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.
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.
