The weird thing is that the parliamentary letter about the Julian Assange case would have been absolutely right and proper except for the incredible lapse of judgement by the organisers in letting alleged sex pest John Woodcock sign it.
Diane Abbott's good faith response this letter is absolutely spot on in the way she clearly delineates between the sexual assault allegations against Assange and the fact that he's actually been arrested on trumped up hacking charges designed to punish him for his role in leaking masses of evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Abbott's position is that Assange should not be extradited to the US to face political persecution for revealing the truth about grotesque war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he should be extradited to face a fair trial in Sweden if the authorities there do re-open the sexual assault case against him.
Abbott would have been quite within her rights to point out the absolute hypocrisy of including the signature of an alleged sex pest who then blatantly ran away from the Labour Party in order to evade the internal party investigations into the serious sexual misconduct allegations against him, but she chose to deal with the letter in good faith without raising this issue.
As someone looking at this from outside the parliamentary bubble, I obviously agree with supporting victims of sexual violence, but it's absolutely mind-boggling that the organisers of this letter decided to allow Woodcock to sign it, and that others who knew that his signature was on it decided to go along with it regardless of the hypocrisy.
It seems so obvious that once you've decided to publicly legitimise an alleged sex pest who ran away from investigations into his behaviour, any legitimate point you're trying to make about the importance of showing solidarity with victims of sexual abuse is completely annihilated by the hypocrisy.
In fact, allowing an alleged sex pest to sign the letter trivialised the issue of sexual abuse by making it look like nothing more than an exercise in petty political point scoring.
It makes it look as if you don't actually give a toss about the very real importance of showing solidarity with the victims of sexual misconduct, and you're just using the issue to score incredibly cheap political points against your political opponents.
Allowing an alleged sex pest to sign this letter about the importance of showing solidarity with the victims of sexual abuse just makes you wonder what the hell the organisers were thinking.
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Steven Woolfe supporters (including the odious Arron Banks) are crying conspiracy because he's been excluded from the UKIP leadership election by the National Executive Committee of the party.
Woolfe's decision to leave his UKIP leadership application bid until the very last moment when he had weeks to submit it was a sign that if nothing else he's recklessly disorganised.
The fact that Woolfe and his supporters have demanded that the NEC ignore the fact he missed the deadline as a result of leaving his application to the last moment demonstrates a sickening sense of entitlement on their part. Why should they have to follow the rules like everyone else? They're obviously too important for that aren't they?
The fact that Woolfe put himself forward to stand as a Police and Crime Commissioner for UKIP without declaring his drink driving conviction (as he was required to by law) shows that he's dishonest too. It just goes to show how thinly the UKIP talent must be spread that a dishonest and recklessly disorganised former drink-driver like Steven Woolfe was the front-runner to lead the party until he was excluded from the leadership race.
The fact that Steven Woolfe is backed by the millionaire former Tory party donor Arron Banks gives some insight into the kind of hard-right candidate he must be. Banks is on record as saying that he wants to see the NHS privatised. Banks wouldn't have backed Woolfe if he didn't share the same hard-right ideology, just as he wouldn't have backed Andrea Leadsom to become Tory party leader a few weeks ago if she didn't share his fanatically right-wing agenda too.
A load of Ukippers are up in arms that their Arron Banks puppet has been barred from the leadership contest instead of seeing it as a blessing that Banks' malign influence over the party has been curtailed a little bit.
Steven Woolfe's running mate Nathan Gill (the guy who used to run a company undercutting British businesses using low-paid migrant labourers living in bunk houses, until it went bankrupt) has been threatened with expulsion from UKIP for double-jobbing. The NEC have said he has to either give up his job as an MEP or his job in the Welsh Assembly or get thrown out of the party. Some would say it's actually a reasonable stance to request that Gill stops double-jobbing, others see it as part of the conspiracy against the Woolfe-Gill-Banks faction of the party.
Arron Banks' reaction to Woolfe getting himself disbarred from the leadership contest was utterly bizarre. Instead of accepting that he make the mistake of backing a recklessly disorganised candidate, Banks is blaming it all on a supposed Tory takeover of the party by the former Tory MPs Douglas Carswell and Neil Hamilton.
The accusation of a Tory takeover of UKIP by ... errr ... a former Tory party donor who has only been a UKIP member for a few years is quite extraordinary.
Arron Banks bizarre "Tory Takeover" conspiracy theory is a clear demonstration that he considers most UKIP supporters to be a bunch of complete half-wits who are incapable of seeing that he's furious because his own failed Tory takeover of UKIP has been ruined by the recklessly disorganised conduct of his own puppet-candidate.
The whole of UKIP is absolutely riddled with failed, disgraced and defected Tories. Not only is Arron Banks himself a defected Tory, so was the former leader Nigel Farage and so too is the new leadership favourite Diane James! To pretend that UKIP isn't already stuffed to the brim with ex-Tories in order to stoke 'kipper fears about a Tory takeover of the party is absolutely ridiculous stuff.
In conclusion I hope that all of the Woolfe supporters who are threatening to "declare war on UKIP", sue them and/or form a breakaway party go ahead and do so. The sooner this hard-right Tory Trojan Horse protest party sinks back into obscurity the better.
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.
