The fact that David Sainsbury was even allowed to continue as a member of the Labour Party after breaking party rules by making a huge £2 million+ donation to the Liberal Democrats was an affront to justice after tens of thousands of grassroots members were systematically purged from the party for supposed "crimes" such as admitting they'd once voted Green years before joining the labour Party, retweeting Tweets non-Labour politicians, or even being too enthusiastic about how much they like the band Foo Fighters!
The desperate anti-democratic effort by embedded Labour Party right-wingers to topple Jeremy Corbyn by purging as many suspected Corbyn supporters as possible failed, but somehow Sainsbury was allowed to get away with funding a rival political party.
In the wake of Labour defying the political pundit class by winning seats and eradicating the Tory majority in Westminster, David Sainsbury has announced his decision to quit injecting cash into political parties.
This decision has come as a particularly heavy blow to the Progress faction of the Labour Party, which is no surprise given how they're a top-down millionaire-backed right-wing pressure group within the Labour Party.
They have very little enthusiastic support at the grassroots level and only really exist in order to promote the lie that the only route to political power is to weakly imitate Tory policy, no matter how far off into the bonkers hard-right realm of privatisation mania and ruinous austerity dogma they wander.
Their right-wing capture of the Labour Party succeeded for a while under Tony Blair, and to be fair Blair's prescription of neoliberalism-lite was a lot less damaging than the bonkers privatisation chaos served up by John Major's dead duck government between 1992 and 1997, or the ruinous hard-right austerity dogma the Tories have been forcing on the nation since 2010.
The big problem for the centre-right of the Labour Party is that despite a savagely biased media campaign against him, Jeremy Corbyn has demonstrated that there's very much more public appetite for a genuine democratic socialist alternative to Tory neoliberalism than for the kind of centre-right Tory-lite policies favoured by Progress.
The Guardian coverage of Sainsbury abandoning Progress is an absolute delight to read as their correspondent cries bitter tears of frustration for the demoralised centre-right Labour Party faction.
The Progress sympathisers at the Guardian even quoted the Progress director Richard Angell spouting desperate misrepresentations and outright anti-democratic contempt by claiming that there is lots of work to be done in "renewing the ideas of the centre-left" and "stopping a hard-left takeover in constituencies".
When he refers to "centre-left" he's actually talking about the pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, pro-PFI, pro-globalisation centre-right faction of the Labour Party.
And when he talks about "stopping a hard-left takeover in constituencies" he's talking about the deeply embedded right-wing of the Labour Party doing absolutely everything in their power to prevent local constituency Labour Party members choosing the election candidates that they actually want, in favour of parachuting in even more useless and unappealing centre-right Progress-approved candidates who think that the purpose of politics is to imitate, rather than to oppose the Tory party.
An awful lot of Progress types are blatant anti-democrats who regard Ed Miliband's decision to democratise the Labour Party as a terrible unforgivable mistake (rather than easily the best thing he ever did). They detest the majority of Labour Party members and the millions of people who flocked back to the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn presented a proper manifesto to undo some of the Tory damage, rather than weakly imitating the Tories like Labour did in 2015.
A lot of Progress people would rather that Labour existed in the political wilderness of a largely abandoned centre-right territory (the Tories have veered off to the hard-right well beyond Ukipper levels of fanaticism, the SNP occupies the centre ground, Labour under Corbyn occupy the traditional centre-left and the Lib-Dems won a pitiful 7.9% of the vote on their centre-right rabidly pro-EU platform).
I'm not a Labour Party member, but if you are a Labour Party supporter who wants to counter the toxic anti-democratic scheming of this centre-right pressure group, my advice is to join or make a donation to the centre-left group Momentum.
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The Labour Party purge squad has finally suspended the party donor Michael Foster over his appalling Nazi storm troopers slurs in the Daily Mail last month, and it's about time too.
It could be seen as a measure of progress that the Labour Party has eventually got around to suspending one of the party elitists for hurling abuse, but the question of how it took them four weeks to decide to take action over such a high profile example of abuse-slinging still remains.
Why the discrepancy between the instant suspensions handed out to ordinary members over utterly trivial stuff (liking the Foo Fighters too much, voting Green before they even joined Labour, allegedly abusive social media comments that apparently don't even exist ...) and the four weeks it took them to decide to suspend Foster over his extremely high profile abuse of other Labour Party members?
It could be argued that Foster is being used by the NEC as a token sacrifice to stem the chorus of condemnation in the Labour Party ranks over the the clear double standards of the purge operation. Foster's continued membership of the party weeks after having submitted such an abusive article to the Daily Mail was one of the totemic examples of double standards between the treatment of ordinary members and the treatment of the party elites.
How on earth could the Labour Party purge squad have been concentrating their efforts on a massive social media trawling operation to turf hundreds of people out of the party over completely innocuous social media comments while this incredibly high profile example of abusive behaviour went unpunished for so long?
The problem with the NEC using Foster as a token sacrifice to create the impression of balance is that there are plenty of other examples of Labour Party elitists (like Tom Blenkinsop, Ian Austin, and Luke Akehurst) busily slinging and retweeting insults, abuse and utterly divisive comments. If the Foster suspension sets the precedent that calling other Labour members Nazis is unacceptable abuse, then surely it stands to reason that calling other members "Stalinists" or "Trots" constitutes unacceptable abuse too?
Another thing that will ensure that the accusations of hypocrisy will not be going away is the continued membership of the major Labour donor David Sainsbury. If voting for the Green Party ages before they even joined Labour has been deemed a purge-worthy offence by the NEC, then making a £2,125,000 donation to the Liberal Democrats whilst a member of the Labour Party has to result in suspension too.
As long as they're turfing ordinary members out of the party for utterly trivial stuff, there's absolutely no way that the Labour purge squad can justify continuing to allow the insulting, abusive and utterly divisive behaviour of anti-Corbyn members of the party elite to go unpunished.
As long as they're turfing ordinary members out of the party for having supported other parties before they even joined Labour, there's absolutely no way that the Labour purge squad can even try to justify allowing a member of the party elite to actually hand two million quid to a rival political party.
One token sacrifice of a Labour Party elitist by the NEC will not make the accusations of elitism, heavy-handedness, double standards and politically motivated bias go away.
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In an attempt to defend the indefensible the former Labour Party Home Secretary Alan Johnson wrote a woeful article in the Guardian trying to defend the double standard of allowing the unelected Labour peer David Sainsbury to get away with donating over £2 million to the Lib-Dems whilst the party simultaneously purges huge numbers of ordinary members for the "crime" of posting social media comments in support of other political parties before they even became Labour Party members.
Johnson deviously decided to completely evade the central issues of Labour Party vote-rigging and the brazen double-standards between party elites and ordinary members. Instead he made the crux of his argument that Sainsbury deserves to be let off the hook for funding a rival political party that "At least he really tried to stop Brexit", which is clearly reiteration of the tired "Blame Corbyn for Brexit" trope.
Efforts to blame Jeremy Corbyn for Brexit are pathetic enough in their own right, but when it comes from a guy who led an almost invisible Labour remain campaign, it really does take the biscuit.
There's no excuse for holding ordinary party members to a much higher standard of behaviour than party elites (which is what everyone talking about the Sainsbury donation to the Lib-Dems is complaining about), and there's no excuse for casting blame onto others and ignoring your own culpability.
If the Labour Party is busy purging ordinary members for the "crime" of supporting other parties before they even became Labour members, there is no excuse for not purging Labour members who actively supported another political party while they actually were Labour members.
To look at it from the other direction, if they're letting someone off for financially supporting another political party while they were an actual Labour Party member, they can't possibly justify purging people for having posted social media comments supporting other political parties a long time before they even joined Labour.
Only someone who has completely abandoned reason could attempt to argue for a double-standard where the party elites are subject to a completely different set of rules to the party membership, and make the crux of their argument the passing off of blame for their own failures onto someone else.
If Alan Johnson was capable of even the remotest level of introspection, he would be deeply ashamed of his behaviour, his double standards, his deliberately evasive argument and his embarrassing blame-passing conclusion, but he clearly isn't. He's so consumed by terror that Jeremy Corbyn is going to democratise the Labour Party and make the situation untenable for party elitists who don't want to be made accountable to the ordinary party membership that he's having an adult tantrum.
Anyone who has dealt with children's tantrums knows how they lose all sense of self-awareness and their rational thinking skills completely dissipate until the point at which they calm down and stop screaming. Toddlers having tantrums shout all kinds of incoherent nonsense, they put on incredible displays of stubbornness, their patterns of behaviour become illogical and self-defeating and during the tantrum they remain completely unaware of what their spate of uncontrolled behaviour looks like to other people.
The lack of self-awareness, the self-defeating actions, the stubbornness and the completely illogical nonsense and insult laden diatribes spouted by Anyone But Corbyn people like Alan Johnson, Tom Blenkinsop, Michael Foster, Alex Andreou, Ian Austin, Tristram Hunt, Angela Eagle, the Labour MPs making anonymous threats in the press, JK Rowling and the like appear to be the symptoms of adult tantrums.
The polling on the Labour leadership shows that despite the concerted efforts by the party elite to purge as many Corbyn supporters as possible (often on the most tenuous or hypocritical grounds) Corbyn is still looking set for a huge landslide victory.
The vote-rigging efforts from the terrified Labour Party elitists are such a blatant display of self-defeating behaviour (the more they try to rig the vote the more they make themselves look like an out-of-touch bunch of elitists with absolute contempt for ordinary people) it's like a toddler furiously scribbling crayon all over their bedroom wall because their mummy said no ice cream for pudding.
Not only does the crayon scribbling make the prospect of ice cream significantly less likely, it's also likely to incur punishment of its own.
Pretty much everyone can see that the concerted anti-democratic vote rigging effort of the Labour Party elitists is self-defeating behaviour except the Anyone But Corbyn camp who are so locked into their stubborn, self-awareness lacking tantrums that they've deluded themselves into thinking that their furious crayon scribbling episode isn't going to backfire.
Alan Johnson and various other members of the Anyone But Corbyn camp are blind furious that they're not getting their own way, and like toddlers they're reacting by trying to scream the house down.
The problem with this tantrum analogy is that most toddlers eventually calm down and get over their screaming fits, but many of the Anyone But Corbyn coup supporters are so belligerent that they're clearly going to continue trying to scream the house down indefinitely because they're not willing to accept that they're not going to get their own way.
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The ongoing Labour Party purge is an extraordinary thing to behold. Not only is it a demonstration that a bunch of out-of-touch Labour Party elitists are intent on waging an anti-democratic war of attrition against the party's own membership, it's also being conducted in a searingly hypocritical manner.
Retrospective trawling
It's bad enough that Jeremy Corbyn supporters are being purged from the party for stuff as trivial as liking the Foo Fighters too much on their personal Facebook feed, while anti-Corbyn members of the Labour Party establishment are allowed to get away with abuse like calling other members of the party "Nazi stormtroopers" in the mainstream press, but one of the most disgraceful things is the people are being purged for having posted social media comments supporting other political parties long before they joined Labour.
When the civil rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti delivered her report into alleged cases of anti-Semitism the Labour Party and the NEC agreed to abide by its findings. One of the clearest recommendations of the whole report was her call for "a moratorium on the retrospective trawling of members' social media accounts and past comments".
Instead of heeding this call for a moratorium on social media trawling, the Labour Party NEC has instead decided to orchestrate what is almost certainly the most invasive Stasiesque mass trawling exercise in British political history.
Not only are they trawling back through people's social media accounts to look for signs of disloyalty or thought crime from when people became party members, they're clearly and undeniably trawling back through comments that were made long before the intended victims of their witch-hunt ever even joined the Labour Party.
Examples
One of the worst examples of someone being purged for supporting other parties long before Corbyn even became Labour leader is the case of Dr Gemma Angel who was purged from the Labour Party over a Tweet from May 2014 in which she explained her reasons for voting Green.
Gemma Angel is far from the only example of someone being purged from the Labour Party for having supported other parties long before Jeremy Corbyn became leader and inspired them to join Labour. Another example is Ben Crawford who was also purged for the "crime" of posting Tweets in support of the Green Party between 2014 and 2015 (see letter).
Attracting other voters
Before the Anyone But Corbyn coup was launched the right-wing of the Labour Party constantly chelped away about how Corbyn couldn't appeal to supporters of other parties, but now that they've realised that tens of thousands of people who used to support other parties have joined Labour in order to support Jeremy Corbyn, they've set about trawling through their social media accounts desperately searching for any reason to prevent them voting for Corbyn in the leadership election!
A political party that is determined to bar people from joining them if they've ever supported a rival political party is so ridiculous it's like an unwitting self-parody. It's hardly possible to think of a more effective way of making sure your political party becomes an increasingly irrelevant dissent-banning closed ideology echo chamber than the orchestration of a massive witch-hunt of any members who ever dared to support another party in the past.
The sheer hypocrisy of it
The idea of setting a load of Labour Party minions the task of trawling through the social media postings of pro-Corbyn party members and supporters to look for any excuse to bar them from voting in the leadership election is appalling enough in its own right, but punishing people for supporting other parties before they even became Labour Party members is staggeringly hypocritical when actual members of the Labour Party establishment have been allowed to get away with making a £2 million+ donation to the Liberal Democrats (David Sainsbury), openly stating that they'd rather the Tories win the next election than a Labour Party that represents the will of its membership (Tony Blair), speaking at a Tory party conference and praising their hard-right economic agenda (John McTernan), and accepting a load of Tory party cash to run an anti-EU campaign to undermine the official position of the party (the Labour Leave shills).
It's staggeringly hypocritical for the Labour Party NEC to purge ordinary members for stuff they said long before they even joined the party when they've proven themselves so willing to turn a blind-eye to blatant examples of disloyalty from high profile Labour people who were members of the party at the time of their disloyalty.
A Pyrrhic victory is their best possible outcome for Owen Smith
If the terrified Labour Party establishment do succeed in purging 200,000+ Labour Party members in order to hand victory to the Anyone But Corbyn candidate Owen Smith it will clearly be a Pyrrhic victory.
Corbyn supporters won't be the only ones to delegitimise Smith and the Labour Party by pointing out that he only managed to win because the leadership election was rigged in his favour. All of Labour's political rivals would gleefully use this anti-democratic shambles as a stick to whack him with too.
Do the Anyone But Corbyn supporters really believe that Theresa May and the Tories wouldn't use this disgraceful anti-democratic purge to score points against Owen Smith if he won? Do they really think the tories and other rival parties would go easy on him just because he helped to get Jeremy Corbyn out of the picture?
Even if Owen Smith wins, he's doomed and the Labour's reputation as a democratic party will be in tatters because of the manner of his victory. The only way to repair the damage is for the Labour members who haven't been purged to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and to then demand democratic reforms of the party so that Labour Party elitists will never be able to go on such an appallingly damaging anti-democratic rampage against the party membership again.
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Richard Burgon is the Labour MP for Leeds East and the shadow Justice Secretary. On the 27th of August 2016 he summed up what the Labour Party civil war is all about when he said:
"I believe it's important to stand up for Labour members. MPs are not 'a cut above' the membership. Myself and other MPs are just ordinary members who have been given the privilege of serving as representatives of our communities."
Contempt for the membership
A look at the behaviour of the Labour Party establishment since September 2015 Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the party with an astonishing 59.5% of the vote in a four horse race provides plenty of proof of the contempt that a lot of Labour Party elitists have towards the ordinary members.
- Certain coup-plotter MPs have taken to distorting events and outright lying in order to paint ordinary party members as a violent mob of bigoted brick-lobbing thugs. Angela Eagle is a particularly egregious offender in this regard having brazenly misrepresented the "notorious brick" incident, refused to correct allegations that she suffered homophobic abuse at a meeting she didn't even attend and outright lying about an even being cancelled due to "threats" when in reality the venue owner pulled the plug because he didn't want a political event in his hotel.
All of these actions demonstrate that the party hierarchy and the coup-plotters see themselves as a cut above the party membership. As far as they're concerned the will of 172 MPs completely outweighs the will of 250,000+ party members. Their opinions are well over 1,000 times as important as ordinary party members.
The deputy leader Tom Watson clearly expressed this contempt for the party membership when he described the decision to introduce a properly democratic One Member One Vote electoral system within the Labour Party as "a terrible error of judgement".
All of the above things demonstrate that certain Labour Party politicians see themselves as "a cut above" ordinary party members, but this disgusting elitist attitude is best demonstrated by the ongoing Labour Party purge.
The contrast between the standards of behaviour being applied to ordinary party members and people at the top of the party couldn't be starker.
Abuse
Ordinary members are being purged from the party for all kinds of spurious reasons, perhaps the most of all being the woman who was slung out of the party for posting "I fucking love the Foo Fighters" on her personal Facebook wall. Many others have been suspended with no explanation of what they are supposed to have done wrong other than generic "comments on social media" or "comments on Twitter" meaning they have pretty much no means to appeal the suspension because they don't even know what they stand accused of saying.
The fact that Labour Party minions are trawling through people's social media activities to search for reasons to exclude them from voting in the leadership election is bad enough in its own right, but the contrast between the trivial "crimes" committed by purged Labour members and the unpunished behaviour of members of the party elite couldn't be stronger.
Here are a few examples:
- The Labour Party MP Tom Blenkinsop turning his Twitter feed into a tide of cry-bully abuse in which he yelled "idiot" and "entryist" at anyone who disagreed with his appalling behaviour, including a life-long Labour voter - Not suspended
- Another coup-supporting MP to turn his Twitter feed into a severely damaging tide of abuse against the party leadership and other party members is the Labour MP Ian Austin. He was also allowed to get away with telling the leader of his party to "sit down and shut up" when he was speaking about the damning findings of the Chilcot report.
It's absolutely clear that when it comes to abusive and disreputable behaviour, ordinary members are being held to a much higher standard than members of the party establishment who seem to be able to get away with pretty much whatever they like.
Disloyalty
Another reason the Labour Party establishment have come up with for slinging ordinary members out of the party is "disloyalty". Several people have been purged for Twitter comments in favour of other political parties such as the Green Party dating from as far back as May 2014, long before they even became members of the Labour Party.
Contrast the ludicrous attitude that ordinary members who used to support other parties are unwelcome with what members of the Labour Party establishment have been allowed to get away with despite being high-profile members of the party.
It's utterly preposterous that Tweeting about having voted for the Green Party years before they even joined Labour is considered a "crime" that ordinary members must be suspended for, while people within the party establishment go completely unpunished for bankrolling rival political parties to the tune of £millions, appearing at rival party conferences and endorsing their political agendas, accepting Tory cash to campaign against the official party line and openly declaring that they'd rather Labour loses the next election to the Tories.
It's also worth considering the party establishment's attitude towards defectors from other parties.
- During the Blair era numerous Tory politicians defected directly from the Tory party to Labour. Probably the most high profile was Shaun Woodward who defected to Labour in 1999 and was pretty much immediately put in charge of Labour's 2001 Election campaign. He was then rewarded by the party elite by being parachuted into the ultra-safe Labour seat of St Helens.
The fact that Labour has repeatedly accepted defectors from other parties shows how remarkable their double standards are. If you're party of the political club you can switch allegiance immediately, but if you're an ordinary person you can be barred from the Labour Party for having voted for another political party years previously.
Conclusion
It's beyond doubt that a large number of people in the Labour Party establishment (politicians, party donors, advisers, party administrators ...) see themselves and their ilk as "a cut above" the ordinary members. The coup plot has proven their contempt for the will of the party membership clearly enough, but the abject hypocrisy of the ongoing Labour Party purge is absolute proof that these people have the same mentality as elitists across the political spectrum, that there should be one set of rules for the little people, and an altogether more lenient set of rules for members of the elite inner circle.
The battle for the future of the Labour Party isn't really so much about policy (Owen Smith is blatantly pilfering Corbyn's policies) and neither is it about personality (If Corbyn is "unelectable" because of his lack of media training then putting up a gaffe-prone blunderer who pretty much nobody has heard to challenge him is utterly ludicrous).
What it's really all about is whether the Labour Party membership believe that the party is best run by a managerialist elite who see themselves as a "a cut above the lower orders", or whether they think it's best run in the actual interests of the Labour Party members and voters.
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.
The Labour Party purge is getting absolutely ridiculous. Not content with banning 130,000 party members from participation in the leadership election out of a fear that they're likely to back Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party hierarchy has set about trawling through people's social media accounts looking for excuses to suspend them from the party.
Some of the most notable examples include the Orgreave Justice campaigner and 45 year long Labour Party member John Dunn, the head of the Bakers' Union Ronnie Draper, a Unison rep and long-time Labour Party activist called Philip Lewis and a woman called Catherine Starr who was apparently suspended for liking a band called the Foo Fighters too much.
The Catherine Starr case was unusual because the letter of suspension actually included a date when the supposedly unacceptable comment was made, allowing her to track down the "abusive" comment to a post where she said "I fucking love the Foo Fighters". Huge numbers of people are being suspended with an explanation consisting of nothing more than "comments you posted on social media" making it pretty much impossible for people to track down the supposedly problematic comments.
There is clearly a lack of due process if people are being suspended from the party and barred from voting in the leadership election based on such vague allegations. If the Labour Party snoopers have evidence of abusive language they should include screen grabs of the comments deemed to be unacceptable, which is hardly difficult given the way that they're snooping through people's social media accounts.
Some people have raised concerns that snooping through the social media accounts of tens of thousands of Labour Party members in order to find excuses to suspend Jeremy Corbyn supporters is a deeply sinister thing to do. Others have argued that it's a tremendous waste of time and effort that could be better used on actually opposing the Tories. My biggest concern is the abject hypocrisy of it all.
You just have to look at the behaviour of some of the Labour Party members who are backing Owen Smith to see how rigged the whole purge is:
In March 2016 Catherine Starr posted a comment about how much she likes the Foo Fighters on her personal Facebook page. The Labour Party donor Michael Foster wrote an extraordinary article for the Daily Mail describing other Labour Party members as "Nazi stormtroopers" and a tide of other abusive comments and insults including "arrivistas", "a divisive, aggressive holier-than-thou cadre of hard-Left socialists", "bullies and arm-twisters", "economically illiterate people", "a mob", "second-rate minds", "the extreme left".
Catherine Starr has been purged and Michael Foster has suffered no consequences for his abusive diatribe.
In 2014 Dr Gemma Angel wrote a Twitter post detailing her reasons for voting for the Green Party at the European elections. Since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour Party leader she changed her allegiance and tried to join the Labour Party. In 2016 the unelected Labour Party peer David Sainsbury made a donation of £2,150,000 to the Liberal Democrats.
For a tweet supporting the Green Party from over two years ago Dr Gemma Angel was purged from the party. For handing over two million quid to a rival political party between April and June 2016 David Sainsbury has suffered no consequences.
The fact that the Labour Party hierarchy have decided to trawl through the social media postings of Jeremy Corbyn supporters to look for (often incredibly tenuous) excuses to block them from membership is bad enough, but the fact that party politicians and donors are being allowed to get away with things that are very much worse demonstrates beyond doubt that the purge is being conducted in order to rig the election, rather than to rid the party of abusive people or those who clearly support other political parties.
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.
