Something's gone terribly wrong with Labour

Keir Starmer has once again demonstrated Labour's chaotic lurch to the right under his lamentable leadership, this time by forcing Wes Streeting to apologise for expressing a bit of solidarity with striking UK rail workers last week.

Let's not forget that Labour is supposed to be the party of the workers (the clue is in the name). 

It's supposed to defend ordinary people from the greed and exploitation of capitalists and landlords. 

If Labour founding-father Keir Hardie was alive
today, Starmer would no-doubt force him to
apologise for saying things like this

It was founded by socialists and trade unionists, and it's still almost entirely funded by socialists and trade unionists through their membership fees and union subs.

But Starmer sees it as his own personal fiefdom, which he rules over through relentless factionalism; petty diktats; depraved ideological purity tests; constant vote-rigging; forced apologies; and regular witch-hunts against those who refuse to bow down to his authoritarian hankerings.

Starmer started off by hastily driving anyone with a shred of decency out of his shadow cabinet by insisting that they abstain on a couple of truly vile pieces of Tory legislation designed to allow undercover cops to rape women with impunity, and to provide impunity to British soldiers who commit war crimes overseas.

These ideological purity tests did what they were designed to, and drove all of the genuinely left-wing and socially progressive figures out of his shadow cabinet, so he then set about demoting all the so-called "soft-left" figures too (like Dodds and Thomas-Symonds), replacing them with his right-wing allies.

Starmer and his bully-boy enforcer on the NEC David Evans have issued loads of diktats banning local party members from discussing certain subjects, or holding no confidence votes in Starmer or Evans, because if there's one thing that petty tyrants can't tolerate, it's open and free discussion amongst people they believe to be their inferiors.

Starmer forced Alex Sobel (hardly a radical leftist) to issue a grovelling apology for suggesting that he thought capitalism was to blame for climate change, then he cynically rigged the Labour leadership nomination process to make it almost impossible for his successor to be socialist, female, or a person of colour.

Then Starmer positioned himself miles to the right of Tony Blair by going after the anti-war group of Labour MPs, threatening to expel them from the party if they refused to bend to his will. 

Even though Iraq turned out to be an absolutely horrific disaster, meaning Blair really should have listened to the warnings of rebels like of Robin Cook, Tony Benn, Tam Dalyell, Jeremy Corbyn ... he still allowed them to dissent without threatening to expel them from the party like Starmer does to anyone with a different opinion to his own.

And now Starmer's humiliating Wes Streeting, and showing utter contempt for the trade union movement that pays the Labour Party's bills, by demanding Streeting issue a grovelling apology for his expression of sympathy towards striking rail workers!

If Starmer's punishing a right-wing lickspittle like Streeting for coming across as too left-wing, it's beyond obvious that something has gone catastrophically wrong with the Labour Party.

It's been usurped by the political right, and under Starmer's leadership it's being used as a battering ram to undermine, disempower, demoralise, and silence the left, instead of offering a better alternative to this cesspit of Tory incompetence, corruption, and degeneracy.

The workers' party has been taken over by people who favour greedy capitalists over exploited workers; selfish private landlords over suffering tenants; the power of the state over the power of the people; and property rights over people.

It's been taken over by a wannabe-tyrant who refuses to accept any opinion other than his own, and clearly considers the genuine left within his own party to be a much bigger problem than Johnson's malicious, corrupt, and incompetent ghouls in government, who he repeatedly refuses to properly oppose.

I would never have picked Starmer as Labour leader, but I could also never have imagined that things would have degraded so rapidly under his perpetual abstention of a leadership. 

He's more of a right-wing control freak than Blair; he's more obsessed with defending the neoliberal economic order than Brown; he's more other-worldly and unengaging than Miliband; and he's far worse at getting to the point and hammering home the political advantage than Corbyn was!

He's like some kind of Frankenstein's monster composed of all of the worst aspects of other Labour leaders, without any of the good bits. 

Without the charisma of Blair; without Brown's aura of decency; without Miliband's desire to make the Labour Party more democratic and accountable; and without Corbyn's popular policies.

What's more is how utterly dismal Starmer is on policy and strategy.

He seems to be convinced that his strategy of repeating the same mistakes of the past will prove successful this time. 

Attacking the left rather than properly holding the Tories to account delivered Neil Kinnock his absolute pratfall of an election in 1992, and in 2015 Ed Miliband's mistake of pathetically imitating Tory economic insanity rather than opposing it turned what should have been an absolute gimme of an election, into a humbling defeat.

Starmer's going to do both at the same time, as well as insisting that the public are wrong to want energy and water renationalisation, when the sewage scandal and the energy crisis had actually provided him absolutely golden opportunities to offer the public the renationalisations that they've repeatedly told pollsters that they want (and what he'd promised in his leadership election pledges to boot!).

Starmer's just as determined to lecture the public that they're wrong, as he is to ignore the lessons from Labour Party history!

It's absolutely mind-boggling that there are still people within the Labour ranks who insist on trying to gaslight the public into believing that this unlikeable, unengaging, unsympathetic, untrustworthy figure is actually brilliant, funny, charismatic, relatable, and honest, and that we're all at fault for not having noticed yet!

Starmer's been far worse than even his harshest critics could have imagined in 2019, and yet Labour seem determined not to get rid of him, and to go into the next general election with this absolute dud dictating, and foot-stamping, and micromanaging the party into another devastating electoral pratfall.

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OR

In an alternative universe Ed Miliband is approaching his 4th boring year as Prime Minister

Alternate universe theory suggests the possibility that there are an infinite number of parallel universes, and that new ones spring into existence every time a choice is made.

According to alternate universe theory the universe where I decided to write this article is the one we're living in, but another alternative universe branched off at the moment I made the (probably correct) decision that producing a multiverse theory article on the root causes of Brexit would be a ridiculous waste of my own time, and did something else like go far a walk.

If alternative universe theory is correct then that means that in some parallel universe Prime Minister Ed Miliband is approaching his fourth year in office having decided to actively oppose ruinous Tory austerity dogma back in 2015, rather than following the hopelessly self-defeating strategy of Blairite centrists like Ed Balls and Chris Leslie who thought that pathetically imitating Tory austerity dogma would win Labour the 2015 General Election by appealing to soft-Tory voters in marginal constituencies.

In this alternate universe Ed Miliband was smart enough to realise that Labour offering a toxic prescription of yet more Tory-style austerity would drive away dozens of natural Labour voters all over the country for every soft-Tory voter they won over in marginal constituencies, and told them to go away and come up with an strategically competent and economically coherent investment-based alternative to Tory austerity madness, or get out of the shadow treasury and let someone with an actual clue have a go instead.

In this alternative universe Ed Miliband leadership presented Labour as the only UK-wide alternative to 5 more years of ruinous austerity madness. This strategy gave Labour Party activists a very clear message to get enthusiastic about and sell to the electorate, and galvanised the Labour vote resulting in a resounding defeat for the austerity-fixated Tory/Lib-Dem coalition.

This Tory defeat meant that there would be no referendum on quitting the EU, and that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell would remain obscure Labour backbenchers as Ed Miliband was sworn in as Prime Minister, rather than becoming the guys who finally made Labour stand up, stop imitating Tory austerity fanaticism, and offer an actual alternative to economically illiterate Tory austerity madness.

What's the point in imagining this alternative universe?

The point is that imagining an alternative universe where Labour didn't continually track further and further to the right under the direction of clueless centrists like Ed Balls and Chris Leslie illustrates how centrism managed to deliver it's own worst nightmares.

First this clueless centrist agenda of ever closer imitation of the Tories managed to deliver the Labour Party back into the hands of genuine democratic socialists after two decades of control by pro-privatisation, pro-austerity centrists, and then to make matters even worse for the centrists their absolute ineptitude helped to give birth to Brexit too.

If Ed Miliband had become Prime Minister in 2015 there would never have been an EU referendum, and even if he'd still somehow still lost the 2015 general election to the Tories, the EU referendum would obviously have played out very differently.

Had the centrists actively opposed ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma from the beginning rather than pathetically imitating it, they could have made the very clear argument that the unprecedented collapse in living standards that people had been suffering was purely the consequence of hard-right Tory policies like austerity dogma, wage repression, the deliberate defunding of public services, and massive social security cuts.

But having actively supported these ruinous austerity policies, the centrists were left biting their tongues while the ukippers, the hard-right of the Tory party, and assorted extreme-right fanatics gleefully filled the political vacuum by blaming the devastating real life consequences of hard-right Tory austerity dogma on immigrants and the EU.

The centrists blatantly created their own political nightmares by enabling (Lib-Dems) and imitating (Labour right-wingers) the hard-right fanaticism of the Tory party, and now they're left torn between slinging abuse and lies at Jeremy Corbyn and anyone who supports his pro-investment economic policies in the vain hope of returning the Labour leadership to centrist control, and desperately trying to stop the Brexit shambles that they enabled in the first place by means of another referendum that they're actually quite likely to lose again given their abject failure to address the root causes of why the 2016 Brexit vote happened in the first place.
 

This Tweet from David Cameron will never get old

Imagining a calm and rather boring Ed Miliband approaching his fourth relatively uneventful year as Prime Minister helps us to understand the sheer idiocy of all the centrists who somehow imagined that the essence of political centrism isn't maintaining a mix between capitalism and socialism, but continually tracking the Tory party ever further towards the bonkers hard-right, no matter how blatantly harmful and self-defeating the economic fanaticism the Tories have been promoting.

But if the behaviour of centrists has taught us anything over the last three years it's that they're absolutely immune to self-awareness, and absolutely intent on bitterly blaming everyone apart from themselves for the absolute chaos they unleashed by deliberately denying the public any real alternative to hard-right Tory austerity fanaticism back in 2015.

They won't blame themselves and their noxious austerity-lite agenda for Ed Miliband not becoming Prime Minister. They'll blame literally anyone else from Rupert Murdoch for publishing that notorious bacon sandwich picture, to Ed Miliband for supposedly being too left-wing (!!?!), to people who voted Green/SNP/Plaid Cymru in 2015 (because they were the only parties that actually bothered opposing Tory austerity fanaticism at the time).

And they absolutely refuse to blame themselves for facilitating Brexit either.

Even when Lib-Dem centrists were part of the pro-austerity government and Labour "centrists" controlled the pro-austerity political opposition too, it's still somehow always somebody else's fault.

If only Ed Miliband had been smart enough to reject the centrists morally indefensible and strategically incompetent austerity-lite rubbish and actually given the public an alternative to get behind, but all we can do now is imagine what that might have been like, and marvel at the self-absorbed wittering of centrists who still outright deny the fact that their despicable austerity-appeasement opened the door to all of this Tory chaos in the first place.

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OR

The Tories are courting the most anti-Semitic demographic of all whilst smearing Labour as anti-Semites!

One of the most incredible things about right-wing propaganda is the extraordinarily contradictory nature of it.

Take the resurgence of the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party as an example.

We all know that these kinds of smears are intended as distraction tactics because the Tories have lost the argument completely when it comes to actual policies, so they resort to smears.

A few weeks ago they were smearing Corbyn as a communist Czech spy, then he was supposedly a Putin stooge for capitalist Russia, then he's a hard-left Marxist again, then he's a Stalinist for demonstrating the leadership skills that Theresa May so badly lacks, and now it's back to anti-Semitism again.

One of the big problems with the right-wing using accusations of anti-Semitism to attack Jeremy Corbyn is that these very same people were perfectly happy to use anti-Semitic tropes to attack Ed Miliband when he was Labour leader.

When anti-Semitism is useful to the Tory purpose of defending the interests of corporations and the mega-rich they're perfectly happy to use it as a weapon to attack a Jewish leader of the Labour Party, but when they're feeling afraid because Jeremy Corbyn's centre-left policies are so popular, they use accusations of anti-Semitism against him to distract people from talking about policy.

Then there's the grotesque history of anti-Semitism within the Tory party itself. When the so-called hard-left stood in solidarity with the Jews, the Irish and the working class to beat Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists at the Battle of Coble Street in 1936, the Daily Mail were telling their readers to join the BUF, propagandising against Britain accepting Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution, and Tory politicians were signing up in droves to secret anti-Semitic pro-Nazi societies called the Right Club and the Anglo-German Link.

Then there's the history of right-wingers using anti-Semitism to attack the left. Until very recently the political right regularly used the anti-Semitic "Jewish global conspiracy" trope to attack the left, using Jewish left-wing figures like Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Liebknecht, Ralph Miliband, Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders to argue that left-wing politics is actually a Jewish plot to control the world. To seamlessly go from these anti-Semitic attacks against the left to decrying the left as anti-Semitic takes some incredible brass neck.

Then there's the fact that the head of the pro-Corbyn campaign group Momentum is a Jewish guy called Jon Lansman. The right-wingers want people to simultaneously believe in two mutually exclusive pieces of anti-left propaganda. They want the public to fear and despisee Momentum which is led by a Jewish guy, and they want us to hate Labour because it's supposedly an anti-Semitic party!

The only way these two positions can be reconciled is by using the vile anti-Semitic trope of the "self-hating Jew" to dismiss the existence that Lansman and all other Jewish members of the Labour Party. And this is precisely what Theresa May did in parliament. She was desperate to deflect public attention from the devastating impact of Tory cuts to the local government budget that she casually dismissed every single Jewish member of the Labour Party as a bunch of self-hating Jews with her outlandish claim that there is no place for people who oppose anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

Then there's the fact that the Tories have a very clear strategy of appealing to the hard-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic who are fleeing the wreckage of UKIP.
  
Analysis by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research has found that anti-Semitic attitudes are very much more prevalent amongst extreme right-wingers than any other political demographic (see image).

So the Tories are attempting to pull off a truly incredible balancing act. They're working their socks off to attract the deeply anti-Semitic hard-right ultranationalist blue-kippers into the Tory fold (because they know they'll never be able to cling onto power without them) whilst they simultaneously try to smear the political left as a bunch of anti-Semites!

Conclusions

The resurgence of the anti-Semitism smears right before the local elections is a very clear indicator that the Tories really don't want people talking about policy. The reason being that if the debate focused on policy then attention would obviously fall on the catastrophic consequences of the ideologically driven Tory cuts to the Communities and Local Government budget.

The Tories have reversed history to distance themselves from their own party's sickening history of anti-Semitism, and from the anti-Semitic tropes they were perfectly happy to use to attack the left with when Labour had a Jewish leader just a few years ago.

The Tories have incredible cheek to use anti-Semitism smears against the left when their only hope of electoral survival is to attract support from the hard-right ultranationalist blue-kippers, who are demonstrably the most anti-Semitic demographic of all.

Theresa May actually used the profoundly anti-Semitic "self-hating Jew" trope to attack Jewish members of the Labour Party just last week, but the mainstream media apparently don't give the slightest damn about the disgusting spectacle of a non-Jew using an anti-Semitic trope to accuse actual Jewish people of condoning anti-Semitism, even when it's the Prime Minister doing it!

With their history-rewriting, reality-reversing, smear-mongering campaign the Tories are proving one thing beyond doubt. It clearly takes a boundless amount of contempt towards members of the general public to assume that we're so ignorant of history, absurdly gullible, and thoroughly immune to cognitive dissonance that we'd actually fall for their cynical weaponisation of anti-Semitism in order to distract from their own appalling record in government.

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OR

Why aren't the Daily Mail shrieking "Stalinism" at Theresa May's 'new' housing policy?

In a pathetic attempt to appeal to the youth vote her party has spent the last eight years crapping all over, Theresa May is once again pretending to give a damn about the housing crisis.

It's not just that since 2010 the Tories have overseen the lowest levels of house building since the early 1920s and imposed the worst sustained collapse in the value of workers wages since records began that makes this pathetic begging for votes so grotesque. It's that yet another of her headline policies has been crudely ripped off from Ed Miliband's Labour Party.

When Miliband proposed new legislation to combat idle property speculators who hoard unused land in 2015 the Tories and their attack dogs in the mainstream media went apoplectic with rage over it.

Yet just three years later they're not shrieking "Stalinism" anymore, because Miliband's policy of punishing landbankers is now official Tory party policy.

Nowhere is this hypocrisy better illustrated than in the pages of the Daily Mail. 

Oh how they raged against the policy when Labour suggested it, yet within three years they're presenting the exact same policy from the Tories as if they've just copied their analysis of it directly from a government press release.

People with political memories that last longer than a few months will remember the exact same hypocrisy from the Tories and their propagandists in the mainstream media when Theresa May nicked Ed Miliband's policy of capping energy prices too.

The main lessons here are obvious:

The Tories are a bunch of outrageous political opportunists who will resort to absurd "reds under the bed!" fearmongering at the drop of a hat over Labour policies, but then nick the exact same policies they were deriding and fearmongering about and brazenly to pretend that they're their own.

And the Daily Mail is nothing but a propaganda rag for the Tory party that is staffed by mercenary hacks who view their readers with absolute contempt. But seriously, what else would you expect from the most dishonest propaganda rag in the UK?

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OR

Tory MPs are struggling to explain the abrupt Tory conversion to Corbynite investment economics

The Tory party have decided to openly pilfer one of Jeremy Corbyn's core economic policies, and in order to defend this astounding U-turn on borrowing to fund public investment, they've resorted to bizarre displays of meaningless economically illiterate jabbering.

This latest screeching U-turn came when the Tory Communities Minister Sajid Javid announced that the government should borrow money to invest in building affordable housing.

The reason this investment strategy is such a massive U-turn is that it completely contradicts the insane Tory austerity narrative, which relies on the economically illiterate fairy story that the only way to balance the national budget is to impose harsh across the board cuts in spending on public infrastructure and services.

After Ed Miliband and Ed Balls torpedoed Labour's chances of winning the 2015 General Election with their insipid and catastrophically uninspiring "austerity-lite" campaign, Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader and began to inject some actual economic sense into the political debate, including a clear manifesto commitment to invest money in the construction of affordable housing.

Under Jeremy Corbyn Labour have never suggested that the national finances can be resolved by just turning on the money taps and splurging on whatever, they've proposed a costed programme of investment in things that actually generate more economic activity in the long run than they cost. Stuff like affordable housing, public infrastructure, transport, and education.

The backbone of Labour's economic policy is the concept of the investment based recovery. The idea that you can't cure the economy by wildly slashing spending as if all forms of government investment are essentially waste, but that it takes a process of identifying which areas of spending create good returns on investment to invest more in, while restricting spending cuts to areas that create poor returns on investment.

It's astounding to see the Tory party come so late to the investment based recovery game after imposing their socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma for seven torturous years and overseeing the lowest rate of house building since the early 1920s.

By suddenly admitting that the nation needs to borrow to invest in affordable housing, the Tories are essentially demonstrating that the critics of their ruinous austerity agenda were absolutely right all along. And they're also proving that their ideologically driven cuts to housing, infrastructure spending, and public services were driven purely by ideology, not by need.

We all know that had Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party announced a strategy of borrowing some £50 billion to create affordable housing last year, the Tories and their bully boys in the right-wing press would undoubtedly have all shrieked in unison "reckless spendthrift Marxism", but because this kind of investment economics is suddenly a Tory policy, they're completely wrong-footed and floundering.

This latest screeching Tory U-turn has created confusion and panic amongst Tory MPs. For seven years they've been defending their ludicrous "let's cut our way to growth" austerity agenda and slandering anyone who talks of investment economics as if they're crazed far-left madmen. So they're now struggling desperately to align their anti-Labour propaganda with this complete reversal of their own position in order to actually imitate Jeremy Corbyn's headline economic approach.

The Tory MP Nick Boles exemplified this confusion and panic over this Tory adoption of a Corbynite economic strategy in an absolute mess of a Tweet in which he said "[The] key difference between borrowing to build houses and borrowing to fund deficit: house building creates new assets which can act as security".

The first thing to note is that "borrowing to fund deficit" is absolutely meaningless gibberish because funding or creating a deficit is precisely the result of borrowing, so he's comparing the suddenly pilfered Labour policy of borrowing to invest with the policy of borrowing for the sake of borrowing which he's just plucked straight out of his arse.

The next thing to note is that the borrowing to invest strategy he's suddenly found himself having to defend is precisely the kind of economic strategy the Tories were ferociously attacking during the 2017 election with demeaning economic baby talk like "there is no magic money tree" and absolute idiot fodder like comparisons between the national economy and a simple household budget.

The next thing to note is that Boles' actual reason supporting this sudden Tory conversion to Corbynite investment economics is pure gobbledygook. There are many good reasons that investment in affordable housing is good for the economy, not least jobs growth (architects, engineers, builders, electricians, plumbers, labourers ...), increased demand for building materials and tools (secondary job growth), and increases in aggregate economic demand (as the people employed to build the houses spend their wages, and younger generations are released from the penury of rip-off private sector rents as they move into affordable housing).

Boles' clever-sounding "new assets = security" reason on the other hand is precisely the kind of half-arsed drivel you'd expect from someone who has been completely wrong-footed by suddenly having to defend the kind of economic strategy he's spent the last seven years furiously attacking.

The big problem the Tories are facing now is the exactly the same kind of problem faced by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls back in 2015. 

When the two Eds came up with austerity-lite, the average punter was left wondering why on earth they should vote for Labour's meek imitation of austerity when they could have the real thing from the Tories. 

Now that the Tories are openly mimicking Jeremy Corbyn's investment economics with investment-lite, the average punter is surely going to end up wondering why they should pick the Tories' weak and opportunistic ersatz version of investment economics when they can have the real thing from people who actually believe in it.

Presumably Nick Boles and his ilk believe that ordinary people are such uneducated halfwits that they won't even spot that by encroaching on Jeremy Corbyn's economic territory the Tories have performed yet another massive screeching U-turn, and furthermore they clearly imagine that us plebs must be so thick we'll just forget all about seven years of socially and economically devastating Tory austerity madness because they've rapidly cobbled together some half-arsed pseudo-economic gobbledygook on Twitter to justify its sudden abandonment. 

 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 imagine the Tories dropped their rip-off DWP charges out of the goodness of their hearts

The Tories have announced that they 're now planning to scrap their policy of charging 55p a minute for people to phone the Universal Credit hotline, and all of their other rip off DWP hotline charges.

Don't make any mistake. They're not scrapping their vindictive policy of wringing cash out of some of the poorest people in society out of the goodness of their hearts. They're doing it because they got caught, and in Jeremy Corbyn Labour have a leader who is prepared to ignore what the right-wing tabloids might say about him, and hold the Tories to account for their malice.

It's absolutely no coincidence that DWP helplines are being made free just one week after Corbyn roasted Theresa May about the rip-off charges in parliament. This Tory U-turn has only happened because Britain has an effective opposition that is holding the government to account and forcing them into one U-turn after another.

Corbyn's predecessor Ed Miliband wasn't actually such a bad guy, but unlike Corbyn he didn't have the courage of his convictions, and surrounded himself with economic right-wingers like Ed Balls and Chris Leslie.

Not only did Miliband squander the 2015 General Election by adopting Ed Balls' ridiculously uninspiring "austerity-lite" narrative when outright opposition to ruinous and failing Tory austerity dogma was required, he also allowed other Labour right-wingers to mimic the Tories in order to pander to the right-wing press.

One of the most notorious examples came when Miliband's shadow DWP minister Rachael Reeves vowed that Labour would be tougher on benefits claimants than the Tories (as if systematically abusing disabled people, using unemployed workers as sources of free labour to distribute to their corporate mates, slashing in-work benefits for the working poor, and their draconian sanctions regime weren't harsh enough already)!

Just imagine if the right-wing of the Labour Party had succeeded in their numerous plots and schemes to oust Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour leadership. 

Their desperation to appeal to the editors of the right-wing propaganda rags would have prevented them from ever being seen to side with social security claimants, so the pressure over these ludicrously unfair DWP hotline charges would never have been applied, Theresa May wouldn't have been forced into performing another screeching U-turn, and the Tories would have continued wringing money out of poor people forced to righ the DWP over stuff like the unacceptable delays in their Universal Credit payments.

The difference with Corbyn is that he doesn't give a damn if mercenary hacks at right-wing propaganda rags like the S*n, Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph are going to attack him for standing up for the millions of working and non-working people on social security. Corbyn can see that charging people 55p a minute to deal with DWP errors in the Universal Credit system is just wrong, so he stood up and said it was wrong, and as a result forced the Tories into changing direction.

Of course the right-wing tabloid hacks are going to hate him for it. Of course people who have been conditioned to despise all social security claimants (whether they're working, not working, or physically unable to work) will hate him for it. But when Ed Miliband's pro-austerity anti-welfare incarnation of the Labour Party fumbled the golden opportunity that was the 2015 General Election, they proved that Labour simply can't win elections by crudely aping the Tory party in the hope of appealing to the kind of people who are never going to support Labour anyway.

You don't hold the powerful to account by meekly imitating their policies in the hope that you get a go at being in power next. You hold them to account by identifying their malice, incompetence and greed then haranguing them over it until they're forced to change direction, then eventually after the public have seen the powerful forced into either defending the indefensible, or U-turning for the umpteenth time, they get sick and tired of it and vote for a government with some actual principles.

This latest screeching U-turn from Theresa May is proof that Jeremy Corbyn is doing an increasingly effective job of holding the Tories to account, and what Labour (and the other opposition parties) need to do now is to continue to actively oppose this absolute shambles of a Tory government, especially when their policies are unfair, incompetent, or downright vindictive. 

 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

The centre-right faction of the Labour Party are going to run out of money

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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