobody has suggested leaving social housing landlords high and dry with no compensation.

But even if they had suggested this, the houses don't simply disappear if the housing association goes bust. Take the homes back into public ownership, turn them back into the Council Houses most of them were built as in the beginning, and pop, her imaginary problem is solved!

"It's the private rented sector where we've got a problem" - the first accurate thing she's said in this entire diatribe isn't it? 

God-damn it! We're back to this again!

If the proposals to "deal with it upfront" are competently administered, then there is simply no need for the two year arrears extraction programme at all - You know, the issue that huge numbers of people got upset at her about in the first place! The bloody reason she's giving this speech at all!

Well "evil" is a bit strong, but there's basically no way you can argue that landlordism isn't "exploitative" unless you position yourself significantly to the right of figures like Winston Churchill and Adam Smith, who both railed against the exploitative practice of landlordism.

And if you're so far to the political right that Churchill and Smith are reduced to mere distant specks over your left shoulder, what the absolute hell are you doing as a Labour Party housing minister?

OK, for the sake of argument let's say there's absolutely no scheme to compensate landlords, and the most recklessly over-extended ones (who didn't even keep a few months worth of rent in reserve in case of emergencies) end up deservedly going bust.

The house doesn't just disappear does it? It ends up with the reckless bank that recklessly lent the money to the reckless buy-to-let speculator in the first place.

The government could just step in, compensate the reckless bank for a proportion of their losses, and transfer the property to the local council or a local housing association (which, by the way, should be the policy whenever a private landlord goes bust, shouldn't it?).

She's catastrophising about "even greedier landlords" rather than proposing a humane solution to the traumatic busted landlord situation that significant numbers of people face each year, through no fault of their own (coronavirus crisis or no coronavirus crisis).

This "it could be worse" rather than "here's a proposal to make it better" stance just goes to illustrate how dreadfully unfit this woman is for her position.

This is just a very crude reworking of the "just think of poor old Granny" Tory argument against Mansion Tax isn't it?

Forget about the primary problem of millions of exploitative buy-to-let landlords greedily hoarding all the affordable housing in their local areas so that they can then get the poor saps they just priced out of the housing market to pay off their speculative property loans for them, let's humanise landlordism by invoking the much rarer and less problematic scenario of poor Terry and Jean who rent out frail old Marjorie's house to supplement their meagre salaries.

Instead of dishonestly pretending that "Cancel the Rent" is a proposal to just expropriate this house on behalf of the tenants, with no compensation, why not go the whole hog and pretend the nasty lefties want to shove poor old Terry and Jean and Marjorie into a pit and burn them alive?

Wouldn't that be even easier to argue against?

The oddness of this Tory-style 'pity the poor old landlords who are just scraping by' tactic makes it seem as if her speech was just written for her by some die-hard Tory from the Landlords Association. I wonder who did actually write it, and where they got this weird Tory-style persuasion tactic from.

Once again (and thankfully for the last time) the proposal in the letter she has been railing against is not a "general waiver", and it's staggeringly disingenuous of her to have pretended that it was for her entire speech.

The ideal-world scenario she invokes is lovely, but it simply doesn't explain the need for a punishing two year arrears extraction programme (which is what this speech was supposedly intended to defend).

And even though a "general waiver" clearly isn't the policy proposal in the letter she was railing against, it's still alarming for her to keep screeching "regressive" at the concept just because some wealthier people might benefit from the hypothetical scenario she's invented.

The reason it's alarming is that anyone who thinks like this would surely be howling "regressive" at the creation of a "free at the point of need" NHS if it were proposed today, on the absolutely appalling basis that richer people should never be allowed to benefit from public policy.

There's absolutely no way Labour adopts anything like the policies this country needs if Debbonaire's shockingly disingenuous, anti-universalism, sanctity of contracts, screw the economy, save the landlords diatribe is representative of the rest of the shadow cabinet.

Conclusion

It's not like workers chose not to work, they were compelled not to work by the government, so it's about as blatantly 'un-Labour' as you can get for Debbonaire to propose a policy of forcing people into penury in order to ensure that landlords are amongst the only economic demographics who end up not suffering any Covid-19 losses at all.

Yet she derides her critics with ludicrously fallacious and downright disingenuous arguments, and then accuses them of being the ones who don't understand Labour values!

It's enough to make you wonder what on earth is this woman doing in the Labour Party, let alone on their front bench.

Her rant is one of the most profoundly disingenuous diatribes I've ever waded through, and it's deeply concerning that it's not one of the usual suspects like a Tory liar, or a Brextremist, or an far-right hatemonger, or one of those viral lie copy n' paste social media propaganda campaigns ... it's a speech by a Labour Party shadow minister!

She was either too lazy to even read the "Cancel the Rent" letter from 4,000+ of her Labour Party colleagues and just formed this entire attempted rebuttal based on the title alone, or she did read it and decided to create a ridiculous straw-man interpretation because she figured it would be easier to attack that (incredibly ineptly as it turned out) than addressing what people actually said.

Either explanation is utterly contemptuous towards her fellow party members, and towards anyone who believes in basic competence or good faith political discourse.

She's clearly rendered herself unfit for the important responsibilities she's been tasked with, but it would simply be too embarrassingly soon for Starmer to sack her (rather understandable political inertia on his part), so we're stuck with her for the foreseeable future.

If Starmer was going to be decisive and nip this absolute nonsense in the bud, I'd suggest replacing her with Richard Burgon, but showing her the door within weeks of her appointment is obviously going to be far too much of an embarrassment for the party, so it definitely won't happen any time soon.

 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.

OR