Elitist rule-bending should have no place in the Labour Party

During the 2016 Labour leadership elections the right-wing controlled NEC orchestrated a massive purge of ordinary Labour membesr designed to prevent them voting for Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership election.

Literally thousands of people were instantly kicked out for the most trivial of offences. Stuff like retweeting a Green Party politician, admitting that they used to support another political party in the years before they joined Labour, and even for tweeting that they love the Foo Fighters.

There were no tears of frustration and screams of outrage from Labour right-wingers or elitist hacks in the mainstream media.

They didn't speak out because they tacitly approved of what was going on, knowing that a mass purge of ordinary members in order to rig the leadership election against Corbyn was their only chance of crushing Labour party socialism and returning the party to orthodox neoliberalism.

Their plot failed spectacularly because they would have had to have purged well over 120,000 members, but their absolute contempt for ordinary party members, and their willingness to abuse the rules for their own advantage was made absolutely and undeniably clear.

Fast forward to 2019 and these same Labour right-wingers and neoliberal media hacks are screeching with outrage that Alistair Campbell got himself kicked out of the Labour Party for openly bragging that he voted for the unrepentant, pro-austerity, welfare-vandalising, wage-repressing, Royal Mail-privatising Lib-Dem neoliberals who wilfully helped the Tories lay the groundwork for Brexit by trashing our living standards for five ruinous years.

So after saying absolutely nothing to condemn the bending of the party rules to purge thousands of ordinary party members in 2016, they're suddenly spewing outrage because the party rules haven't been bent in the complete opposite direction to let a high profile party figure publicly flaunt the party rule that you don't campaign and vote for rival political parties.

The distinction here is absolutely clear, and yet again it's elitism.

Labour right-wingers and mainstream media hacks don't give a shit about ordinary people like you and I, and wouldn't dream of speaking up for us when the rules are being deliberately bent to punish "the lower orders" for their political opinions.

But when it's one of their fellow elitists from deep within the Westminster establishment class getting punished for wantonly defying the party rules, suddenly it's tears of outrage and demands for an exception to a rule that would certainly have seen any ordinary member instantly purged from the party at any point in its history.

This idea that the rules should be bent to discriminate against ordinary people, but bent the complete other way to excuse those at the top of the party is outright and ugly elitism, and there's no excuse for it whatever, especially in a party like Labour.

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How the Vote Leave campaign cynically used the Jo Cox killing to their advantage

When the Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered in the street by a "Britain First" screaming extreme-right terrorist during the EU referendum campaign, all of the Brexit campaign groups agreed to a three day pause in campaigning as a mark of respect.

On Thursday 26 July 2018 Facebook finally released a massive tranche of Vote Leave dark ads that were run during the EU referendum campaign. The immediate response was shock at the dishonesty of the content, the slick clickbait nature of the adverts, and the complete lack of imprints or information identifying the dark ads as Vote Leave campaign material.

Then people started looking into the time stamps of the dark ads and found that a load of them had been uploaded during the agreed pause in campaigning, meaning Vote Leave were taking advantage of the Jo Cox pause to continue pushing their own Brexit propaganda while the Remain campaigners stopped to pay their respects.

When this information became public the Vote Leave campaign director Dominic Cummings initially denied that the dark ads were run during the pause, and claimed that they were just being uploaded for later.

This excuse crumbled almost immediately with the leak of a conversation between Darren Grimes and the AIQ staffer who was running the dark ad campaign which showed that Grimes' response to the dark ads starting up again at 10pm on the day after the killing was "oh fantastic".

Now it's already been proven that Vote Leave illegally overspent during the EU referendum (for which they've been hit with the maximum possible fine by the Electoral Commission) and that this overspend was due to their campaign of social media dark ads.

Serious questions remain over the legality of the adverts they ran, given the desperately misleading content, and that they contained absolutely no indication that they were EU referendum campaign material at all.

However there's not much prospect of prosecution of their decision to carry on campaigning after agreeing to pause out of respect to Jo Cox, because the agreement between the campaigns didn't take the form of a legally enforceable contract, it was just a matter of integrity and basic human decency.

Vote Leave's decision to carry on secretly campaigning so as to use the Jo Cox pause for their own advantage is particularly cynical given how numerous Brexiteers actually accused Remain campaigners of "politicising the killing" and "using it to their advantage" in the aftermath of the murder.

Now it's absolutely clear that Vote Leave deliberately and cynically used the pause in campaigning to their own advantage, which even a hefty proportion of Leave voters would no doubt find utterly repulsive if they knew about it.

So the big question now is how the mainstream media will cover these revelations. Will they be swept under the carpet so most people don't even know that Vote Leave decided to cynically use the Jo Cox pause to their own advantage, or will this scandal be presented as the outrageously cynical and dishonest behaviour that it was?

My guess is that this decision to take advantage of the Jo Cox murder won't be dominating any headlines, and if it is mentioned at all, buried in the back pages, it will only be down to the sterling work of people like Carole Cadwalladr (one of the few mainstream media journalists worth their salary).

What you can do

Share this article to help spread awareness of the despicable behaviour of the Vote Leave campaign. 

Contact journalists in the mainstream media and ask them to cover the story of how Vote Leave cynically continued campaigning during the Jo Cox pause.

Write to your MP and ask them to take action to prevent the use of social media dark ads in future democratic votes. One way would be to introduce a new law that all campaign adverts (paper or digital) must be registered with the Electoral Commission and clearly marked as campaign literature, with jail time for those who break the rules. 

Take a look at the evidence for yourself. Look at how dishonest and immigration fixated these dark ads were, and try to get your head around the staggering number of people who saw and were influenced by these misleading dark ads in the run up to the EU referendum vote.

Support independent media in their efforts to counter-balance mainstream media bias by setting up small subscriptions to your favourite independent media sites.

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Note: Article amended over a mistaken attribution of the "oh fantastic" comment to Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings, rather than Darren Grimes (who was given £625,000 by Vote Leave to spend on Facebook dark ads).

The Tories create laws to benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of us

In 2016 former Tory Chancellor George Osborne introduced a new 3% Stamp Duty rate for people buying property to rent out, but for some reason he decided to create an exemption for anyone purchasing more than six properties at the same time.

The very next year the Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt took advantage of this loophole by purchasing seven luxury flats in Southampton, saving himself almost £100,000 in Stamp Duty.

Osborne's loophole was obviously designed to benefit the mega-rich with sufficient capital to purchase seven or more properties at once, but to see one of his actual Tory colleagues taking advantage of it just goes to show what a grotesque bunch they really are, designing legislation to benefit themselves and their mega-rich mates at the expense of everyone else.

The scandal doesn't stop there either. Jeremy Hunt also defied parliamentary ethics when he "forgot" to declare this investment on the parliamentary register of interests, and he also broke the law when he "forgot" to tell Companies House about his financial interest in the company used to buy the flats (an offence that could result in a two year prison sentence if it was one of us that did it, rather than a member of the privileged class).

This scandal reveals the sheer self-serving greed of the Tory party by proving that they design legislation to benefit them and their own class at the expense of the rest of us, but don't expect it to dominate the mainstream news because exposing this scandal runs entirely counter to the current primary objective of trying to ensure a poor Labour result at the local elections.

If this was one of Jeremy Corbyn's shadow ministers then we know they'd be hounded from pillar to post over it until they were forced into resigning, and how the scandal would dominate the headlines for days, but because it's a Tory member of the establishment class it'll receive very limited coverage, and Hunt will ride out the storm without even coming close to being under pressure to resign.

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Why is Nigel Farage suddenly talking in favour of a second EU referendum?

The former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has propelled himself back into the headlines by announcing that he's coming around to the idea of a second referendum on EU membership.

This is obviously quite a sensational announcement given the absolute bile Brexiters generally fling at people who suggest that perhaps the British people deserve a democratic vote once the terms and conditions of Brexit are actually known.

Most Brexiters strongly resist the idea of a second referendum because they know that the 2016 referendum was a freak result, won with a tiny minority against a backdrop of collapsing public services and stagnating wages caused by ruinous Tory austerity dogma.

Brextremists are understandably afraid that a second vote would result in a reversal of Brexit, especially in light of Theresa May's catastrophic, increasingly unpopular, and profoundly anti-democratic handling of the Brexit process so far.

The fact that Farage is going against the position held by the majority of Brexiters by suggesting a second referendum raises the obvious question of why?

If we take Farage at his word, he's claiming that a cancel-Brexit campaign fronted by the likes of Tony Blair and Nick Clegg would fail spectacularly, and anyone with a grain of political sense must be able to realise that Clegg and Blair are now so politically toxic they would undoubtedly damage any 2nd Remain campaign by association.

However, it's also worth noting that the likely leaders of the 2nd Leave campaign would also be politically toxic too. Only a fool would put their trust in the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove after their "£350 for the NHS" lies, and Theresa May would be at the forefront of the whole 2nd Brexit campaign trying to argue in favour of whatever lamentable deal she's managed to cobble together.

Even taking into account the fact that Blair and Clegg are politically toxic, a second EU referendum campaign looks like an almighty risk for Brexiters, given that their likely figureheads are just as politically toxic as the their opponents.

Aside from saying that he's coming around to the idea of a second referendum, Farage said something else telling. He said that the idea of a multiple choice referendum would confuse the British people.

This is interesting because he's clearly envisioning a binary choice between just two options.

Obviously the hard-right Brextremist mob have jumped on this idea saying that the choice should be a fake Brexit or Brexit choice between whatever hard-right Tory Brexit Theresa May manages to cobble together, and a totally catastrophic "no deal" flounce out of the EU.

But this kind of ridiculous false choice is clearly not what Farage has in mind, because it's impossible that Blair or Clegg would front either of those campaigns.

Farage clearly wants to re-fight the battle all over again and win a decisive Brexit victory against those who wish to remain in the EU.

This is interesting because it indicates that he's willing to shackle himself to whatever deal Theresa May and her three Brexiteer charlatans come up with. This seems like a pretty bold gamble given the chaotic and incompetent shambles the Tories have been making of the Brexit process so far.

Farage also doesn't seem to have considered the fact that that a second Brexit vote could be seen as a way of slapping the government in the face. 

Just as huge numbers of people saw the 2016 Brexit vote as an ideal opportunity to slap David Cameron and George Osborne in the face by voting Brexit, a second referendum could easily be seen as a means of slapping Theresa May in the face, but this time by voting to lob her chaotic Brexit shambles onto the scrapheap.

One of the more compelling explanations behind Farage's U-turn on the idea of a second referendum is pure self-interest.

Ever since Farage felt the euphoria of winning the Brexit vote in June 2016 his star has been fading. He's gone from being a leader of one of the most consequential political rebellions in decades to begging unsuccessfully to be made Donald Trump's butler, backing Marine Le Pen's failed National Front presidential bid in France, speaking at extreme-right rallies in Germany, and backing an alleged paedophile who actually managed to lose an election for the Republicans in Alabama!

Perhaps Farage wants a second referendum because he wants to be back in the limelight again?

Then there's Farage's financial backer Arron Banks who managed to build up a huge social media propaganda empire through the last EU referendum. Unlike the official Vote Leave campaign that folded up after the 2016 referendum, Banks' Leave.EU operation has continued churning out extreme-right propaganda and links to Banks' own Westmonster propaganda site ever since.

A second referendum campaign would obviously allow Banks to further expand his extreme-right propaganda empire, no matter what the final result.

All in all Farage's confidence that a second referendum would result in a landslide for Brexit seems massively over-optimistic given that such a scenario would offer the British public a chance to step back from the cliff edge, and to give Theresa May a massive slap in the face in the process.

However, whether Farage is motivated by exuberant over-confidence, or by self-interest, or just by a desperation to push himself back into the limelight, one thing is for sure; whether he intended it or not he's done a huge favour to those of us who believe democracy would be better served by a serious and properly informed Brexit referendum once the terms and conditions have been made clear, than by the hastily rushed and profoundly dishonest farce of a debate that happened in 2016.

Like him or not, Farage has completely shattered the Brextremist trope that a second referendum would be anti-democratic and against "the will of the people", because we now have one of the leading Brexiteers arguing that a second referendum would actually be a democratic opportunity to decide the situation once and for all.

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The more they try to destroy him the stronger he becomes

When Theresa May called her vanity election in April 2017 Jeremy Corbyn's leadership was hardly looking healthy, but May's hubris handed him a lifeline and ended up crashing any hopes that anti-democratic Labour Party right-wingers had of staging another Anyone But Corbyn coup.

Theresa May's decision to call the opportunistic snap election that she'd repeatedly said that she wouldn't gifted Corbyn the chance to do what he does best and snap into campaign mode. It also allowed the Labour Party to mobilise their new weapon, a membership of over 600,000 as activists, online campaigners and canvassers.

Corbyn was obviously helped by Theresa May's insipid campaign and her manifesto of misery that offered nothing to ordinary people in favour of lavishing even more handouts on corporations and the mega-rich. But Labour's rise from the mid-20s in the early polls up to 40% on election day had a lot more to do with Labour providing the electorate with an actual alternative to hard-right orthodox neoliberalism for the first time in decades, which would never have happened under any of the so-called "centrist" Labour politicians.

A look at the May 2017 local election results that were massively over-shadowed by the general election campaign reveals a very poor Labour performance that would have had the Blairite/Progress faction of the Labour Party braying for a new anti-Corbyn coup plot had they not known that such a move in the middle of a general election campaign would surely have lost them most of their own seats in the resulting carnage.

Had May not called her vanity election then there would have been no such self-interest stopping the right-wing faction of the Labour Party from seeking to topple Corbyn, because make no mistake about it, the May 2017 local election results were very poor indeed with Labour dropping 382 council seats and losing control of seven councils.

Looking at the absolute bile that has been spat by Labour right-wingers like of Chris Leslie and Jess Phillips, and their tireless cheerleaders like JK Rowling, even after Jeremy Corbyn became the first Labour leader to actually gain seats at a General Election since 1997, just imagine the undiluted hate they would have been spewing had Theresa May not handed Jeremy Corbyn the ideal opportunity to inject a huge amount of momentum into his leadership.

The majority of Labour's 600,000 members support Jeremy Corbyn's policies and leadership, and there's a huge groundswell of approval for a move to democratise the Labour Party by giving local parties the opportunity to remove unsatisfactory Labour MPs. But without the gains made in Theresa May's vanity election, Corbyn would have struggled badly to democratise the party against the visceral objections of the anti-democratic Labour Party right-wingers who would have been pointing to the local election debacle and dismal results like the Cumberland by-election as evidence that Corbyn needs to be ousted as leader at any cost.

Thanks to Theresa May's hubris Jeremy Corbyn suddenly looks like an authoritative Prime Minister in waiting, and she's ebded up looking like an bedraggled and emotionally ruined placeholder PM who is only still there because the Tories (who absolutely detest her for what she's done) are afraid of losing their grip on power completely if they move to bring her down now.

Now that Corbyn has withstood the most savage mainstream media smear campaign any UK party leader has ever faced in order to achieve the biggest upsurge in the Labour vote since 1945, the chances of Labour transforming into a truly democratic party that properly reflects the will of the party members look stronger than ever.

The craziness of this situation is that Corbyn would never have found himself in such a strong position to democratise the Labour Party if it weren't for Theresa May's vanity and hubris. And furthermore Theresa May would never have been lured into such extraordinary complacency that she called a needless election if it weren't for the huge public opinion damage inflicted on the Labour Party by the right-wing Labour mob and their ridiculously ill-timed and unbelievably divisive Anyone But Corbyn coup in the summer of 2016.

It's amazing to think that Corbyn's path from the most unlikely political outsider ever to lead the Labour Party to Prime Minister in waiting owes as much to the people who tried to destroy him (the coup-plotter Labour MPs and Theresa May) as it does to the hundreds of thousands of Labour Party activists who worked tirelessly to create the biggest General Election upset in decades.

Corbyn owes a measure of his success to those who tried to destroy him because without the self-serving hubris of the former, the latter would never have had the circumstances they required to allow their hard work and dedication to pay off.

"The more they attack him, the stronger he gets" - I said it very early in Corbyn's original leadership bid in 2015 as the likes of Tony Blair, Jack Straw, John McTernan, and Peter Mandelson massively fuelled Corbyn's popularity with their hyperbolic attacks on him, and in light of the current circumstances it stands truer than ever.

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Why the disparity between the way the UK media cover Donald Trump and Theresa May?

On Sunday July 2nd 2017 Donald trump tweeted something extraordinary. He shared a ridiculous doctored video of him beating up a guy whose head has been replaced with the CNN logo. You'll probably be aware of this already given the significant amount of mainstream media coverage of this bizarre Tweet on both sides of the Atlantic.

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

Before we even get into the origins of the video, the content should be deeply concerning to anyone who gives the remotest damn about the freedom of the press. 

Trump's attacks on certain sections of the media were bad enough before this doctored video clip, but anyone who imagines that the President sharing this clip wouldn't be seen as an incitement to abuse and violence towards the press amongst by the angry meat-head demographic of the Trump supporter base is clearly delusional.

The origins of the video are very much more appalling than the content itself, originating from a vile Reddit bigot calling himself Han Asshole Solo.

Not only is the creator of the video a rabid Islamophobe and anti-Semite, he's also been guilty of spreading fake news, which is quite some irony given that Trump posted the bigot's video with a rant about CNN being "fake news".

Trump was so pleased with the video clip that he'd ripped off from this Reddit bigot that he even retweeted it from the official Presidential Twitter account, meaning that it will be permanently recorded on the US public record as an official statement by the President!

The fact that the work of a depraved extreme-right bigot has been written into the US public record brings us neatly to Theresa May.

Not many people will know that Theresa May also ensured that the work of an extreme-right social media bigot was recorded on the public record by reading out a Tweet from a notorious Twitter troll account at Prime Minister's Questions as a pathetic attempt to score political points against Jeremy Corbyn.

Theresa May's decision to write this vile xenophobic and misogynistic Twitter troll into the permanent Hansard political record went virtually unnoticed by the public because the incident massively contradicted the prevailing UK mainstream media narrative that it was Jeremy Corbyn who had a lax attitude towards bigotry and online abuse not Theresa May, so went almost entirely ignored.

For some reason Theresa May never did sing the Notting Hill Carnival song
composed by her favoured Twitter troll.

Had Corbyn read out a Tweet from a vile Twitter bigot we all know the mainstream media would have leapt on it and used it as a stick to beat him with ever since, but Theresa May was allowed to get away with it completely, with only a few independent media sources ever actually bothering to highlight her appallingly poor judgement.

The fact that Trump is getting pilloried by the UK press for doing essentially the same thing that Theresa May was given a free pass for in September 2016 raises the question of why the different treatment.

Why do the UK press regularly hold Donald Trump to account for his unstable behaviour, his hard-right economic policies, his contempt for civil rights and the rule of law, and his extreme narcissistic tendencies, but they treat Theresa May with almost total reverence and deference when she has largely the same outrageous hard-right politics and the same absurdly narcissistic right-wing authoritarian personality type (minus the confidence and charisma of course)?

Is it just a case of snobby and superior Brits laughing and pointing at the silly American, when their own leader is arguably even worse?

Or is it a deep sense of ingrained subservience that lower-ranked members of the British establishment have towards their lords and masters that makes them incapable of criticising their own political leaders with anything like the venom with which they'll criticise foreign leaders?

Whether it's snobbishness towards foreigners, or ingrained British subservience, this disparity between the way British mainstream media hacks will criticise Donald Trump, but turn a blind eye to Theresa May for exactly the same kind of behaviour is totally unacceptable.

There's no way they should end this disparity by lessening their criticism of Trump, so the only way to address the problem is by treating Theresa May and her shamelessly shambolic Tory government with the same level of scrutiny and criticism as they're prepared to treat Donald Trump and his chaotic Republican administration.

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Theresa May has stalled Brexit for an entire year, so why aren't Brexiters livid with her?

It's one full year since EU referendum day, and Theresa May has stalled Brexit so successfully that there has just been one single negotiation with the EU in the entire year!

In light of this year-long delaying game she's been playing, it's absolutely astounding that Brexit supporters aren't totally livid with her.

Last year I argued against Brexit not because I was against the idea in principle, but from the pragmatic perspective that signing a blank contract with the hard-right fringe of the Tory party to make Brexit up as they go along would lead to absolute chaos, which is exactly what is happening in front of our eyes.

If I had been a Brexit supporter, I'd be absolutely furious with the way Theresa May has spent the last year obfuscating and stalling in order to slow the Brexit process down as much as possible, but somehow millions of Brexit voters are so gullible that they uncritically believe the words that come out of her mouth, rather than subjecting any of her actual actions to critical scrutiny.

• Between her undemocratic coronation as Prime Minister in July 2016 (achieved when Theresa May's supporters bullied Andrea Leadsom out of the leadership contest) and January 2017 Theresa May did nothing much apart from spout utterly meaningless platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit" (a six month delay).

• In January 2017 Theresa May decided to sour UK-EU relations by announcing that the centrepiece of her so-called negotiating strategy would be a threat to trigger a massive economic crisis by stropping away from the negotiating table with nothing, then turn the UK into a universally despised corporate tax haven! The idea that infuriating the EU by stalling them for six months then taking such a belligerent approach to the negotiations is compatible with a smooth and orderly Brexit is ludicrous fantasy land gibberish (souring diplomatic negotiations with the EU is a woefully inept strategy that is likely to significantly prolong the Brexit negotiation period).

• Instead of putting her Article 50 bill through parliament Theresa May spent valuable time (and a significant sum of taxpayers' money) fighting, and losing, court battles to overthrow parliamentary sovereignty and impose Article 50 as a despotic leader who gets to make things up as they go along with no democratic oversight (an insult to democracy, a huge waste of time and money and another two month delay between January and March 2017).

• Immediately after triggering Article 50 and setting the clock ticking on the most complex diplomatic negotiations the UK has ever faced Theresa May called her vanity election (another two month delay).

• After throwing away her parliamentary majority in one of the most inept political manoeuvres in history, Theresa May sent David Davis to the first day of negotiations in which he completely abandoned his demands for parallel trade talks, and agreed with the EU that the separation deal, migrants' rights and the Irish border issue come first (a glaring demonstration that the Tory Brexiteers had spent the previous 11 months completely wasting their time on ridiculous fantasies that immediately got binned the moment the negotiations actually started).

• On the anniversary of the EU referendum Theresa May decided to throw an absolute insult of an offer to the EU on protecting citizens' rights. She basically lowered her knickers and did a great big shit on the negotiating table, and the hard-right bully boys in the UK right-wing press are going to attack the EU as evil monsters if they don't gratefully eat it up. Insulting the EU (and all of the 4 million+ UK and EU citizens who live on the other side of the proposed Brexit border) with such a lowball starting offer on citizens' rights is clearly another delaying tactic. Instead of quickly agreeing to a sensible compromise with the EU, Theresa May wants to drag out the preliminary negotiations over citizens' rights for as long as possible in order to delay the beginning of the trade talks (a grotesque use of people's lives as bargaining chips to be haggled over, and another glaringly obvious delaying tactic).

It's absolutely beyond me why so many Brexit supporters still back Theresa May and the Tories to deliver Brexit given the absolute ineptitude of the last year, and Theresa May's endless stalling, but I guess they just like the way she says "Brexit means Brexit" so very much they're willing to completely overlook all of observable reality!

It's quite something that Theresa May's endless repetition of meaningless Brexit platitudes are easily sufficient to mollify millions of pro-Leave people who should be absolutely bloody livid with her for blatantly stalling their beloved Brexit at every single turn.

 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 71 Tory landlord-MPs who voted down the "fit for human habitation" amendment

In January 2016 the Tories notoriously voted down a Labour Party amendment to their Housing Bill that would have required landlords to ensure that the properties they rent out are "fit for human habitation".

71 of the 319 Tory MPs to shoot this "fit for human habitation" requirement out of the water are registered as landlords on the Parliamentary register of members' interests.

Here's a list of the Tory MPs who thought that landlords like them should not be required to ensure the properties they rent out are "fit for human habitation".

• Nigel Adams 
• Stuart Andrew 
• Victoria Atkins 
• Jake Berry 
• James Berry 
• Bob Blackman 
• Robert Buckland 
• Alun Cairns 
• David Cameron 
• Alex Chalk 
• James Cleverley 
• Geoffrey Clifton-Brown 
• Geoffrey Cox 
• Mims Davies 
• Philip Davies 
• Richard Drax 
• James Duddridge 
• Alan Duncan 
• Philip Dunne 
• Jane Ellison 
• George Eustice 
• Mike Freer
•  Richard Fuller 
• John Glen 
• Robert Goodwill 
• Chris Grayling 
• Dominic Grieve 
• Chris Heaton-Harris 
• Peter Heaton-Jones 
• George Hollingberry 
• Kevin Hollinrake 
• Philip Hollobone 
• Nick Hurd 
• Stewart Jackson 
• Margot James 
• Sajid Javid 
• Joseph Johnson 
• Simon Kirby (teller) 
• Greg Knight 
• Brandon Lewis 
• Julian Lewis 
• Craig Mackinlay 
• Tania Mathias 
• Karl McCartney 
• Anne Marie Morris 
• Sheryll Murray 
• Robert Neill 
• Sarah Newton (teller) 
• Jesse Norman 
• David Nuttall 
• Neil Parish 
• Owen Paterson 
• Rebecca Pow 
• Jeremy Quin 
• Jacob Rees-Mogg 
• Laurence Robertson 
• Julian Smith 
• Royston Smith 
• Mark Spencer 
• John Stevenson 
• Desmond Swayne 
• Derek Thomas 
• Anne-Marie Trevelyan 
• Andrew Turner 
• Shailesh Vara 
• Theresa Villiers 
• Ben Wallace 
• David Warburton 
• Craig Whittaker 
• John Whittingdale 
• Nadhim Zahawi

Credit to Political Scrapbook for trawling through the parliamentary register of interests to cross reference the Tory landlords with the Tory MPs who voted not to require landlords to ensure that the properties they rent are fit for human habitation.

In light of the Grenfell Tower fire and the fact that a succession of Tory housing ministers sat on a report into tower block fire safety, it's about time people started waking up to the fact that the Tory government don't give a damn about housing.

They oversaw the lowest rate of house building since the early 1920s and the most unaffordable house prices in history, but to them that's all good, because the higher the demand for housing, the faster the inflation of their own personal property portfolios, and the higher the rents they can charge to their tenants.

These people are far too removed from reality to give a damn.

 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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