Who is in Caroline Lucas' all-female all-white Brexit-foiling "fantasy cabinet"?

The Green Party's only MP Caroline Lucas has completely and utterly lost the plot over Brexit.

For years she was one of my absolute favourite politicians. She led the Greens when they were the only UK-wide party opposing ruinous austerity fanaticism (Labour pushed pathetic austerity-lite rubbish until this pathetic non-opposition cost them the 2015 general election and triggered the Corbyn fightback against the "centrist" policy of imitating Tory austerity fanaticism, rather than opposing it). Lucas has also consistently been on the right side of important parliamentary votes (alongside Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, and Dennis Skinner she was the only other MP with sufficient principles to vote against Theresa May's racist hostile environment, David Cameron's disastrous war-mongering in Libya, and Theresa May's enhanced state snooping powers, and George Osborne's welfare vandalism bill).

Over the last few months it's been bad enough watching the Greens voluntarily turning themselves into recruitment agents for the austerity enabling, privatisation scamming, welfare vandalising, workers' rights attacking, fracking tax cutting, disability persecuting, student impoverishing, electoral reform abandoning Lib-Dem warmongers, but Lucas' "fantasy cabinet" of herself and ten all-white, all-female MPs is an extraordinary blowout.

Here are details on the ten other women Lucas wants to orchestrate a "foil Brexit at any cost" coup with:

Anna Soubry: Ex-Tory Soubry talks a good game pretending to oppose Brexit, but when it came to the crunch she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard Brexit shambles of a Withdrawal Agreement! Soubry has also made it absolutely clear that she'd prefer a ruinous Tory-administered Brexit than stopping Brexit under a Corbyn-led Labour government. She also referred to the ruinous living standards destroying policies of the austerity coalition that laid the groundwork for Brexit as "marvellous".

Heidi Allen: Another ex-Tory. As a Tory she once cried in parliament about the devastating impact of Tory welfare vandalism to gather "compassionate Conservative" headlines, before wilfully marching through the lobby to vote in favour of even more of the welfare vandalism and devastating cuts she was crying over. She's also responsible for the stupidest and most dangerous Remainer idea yet, which is to just let No Deal go ahead, then try to magically undo it using retroactive legislation!

Jo Swinson: She isn't a Tory, but she might as well be, having been more loyal to the Tory whip during the ruinous austerity coalition than numerous Tory MPs (including recent Tory leadership candidate Jeremy Hunt!). Whatever horrible abuse and economically illiterate nonsense the Tories were pushing, Swinson wilfully voted it all through, refusing to protest by resigning as Employment Minister, even when they launched their vile and unlawful policy of protecting bad bosses by pricing low-income workers out of the justice system with £1,200 upfront Tribunal Fees. She's also bankrolled by the owner of a fracking operation and voted in favour of Cameron and Osborne's massive tax cut for onshore fracking (which makes her a very odd bedfellow for a Green MP).

Justine Greening: If you're going to stuff your "fantasy cabinet" full of ex-Tory austerity enforcers and Lib-Dem austerity enablers, you might as well include a sitting Tory MP just to hammer home the point that opposing the austerity fanaticism that caused Brexit in the first place will be an absolute non-priority. Aside from being a horrifying austerity-enforcer, Greening was also personally in charge of the mass privatisation of state schools in England. The vast majority of Brits believe that schools should be run as not-for-profit public services, but somehow Lucas wants to include a hard-right school-privatising extremist in her "fantasy cabinet".

Nicola Sturgeon: Sturgeon does occasionally let herself down with cheap partisan political point scoring (which is regrettable, but understandable given the tides of absolute filth that are spewed in her direction), but in general she's a really strong and popular leader. The main problem with the inclusion of SNP figures like Sturgeon and Kirsty Blackman is that Swinson and the Lib-Dems have outright refused to work with the SNP to stop Brexit because they actually see preventing another Scottish independence referendum as a much higher priority than stopping Brexit.

Liz Saville Roberts: Including Plaid Cymru's only female MP is an obvious choice if you're doing a stupid identity politics driven all-female "fantasy cabinet". She has been a hard-working MP since arriving in parliament in 2015, and she's on the decent side of parliamentary divisions the majority of the time. It's hard to see how an alliance between a Welsh independence MP and the ultra-unionist Lib-Dems could ever really hold up for very long though.

Sylvia Hermon: Again, there's nothing particularly wrong with the former UUP, now independent Northern Irish MP Sylvia Hermon. It's just an odd selection to pick a solitary independent MP from Northern Ireland, unless the reason is the tokenism of picking the only Brexit-sceptic MP in Northern Ireland (the DUP are hard Brexit militants and Sinn Féin refuse their Westminster seats on principle).

Emily Thornberry: Reaching out to a serving Labour Party cabinet minister to engage in a plot to sideline Labour from the anti-No Deal fightback is a bold move, but Thornberry is surely far too sensible a political operator to ditch her career by joining this ludicrous identity politics publicity stunt.

Yvette Cooper: Cooper is one of the oddest picks of all. Yes she's involved herself in opposing Brexit, but she's stopped short of calling for another referendum (unlike Labour front bench MPs like Diane Abbott, who has repeatedly made the case for a final say referendum on Brexit).

• The inclusion of a load of pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-fracking, Heathrow expansion-supporting, solar subsidy slashing MPs in Lucas' "fantasy cabinet" just goes to show how wildly she's lost her way. She won so much admiration for her principled stances on austerity, welfare, privatisation, and the environment, and now she's bulldozing the lot into a fire pit in order to cavort with hard-right austerity enablers and fracking advocates!

• The idea of gender exclusion is absolutely terrible too. Anyone who is genuinely opposed to Brexit must understand that a ludicrous identity politics dick-counting exercise is a pointless distraction. Anyone who thinks an unprincipled loudmouth like Anna Soubry is more of an asset to the Brexit fightback than Dominic Grieve or Keir Starmer, simply because she's female, is absolutely out of their god-damned tree.

• An all-white cabinet which includes several Brexit enablers, whilst excluding significantly more anti-Brexit BAME women like Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler, Marsha de Cordova, and Rupa Huq is extraordinary. And their exclusion makes no sense either. Lucas reached out to Thornberry who is in Corbyn's shadow cabinet, so she could have reached out to Abbott and Butler too, and she reached out to Cooper who is a Labour back bencher, meaning there must be some other reason she decided not to involve BAME Labour backbenchers like Huq and de Cordova.

• One of the most worrying things is that nobody in the Green Party seems able or willing to take her to one side and ask her to stop this increasingly erratic and damaging behaviour. There's absolutely no way that this all-female all-white "fantasy cabinet" idea including a load of austerity-enablers, privatisation fanatics, and environmental vandals was approved at Green Party conference, so she's not only making a fool of herself, she's also making a mockery of the Green Party's claim to be the most democratic and accountable party in UK politics.

• The whole thing seems to be a desperate last-ditch effort to exclude Corbyn and the Labour-left from the process, even though it's absolutely obvious that the support of the Labour-left would be absolutely vital if Lucas ever gets the "another roll of the dice" referendum she's expended so much energy on demanding (whilst ignoring the role austerity fanaticism played in causing Brexit in the first place).

• And last but not least the whole idea of a "foil Brexit at any cost" cross-bench coup is absolutely terrible anyway. If you wanted to think of the ideal way of empowering Boris Johnson to seize the moral high ground and romp to a general election victory, an unelected Westminster establishment clique overturning Brexit without even a General Election or Referendum result to give them a mandate would be pretty much exactly what the Brextremists would be wishing for!

Caroline Lucas is far from the only person to have been driven to absolute insanity by Brexit, but seeing a strong and principled woman I really admired degenerate to the point of proposing ludicrous unworkable nonsense that burns all of her preexisting principles to ashes is definitely the saddest case of Brexit Brain Worms yet.

 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

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.

 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

Centrists: Your anti-Brexit heroes are total frauds

The gullibility of some people never ceases to astound.

Even when it's absolutely obvious that a breakaway group of right-wing Labour MPs and Tories has absolutely nothing to do with Brexit, and everything to do with a desperate last-ditch effort to divide the Labour vote and keep the Tory austerity agenda rolling on, huge numbers of people who consider themselves rational, suddenly begin falling over themselves to continue believing the lies and deceptions of a bunch of egotistical fabulists.

If you look at the facts rather than mindlessly and uncritically absorbing mainstream media propaganda tropes, the entire justification for the existence of the Independent Group is obviously a fraud.

The ex-Labour component said they had to quit Labour because the party wasn't doing enough to oppose Brexit, and the ex-Tory component said they had to quit the Tories because they were in hock to Jacob Rees-Mogg's ERG Brextremists and the bigoted DUP sectarians that Theresa May bribed into propping up her shambles of a government.

But the evidence proves this to be absolutely false. 

On January 29th Labour tabled a Brexit amendment proposing another referendum as an option in order to prevent Theresa May and the ERG Brextremists driving the UK economy off a cliff, but the three ex-Tory members of the squatter group of MPs all actively sided with Theresa May, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, and the 10 DUP sectarians to vote against this amendment [source].

If you ever needed absolute proof that opposing Brexit was never their true priority, the fact that these three voted against Labour's amendment 307 aimed at stopping Theresa May's reckless game of brinkmanship with the nation's future less than a month before becoming political squatters is it, isn't it?

And the fact that the ex-Labour component have joined up with these outrageous ex-Tories who less than a month previously were actively siding with the ERG Brextremsists and the DUP to prevent Labour's efforts to oppose Tory Brexit is proof that the priority isn't opposing Brexit for them either.

So if their stated justification is an easily demonstrable lie, what is the ulterior agenda?

Well the ex-Labour squatter MP Gavin Shuker (the one who decided to set their group up as a private company rather than a political party in order to hide who is bankrolling them) said that their primary objective was begging Theresa May to form a pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-welfare coalition with them. "I'm willing to extend confidence and supply to your government so it doesn’t fall over" being his exact words.

The ex-Labour squatter MP Chris Leslie (one of the right-wing idiots who came up with the staggeringly unappealing austerity-lite posturing that trashed Labour's election chances at the 2015 general election) went even further, saying that the group would refuse to do everything in their power to stop the Tory Brexit chaos, because if stopping hard-right Tory Brexit meant giving Jeremy Corbyn another shot at removing Theresa May from power, they'd vote with the Tories to prevent that from happening!

The ex-Tory squatter MP Anna Soubry made things absolutely clear when she used the word "marvellous" to describe the Coalition austerity-enforcing, wage-repressing, public service-wrecking, social security-slashing, privatisation obsessed dogma of the 2010-2015 period that collapsed living standards and created the wave of public fury that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line in 2016.

Instead of looking at the austerity disease that caused Brexit in the first place, Soubry is pretending to treat the symptoms (while actively voting against another referendum that may have helped to treat the symptoms) and actually continuing to praise the toxic Tory austerity dogma that caused the symptoms in the first place as "marvellous"!

And then Soubry went on the television to argue that she should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party and their ruinous austerity dogma from under the umbrella of the Independent Group, and her fellow squatter MP Chuka Umunna actually sat next to her nodding and agreeing that members of his absurd vanity project should be allowed to actively campaign for the Tories and promote Tory austerity dogma!

The obvious problem is that the hopelessly gullible are incredibly difficult to convince, because in order to see the squatter MPs as the cynical opportunists hiding a pro-Tory pro-austerity, anti-worker, anti-investment agenda behind a cloak of Brexit rhetoric, people need to accept that they were foolish to take these politicians from deep within the heart of the Westminster establishment class at their word, and admit that this gullibility is why they got so easily duped.

If we've learned anything from the last few years in politics it's that huge numbers of people would rather ignore the facts and evidence to continue believing absolute nonsense, rather than take the ego hit of accepting they got conned.

So even when we point out that the squatter group's entire justification for existing is a fraud, and that they're just a bunch of austerity fetishists openly scrounging for places in a Tory-led pro-austerity coalition, people's egos won't allow them to admit that they were hopelessly gullible rubes to ever fall for it in the first place.

But then the gossamer-like transparency of their fraud is so fragile that it's enough to make us suspect that Brexit isn't actually the main issue with a lot of these "centrists" at all, and that the actual unstated priority all along has been an absolute desperation to keep the Tories in power so they can carry on brutally punishing the poor and disabled, trashing ordinary workers' wages, gutting public services, and throttling Britain's economic potential with their toxic austerity dogma like they have been doing for the last 9 years.

The Independent Group is not a brave new challenge to the political orthodoxy, it's people from deep within the political orthodoxy desperately hawking "more of the same" under the guise of opposing the hard-right Brexit that several of their group were voting in favour of less than a month previously!

So the only people left promoting these democracy-fearing squatter MPs are either hopelessly gullible idiots who just rote learn and repeat their political opinions without doing even the most basic fact-checking, or cynical and malicious propagandists who are deliberately hiding their pro-Tory pro-austerity agenda behind a crude veneer of anti-Brexit rhetoric.

 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

Chuka Umunna thinks ex-Tory members of his vanity project should be able to keep campaigning for the Tory party!

With only slightly more than a month to go before Theresa May runs the clock down to the ruinous hard-right Brexit chaos that many in her party always wanted the Westminster establishment class coughed up an extraordinary response.

Instead of seeking to unify opposition to Theresa May's egregious delaying tactics, and outrageous threat to trash the British economy with a "no deal" meltdown if she doesn't get their own way, they decided to try to completely monopolise the political agenda with the launch of an extraordinary vanity project.

After leading us to the brink of calamity the Westminster establishment class have decided that their "solution" to their own mess is a fake political party (set up as a private company to avoid revealing who is bankrolling them) with no leader, no manifesto, no members, no internal democracy, no transparency, no respect for the constituencies that elected them, and no disciplinary procedures for dealing with racist MPs in their ranks!

For the first week the only policy they seem to have agreed on is that they'll beg Theresa May for the opportunity to prop up her pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-investment government in return for another EU referendum in which she gets to pick the options, the wording, and the timing of the ballot to her own personal advantage, and then actively promote hard-right Brexit from Downing Street! (can anyone remember how the AV referendum turned out for the Lib-Dems?).

But now we have another policy they seem to agree on, which is that the three ex-Tory members of the parliamentary squatter group should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party, and that if the Tory party don't want them to, then that's a sign of growing "intolerance" and "tribalism" in politics.

It's quite extraordinary these ludicrous self-publicists trying to redefine the longstanding political convention that party membership and affiliation is lost when members begin actively campaigning for rival political groups as some kind of uniquely modern kind of "intolerance".

Not only did the ex-Labour squatter MP Chuka Umunna sit beside Anna Soubry as she expressed her desire to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party, he actually agreed with her and joined in by suggesting the kind of rhetoric she should be using to decry the fact that the Tories don't actually want to be associated with a politician who quit their party to join a rival group!

We all know that Soubry is a massive fan of ruinous Tory austerity dogma, unprecedented wage repression, devastating public service cuts, and the barbaric treatment of sick and vulnerable people because she voted in favour of all of it, and then subsequently described it all as "marvellous" even after quitting the Tories to join the squatter group, so it's not really a surprise that she wants to carry on actively promoting these malicious Tory policies.

What's even more bonkers is that Chuka Umunna, who was elected on Labour's anti-austerity pro-investment manifesto in 2017 is now actively deriding the Tory party for not wanting his fellow squatter MP to campaign in favour of their austerity agenda!

Chuka's now such a fan of Tory austerity dogma that he thinks his fellow squatter MPs should have the right to continue campaigning for the Tory party while they pretend to be challengers to the establishment order!

Allowing your party members to actively campaign for a rival political party during elections is absolute idiocy, even by the standards of the right-wing pro-austerity centrists who devised Labour's lamentable "austerity-lite" strategy that lost Labour the 2015 general election.

This piss-witted wooly-minded, Tory-sympathising strategic ineptitude just goes to illustrate what a disaster it would have been if the likes of Chuka Umunna or Chris Leslie had ever got their hands on the Labour leadership doesn't it?

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all is that these egotistical opportunists from deep within the Westminster establishment class have tried to position themselves as some kind of new and exciting alternative to our "broken politics", but the only policies they seem to have agreed on in over a week is that they should beg Theresa May to form a pro-austerity coalition with the Tory party, and that members of their group should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party from under the tinge umbrella!

It's unbelievably Orwellian to pretend to be revolutionising Westminster politics, when your words and actions betray the fact that you're actually just a desperate rearguard action to keep the Tories in power, and keep their devastating austerity and wage repression policies alive.

 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

Analysis of Anna Soubry's extraordinary Newsnight rant

On the evening of Monday February 5th 2018 BBC Newsnight broadcast an extraordinary interview with the Tory MP Anna Soubry in which she called for Theresa May to conduct a purge to remove Brextremist MPs from the Tory party.

In this article I'm going to analyse some of the stuff she said in the interview embedded below.

.@Anna_Soubry tells @nicholaswatt it’s time Theresa May stood up to the “hard ideological Brexiteers” and “slung ‘em out” https://t.co/gwWZsznN7M pic.twitter.com/IVemTGXeet

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) February 6, 2018

The clip begins with an assertion that "Labour's front bench itself is ideological" and a claim that the Tory front bench "probably isn't".

This is absolute nonsense for several reasons.

Of course Labour's front bench does have an ideology, they have a clear and unmistakable ideological commitment to democratic public ownership of vital UK infrastructure and services like the NHS, police services, the courts, the education system, the rail network, Royal Mail and the National Grid. (An ideology that is commonplace across the developed world and which has massive public support).

But it's obvious that the Tory front bench has an ideology too. They're not just wedded to the neoliberal ideology of privatisation mania (flogging off the national silver on the cheap to unaccountable private entities), their ruinous obsession with austerity dogma stems directly from their ideological desire to shrink the role of the state too. 

Anyone trying to weaponise the concept of "ideology" with claims that they have no political ideology of their own is clearly trying to bullshit you, because even the most directionless, opportunistic and self-serving of politicians are still guided by an ideology, an ideology of prioritising their personal self-interest.

Soubry then goes on to assert that Theresa May's cabinet are "in hock to 35 hard ideological Brexiteers"

This is undoubtedly true but the number is an underestimate. The Tory Brextremist faction even have their own secretive group called the ERG, which has significantly more than 35 members. In fact they have easily enough MPs to call a vote of no confidence in Theresa May if she doesn't do exactly what they demand. Their previous two leaders (Steve Baker and Suella Fernandes) have both been elevated into Theresa May's government, and the next ERG leader in line is Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Soubry then claims that these Brextremists are "not Tories" and "not the Tory party I joined 40 years ago".

The problem here is that they are Tories, and undeniably so. Just like Anna Soubry and the more Europlilic Tory MPs all of the Brextremist Tories voted in favour of every crackpot Tory privatisation scam; they voted in favour of loading the cost of the bankers' crisis onto the shoulders of the poor and ordinary through austerity dogma and wage repression; they voted in favour of welfare cuts and the systematic abuse of disabled people; they voted in favour of erecting one barrier after another to social mobility; they voted in favour of slashing taxes for corporations and the mega-rich whilst simultaneously slashing tax credits and other in-work benefits for the working poor; they voted in favour of gagging their political critics and unprecedented state snooping powers; and they voted in favour of imposing unlawful restrictions on workers' rights to take bad bosses to employment tribunals. 

The Brextremists are just one faction of the Tory ideology. They've always been there, and Soubry knows it because in her next damned sentence she accuses them of bringing down John Major in the 1990s and David Cameron in 2015, which they obviously couldn't have done if they're not a longstanding faction of the Tory party.

"And it's about time Theresa May stood up and slung 'em because they took down John Major and they took down David Cameron, two great leaders, neither of whom stood up to them."

This is an overt call for an ideological purge of the Brextremist wing of the Tory party, which is remarkable because it's only a few weeks since Nadine Dorries of the Brextremist wing was calling for an ideological purge of so-called "Mutineer" Tories like Anna Soubry. 

So now we have two distinct factions of the Tory party calling for the other to be purged, yet the mainstream media remains absolutely fixated on highlighting and magnifying the internal disputes within the Labour Party with the aim of presenting them as hopelessly divided. 

Then there's the delusion that Theresa May has the authority to stand up to Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Brextremist faction he leads. In reality Theresa May is a puppet Prime Minister with no authority whatever because she would be ousted immediately if she ever dared to defy her Brextremist puppet masters. 

Then there's the absurd description of John Major and David Cameron as great leaders. Admittedly Major had more integrity, competence and authority in his little finger than Theresa May, but he was also the leader of a dead duck administration that clung pathetically onto power for years. And as for David Cameron, he gambled away the entire future of the UK in a ludicrous short-term party political ploy to nick votes off UKIP. It doesn't matter what else he did (most of it terrible) that's how he'll be remembered in the history books.

"The time has come for the moderates, the centrists in the Conservative party - dare I use the expression - to 'take control' of our party and make it the sensible, moderate, centrist 'one nation' party that its voters, and I think its members are."

In a political system that has been drifting ever further to the right for four decades, the concept of 'centrism' is a complete misnomer. 

If 'centrism' involves supporting ruinous austerity dogma, imposing the longest sustained collapse in the value of workers wages since records began, systematically persecuting sick and disabled people, slashing in-work benefits for the working poor, overseeing the lowest levels of house building since the 1920s, lumbering students with vast unpayable debts before they even start their careers, privatising thousands of taxpayer funded schools into the hands of unaccountable pseudo-charities, attacking workers' rights, and catastrophically under-funding the NHS and social care services ... then 'centrism' is clearly extremism, not moderation.

"If it comes to it I'm not going to stay in a party which has been taken over by the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson."

She needs to face facts and accept that the Tory party has already been taken over by the extremist blue-kip faction, and those who remain within the party and continue voting in favour of hard-right anti-democratic abominations like Theresa May's European Union Withdrawal Bill (like Soubry did) are even worse. 

They're collaborators who know exactly how bad it is, but they vote in favour of it out of a combination of self-interest and misguided loyalty to a party that's been usurped over by the hard-right fringe.

 "Unless Theresa stands up and sees off these people she's in danger of losing huge swathes of, not just the parliamentary party, but the Conservative party"

This analysis is half correct at the absolute best.  

Tory party membership is already down to well below 70,000, meaning years of austerity dogma, wage repression, and persecution of the sick and disabled have already taken a massive toll on 'one nation' type Tories. Of those who remain Tory members, a hefty majority are already pro-Brexit, and Tory MPs these days are left bolstering their ranks of activists with the worst kind of extreme-right, white supremacists, Brextremists, and the alt-right fringe. 

As for the parliamentary party, Soubry herself illustrated their spinelessness by actually voting in favour of the EU Withdrawal Bill, which was nothing short of a shambolic hard-right power grab dressed up as a Brexit bill. If they were going to revolt, they would have revolted over that.

What the Tories are seriously in danger of losing is voters, because the more they pander to the fanatically right-wing ultranationalist blue-kip faction, the more they'll alienate the rest of the public, and especially the under-50s. 

"If that means leaving the party for some new alliance, God knows, but we just simply can't go on like this any longer. Something is going to have to give, because if it doesn't, not only will we end up with Jacob Rees-Mogg as our Prime Minister, we'll get a devastating hard Brexit which will cause huge damage to our economy for generations to come. And I am not prepared to sit by any longer and put up with this nonsense."

There are many points to raise here, so I'll resort to bullet points.

• Talk of a new 'centrist' alliance is fantasy stuff. If there was any real public appetite for an orthodox neoliberal pro-EU party then surely the Lib-Dem share of the vote surely wouldn't have collapsed even further in 2017 from what almost everyone assumed to be their absolute nadir in 2015.

• Jacob Rees-Mogg is Prime Minister in all but name. He controls the ERG Brextremist group who control theresa May's puppet strings, and if she ever defies him, they have the power to remove her, and he's clear favourite to win the leadership vote if it's put to the party members.

• We're already heading for an extreme hard Brexit thanks to the collaboration of Tory MPs like Anna Soubry who refused to join the alliance of Labour, SNP, Lib-Dem, Plaid Cyru and Green MPs who voted against the EU Withdrawal Bill.

• The future economic potential of the UK has already been trashed thanks to Tories like Anna Soubry and the eight punishing years of Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, and the lowest levels of infrastructure investment anywhere in the developed world that they've overseen. It's a bit much for her to suddenly begin pretending to care about devastating long-term economic consequences now!

• Soubry says she's not prepared to put up with it any longer, but why on earth did she wait until after she helped push through the horrific EU Withdrawal Bill to make this stand?

Remainer reaction

Huge numbers of Remainers and #FBPE hashtags on Twitter have been sharing this rant as if Soubry is some kind of hero of the Remain movement, but she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right anti-democratic EU Withdrawal Bill just a few weeks ago.

It's extraordinary that people are buying into this empty posturing, because it's a demonstration that they place more value on Soubry's mouth words than they do on her actual actions!

Anyone who is genuinely committed to opposing an extreme Tory Brexit should be furious with this rant, because it's just empty rhetoric from someone who actively collaborated with the Brextremists just a few weeks ago by voting in favour of the shameless and shambolic legislation they've put forward to seal their hard-right power grab.

Brexiteer reaction 

Soubry's rant has enraged the Brexiteers, with numerous calls for Soubry to be expelled from the party. No doublt she'll be inundated by another wave of death threats from the revolting Blue-kip mob too.

As delusional as she is, there's no way Soubry deserves death threats for expressing her political opinions. Nobody does.

When it comes to the calls for expulsion from the party though, that's surely got to be fair game , because she called for her political opponents to be purged in the rant. It would be profoundly hypocritical of her to cry-victim when her opponents respond to her rhetoric with more of the same.

If Soubry does get punished by May, then that will help to illustrate the point that the Tory party is completely controlled by the Brextremists, because it's only a few weeks ago that the Brextremist Nadine Dorries was allowed to get away with a similarly divisive and damaging call for an ideological purge of "mutineer" Tory MPs.

If Soubry gets punished after Dorries was let off for spewing exactly the same kind of factional rhetoric, then that's an obvious indication of which faction of the Tory party is in control of Theresa May.

 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

Don't be naive enough to judge Anna Soubry by her words rather than her actions

If you were naive enough to judge so-called "mutineer" Tory MPs like Anna Soubry by their words rather than their actions, you would end up thinking that they're leading the fight against a ruinous hard-right Brexit, rather than actually enabling it.

Take her "stand up to wreckers" tweet. Those unfamiliar with Soubry's empty posturing might actually think that she's actually arguing against the likes of Boris Johnson, David Davis, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove running the Tory party and the nation.

The reality is completely different. Soubry knows that Theresa May such a weak leader she simply can't stand up to the hard-right Brextremist fringe of the Tory party.

Soubry knows that Theresa May has appointed Brextremists to key positions throughout her government, and she knows that May's future as Prime Minister is hanging by a thread because as soon as the secretive cabal of Brextremist Tory MPs led by Jacob Rees-Mogg turns on her, she's finished.

Soubry knows that Theresa May's European Union (Withdrawal) Bill is an effort to use Brexit as a Trojan Horse to enable a hard-right attack on parliamentary sovereignty, workers' rights, consumer protections, devolved parliaments, food standards, democratic accountability, and pretty much everything that has impeded the fanatical fringe of the Tory party from turning the UK into a horrible hard-right dystopia.

She knows that the EU Withdrawal Bill is a shameless and shambolic hard-right power grab because she's done an awful lot of grandstanding against it during the legislative process.

But then when it came to the crunch she helped to ensure that it passed to the next phase by actually voting in favour of it!

Anna Soubry and the rest of the so-called "mutineer" Tory MPs had the chance to defeat this outrageous piece of legislation by siding with Labour and the other opposition parties to oppose it, but she actually voted in favour of it.

The reason she voted in favour of this hard-right power grab is simple: She knew that a defeat on such a high profile piece of legislation would have caused the end of Theresa May and a massive succession problem for the Tory party, so she decided to put the narrow party political interests of the Conservative party above the welfare of the nation.

In many ways grandstanders like Anna Soubry are the worst. They're actually worse than the Tory Brextremists because at least the Brextremists are driven to inflict such harm on the nation because of their hard-right ideology.

Soubry has no such excuse. She knows how bad it is. She keeps saying how bad it is. She wins plaudits for saying how bad it is. She garners sympathy when Theresa May's Blue-kip hate mob send her death threats for saying how bad it is. But when it comes to the crunch and she has the opportunity to actually stop it, she actually votes in favour of 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