Meet the "more of the same" party

The Independent Group of 11 MPs who are squatting in parliament, refusing to call by-elections, and pinning their political hopes on begging Theresa May for an opportunity to prop up her pro-austerity government have announced the positions they've given themselves, and you couldn't have picked more inappropriate roles for several of them if you'd actively tried.

Heidi Allen - Welfare, social care, pensions, and business

Source: Heidi Allen on They Work For You

Heidi Allen is one of the three ex-Tories to join the parliamentary squatter group, and by putting her in charge of welfare and social care this lot are sending a very clear message to their financial backers that they're intent on continuing the savage welfare policies that Allen repeatedly voted in favour of during her time on the Tory benches.

Any "centrists" hoping this new group might adopt a more humane approach than the Tories to issues like disability, social security, and social care will surely be sorely disappointed to see this position handed to a Tory with a proven track record of voting in favour of savage welfare cuts and crippling reduced local government funding in order to fund lavish tax cuts on corporations and the super-rich.

Greedy businessmen hoping for more unearned handouts on the other hand, they'll be punching the air with delight that this new group is intent on continuing the same old "something for nothing" Tory agenda, and actively begging Theresa May to let them prop up her shambles of a government.

Mike Gapes - Foreign affairs and defence

It's difficult to think of a less suitable individual to take responsibility for foreign affairs than the unapologetic warmonger Mike Gapes.

This is a man who voted in favour of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and then repeatedly voted against investigations into the ensuing catastrophe.

The Iraq war caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, triggered a refugee crisis of millions, and created a lawless power vacuum that eventually gave birth to ISIS.

Mike Gapes refuses to accept any moral responsibility whatever for any of this, and remains 100% unapologetic.

Gapes is also a big fan of the tyrannical, homophobic, misogynists, head-chopping, journalist-dismembering, terrorism-spreading Saudi war criminals, and was one of 13 MPs to receive a share of over £100,000 of gifts and freebies lavished on British politicians by the Saudi regime in 2018.

Gapes knows that the Saudis use British weapons to commit war crimes in Yemen because he was a member of the foreign affairs select committee that admitted that this was the case, but he simply doesn't care.

By appointing Gapes to their foreign affairs and defence brief the group are sending a very clear signal to arms manufacturers and the military-industrial complex that they're setting up as a pro-war, pro-imperialist party that is willing to turn a blind eye to the sickening war crimes of disgustingly tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia in order to flog them £billions more in weapons.

Chris Leslie - Treasury and trade

One of Ed Miliband's biggest mistakes as Labour leader was to allow a bunch of hard-right austerity fetishists rule the shadow treasury which resulted in Labour's ridiculously unappealing "austerity-lite" agenda that ruined their chances at the 2015 general election.

The 'thinking' behind this ludicrous policy was that Labour could pinch a few thousand soft-Tory votes in marginal constituencies by imitating ruinous Tory austerity rather than actively opposing it. What they clearly failed to factor into this mind-bogglingly stupid plan was the fact that an explicitly pro-austerity agenda would end up driving away vast numbers of natural Labour voters for every "soft-Tory" they managed to entice.

Hence Labour's share of the vote collapsing from 35% in 2010 to just 29% in 2015, despite the Tories overseeing unprecedented collapses in workers' wages and living standards, trashing Britain's AAA credit rating, and spectacularly missing all of their economic targets!

Had Labour actually opposed devastating Tory austerity dogma in 2015, Labour would probably have beaten the Tories, Ed Miliband would have become Prime Minister, austerity would be over, Jeremy Corbyn would still be an obscure Labour backbencher, and there's be no such thing as Brexit!

Chris Leslie was one of the ludicrous hard-right wonks in the shadow treasury who helped to lay the groundwork for Brexit by outright refusing to oppose the Tory austerity madness that was trashing wages, living standards, and public services, and he's still a pro-austerity fanatic now, even years after right-leaning international bodies like the IMF and OECD have rejected austerity dogma as an economically damaging ideology.

Appointing a hard-right economic illiterate like Chris Leslie to their economics brief is a very clear signal to the mega-rich beneficiaries of Tory austerity dogma that this group intends to continue the Tory agenda of using austerity as a means of transferring ever more wealth from to poor and ordinary to corporations and the mega-rich.

Angela Smith - Transport, Local government, housing, energy, environment, rural affairs

Angela Smith is such a talentless incompetent that she managed to completely screw up the biggest day of her entire political career by referring to British Asians as "funny tinge" on live TV on the Independent Group launch day.

Afterwards she excused this racist gaffe by repeatedly claiming that she was "very tired" which is actually significantly more offensive than the original gaffe because it implies that racist attitudes are somehow so natural and inherent that they accidentally slip out when people are tired, drunk, or stressed.

The idea that we're all inherently racists and it only depends how tired, drunk, or stressed we get before we start spouting bigoted racist slurs is absolutely extraordinary, but not quite as extraordinary as this group putting a pro-privatisation ideologue and lobbyist for private water companies in charge of their transport, energy, water, and housing policies.

With a hard-right pro-privatisation ideologue running this huge brief, it's absolutely clear that this group are committed to defying the public will by cementing private profiteering ownership of the railways, national grid, water companies, and other public services.

Putting Smith in charge of this brief is a clear signal to the private profiteers who are gouging vast profits out of our housing, public services, and utilities that this group is absolutely committed to delivering "more of the same". 

Anna Soubry - Brexit and justice

Of all of the squatter MPs Anna Soubry is perhaps the most distasteful because of her outright and glaring displays of hypocrisy.

When she's not praising the devastating 2010-15 austerity policies that laid the groundwork for Brexit by collapsing UK living standards as "marvellous" Soubry often talks a good talk, but when it comes to the actions her parliamentary voting record stands as absolute proof that she repeatedly does precisely the opposite.

Take her continual grandstanding on Brexit to pose as some kind of noble Brexit-critic which is completely contradicted by her actions. She poses as a Brexit-sceptic, but in parliament she's repeatedly voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right interpretation of Brexit.

Soubry's Brexit collusion including votes in favour of May's shambolic Withdrawal Bill in January 2018, votes against opposition amendments to protect workers' rights, environmental laws, equality rules, consumer protections and food standards, and even a vote of confidence in Theresa May after she humiliated Britain by postponing the scheduled "meaningful vote" for no reason other than the fact she knew she was going to lose it.

It's not just talking about opposing Brexit while repeatedly voting in favour of it either. When it comes to police cuts and violent crime she's also proven herself a despicable hypocrite too.

In response to Theresa May's ludicrous assertion that her policy of getting rid of 21,000 police and slashing police budgets has no relation with soaring rates of violent crime, Soubry stated that "of course there's a link between policing numbers and crime".

This Tweet is an admission that she knew that slashing police budgets would end up increasing rates of serious and violent crime all along, but she repeatedly voted in favour of Theresa May's ideologically driven assault on the police service regardless of the dire and deadly consequences she knew would happen. 

She blatantly put loyalty to the Tory party above the lives of violent crime victims, but now she's abandoned that party loyalty as worthless to join the parliamentary squatters, demonstrating that the victims of the violent crime wave she helped Theresa May to create are actually less than worthless in her estimations!

And she's got the absolute brass neck to start carping from the sidelines about the appalling consequences of the austerity fanaticism that she repeatedly and knowingly voted in favour of as if she's now some kind of heroic saviour!

Putting one of the most brazen hypocrites in the whole of parliament in charge of their Brexit brief is a signal to their financial backers that the group are actually extremely flexible on their Brexit position. If the secretive millionaires who are bankrolling this group want them to go all out for a referendum then that's what they'll do, but if the bankrollers decide that a hard-right Tory Brexit is actually in their interests, that's obviously what Soubry and the squatters will eventually vote in favour of.

Change Politics!

The parliamentary squatters' "change politics" slogan is every bit as Orwellian anything the Tory government have come up with over the years ("all in this together" - while transferring as much wealth as possible from the majority to the mega-rich minority, "making work pay" while overseeing the longest sustained collapse in workers wages in recorded history and slashing in-work benefits, "strong and stable" as their campaign slogan during the most shambolic and needless election in modern British history ...).

They repeatedly claim that they want to "change politics" but their actions demonstrate that on all manner of crucial issues from ruinous austerity dogma to war-mongering imperialism, and from privatisation mania to welfare policy, these are people who desperately want to keep things exactly the same.

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Is "tinge" offensive?

When the Labour-defecting MP Angela Smith made her weird and racist comments about British Asians being "funny tinge" on the big day these splitters had been plotting for months, this racist gaffe was obviously going to attract a lot of ridicule.

The mess was made even worse when Smith and her fellow splitter MPs decided that there should be no disciplinary process, and agreed the line that she only spouted racist remarks because she was "very tired" (is it just me or is 'I was only racist because I was tired' an extraordinary excuse that implies racism is an inherent attribute that is always there, but only leaks out under conditions like tiredness, stress, or drunkenness?).

For context this is a bunch of MPs who spent months bitterly attacking Labour's internal processes for dealing with bigotry, who then immediately give one of their own MPs a total free pass on a bizarre outburst of 1970s-style racism, revealing the fact that they have absolutely no disciplinary procedures at all for dealing with racism in the ranks!

This shockingly lax attitude to dealing with racism is hardly surprising from a group who all either abstained on, or actually voted in favour of Theresa may's racist "Hostile Environment" legislation that created the Windrush Scandal, and resulted in black Britons being deported to their deaths overseas.

This bizarre and hypocritical "funny tinge" episode was always going to provoke derision, and the word "tinge" has subsequently been used to ridicule the Independent Group.

Nicknames, satire, and political shorthand have always been a fundamental part of UK political discourse, but ever since "tinge" became a thing there have been an awful lot of people turning up in comments threads to cry that calling Independent Group "tinge" is unfair, improper, offensive, and even Trumpian!

Amazingly these are people who will willingly and uncritically accept the explanation that Angela Smith slurred British Asians as "funny tinges" because she was "very tired" but then get hyper-offended at other people using the term "tinge" to refer to the group of MPs who continue to side with Smith, and who fully accept her outrageous 'I was only racist because I was tired' excuse!

In this warped worldview it's apparently perfectly fine to refer to the "tinge" of British Asians' skin as being "funny", but then unspeakably offensive to use the word "tinge" as satirical shorthand for the group the woman who did this belongs to!

The same thing happens when you use the political shorthand "parliamentary squatters" to describe the fact these MPs have refused to call by-elections in their constituencies because they're a bunch of democracy-fearing cowards who know they'd lose their seats if they actually put their divisive and egotistical actions to the vote.

The reason pro-austerity centrists are getting so upset about the use of satirical shorthand like "tinge" and "squatter" to describe the Independent Group actually has nothing to do with these words being offensive in their own right, it's that these people know that satire and shorthand are very effective ways of influencing public opinion.

If nicknames and descriptions like "tinge" and "squatter" are allowed to stick, people will be continually reminded about this group's shockingly lax attitude to racism in their ranks and the fact that they're so terrified of democracy that they're treating the constituencies that elected them with contempt.

So they react with outrage, and attempt to impose a form of political correctness to police political satire (meta political correctness if you like) because they desperately want to stamp out the kind of political satire that satirises the opaquely funded, self-serving, Tory-facilitating, pro-austerity centrism they approve of.

These people are not upset because the words "tinge" and "squatter" are offensive, they're upset because they're effective.

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Silence in the face of bigotry is complicity

February 18th 2019 was a truly extraordinary day in British politics. Not only did a bunch of self-serving Labour right-wingers split away from the Labour Party in a lest desperate effort to keep Tory austerity dogma alive, the British mainstream media twice demonstrated their screaming hypocrisy when it comes to bigotry.

Just hours after citing racism as one of her reasons for quitting the Labour Party, the right-wing pro-privatisation MP Angela Smith uttered an extraordinary racial slur on live TV, accusing British Asians of having a "funny tinge".

Even more extraordinary than this display of casual racism on live TV was the reaction of the mainstream media and Westminster establishment stooges on the panel. They just sat there in silence leaving the left-wing British Asian Ash Sarkar as the only one to immediately express disbelief at what had been said.

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

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

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

Interestingly the pseudo-political party that Angela Smith has joined (actually registered as a private company to evade declaring who is bankrolling them) has absolutely no disciplinary procedures in place to deal with racist comments from their MPs, so she was just allowed to get away with claiming that she wasn't serious and it only happened because she was "very tired".

Imagine if a left-winger or Corbyn-supporter had uttered a racial slur then tried to defend it on the grounds that they were just "very tired", do you honestly think the mainstream media would be fastidiously trying to bury the story?

Then on a different political panel show the right-wing anti-Corbyn polemicist Tom Bower (him of the extraordinary Corbyn is a 'dangerous hero' because he likes baked beans nonsense in the Daily Mail) used a vile anti-Semitic trope to bully and abuse a left-wing Jewish journalist called Michael Segalov.

Unbelievably the rest of the panel just sat there in silence as if racially bullying people is perfectly fine as long as the target is left-wing, leaving Segalov to defend himself against the abuse. No condemnation of the abuse, no solidarity with the victim, nothing!

The disgustingly anti-Semitic "self-hating Jew" trope used against a Jewish person on live TV, but the rest of the panel say nothing & the media say nothing.

As far as they're concerned anti-Semitism is perfectly fine when wielded against left-wingers.pic.twitter.com/FUqDOqmSfv

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) February 19, 2019

The fact that this silent reaction to bigoted abuse happened twice on the same day illustrates the fact that this wilful blindness to bigotry from within the establishment ranks is an endemic problem.

It's quite extraordinary that people who would have howled themselves hoarse about the scandal if some leftist had used anti-Semetic bigotry to bully a Jewish person right in front of them on live TV, will just sit there in absolute silence when it's members of their in-group spouting the most absurdly bigoted things, actually leaving the targets of this bigoted abuse to defend themselves.

Let's make no mistake about it here. Bigotry is wrong whether it manifests on the left, the centre, or the right. Anyone proven to be a bigot needs to be lobbed out of whichever political party they belong to, no exceptions for the fact that you prefer one party or another.

Anyone who only opposes bigotry when it involves their political opponents, yet sits there and says absolutely nothing when it's coming from their political allies is an outrageous hypocrite, who is clearly only using the subject of bigotry to score cheap political points.

Whether you think Jeremy Corbyn has done enough to oppose anti-Semitism in Labour is one thing, but you'd be outright lying if you said he'd done nothing. At least he's trying, unlike those who just sit there and say nothing at all while their fellow establishment insiders spew casual racism and the most hateful anti-Semitic abuse.

Sitting there in silence as if nothing of importance has happened while your ideological brethren spew outright bigotry is bad enough in its own right because silence in the face of bigotry is complicity, but from people who are so keen to weaponise accusations of bigotry against their political foes, well it's just absolutely vile isn't it?

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The 7 right-wing pro-austerity Labour splitters have even less integrity than Ukippers!

Seven of the most right-wing pro-austerity Labour Party MPs have quit the party in order to establish a new opaquely-funded "centrist" party designed to keep Labour out of power, and prevent them from ending ruinous Tory policies like austerity dogma, public service cuts, and wage repression.

The seven are Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Gavin Shuker, Mike Gapes, Angela Smith, Luciana Berger, and Ann Coffey. They're the same old faces, the internal wreckers who always expended far more time and effort attacking their own party, rather than explaining Labour Party policies, or criticising the countless failures of the Tory government.

One of the splitters is Chris Leslie, who was one of the Labour right-wingers who came up with the ludicrously unappealing austerity-lite policy of pathetically imitating Tory austerity dogma at the 2015 general election, rather than vehemently opposing it.

Had Labour opposed austerity in 2015 rather than pathetically imitating it Ed Miliband would probably have won, austerity would be over, Corbyn would still be an obscure backbencher, and there would be no such thing as Brexit!

It was Miliband's lack of leadership (in not telling Chris Leslie, Ed Balls, and the other pro-austerity Labour right-wingers to naff off with their rubbish Tory-lite strategy) that got us in this mess in the first place, yet the other six splitters are throwing their support behind Leslie in the hope that their faction can keep Labour out of power and keep Tory austerity dogma alive.

Another of the splitters is Chuka Umunna who is the living embodiment of directionless self-serving opportunism. These days he parades around as a "people's vote" advocate hoping to soak up support from the stop-Brexit activists, but before this miraculous conversion he opposed Freedom of Movement even before the EU referendum, was adamantly opposed to a second referendum, and publicly advocated Britain quitting the Single Market.

And it's only six months since Umunna vehemently denied that he was plotting to form a breakaway party!

This is a shockingly dishonest guy who has crept from the most Europhobic hard-Brexit fringe of the Labour Party in 2016 through to the Europhile stop-Brexit fringe, lying and deceiving all the time, and then out of the door. Yet somehow some people actually see Umunna as a hero, rather than the brazenly self-serving charlatan that he so obviously is.

The parliamentary voting record of this group of seven is absolutely clear. Every single one of these splitters refused to oppose Tory austerity dogma when they had the chance in 2015 and every single one of them abstained on Theresa May's disgusting "deport now, hear appeals later" Hostile Environment policy that led to the Windrush scandal. 

Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that not a single one of the seven splitter had the decency to call a by-election after quitting the Labour Party.

These cynical opportunists have cynically ridden into Westminster on the Labour brand, using the unpaid support and activism of thousands of ordinary Labour members to get there. And now they're selfishly turning their backs on these people in a desperate last-ditch effort to prevent Labour coming to power and bringing ruinous Tory austerity dogma, public service cuts, and wage repression policies to an end.

Even the Brexity Tory MPs Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless had more integrity, because when they quit Cameron's Tory party to join UKIP in 2014 they both called by-elections out of respect for their constituents.

The fact these 7 pro-austerity Labour splitters have even less integrity than Ukippers tells us everything we need to know about how untrustworthy they are, how much contempt they have towards their constituents, and how much they fear the concept of democratic accountability.

There's also the very real risk that these 7 splitters will decide to vote in favour of Theresa May's hard-right Brexit shambles purely because Corbyn and the Labour Party will be opposing it (which would be breathtakingly hypocritical given all the abuse they've lobbed at Corbyn for the last 2 years for supposedly "enabling" Tory Brexit).

Anyone who buys into the splitters' pro-austerity politics, their brazenly self-serving nonsense, and their outright contempt for democratic accountability must be as politically clueless as they are delusional.

But sadly we know there are lots of political dupes out there who will vote for any old shit given the right branding (how else is it possible to explain the popularity of the economically illiterate, billionaire-bankrolled, bloated spiv David Cameron before his Brexit gamble backfired so spectacularly?).

The Labour splitter group will almost certainly end up a total failure like the SDP in the 1980s, but there's a serious danger that they'll nick just enough Labour votes to keep the Tories in power at the next election. Thus more ruinous austerity dogma, more education cuts, more privatisation mania, more ideologically driven defunding of public services, more systematic abuse of sick and disabled people, more tax cuts for the rich, more social security cuts for the working poor, more collapsing local government services, and more wage repression for ordinary working people.

But to the splitter group and those who support them, all this damage and suffering be a price worth paying in order to maintain the political status quo.

 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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Angela Smith is spouting pro-privatisation sewage in the Guardian

The right-wing Labour MP Angela Smith has written an excruciatingly poor article in the Guardian fear-mongering against Labour's popular manifesto commitment to bring the privatised water companies in England and Wales back under national control.

The article is so poorly structured that it's difficult to actually discern the crux of the argument, but it seems to be some kind of argument that running national water supplies as public not-for-profit enterprises (rather than profit-seeking corporate entities) risks a collapse in standards that would make Britain "the dirty man of Europe".

The article is so riddled with basic errors, logical inconsistencies, and downright deceptions that it's quite extraordinary that it was written by an actual MP and published in a (supposedly reputable) national newspaper, especially considering Angela Smith claims to be some kind of expert on the water industry and chairs the all-party parliamentary group on water!

Britain?

The most glaring error of all in the was the way Smith referenced privatised water supplies in "Britain", suggesting that she didn't even know that water supplies in Scotland and Northern Ireland are nationalised. A mistake which blows a massive great hole in the main thrust of her argument: If nationalising water supplies would supposedly cause a dreadful collapse in standards, why is Scottish water doing so well, and why hasn't Northern Ireland descended into a hellish sewer since Northern Ireland Water was renationalised in 2007?

Public ownership

Smith's case that public ownership could lead to a collapse in standards further disintegrates when we take a look at Germany, where the vast majority of the water supply is provided by a network of some 6,000 publicly owned municipal water companies, only 3.5% of which are fully privatised.

Is Germany the kind of hellscape of contaminated water, overflowing sewers, and filthy rivers and beaches that Smith fear-mongers about in her article?

Of course it's not. In fact standards in Germany are actually significantly higher than England and Wales, especially when it comes to issues like repairing leaks (7% distribution losses in Germany vs 19% in England and Wales) and municipal waste water treatment (94% treated to the highest standard as compared to just 39% in England and Wales).

Smith's conflation of public water provision with poor standards simply doesn't stack up, in fact the actual evidence points to the opposite: standards of largely public water supplies in Germany are way higher than the privatised water companies in England.

China

Another gaping flaw in Angela Smith's argument against public ownership of the UK water supply is that chunks of it are publicly owned under the current system that she's so desperate to defend, but just not by Britain! 

When the Chinese sovereign wealth fund purchased a huge stake in Thames Water in 2012 the company was essentially part nationalised under the control of the Chinese state.

Angela Smith tries to paint people who support water renationalisation as having their judgement clouded by ideology, but surely someone like Smith who bitterly opposes UK government involvement in the UK water supply, whilst defending Chinese government involvement in the UK water supply is the one who needs to have their ideological judgement questioned?

Admitting the truth

In the 4th paragraph of her article Smith admits the truth; that "EU regulations have played a crucial role in raising standards", which blasts another gaping hole in her pro-privatisation argument.

Then twisting it

In order to make this inconvenient fact fit her pro-privatisation narrative Smith then tries to argue that it's only down to privatisation that the cost of meeting EU standards were met, but again, this is contradicted by the reality. Standards in Germany have actually improved far more quickly where only a tiny fraction of local water companies have been privatised there.

Investment

The reality is that water company bosses have extracted £billions upon £billions to pay out in shareholder dividends and bloated executive salaries, all of which could have been spent on repairing leaks and treating more than a paltry 39% of waste water to the cleanest standard.

Smith's whole argument that privatisation led to a boom in investment utterly misrepresents the couldn't have been afforded under public ownership completely misrepresents the way the water industry is funded.

Water supplies don't have to compete for "scarce government resources" against "schools and hospitals" as Smith claims. They raise their revenues through water rates in the same way as private providers do, but then save huge amounts of money by not paying out £billions in shareholder dividends and bloated executive salaries.

If a Labour government nationalised the water supply and then set about trying to raid the money raised through water rates to pay for other government services there'd rightly be uproar about it, but that's not what they're proposing to do at all. It's just dishonest propaganda from someone with an ideological axe to grind.

Cost to consumers

handing the water supply over to private profiteers comes at a cost of £2.3 billion per year to water rate payers.

If the water supply was returned to not-for-profit public ownership this £2.3 billion could be returned to water rate payers through reduced water bills, or it could be used to fund much-needed infrastructure improvements to bring our standards up closer to the standards in Germany.

The profit motive

When profit is the primary motive, stuff like improving water quality and dealing with leaks inhibit the profit rate.

Privately owned water companies have a primary duty to create profits for their shareholders. If the fines from failing water quality standards or widespread leaks are higher than the cost of improving standards then the changes will be made, however if the fines are lower, then they'll be written off as a cost of doing business.

This means that any improvements that have happened since privatisation have happened despite the private water companies, not because of them.

Public opinion

Public opinion is massively in favour of water renationalisation, so Anglea Smith isn't just arguing against the Labour Party leadership and the Labour Party members who support the Labour commitment to renationalise the water companies, she's criticising the vast majority of the public too.

Ideology over fact

At one point in the article Smith even says that "when it comes to ensuring we have clean water and a safe marine environment we cannot allow ideology to be the master of fact", which takes an awful lot of brass neck from someone who is so blatantly prepared to ignore and/or misrepresent inconvenient facts (as detailed above) in order to grind her pro-privatisation axe.
We've all seen countless examples of this kind of Orwellian reality-reversing propaganda from the Tories, but it's still quite shocking to see it from a Labour Party MP.

Conflicts of interest

One of the most extraordinary things about Angela Smith's article is the fact that she omits to mention that her husband works in the private water industry, and that the all-party parliamentary group on water that she chairs is funded by the private water lobby.

Even if Smith refused to admit the fact that she's essentially just a lobbyist for the private water companies embedded within the Labour Party and parliament, the Guardian should at least make Smith's conflicts of interest known to their readers.

Problems for Corbyn

This article isn't just proof that one of the most high profile Labour right-wingers is such a lame duck that she can't even write an article about her own supposed area of expertise without a mass of errors, logical inconsistencies, and outright deceptions. It's also a demonstration of the fact that Jeremy Corbyn would face serious problems were he to become Prime Minister.

When the Labour Party was controlled by the right-wing faction of the party between 1994 and 2010 numerous pro-austerity, pro-privatisation neoliberals like Angela Smith were parachuted into Labour seats. This means that even if Corbyn won a majority at the next election, he'd struggle to implement his manifesto commitments like nationalising the water supply, creating a National Education Service, and scrapping Tory austerity dogma as a result of ideological opposition from the rump of self-serving, right-wing orthodox neoliberals embedded within his own party.

Nobody ever said it would be easy

Nobody ever claimed that returning the Labour Party to its democratic socialist principles would be easy, but just because a job is difficult doesn't make it not worth doing.

The UK has suffered four decades of unbroken neoliberal rule since 1979, resulting in an absolute mess of inequality, stagnating wages, failing public services, collapsing productivity, ruinous austerity dogma, and now the Brexit shambles.

Something has to change because "more of the same" simply won't cut it any more. 

Jeremy Corbyn has outlined a path towards Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, which is obviously unappealing to right-wing orthodox neoliberals like Angela Smith, but the other alternative is the kind of hard-right frenzy of deregulation, ultranationalism and deliberate disaster capitalism envisaged by the Brextremists.

We're facing a political choice between maintaining existing standards on workers' rights, environmental laws, food standards, equal rights legislation, and consumer protections alongside a move back towards public ownership of vital state services and infrastructure, or a fanatically right-wing deregulation frenzy.

And by publicly fear-mongering about Labour's democratic socialist policies, Angela Smith is acting as a useful idiot for the hard-right Brextremists. 

But then the suspicion remains that when it comes to issues like austerity dogma, wage repression, imposing barriers to social mobility, and privatisation mania, numerous right-wing Labour MPs actually have far more in common with the fanatical Tory Brextremists than they do with the Labour leadership, with Labour Party members, and even with the general 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.

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