When attempting to build a broad political coalition you've decided to call "The Progressive Alliance", it may be considered wise not to deliberately antagonise pretty much anyone with vaguely progressive or left-leaning views ... but there's no telling liberal capitalist aggro-centrists how to do political communication is there?
- Liberal capitalists laid the groundwork for Brexit by propping up the ruinous Austerity Coalition, which caused the unprecedented wage collapse, failing public services, the housing crisis, and the devastating under-investment that the Brexiteers then cynically weaponised by blaming on immigrants and the EU.
- They delivered their own worst nightmare of Brexit with their condescending and ineffective "jobs for the boys" non-campaign.
- They blew probably the best opportunity ever to hammer the Tories by turning the Brexit referendum result into an excuse to launch a bitter factionalist coup to get rid of Labour's democratically elected leader instead!
- Then they handed the keys of Downing Street to Boris Johnson by turning the 2019 General Election into a rerun of the Brexit referendum they'd already lost.
If these people has 1% of the strategic capabilities they imagine themselves to have, we wouldn't be in anything like as much of a mess as a nation, but they will keep insisting that tepid, unappealing, liberal capitalist gruel must be the only alternative to radically right-wing conservative capitalist poison.
A lot of the People's Vote campaigners who invested so much work in throwing the 2019 general election have respawned themselves as The Progressive Alliance, which apparently aims to remove the Tories from power by building an astonishingly unlikely political coalition.
I won't spend too much time explaining why it's so unlikely, you just have to consider the vitriolic anti-SNP bile in Keir Starmer's much-lauded Labour conference speech to understand that the Labour right detest the SNP Westminster-outsiders infinitely more than they mildly disapprove of their Tory Westminster brethren.
Anyway. Onto the astonishing infographic in the article header image.
This is a real thing, that was actually designed and approved by Progressive Alliance people, and posted on their social media accounts (here's the link on Facebook, at least until they delete it).
"But The Lib-Dems went into coalition with the Tories"
The Progressive Alliance may try to trivialise this with the misleading claim that it all happened "a decade ago" when the Lib-Dems were still enabling Tory malice will into 2015, and the Brexiteer-style cry of "get over it", but the fact is that the ruinous Austerity Coalition imposed a shocking range of anti-progressive policies that are still causing devastating social and economic consequences today.
What's more, the Lib-Dems are completely unapologetic about it, to the extent that they picked one of the very worst Tory-collaborators, Ed Davey, as their their new leader, when they had the chance to turn over a new leaf with the much more progressive Layla Moran.
The message here is that if you're horrified by austerity ruination; systematic "fit for work" disability persecution; Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment and the ensuing the Windrush scandal; the worst period of wage repression in recorded history; unlawful Tribunal Fees; the Royal Mail scam and £billions in other privatisation rip-offs; the student loan betrayal; the brutal social security sanctions regime; arms sales to tyrants, despots and war criminals; privatising literally thousands of schools into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers; devastating local government cuts; economically illiterate cuts to the drivers of future economic prosperity (education, infrastructure, R&D); or any of the other profoundly anti-progressive policies enacted between 2010 and 2015, you can just piss off, because this lot don't want your vote.
"Jeremy Corbyn is no longer Labour leader"
The logic of attacking Jeremy Corbyn supporters and socialists in general is unclear.
Apparently sneering at them with the Brexiteer style slogan "he lost, get over it" is going to magically win them over to the Progressive Alliance cause!
Who cares that Corbyn was demonised by the press and repeatedly sabotaged from within his own party, purely for promoting progressive social and economic policies?
If you supported Corbyn's policy platform, you can also piss off, because the so-called Progressive Alliance don't want your vote!
"Blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair blah blah Iraq"
The UK government ignored the legitimate concerns of millions of British people, illegally invaded another country, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a refugee crisis of millions.
They triggered a cycle of terrorist violence that spread throughout the target country, across the entire region, and eventually culminated in terrorist atrocities across Europe perpetrated by the ISIS fanatics that metastasised out the lawless terrorism breeding grounds that Tony Blair and his ilk created in Iraq.
"Blah blah jabber jabber ... get over it": What an arrogant and offensive way to dismiss legitimate concerns over one of modern Britain's most horrific foreign policy catastrophes!
If you're the kind of progressively-minded person who opposed the Iraq war, the so-called Progressive Alliance clearly hold your political opinions in the same regard as dog much on their shoes, they simply don't want your vote.
"The Lib-Dems will just flounce off with the Tories"
They want to re-argue point one over again, just to make their list look longer, but the essence of their case is that we should just trust the Lib-Dems this time, despite them being led by one of the worst Lib-Dem ministers in the ruinous Austerity Coalition!
This is less an effort to tell potential voters to piss off, more of a desperate appeal to the astonishingly gullible!
"But Keith ... [insert politically illiterate rant here]"
Ah right.
listen up!
Anyone who has any concerns whatever about Keir Starmer's pathetic abstention of a leadership so far; his broken pledges; his obsession with factionalist infighting; his campaign of abuse against left-wing and socially progressive Jews; his repeated purges of left-wing and progressive voices out of his shadow cabinet; his abject failure to hold the Tory government to account; his repeated abstentions on sickeningly anti-progressive pieces of Tory legislation like the Rape Cops Bill; or even just his robotic lack of charisma.
You can all piss off too!
"I will always vote for [party] out of loyalty"
Nobody doubts that tribal voters exist, but has anyone ever uttered such an unconvincing phrase to say that they won't tactically vote to get the Tories out?
I guess if we're expected to believe that people said "blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair jabber jabber Iraq". we're expected to believe anything!
And as for pointless tribally motivated voting, what about all the liberal capitalist dweebs who went out and belligerently voted Lib-Dem and Green in ultra tight Labour-Tory marginals in 2019, despite Labour caving in and offering them the sore loser referendum they said they wanted?
Loads of these people, who helped create a Tory mega-majority, have now quietly thrown away their "People's Vote" outfits, and come back wearing "Progressive Alliance" garb, to tell other people how to vote!
Conclusion
Given the shockingly outdated and unrepresentative Westminster voting system, I tend to agree with tactical voting, and have voted tactically myself in the past.
People like me should be the natural target audience for a campaign like The Progressive Alliance, but for whatever reason they've decided to tell me to "piss off" four different ways, taken me for a gullible idiot, and insulted my intelligence, all in a single infographic!
They're clearly more concerned with laundering the reputations of their liberal capitalist idols like Tory Blair, the Lib-Dem austerity enablers, the right-wing Labour saboteurs, and the democracy-defying CUK squatters, who all helped turn people away from progressive politics in different ways. and installed Boris Johnson in Downing Street, than in actually building a broad coalition of progressive and left-wing people.
If our hopes of a better future rely on the strategic capabilities of this lot, we're clearly doomed to Tory rule forever!
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If you're the kind of person who sincerely believe that the Brexit issue is far more important than other pressing concerns like the climate crisis, or combating the ruinous austerity fanaticism that caused Brexit in the first place, then the idea of a Remain Alliance between pro-EU parties makes some kind of sense.
However any such Remain Alliance must come with the obvious caveat that the Remain Alliance is only used to defend Remain parliamentary seats already held, and to unseat pro-Brexit MPs.
Unfortunately the newly announced Remain Alliance between the Lib-Dems, Greens, and Plaid Cymru goes a lot further, and actually targets the seats of a load of pro-EU MPs too.
One such target is the Labour MP for Warrington South Faisal Rashid, who holds a tight majority of 2,500 over the Tories (48.4% to 44.3%), with the Lib-Dem candidate coming in a distant 3rd place in 2017, with just 5% of the vote.
Rashid is a vocal anti-Brexit advocate, who wants another EU referendum, and represents a party that is committed to a Final Say referendum, opposes austerity fanaticism, and shares Green party views on de-privatisation of vital public services and infrastructure like the railways, water supply, national grid, NHS, and education system.
Rashid is also very vocal on the climate crisis, and in June 2019 he strongly urged Warrington Council to declare a climate emergency.
He sounds exactly like the kind of figure Green Party supporters should feel comfortable voting for, but according to the terms of the new Remain Alliance, the Greens are supporting the Lib-Dems in Warrington South, which seems like a very odd strategy for an alliance intended to put as many Brexit-sceptic MPs in parliament as possible.
If the Remain Alliance does succeed in their ambition to unseat Rashid, there are only two possible outcomes.
One is that the extraordinarily unlikely scenario where the Lib-Dem candidate comes from nowhere to achieve an unprecedented 40%+ swing, meaning a green, anti-austerity, democratic socialist who supports Remain is replaced pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, welfare-vandalising orthodox neoliberal who supports Remain.
Well, hooray for the Remain Alliance!
The other, vastly more likely outcome is that the Lib-Dems and their fellow Remain Alliance plotters split the anti-Tory vote, and let the pro-Brexit Tory take the seat (a scenario which would only necessitate a 4% swing).
Erm, hooray for the Remain Alliance???
Another ludicrous target for the Remain Alliance is Stephan Morgan in Portsmouth South, who is a vehement advocate of another referendum, who swears he'll lead the Remain campaign in Portsmouth if the referendum happens. He won the seat from the Tories in 2017 by 41% to 38%, the Lib-Dem the Remain Alliance is backing came a distant 3rd on 17%.
Again the most likely scenario is handing the seat back to a pro-Brexit Tory, with the remote outside chance of switching out an anti-austerity, anti-privatisation democratic socialist Remainer, for a pro-austerity, pro-privatisation neoliberal Remainer.
In what world does this make any sense whatever?
The reason the Greens are supporting this absolute lunacy is obvious. It's a quid pro quo.
In return for the Lib-Dems standing aside in a few Green target seats like the Isle of Wight, and Bristol West (which is also held by a vocal Labour Remainer, Thangam Debbonaire by the way) they're going to help the Lib-Dems sabotage other Labour Remainer MPs like Faisal Rashid up and down the country, helping them turn Labour Remain red, to Tory Brexit blue.
From a pragmatic perspective helping the Lib-Dems remove pro-remain, anti-austerity, environmentalist Labour MPs from parliament looks like dreadful self-sabotage from a wider green perspective, but from a narrow party political perspective it means a shot at increasing their representation from one seat out of 650 to maybe two, so it's a price they're apparently willing to pay!
The most charitable explanation possible is that all the Brexit chaos has given the Green Party a horrible dose of Brexit Brain Worms, rendering them incapable of thinking straight.
A less charitable explanation is that they're willing to embrace the notoriously untrustworthy Lib-Dem neoliberals and help them shoot down pro-Remain Labour MPs up and down the country, purely because they're prioritising their narrow party political interest above the interests of the nation as a whole.
Whichever way you look at it, it's incredibly disappointing and divisive stuff from a political party that most left-wingers, social progressives, and Labour supporters tend to agree with on most issues.
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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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Under the circumstances the Green Party did pretty poorly at the European elections.
Yes I know I'm going to have to explain this in light of the fact that they won their biggest share of the vote since they bagged 14.5% in 1989, and their most seats ever with 7 MEPs, and got the wonderful Magid Magid into the European Parliament to represent the Yorkshire and Humber region that was electing the BNP there just 10 years ago.
12% of the vote is an improvement on the Green performance last time around, but under the unique political circumstances it's actually a pretty poor showing.
The Greens should have done really well because they're unambiguously on the progressive side of the three most burning political issues of our time.
Their name alone is evidence enough that they're serious about combating environmental degradation, they've been campaigning against the blight of ruinous Tory austerity since well before Jeremy Corbyn took Labour back from the orthodoc neoliberals and put an end to the austerity-imitating gibberish that lost them the 2015 General Election, and they're unambiguously opposed to Brexit.
Add in the stuff like the Extinction Rebellion protests, the School Strikes for Climate Action, ever growing awareness of the mess we're making of this planet, and we've got to be left asking if 2019 wasn't the time for the Greens to break through into the political mainstream, when will it be?
There's plenty of ground for arguing that their obsession with an "another roll of the dice" referendum is a massive waste of Green political energy, but there's no doubt that if you're a social progressive who really wants to stay in the EU so much you'll gamble everything on a referendum despite the Tories still in power to rig the whole thing in their own favour, then the Greens are obviously the ones for you (unless you're from Scotland or Wales where the SNP and Plaid Cymru also have justifiable claims to represent progressive Brexit-sceptics).
But somehow the Greens got absolutely steamrollered by the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, welfare-vandalising, wage-repressing, infrastructure-underinvesting Lib-Dem neoliberals who were the venal self-serving charlatans who wilfully helped the Tories lay the groundwork for Brexit to happen in the first place by trashing our wages, public services, social safety net, and living standards between 2010 and 2015.
Somehow, out of the minority of those who could be arsed to vote in the Euro elections (just 35.6% bothered), the majority of the anti-Brexit vote went to the disgustingly unrepentant Lib-Dems, rather than to the Green Party who had exactly the same anti-Brexit stance, but with absolutely none of the austerity blood on their hands.
The rise of the Greens in Germany puts the UK Greens' failure into perspective. Despite no Brexit bandwagon to leap onto the German Greens doubled their vote to 20.5% and bagged 21 MEPs, meaning they finished in second place behind Angela Merkel's centre-right CDU.
In the days after the election the German Greens have risen further with the post-Euro election bounce lifting them to the top of an opinion poll for the first time in their history on 27%.
Meanwhile in the UK it's the austerity-enforcing, wage-repressing, renewable subsidy-slashing, public service-trashing, welfare-vandalising, Royal Mail-privatising Lib-Dems who are gleefully basking in the post-Euro election bounce at the top of outlier polls.
It's difficult to get down to why the Green campaign has faltered so badly in the UK, when all the factors seemed to be pointing in their favour. But as someone who is broadly supportive of their party (especially on stuff like opposing austerity, protecting the environment, and renationalisation) I'll have a go:
Mainstream media bias: The Greens have fought tooth and nail for years to try to get fairer representation in the mainstream media, but to no avail. They're continually locked out of election debates, denied party political broadcasts, and treated as a minor party, even though they went into the 2019 Euro elections with triple the seats of the supposedly bigger Lib-Dems.
Leadership structure: The Greens have an unusual joint leadership between Siân Berry and Jonathan Bartley instead of one high profile leader. It's possible that this unusual leadership structure make them seem more like well meaning political amateurs than a serious political party. However this doesn't explain the disparity between the UK and German Greens because they too have a shared leadership structure. Perhaps the polarised hyper-partisan, and divisive nature of British politics means Brits are somewhat less open to ideas like shared leadership and compromise?
Leadership figures: One of the German Greens' co-leaders is Robert Habeck who is an almost ubiquitous figure in the German media and a former government minister in the Schleswig-Holstein region, and the other co-leader is Annalena Baerbock who is a member of the Bundestag (the main German parliament). Neither Jonathan Bartley nor Siân Berry have anything like as high profiles (Bartley is a local councillor in Lambeth, and Berry has a seat in the London Assembly which is an institution barely mentioned by ordinary folk in London, let alone us yokels outside of it). Unfortunately Caroline Lucas is still the only major figure in the UK Green Party ranks, but it's understandable that she wants to concentrate on her duties in parliament rather than acting as party figurehead.
Naivety: All the stuff about forming electoral pacts with the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters before the Euro elections was extremely poor from a Green perspective. Instead of positioning themselves as making a more or less identical/interchangeable anti-Brexit offer as the two overtly neoliberal Remain parties, they should have strongly and clearly distanced themselves and made it clear that they were the only UK-wide Remain party willing to address the actual causes of Brexit in the first place (austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, welfare vandalism, infrastructure underinvestment ...). Presenting themselves as Lib-Dem allies in the fight against Brexit allowed the ever cynical Lib-Dems to use "tactical voting guides" to lure people into abandoning the Greens and voting Lib-Dem as the supposedly biggest Remain party. Failure to heed the basic political axiom "never trust the Lib-Dems" is remarkably naive stuff.
General antipathy: One factor that it would be easy to overlook is the general UK public antipathy towards the Greens. We've all seen people dismissing them as mung bean-weaving, sandal-wearing, hippy-dippy fruitcakes over the years. Maybe the Greens seriously need to think about toughening up their image as seasoned battlers in the existential crisis that out-of-control capitalism is inflicting on our planet?
Lack of clarity: By presenting themselves as being basically inter-changeable Remain protest votes with the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters, the Greens threw away their chance to explain why they were the better alternative and handed all the political momentum to the more establishment-friendly Lib-Dems.
Poor strategy: In the final days before the EU election practically all I noticed from Green activists on Twitter were efforts to pinch left-leaning Labour voters by attacking Labour's Brexit position, rather than focusing on convincing the sizeable and defined Remain demographic to vote Green instead of the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems. Instead of appealing to a large well defined demographic as the best option with no austerity baggage, they were wasting their efforts on desperately trying to erode a final few Labour votes from a party already reduced down to its core support.
Ineffectiveness: Even though a lot Green effort was expended on trying to pinch Labour votes during the the final days of the Euro election campaign, the evidence suggests that far more Labour supporters deserted to the pro-austerity Lib-Dems than to the anti-austerity Greens! If the Greens failed to even convince Labour deserters to back them instead of the pro-austerity Lib-Dem Tory collaborators, they clearly failed quite spectacularly. Someone within the Green ranks would have to conduct the autopsy but letting millions of left and centre-left votes slip through their fingers to be gobbled up by the orthodox neoliberal Lib-Dems was a disaster.
Differences in the traditional left: The traditional left SPD party in Germany has completely lost its way and people are crying out for an alternative. Jeremy Corbyn has revitalised the Labour Party, binned the orthodox neoliberal tripe that was driving voters away in their millions, and returned to genuine democratic socialism. Even though the low-turnout Euro Elections were incredibly poor for Labour, they haven't been floundering as badly as the German Social Democrat Party for the past four years. Coming up against a stronger traditional left than the German Greens still doesn't explain how the UK Greens let so many votes slip through their fingers to the Lib-Dems though.
Brexit fixation: Perhaps the German Greens did so well not despite the lack of a Brexit bandwagon to jump on, but because of it? Perhaps jumping on the exact same People's Vote bandwagon as the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters ended up obscuring and diluting the core Green policies that differentiate them from the pro-austerity neoliberal parties they decided to side with? Perhaps Brexit brain worms cost the Greens their best ever chance at making the breakthrough to the political big time?
It would be a futile task to try to identify one single reason that the Greens faltered and fumbled millions of potential votes through their fingers in the UK to the benefit of a bunch of unrepentant neoliberals, while the Greens surged to position themselves as the 2nd party in German politics, but it's important for UK Greens to avoid celebrating marginal gains when they should have been making significant headway, and for them to get a feel of what went so wrong so they can learn from their mistakes.
If you've got any other ideas about why the Greens faltered so badly, feel free to share them in the comments.
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.
Before Labour finally quit pushing the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation neoliberal orthodoxy with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in 2015 I was a big fan of the Green Party because they were the only major party in England that refused to buy into Tory austerity fanaticism (Scotland had the SNP and Wales had Plaid Cymru), but in recent years they've really lost their way.
Nothing demonstrates this Green directionlessness more than their dalliance with pro-austerity neoliberals as part of the campaign for an "another roll of the dice" referendum.
The case for another referendum looks questionable in its own right, given the possibility that Remain could easily conspire to lose again and end up creating an inescapable double-mandate for Brexit, but the loyalty pledges to Theresa May from the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters to keep the Tories in power while they roll the dice again makes it even more risky, because a Remainer loss under these circumstances would end up creating a double-mandate for the worst kind of hard-right, economy-tanking, job-destroying, Tory administered nuclear Brexit.
Whether you agree with the campaign for another roll of the dice or not, the anti-austerity Greens make very odd bedfellows with the Lib-Dem austerity enablers who caused Brexit in the first place by helping the Tories to trash our living standards, ruin our public services, under-invest in infrastructure, health, housing and education, vandalise the social safety net, and impose the longest sustained collapse in the value of our wages in centuries.
And then the CUK squatters are even stranger bedfellows for the Greens, given that they're promising to "change" politics by ... err ... promoting more of the same pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, millionaire-bankrolled neoliberalism that got us in this mess in the first place, even after the disastrous consequences of these policies are now all too clear.
Somehow the Greens have decided that collusion with these toxic austerity ideologues is in their best interests. But when you decide that it's a good idea to swim with piranhas, it's a little over-optimistic to expect not to get bitten.
So now the Remain campaigner and vocal advocate of Lib-Dem style "centrist" neoliberal orthodoxy Gina Miller has helped to launch a "helpful" new Remain United tool to tell Remainers how to vote in the upcoming regional elections, and somehow, they've calculated that Remain supporters in the South West should abandon support for the sitting Green MEP Molly Scott Cato, and vote Lib-Dem instead.
In London where the Greens have another MEP, guess what, the "Remain United" campaign is advising Green voters to ditch their party and vote Lib-Dem instead in the hope that the Lib-Dems nick their seat!
And in Yorkshire and the Humber where the Green's leading candidate for one of the six available seats is the fantastic Magid Magid, once again the Remain United advice is to abandon the Greens and vote Lib-Dem.
And in the 10 seat region of South East England where the Greens already have a sitting MEP, and have the best mathematical chance of retaining a seat, guess what the "Remain United" advice is?
Well it's obvious, just like every single region of England, it's to abandon the Green Party and vote Lib-Dem so that the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems can wipe the Greens off the map and bag themselves two seats in the region!
This cynical attempt to use the Tory Brexit farce as an excuse to pinch Green votes on behalf of the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems (who helped create Brexit in the first place) is precisely what you's expect from a bunch of self-serving neoliberals, but then somehow the Greens have been too naive to see this threat coming, and by willingly colluding with these cynical opportunists, they've been wilfully handing out the nails that are being used to seal them in their own political coffins.
In fact they're still actively colluding with the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters over a plan to field a joint Remainer candidate in the Peterborough by-election!
The Greens are still colluding with these nasty neoliberal charlatans even as they're being stabbed in the back by them.
If this cynical effort to use Brexit to turn anti-austerity Green voters into pro-austerity Lib-Dems succeeds, and the Greens end up getting completely wiped out at the Euro elections, they'll unfortunately only have themselves to blame.
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Whatever your position on the Brexit spectrum, it's impossible for anyone with rudimentary critical thinking skills to deny that there are loads of obnoxious and downright dishonest people on both sides of this increasingly polarised debate, and that the further towards the polar extremes, the higher the liar and fanatic intensity becomes.
Brexit snake oil
The biggest lie of all during the 2016 EU referendum debate came from the Brexit snake oil sellers who opportunistically used the dire consequences of ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma as a weapon to attack immigrants and the EU with.
It's absolutely obvious that it was six years of callous and divisive domestic government policy that was causing the collapse in living standards that these opportunists weaponised to push their agenda.
Far-right Brextremists (many of them Tory MPs who actively voted in favour of all of these devastating policies) cynically weaponised this collapse in living standards to falsely point the finger of blame at immigrants and the EU.
The snake oil solution they were selling was that quitting the EU and abolishing our own rights to Freedom of Movement would magically resolve all problems like stagnating wages, failing public services, unaffordable housing, violent crime, huge NHS waiting lists, and all of the other austerity-related ills caused by the Tory government's austerity fanaticism.
Sadly millions of people fell for it and bought this Brexit snake oil.
The failure of centrism
The reason that the far-right Brextremists managed to get away with flogging this ludicrous blame-switching snake oil is the abject failure of centrism to oppose this destructive Tory austerity ideology.
For five years between 2010 and 2015 the Liberal Democrats actively supported all of the disastrous Tory austerity policies that caused the living standards collapse. They couldn't very well turn around in 2016 and point out that the real blame lay with the destructive austerity policies they helped the Tories enforce rather than immigrants and the EU without demonstrating their own culpability. So they sat on their hands and just let the far-right Brextremists sell their immigrant-blaming snake oil.
The right-wing orthodox neoliberal centrist faction of the Labour Party had a very similar problem because during the 2015 General Election they adopted a ludicrous "austerity lite" policy of pathetically imitating Tory austerity dogma rather than actively opposing it.
They couldn't reverse position completely the very next year and point out that Tory austerity dogma was to blame for collapsing living standards, not immigrants and the EU, without making themselves look like a bunch of U-turning idiots.
Furthermore any centrist conversion to anti-austerity positioning in order to undermine the blame-shifting lies of the Brextremists would have completely validated Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour-left who had opposed Tory austerity fanaticism from the very beginning.
The Labour right-wingers knew that if they admitted that austerity was a con in order to denounce the snake oil of the far-right Brextremist political quack doctors, they'd end up actively validating the man they were itching to get rid of, as demonstrated by the Anyone But Corbyn coup they launched immediately after the Brexit vote came in.
They chose not to counter the Brextremists' blame-shifting lies because their primary over-riding priority wasn't preventing Brexit at all, it was plotting their coup to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn and re-establish neoliberal control of the Labour Party leadership.
Centrist arsenic tablets
The abject centrist failure to criticise the Brexit snake oil sellers was bad enough, but now that we're stuck in the middle of this interminable Brexit farce these appalling people have actually turned to the same kind of political quack doctor tactics as the Brextremists who created brexit in the first place.
Centrists like the Liberal Democrats and the CUK squatters have now set themselves up as quack doctors too, promising that their disgusting political concoctions of neoliberalism, austerity, and privatisation are a magical cure to this Brexit ailment.
They're attempting to sell the exact policies that created the Brexit disease in the first place as their magical quack doctor cures to the Brexit problem!
There's absolutely no denying the fact that the Lib-Dems are a disgraceful bunch of pro-austerity pro-privatisation neoliberals (just look at their disgraceful track record in government voting through every nasty Tory austerity policy, every deeply illiberal Tory assault on freedom, and every rip-off Tory privatisation scam).
The CUK squatters are just as bad, if not worse. Their economics spokesperson is Chris Leslie (one of the main architects of Labour's election-losing "austerity-lite" strategy at the 2015 General Election), Anna Soubry described the ruinous living standards-wrecking policies of the coalition years as "marvellous", their Transport, Environment, and Energy spokesperson is the private water industry lobbyist Angela Smith, and they've just hitched their boat to the pro-privatisation neoliberal EPP group in the European Parliament.
What makes CUK perhaps even worse than the Lib-Dems is that they know perfectly well that they're pushing "more of the same" - more austerity - more privatisation - more neoliberal orthodoxy - more imperialist warmongering - but they've given themselves the Orwellian reality-reversal of a name Change UK.
The centrist Lib-Dems and CUK squatters are selling the austerity arsenic tablets that actually cause Brexit in the first place as their wonderful miracle cure to the Brexit problem!
Anyone who falls for this quackery because they love their soothing mouth words about opposing Brexit is wilfully drinking this toxic centrist arsenic pills even though their hair is already falling out and they've started pissing blood as a consequence.
Avoid the quackery
Fortunately there are other political parties opposing hard-right Tory Brexit besides the neoliberal arsenic pills quacks.
The Greens, SNP (Scotland), and Plaid Cymru (Wales) have all vehemently opposed austerity fanaticism, privatisation mania, public service cuts, and the rest of the hard-right economic vandalism that caused the Brexit vote in the first place since long before the 2016 EU referendum.
Their policies on Brexit is pretty much identical to the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters, in that they want another roll of the dice in a do-or-die final say referendum showdown between Remain and a hard-right Tory administered Brexit. But they come with the added bonus of opposing ruinous austerity fanaticism.
Perhaps putting Remain up against a hard-right Tory version of Brexit will increase the chances of a Remain win, perhaps it won't, but the possibility of creating a devastating and inescapable double-mandate for Brexit can't be discounted, especially given the complacency, condescension, and downright incompetence of the remain campaign back in 2016.
Labour's position is different. They want to create a fail safe Brexit with access to the Customs Union and Single Market, no border in Northern Ireland, and cooperation on science, the environment, and security. Once they've disarmed Brexit to make it as economically harmless as possible. Then they're willing to put it to a final say referendum against Remain (which is a policy agreed on at Labour Conference and supported by the majority of Labour Party members).
Labour have changed direction dramatically since the unbelievably inept austerity-lite betrayal of the Labour centrists in 2015. The two chief architects of this nonsense are gone (Ed Balls lost his seat and Chris Leslie is dictating the economic stance of the CUK squatters), and Corbyn has moved Labour to an economically literate anti-austerity, pro-investment economic position.
So if you're going to vote against the far-right Brexit snake oil salesmen in the upcoming European Parliament elections (like you should), make sure you choose sensibly, and try to avoid actively endorsing the equally repulsive arsenic tablet vendors on the Remain side of the debate.
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.
