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.
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Let's be honest. We're destroying this planet. Just look at the millions of tons of plastic in the oceans. Look at the way insects are dying off in unprecedented numbers. And look at the fact that every single one of the five hottest years on record have occurred in the last five years.
Mindless consumerism and profit-fixated capitalism are not just trashing the planet, they're trashing the futures of the younger generations, many of whom are understandably angry about it.
They're too young to be allowed to vote in elections, but they've found a way to express their political opinions through the School Strike for Climate protests that manifested all over the world today.
Anyone who understands the essential political truth that proper political engagement involves more than stuffing a bit of paper into a box every few years should be delighted that so many young people are learning to raise their political voices before they even get to voting age.
But Theresa May and the Tories are far from pleased. The idea of young activists demanding political action frightens the hell out of them because they're repulsed by anything that might get in the way of their project to transfer as much wealth and power as possible to the mega-rich elitist class who entirely bankroll their party.
Theresa May's unbelievably patronising comments about the School Strike for Climate protests included accusations that the kids were being "disruptive" and "wasting time".
The Daily Mail hack, relentless Tory cheerleader and wife of the Tory environment secretary Sarah Vine went even further with an extraordinary claim that 99.9% of the kids who went on the protest had no real concerns about the planet whatever, and saw it as nothing more than "an excellent opportunity to get out of doing any work".
So the subtext to the Tory stance is absolutely clear. Your concerns are irrelevant, your attempts to engage with politics are not just disruptive, but they're also completely insincere for 999 out of every 1,000 of you too!
Way to appeal to future voters Tory geniuses!
Politicians from other parties adopted an entirely different tone to demonstrate that they were listening carefully to the concerns of the younger generations. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn said the young protesters were "right to feel let down by the generations before them", Caroline Lucas of the Greens described the widespread protests as "most hopeful thing that's happened in years", and Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP said the protests were "a cause for optimism in an often dark world".
The Tory party are already utterly toxic amongst the younger generations as a result of their introduction of rip-off university fees (aspiration taxes that over 3/4 of students will never pay off despite entire working lifetimes of paying a 9% education tax on their disposable income), massive cuts to school funding since 2010, the deliberate and sustained under-investment in the infrastructure and services that generate future economic prosperity, and last but not least their hard-right ultranationalist interpretation of the 2016 Brexit vote.
But this unbelievably patronising attitude to young people raising their political voices is the glitter on the Tory turd.
The Tory stance seems to be that "kids can't vote, so fuck 'em", but it'll obviously only be a few years before these kids at the protest today become adults, so the Tory attitude isn't just patronising and dismissive, but also incredibly short-sighted too
This Tory political shortsightedness when it comes to listening to future voters is decidedly ironic given that political shortsightedness about environmental issues was one of the core themes of the youth protest.
So yes, kids skipped a few lessons today to protest about what they believe in, but the patronising toxicity of Theresa May and the Tories' reactions to their protest provides a much bigger life lesson than anything they could have learned in school: 'Never Vote Tory'.
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.
So much has been happening in relation to Brexit over the last few weeks it's been difficult to keep on top of it all, especially given the incredibly sketchy mainstream media coverage.
Party Political chaos
Understandably a lot of coverage has been given to the fact that the Lib-Dem leader and his predecessor Tim Farron didn't even bother to turn up for a crucial knife-edge Brexit vote, despite having misleadingly championed themselves as anti-Brexit saviours for the last two years. Tim Farron's reason for missing the crucial vote was that he was too busy giving a gay-bashing speech about how he's such a victim because his outdated views on gay sex are pretty damned unpopular these days!
Also a lot of attention has fallen on a number of Tory grandstanders like Anna Soubry and Justine Greening who made passionate interventions to criticise the hard-right ERG Tory Brextremists who dictate Theresa May's every move, and to call for a second referendum. But for some reason very much less media attention has been given to the fact that they caved in to Theresa May's threats of another Tory meltdown of a General Election, and actually voted to support the ERG Brextremists that they pretend to oppose just to save their own skins from the threat of another General Election.
Then there's the four Labour cranks who repeatedly cast decisive votes alongside the hard-right ERG Brextremists too. Right-wing Blairite MPs have been implacably opposed the concept of reselection for MPs (a democratic safeguard against political squatters that is used by the SNP and is absolutely commonplace in other countries), but the treacherous scheming of Kate Hoey, John Mann, Graham Stringer, and Frank Field to prop up Theresa May's shambolic government and facilitate the ruinous "no deal" catastrophe the ERG Brextremists are plotting is surely grounds for the introduction of reselection so local people can get rid of these Tory collaborators.
The NC3 trade deal amendment
Beneath all of the party political chaos at least one MP was actually getting on with their job. Caroline Lucas of the Green Party tabled an amendment to the Tory governments' Trade Bill, which sought to ensure that "all post-Brexit free trade deals are subject to parliamentary scrutiny and approval, with a guaranteed vote for MPs".
One would have thought that Brexiteers who spent the entire EU Referendum campaign banging on about the importance of "democracy" and "parliamentary sovereignty" might have actually appreciated an amendment to ensure that parliament is sovereign, and that the government of the day can't just draw up trade deals with foreign powers behind closed doors, and then enact them without any parliamentary oversight or approval.
But if you expected any kind of consistency or integrity from the Brexiteers, you'd be wrong.
What they actually did was vote down the amendment by 314-284 in order to essentially kill parliamentary sovereignty when it comes to future post-Brexit trade deals.
Amendment 58
In light of this Tory vote to scrap parliamentary sovereignty when it comes to post-Brexit trade deals it's important to think back to the way they also scrapped the cross-party Amendment 58 to the EU Withdrawal Bill in November 2017.
This amendment sought to prevent the Tory government from using Brexit as a Trojan Horse to attack our workers' rights, weaken our environmental laws, water down our consumer protections, undermine our food standards, or scrap our equal rights rules.
By stripping out this amendment the Tories clearly indicated their intention to use Brexit as an excuse to attack these aspects of British life. Just think about it. If they had no intention of attacking these things, why on earth would they vote to scrap an amendment to prevent them from scrapping these things?
A Trump-Tory trade deal
Donald Trump's administration have already made it absolutely clear that if Britain seeks a trade deal with the United States, the UK government will be expected to trash workers' rights, open up the NHS for even more privatisation, and trash our food standards to allow the import of cheap, low quality, heavily-subsidised US produce like chlorinated chicken, hormone-riddled beef, and unlabled GM produce.
What the Tories have done is to wreck cross-party efforts to prevent them from using Brexit as an excuse to lower British standards first, and now they've voted to ensure that parliament has no ability to stop them from drawing up horrific trade deals behind closed doors and enacting them without any parliamentary oversight or approval whatever!
Hard-right Brexit
It should be blindingly obvious by now to anyone who has actually followed the details of the Brexit votes that we're heading for a hard-right, anti-democratic, economically ruinous Tory Brexit.
It should be obvious that the left-wing Lexit voters were absolute dupes. Useful idiots who voted for Brexit for left-wing reasons only to enable an unprecedented hard-right power grab by the Tory establishment.
It should be obvious that the Brexiteers were absolutely lying through their teeth when they talked about grand themes like "democracy" and "parliamentary sovereignty" during the referendum debate. Everything they've done since betrays their absolute contempt for democracy, and their intention to over-ride parliamentary sovereignty in order to centralise as much power as possible in the hands of the executive.
It should be obvious that the hard-right ERG Brextremists who control Theresa May's puppet strings are intent on inflicting the most economically damaging Breixt possible in order to make fortunes by picking £billions worth of distressed british assets out of the ashes of their Brexit bonfire.
It should be obvious. But unfortunately, to millions of people who don't pay attention to the details, and just base their decisions on sentiments and feelings, none of this is obvious, none of the details matter, and "we should just get on with it".
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Back in 2014 the then Home Secretary Theresa May introduced new immigration rules designed to create a 'hostile environment' for immigrants. The introduction of these harsh new immigration rules was clearly a ploy to appeal to the extreme-right ultranationalist demographic, and it coincided with a significant upsurge in anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Tories, and especially from Theresa May.
In light of the Windrush scandal the Tories simply cannot pretend that they were not warned about the serious consequences of this piece of legislation. They were warned, and these warnings are recorded on the Hansard parliamentary record.
During the debate Diane Abbot raised concerns that these harsh new powers could have negative impacts on could have on "people who are British nationals, but appear as if they might be immigrants" (people like the Windrush generation and other perfectly legal migrants from the Commonwealth).
Theresa May completely dodged this question with the kind of evasive waffle we've all become so familiar with since she became Prime Minister.
The Lib-Dem MP Sarah Teather (who went on to quit parliament in disgust at the grotesque Lib-Dem colusion with the Tories between 2010 and 2015) raised concerns about people being denied health care.
These concerns have been totally vindicated as it's turned out that Windrush immigrants who have lived in the UK since childhood and paid tax their entire working lives have been denied healthcare, including life-or-death cancer treatments.
Others to speak out were the The Green MP Caroline Lucas who raised concerns about the shocking 32% error rate in Home Office deportation decisions, John McDonnell who spoke about the appalling conditions in immigration prisons, and Pete Wishart of the SNP who called it a "dreadful" and "terrible" piece of legislation and concluded that the Tories might as well have had Nigel Farage at the dispatch box rather than Theresa May because "this is nothing other than a UKIP bill".
Jeremy Corbyn was the last of the MPs who bravely stood up in opposition to the vile Blue-kip anti-immigrant Juggernaut, here's what he said:
"I will vote against the Bill on Third Reading for a large number of reasons. We have ordained that the Home Secretary will have executive power to take away citizenship in the future and to create a generation of stateless people. The handing over of that power is, I think, a very dangerous thing for any Parliament to do.
We have a number of other serious concerns about the Bill, such as those covered in the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) about the forced removal of people; the death of Jimmy Mubenga, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather); the use of the detention system; the denial of health care access; the problems of forcing landlords to become agents of the Home Office; and the reality of life for those people who have legitimately sought asylum in Britain and are starving on the streets of our cities because we do not have a system in place to give them proper support.
The Bill does not answer any of those problems. It is based on prejudice and headline chasing and has nothing to do with the real needs of people who are desperately seeking support, help and assistance rather than the cold behaviour shown by the Government today."
The bill was voted on immediately after Corbyn's passionate appeal for sanity in the face of headline chasing, UKIP-appealing, extreme-right, anti-immigrant lunacy from the government. Only 18 MPs (including the two tellers) voted against the bill.
Now that the disgusting consequences of this grotesque legislation are becoming more clear (especially in relation to the Windrush generation who have been imprisoned, made homeless, denied work, denied health care, and even deported as a consequence) it's very important to pay tribute to the 18 brave MPs who stood up and voted against this travesty of a bill, while the rest of the House of Commons blithely went along with this overt display of blue-kip extremism by Theresa May.
Diane Abbott (Labour)
Jeremy Corbyn (Labour)
Jonathan Edwards (Plaid Cymru)
Mark Lazarowicz (Labour)
John Leech (Liberal Democrat)
Elfyn Llwyd (Plaid Cymru)
Caroline Lucas (Green)
Angus MacNeil (SNP)
Fiona Mactaggart (Labour)
John McDonnell (Labour)
Angus Robertson (SNP)
Dennis Skinner (Labour)
Sarah Teather (Liberal Democrat)
David Ward (Liberal Democrat)
Mike Weir (SNP)
Eilidh Whiteford (SNP)
Hywel Williams (Plaid Cymru)
Pete Wishart (SNP)
Note that all three Plaid Cymru, and the one Green MP all voted against the bill. Five of the six SNP representatives voted against it. Just six MPs from the Labour left voted against it (three of whom are now the leader, shadow Home Secretary, and Shadow Chancellor), and just three of the 57 Lib-Dems voted against it (one who resigned in disgust in 2015 and two who lost their seats in the furious public backlash against their party's collusion with the Tories at the 2015 General Election). Not a single Tory MP voted against it.
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The Speaker of the House of Commons was forced to intervene when a braying and jeering mob of Tory MPs attempted to shout down a vitally important question from the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas.
Once order was more-or-less restored Lucas asked her question, and staying true to her usual tactics, Theresa May waffled on about a completely different issue in reply.
The question Caroline Lucas asked was about the urgent need to update Britain's electoral rules for the digital age in order to defend democracy from unscrupulous anti-democratic practices, but Theresa May blatantly evaded answering the question in order to waffle on about data protection measures.
Anyone who paid attention to the testimony of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie the day before would have been horrified at the allegations of widespread cheating of the electoral rules.
Not only do the Vote Leave campaign stand accused of unlawful co-ordination with other supposedly independent Brexit campaigns like BeLeave, Wylie also made an astounding allegation that the American Billionaire Robert Mercer has used financial trickery to get around legal election spending limits.
The way it allegedly works is that Mercer pumps millions of dollars into Canbridge Analytica and the associated companies which then sell their psychological profiling/election-rigging products on to right-wing political campaigns at a loss.
Subsidising a company so that they can provide services to right-wing political campaigns at way below cost obviously gives them a huge advantage if other parties are sticking to the electoral spending rules but buying data analytics products at their true market value.
If the allegation is true, it's absolutely critical to British democracy that something is done urgently to close this loophole which essentially allows foreign billionaires to buy massive amounts of influence over our elections and referendums.
After all of their rhetoric about "defending British democracy" during the referendum campaign you would have thought the Brexiteers would be all over this story like a rash, demanding action to prevent foreign billionaires from interfering with British sovereignty.
But no!
When the issue was debated in parliament in the hours after Wylie gave his testimony, only seven Tory MPs bothered to turn up to the emergency debate, and the only one who made any meaningful contribution at all was the minister who was required to be there to represent the government!
The conclusions are obvious. They don't give a damn about alleged foreign interference in our democratic processes as long as the outcome of the interference aligns with their own personal agenda. And they don't want to address the issue because they fear that if referendum cheating is uncovered, then their beloved Brexit might be taken away.
Oh how shallow those Brexiteer referendum cries to "stand up for British democracy" ring now. Now that the very same people are determined to turn a blind eye to the extraordinary allegations about how our democratic processes have been undermined.
Caroline Lucas is absolutely right. Our electoral laws need to be updated as a matter of urgency to make them suitable for the digital age.
The loopholes that allow dishonest players to bypass election spending rules by flogging their services at below cost value must be shut down. The use of big data in election campaigns should be carefully regulated, not left as a total free-for-all. The use of dark ads should be stamped out. And the rules against campaign groups spreading outright lies should be strengthened and updated for the digital age.
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It seems such a ridiculous thing to have to explain, but the outburst of Twitter outrage over the failure of Ian Murray's economic suicide amendment kind of makes it necessary to explain why economic suicide is actually a bad idea.
The likes of ex-Liberal Democrat Leader Tim Farron and the usual suspects from the Labour right bombarded Twitter with howls of protest after the amendment to the Taxation (Cross Border Trade) Bill by the right-wing Labour MP Ian Murray was defeated by 311 votes to 76.
Tim Farron put up a Twitter rant claiming that he'd voted to keep Britain in the Customs Union, but in reality he did no such thing. An amendment to keep Britain in the Customs Union would have specified that Britain should stay in the Customs Union, but what Ian Murray's ludicrous amendment sought to do was to force the UK to continue behaving as if it was in the Customs Union, even if we end up out of it!
Murray's amendment sought to prevent the UK from imposing tariffs or quotas on imported goods from the EU, regardless of whether the hard-right Tories contrive the "no deal" cliff edge Brexit they're craving or not.
However, the World Trade Organisation rules are clear that countries can't offer favourable trade terms to other countries unless they do it through a formal trade agreement, so that means the Murray economic suicide amendment would have forced the UK to drop import tariffs and quotas on all imports from anywhere in the world, whilst leaving the rest of the world free to impose tariffs and quotas on UK exports!
The UK trade deficit is already enormous, so just imagine the impact of eliminating all tariffs and quotas on imports while simultaneously allowing the rest of the world to impose WTO level tariffs on exports from the UK.
Just imagine how scrapping all import tariffs and quotas would render the UK absolutely defenceless when it comes to protecting British manufacturing from unfair trade practices like other nations dumping artificially cheap steel into the UK economy.
So if this amendment had passed and the Tories then forced a "no deal" flounce out of the EU, it would have hard-wired an even more fanatically right-wing and damaging Brexit than the hard-right Tories are pushing for!
Don't get me wrong here. I think the Tory red line that the UK must quit the Customs Union is a terrible idea that has already caused deadlock over the Irish border situation, and will cause a significant amount of economic damage to the UK economy when we leave, but the likes of Ian Murray and Tim Farron got it all wrong by attempting to ensure that the UK is forced to kill its own manufacturing sector stone dead if they don't get their own way.
Yet somehow these people turned the defeat of their economic suicide amendment into furious bile-laden attacks on the majority of the Labour Party for supposedly siding with the Tory hard Brexit fanatics because they lobbed their reckless and economically illiterate amendment in the bin where it belonged.
Ian Murray's amendment was so bad that he's even admitted that he expected it to lose, meaning that it was just another bit of pointless and destructive grandstanding from the Labour-right aimed at damaging their own party from within. And to see the likes of Tim Farron opportunistically piggy-backing anti-Labour diatribes onto it after its failure just proves the point.
I was particularly disappointed to see Caroline Lucas of the Green Party resort to this kind of hyper-partisan rubbish after the amendment was defeated because she's one of my favourite politicians and normally loads better than that.
I was also disappointed to see so many SNP politicians voting in favour of Ian Murray's economic suicide amendment and then engaging in hyper-partisan attacks when it was defeated. The SNP should have considered the implications of what they were voting for before they voted for it, and they should also be perfectly well aware that Ian Murray is a right-wing Labour MP more intent on making trouble for his own party leadership than doing anything to actually help the people of Scotland.
It takes quite a level of idiocy to propose an amendment that would make a Tory "no deal" Brexit even worse by turning the UK into a lame debt-shackled sitting-duck economy that is literally begging to have its core industries ruined by allowing unlimited imports, while the rest of the world can apply tariffs on UK exports. But it takes a whole other level of idiocy to then turn around and spit bile at those who prevented you from making such an economically illiterate blunder, accusing them of collaborating with the Tories.
Even most of the rabid hard-right Brexiteers have enough sense to understand that abolishing all import tariffs and quotas on imports while other economies remain free to impose them on UK exports would be nothing short of unilateral economic surrender, but Tim Farron and his ilk are just too dim-witted to realise that they were attempting to hard-wire a super-hard Brexit that was too extreme even for the hard-right Tory Brexiteers to stomach!
It really does not engender much faith in the parliamentary process that so many MPs voted in favour of an economic suicide amendment, and then cried victim so piteously when it was defeated.
It also severely erodes the standing of the (already hopelessly diminished) mainstream media that they utterly failed to convey the reckless economic illiteracy of Ian Murray's amendment, or it's shocking implications should the Tories achieve the "no deal" Brexit they're so obviously craving.
It's utterly infuriating that so many people (including our elected representatives and the mainstream media figures who are supposedly tasked with holding them to account) are so insistent on framing everything in a over-simplistic binary opposition between pro- and anti- Brexit, when stuff like the Murray economic suicide amendment just doesn't fit.
The politicians who voted in favour of it were too lazy/irresponsible to think about the devastating economic consequences that such an amendment would have in the case of a Tory "no deal" Brexit, meaning that their haphazard knee-jerk opposition to Brexit could have actually hard-wired a more extreme version of Brexit than the foaming-at-the-mouth hard-right Tories are aiming for!
But apparently the reality of the situation is just too boring/complex for most political commentators to bother with, so they just stick with their tactic of hyper-partisan shrieking instead.
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The right-wing Labour MP Chuka Umunna has established a cross-party working group to oppose extreme Brexit.
While I see no problem with like-minded MPs forming cross-party groups to stand up for what they believe in, I do think that certain MPs should be incredibly wary of the kinds of people they're leap into bed with.
The leading Tory in the group is Anna Soubry who has repeatedly voted in favour of the Tory policy of economically punishing the majority of people with hard-right austerity dogma in order to fund ever more lavish handouts to corporations and the mega-rich.
The Leading Lib-Dem in the group is Jo Swinson. She is also an austerity fetishist who voted time and again in favour of George Osborne's socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma until she was lobbed out of her seat in the 2015 Scottish backlash against Tory/Lib-Dem austerity fanaticism. She's back again and nothing she has said has convinced me that she's willing to admit the error of her ways.
Then there's Chuka Umunna himself, who is still unwilling to accept that "let's cut our way to growth" is, and always has been a load of economically illiterate hogwash designed to con the gullible into supporting the very same kind of hard-right economic policies that created the conditions for the economic crash in the first place.
The reason we know that Umunna is still an austerity fetishist is that he openly claimed that leaving the Single Market would mean even more austerity measures would have to be imposed, meaning he's still refusing to admit the fact that austerity dogma is demonstrably the wrong solution to economic trouble.
There's no way I'm disputing that crashing out of the Single Market with no deal would cause a bloody big recession, it's beyond obvious that it would cause absolute chaos.
What I'm disputing is that austerity dogma is the solution to anything at all, self-inflicted or not.
What I'm disputing is the automatic assumption by so many Westminster club insiders (including MPs like Chuka Umunna who should surely know better by now) that the only way to deal with an economic downturn is to turn all of macroeconomic theory on its head and set about cutting public spending when established theory says you should temporarily boost public spending in order to offset the decline in private sector activity.
- After seven years of watching the Tory party imposing austerity dogma and then continually missing all of their economic targets, Chuka Umunna still believes in it.
- After years of people telling him that austerity is a con to ensure an upwards redistribution of wealth, Chuka Umunna still believes in it.
- After Labour totally squandered their opportunity to smash the 2015 General Election on a clear anti-austerity platform, and instead actually lost ground by pushing Ed Balls' shockingly unappetising and unpopular prescription of austerity-lite, Chuka Umunna still believes in it.
- After Jeremy Corbyn secured the biggest increase in the Labour vote since 1945 with a clear investment-based alternative to hard-right Tory austerity dogma, Chuka Umunna still believes in it.
- Even after campaigning on an anti-austerity manifesto, Chuka Umaunna still actually believes in it.
In my view the pro-investment politicians backing this cross party group (Caroline Lucas of the Greens, representatives of Plaid Cymru and the SNP, and any non-Osbournite Labour MPs who get involved) should be incredibly wary of working alongside MPs who maintain their burning ideological commitment to the bonkers idea that growth and stability can be achieved through a death by a million cuts strategy of constantly attacking infrastructure investment, wages, emergency services, the education system, and other public services.
Austerity dogma is a toxic ideological derangement that has infested the Westminster establishment club for seven disastrous years, and the outcome of the Brexit negotiations won't really be of much consequence if this virulent form of economic madness within our own political system isn't controlled and contained.
The pro-investment MPs who involve themselves with this anti-extreme Brexit group should be aware at all times that prominent members like Jo Swinson, Anna Soubry and Chuka Umunna are still dangerously infected with this hard-right economic delusion (even after the actual source of the contagion has quit parliament altogether to spend more time with his jobs).
The politicians who haven't been infected with austerity madness who join this group should be aware of the dangerous delusions of their fellow members, and they should be constantly vigilant that this group isn't used as an excuse to re-toxify the economic debate by using it as an excuse to provide a fake veneer of cross party support for the ruinous austerity fetishism of many of the group's most prominent members.
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