Meet the "more of the same" party

The Independent Group of 11 MPs who are squatting in parliament, refusing to call by-elections, and pinning their political hopes on begging Theresa May for an opportunity to prop up her pro-austerity government have announced the positions they've given themselves, and you couldn't have picked more inappropriate roles for several of them if you'd actively tried.

Heidi Allen - Welfare, social care, pensions, and business

Source: Heidi Allen on They Work For You

Heidi Allen is one of the three ex-Tories to join the parliamentary squatter group, and by putting her in charge of welfare and social care this lot are sending a very clear message to their financial backers that they're intent on continuing the savage welfare policies that Allen repeatedly voted in favour of during her time on the Tory benches.

Any "centrists" hoping this new group might adopt a more humane approach than the Tories to issues like disability, social security, and social care will surely be sorely disappointed to see this position handed to a Tory with a proven track record of voting in favour of savage welfare cuts and crippling reduced local government funding in order to fund lavish tax cuts on corporations and the super-rich.

Greedy businessmen hoping for more unearned handouts on the other hand, they'll be punching the air with delight that this new group is intent on continuing the same old "something for nothing" Tory agenda, and actively begging Theresa May to let them prop up her shambles of a government.

Mike Gapes - Foreign affairs and defence

It's difficult to think of a less suitable individual to take responsibility for foreign affairs than the unapologetic warmonger Mike Gapes.

This is a man who voted in favour of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and then repeatedly voted against investigations into the ensuing catastrophe.

The Iraq war caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, triggered a refugee crisis of millions, and created a lawless power vacuum that eventually gave birth to ISIS.

Mike Gapes refuses to accept any moral responsibility whatever for any of this, and remains 100% unapologetic.

Gapes is also a big fan of the tyrannical, homophobic, misogynists, head-chopping, journalist-dismembering, terrorism-spreading Saudi war criminals, and was one of 13 MPs to receive a share of over £100,000 of gifts and freebies lavished on British politicians by the Saudi regime in 2018.

Gapes knows that the Saudis use British weapons to commit war crimes in Yemen because he was a member of the foreign affairs select committee that admitted that this was the case, but he simply doesn't care.

By appointing Gapes to their foreign affairs and defence brief the group are sending a very clear signal to arms manufacturers and the military-industrial complex that they're setting up as a pro-war, pro-imperialist party that is willing to turn a blind eye to the sickening war crimes of disgustingly tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia in order to flog them £billions more in weapons.

Chris Leslie - Treasury and trade

One of Ed Miliband's biggest mistakes as Labour leader was to allow a bunch of hard-right austerity fetishists rule the shadow treasury which resulted in Labour's ridiculously unappealing "austerity-lite" agenda that ruined their chances at the 2015 general election.

The 'thinking' behind this ludicrous policy was that Labour could pinch a few thousand soft-Tory votes in marginal constituencies by imitating ruinous Tory austerity rather than actively opposing it. What they clearly failed to factor into this mind-bogglingly stupid plan was the fact that an explicitly pro-austerity agenda would end up driving away vast numbers of natural Labour voters for every "soft-Tory" they managed to entice.

Hence Labour's share of the vote collapsing from 35% in 2010 to just 29% in 2015, despite the Tories overseeing unprecedented collapses in workers' wages and living standards, trashing Britain's AAA credit rating, and spectacularly missing all of their economic targets!

Had Labour actually opposed devastating Tory austerity dogma in 2015, Labour would probably have beaten the Tories, Ed Miliband would have become Prime Minister, austerity would be over, Jeremy Corbyn would still be an obscure Labour backbencher, and there's be no such thing as Brexit!

Chris Leslie was one of the ludicrous hard-right wonks in the shadow treasury who helped to lay the groundwork for Brexit by outright refusing to oppose the Tory austerity madness that was trashing wages, living standards, and public services, and he's still a pro-austerity fanatic now, even years after right-leaning international bodies like the IMF and OECD have rejected austerity dogma as an economically damaging ideology.

Appointing a hard-right economic illiterate like Chris Leslie to their economics brief is a very clear signal to the mega-rich beneficiaries of Tory austerity dogma that this group intends to continue the Tory agenda of using austerity as a means of transferring ever more wealth from to poor and ordinary to corporations and the mega-rich.

Angela Smith - Transport, Local government, housing, energy, environment, rural affairs

Angela Smith is such a talentless incompetent that she managed to completely screw up the biggest day of her entire political career by referring to British Asians as "funny tinge" on live TV on the Independent Group launch day.

Afterwards she excused this racist gaffe by repeatedly claiming that she was "very tired" which is actually significantly more offensive than the original gaffe because it implies that racist attitudes are somehow so natural and inherent that they accidentally slip out when people are tired, drunk, or stressed.

The idea that we're all inherently racists and it only depends how tired, drunk, or stressed we get before we start spouting bigoted racist slurs is absolutely extraordinary, but not quite as extraordinary as this group putting a pro-privatisation ideologue and lobbyist for private water companies in charge of their transport, energy, water, and housing policies.

With a hard-right pro-privatisation ideologue running this huge brief, it's absolutely clear that this group are committed to defying the public will by cementing private profiteering ownership of the railways, national grid, water companies, and other public services.

Putting Smith in charge of this brief is a clear signal to the private profiteers who are gouging vast profits out of our housing, public services, and utilities that this group is absolutely committed to delivering "more of the same". 

Anna Soubry - Brexit and justice

Of all of the squatter MPs Anna Soubry is perhaps the most distasteful because of her outright and glaring displays of hypocrisy.

When she's not praising the devastating 2010-15 austerity policies that laid the groundwork for Brexit by collapsing UK living standards as "marvellous" Soubry often talks a good talk, but when it comes to the actions her parliamentary voting record stands as absolute proof that she repeatedly does precisely the opposite.

Take her continual grandstanding on Brexit to pose as some kind of noble Brexit-critic which is completely contradicted by her actions. She poses as a Brexit-sceptic, but in parliament she's repeatedly voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right interpretation of Brexit.

Soubry's Brexit collusion including votes in favour of May's shambolic Withdrawal Bill in January 2018, votes against opposition amendments to protect workers' rights, environmental laws, equality rules, consumer protections and food standards, and even a vote of confidence in Theresa May after she humiliated Britain by postponing the scheduled "meaningful vote" for no reason other than the fact she knew she was going to lose it.

It's not just talking about opposing Brexit while repeatedly voting in favour of it either. When it comes to police cuts and violent crime she's also proven herself a despicable hypocrite too.

In response to Theresa May's ludicrous assertion that her policy of getting rid of 21,000 police and slashing police budgets has no relation with soaring rates of violent crime, Soubry stated that "of course there's a link between policing numbers and crime".

This Tweet is an admission that she knew that slashing police budgets would end up increasing rates of serious and violent crime all along, but she repeatedly voted in favour of Theresa May's ideologically driven assault on the police service regardless of the dire and deadly consequences she knew would happen. 

She blatantly put loyalty to the Tory party above the lives of violent crime victims, but now she's abandoned that party loyalty as worthless to join the parliamentary squatters, demonstrating that the victims of the violent crime wave she helped Theresa May to create are actually less than worthless in her estimations!

And she's got the absolute brass neck to start carping from the sidelines about the appalling consequences of the austerity fanaticism that she repeatedly and knowingly voted in favour of as if she's now some kind of heroic saviour!

Putting one of the most brazen hypocrites in the whole of parliament in charge of their Brexit brief is a signal to their financial backers that the group are actually extremely flexible on their Brexit position. If the secretive millionaires who are bankrolling this group want them to go all out for a referendum then that's what they'll do, but if the bankrollers decide that a hard-right Tory Brexit is actually in their interests, that's obviously what Soubry and the squatters will eventually vote in favour of.

Change Politics!

The parliamentary squatters' "change politics" slogan is every bit as Orwellian anything the Tory government have come up with over the years ("all in this together" - while transferring as much wealth as possible from the majority to the mega-rich minority, "making work pay" while overseeing the longest sustained collapse in workers wages in recorded history and slashing in-work benefits, "strong and stable" as their campaign slogan during the most shambolic and needless election in modern British history ...).

They repeatedly claim that they want to "change politics" but their actions demonstrate that on all manner of crucial issues from ruinous austerity dogma to war-mongering imperialism, and from privatisation mania to welfare policy, these are people who desperately want to keep things exactly the same.

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OR

Centrists: Your anti-Brexit heroes are total frauds

The gullibility of some people never ceases to astound.

Even when it's absolutely obvious that a breakaway group of right-wing Labour MPs and Tories has absolutely nothing to do with Brexit, and everything to do with a desperate last-ditch effort to divide the Labour vote and keep the Tory austerity agenda rolling on, huge numbers of people who consider themselves rational, suddenly begin falling over themselves to continue believing the lies and deceptions of a bunch of egotistical fabulists.

If you look at the facts rather than mindlessly and uncritically absorbing mainstream media propaganda tropes, the entire justification for the existence of the Independent Group is obviously a fraud.

The ex-Labour component said they had to quit Labour because the party wasn't doing enough to oppose Brexit, and the ex-Tory component said they had to quit the Tories because they were in hock to Jacob Rees-Mogg's ERG Brextremists and the bigoted DUP sectarians that Theresa May bribed into propping up her shambles of a government.

But the evidence proves this to be absolutely false. 

On January 29th Labour tabled a Brexit amendment proposing another referendum as an option in order to prevent Theresa May and the ERG Brextremists driving the UK economy off a cliff, but the three ex-Tory members of the squatter group of MPs all actively sided with Theresa May, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, and the 10 DUP sectarians to vote against this amendment [source].

If you ever needed absolute proof that opposing Brexit was never their true priority, the fact that these three voted against Labour's amendment 307 aimed at stopping Theresa May's reckless game of brinkmanship with the nation's future less than a month before becoming political squatters is it, isn't it?

And the fact that the ex-Labour component have joined up with these outrageous ex-Tories who less than a month previously were actively siding with the ERG Brextremsists and the DUP to prevent Labour's efforts to oppose Tory Brexit is proof that the priority isn't opposing Brexit for them either.

So if their stated justification is an easily demonstrable lie, what is the ulterior agenda?

Well the ex-Labour squatter MP Gavin Shuker (the one who decided to set their group up as a private company rather than a political party in order to hide who is bankrolling them) said that their primary objective was begging Theresa May to form a pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-welfare coalition with them. "I'm willing to extend confidence and supply to your government so it doesn’t fall over" being his exact words.

The ex-Labour squatter MP Chris Leslie (one of the right-wing idiots who came up with the staggeringly unappealing austerity-lite posturing that trashed Labour's election chances at the 2015 general election) went even further, saying that the group would refuse to do everything in their power to stop the Tory Brexit chaos, because if stopping hard-right Tory Brexit meant giving Jeremy Corbyn another shot at removing Theresa May from power, they'd vote with the Tories to prevent that from happening!

The ex-Tory squatter MP Anna Soubry made things absolutely clear when she used the word "marvellous" to describe the Coalition austerity-enforcing, wage-repressing, public service-wrecking, social security-slashing, privatisation obsessed dogma of the 2010-2015 period that collapsed living standards and created the wave of public fury that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line in 2016.

Instead of looking at the austerity disease that caused Brexit in the first place, Soubry is pretending to treat the symptoms (while actively voting against another referendum that may have helped to treat the symptoms) and actually continuing to praise the toxic Tory austerity dogma that caused the symptoms in the first place as "marvellous"!

And then Soubry went on the television to argue that she should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party and their ruinous austerity dogma from under the umbrella of the Independent Group, and her fellow squatter MP Chuka Umunna actually sat next to her nodding and agreeing that members of his absurd vanity project should be allowed to actively campaign for the Tories and promote Tory austerity dogma!

The obvious problem is that the hopelessly gullible are incredibly difficult to convince, because in order to see the squatter MPs as the cynical opportunists hiding a pro-Tory pro-austerity, anti-worker, anti-investment agenda behind a cloak of Brexit rhetoric, people need to accept that they were foolish to take these politicians from deep within the heart of the Westminster establishment class at their word, and admit that this gullibility is why they got so easily duped.

If we've learned anything from the last few years in politics it's that huge numbers of people would rather ignore the facts and evidence to continue believing absolute nonsense, rather than take the ego hit of accepting they got conned.

So even when we point out that the squatter group's entire justification for existing is a fraud, and that they're just a bunch of austerity fetishists openly scrounging for places in a Tory-led pro-austerity coalition, people's egos won't allow them to admit that they were hopelessly gullible rubes to ever fall for it in the first place.

But then the gossamer-like transparency of their fraud is so fragile that it's enough to make us suspect that Brexit isn't actually the main issue with a lot of these "centrists" at all, and that the actual unstated priority all along has been an absolute desperation to keep the Tories in power so they can carry on brutally punishing the poor and disabled, trashing ordinary workers' wages, gutting public services, and throttling Britain's economic potential with their toxic austerity dogma like they have been doing for the last 9 years.

The Independent Group is not a brave new challenge to the political orthodoxy, it's people from deep within the political orthodoxy desperately hawking "more of the same" under the guise of opposing the hard-right Brexit that several of their group were voting in favour of less than a month previously!

So the only people left promoting these democracy-fearing squatter MPs are either hopelessly gullible idiots who just rote learn and repeat their political opinions without doing even the most basic fact-checking, or cynical and malicious propagandists who are deliberately hiding their pro-Tory pro-austerity agenda behind a crude veneer of anti-Brexit rhetoric.

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OR

Chuka Umunna thinks ex-Tory members of his vanity project should be able to keep campaigning for the Tory party!

With only slightly more than a month to go before Theresa May runs the clock down to the ruinous hard-right Brexit chaos that many in her party always wanted the Westminster establishment class coughed up an extraordinary response.

Instead of seeking to unify opposition to Theresa May's egregious delaying tactics, and outrageous threat to trash the British economy with a "no deal" meltdown if she doesn't get their own way, they decided to try to completely monopolise the political agenda with the launch of an extraordinary vanity project.

After leading us to the brink of calamity the Westminster establishment class have decided that their "solution" to their own mess is a fake political party (set up as a private company to avoid revealing who is bankrolling them) with no leader, no manifesto, no members, no internal democracy, no transparency, no respect for the constituencies that elected them, and no disciplinary procedures for dealing with racist MPs in their ranks!

For the first week the only policy they seem to have agreed on is that they'll beg Theresa May for the opportunity to prop up her pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-investment government in return for another EU referendum in which she gets to pick the options, the wording, and the timing of the ballot to her own personal advantage, and then actively promote hard-right Brexit from Downing Street! (can anyone remember how the AV referendum turned out for the Lib-Dems?).

But now we have another policy they seem to agree on, which is that the three ex-Tory members of the parliamentary squatter group should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party, and that if the Tory party don't want them to, then that's a sign of growing "intolerance" and "tribalism" in politics.

It's quite extraordinary these ludicrous self-publicists trying to redefine the longstanding political convention that party membership and affiliation is lost when members begin actively campaigning for rival political groups as some kind of uniquely modern kind of "intolerance".

Not only did the ex-Labour squatter MP Chuka Umunna sit beside Anna Soubry as she expressed her desire to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party, he actually agreed with her and joined in by suggesting the kind of rhetoric she should be using to decry the fact that the Tories don't actually want to be associated with a politician who quit their party to join a rival group!

We all know that Soubry is a massive fan of ruinous Tory austerity dogma, unprecedented wage repression, devastating public service cuts, and the barbaric treatment of sick and vulnerable people because she voted in favour of all of it, and then subsequently described it all as "marvellous" even after quitting the Tories to join the squatter group, so it's not really a surprise that she wants to carry on actively promoting these malicious Tory policies.

What's even more bonkers is that Chuka Umunna, who was elected on Labour's anti-austerity pro-investment manifesto in 2017 is now actively deriding the Tory party for not wanting his fellow squatter MP to campaign in favour of their austerity agenda!

Chuka's now such a fan of Tory austerity dogma that he thinks his fellow squatter MPs should have the right to continue campaigning for the Tory party while they pretend to be challengers to the establishment order!

Allowing your party members to actively campaign for a rival political party during elections is absolute idiocy, even by the standards of the right-wing pro-austerity centrists who devised Labour's lamentable "austerity-lite" strategy that lost Labour the 2015 general election.

This piss-witted wooly-minded, Tory-sympathising strategic ineptitude just goes to illustrate what a disaster it would have been if the likes of Chuka Umunna or Chris Leslie had ever got their hands on the Labour leadership doesn't it?

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all is that these egotistical opportunists from deep within the Westminster establishment class have tried to position themselves as some kind of new and exciting alternative to our "broken politics", but the only policies they seem to have agreed on in over a week is that they should beg Theresa May to form a pro-austerity coalition with the Tory party, and that members of their group should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party from under the tinge umbrella!

It's unbelievably Orwellian to pretend to be revolutionising Westminster politics, when your words and actions betray the fact that you're actually just a desperate rearguard action to keep the Tories in power, and keep their devastating austerity and wage repression policies alive.

 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

Is "tinge" offensive?

When the Labour-defecting MP Angela Smith made her weird and racist comments about British Asians being "funny tinge" on the big day these splitters had been plotting for months, this racist gaffe was obviously going to attract a lot of ridicule.

The mess was made even worse when Smith and her fellow splitter MPs decided that there should be no disciplinary process, and agreed the line that she only spouted racist remarks because she was "very tired" (is it just me or is 'I was only racist because I was tired' an extraordinary excuse that implies racism is an inherent attribute that is always there, but only leaks out under conditions like tiredness, stress, or drunkenness?).

For context this is a bunch of MPs who spent months bitterly attacking Labour's internal processes for dealing with bigotry, who then immediately give one of their own MPs a total free pass on a bizarre outburst of 1970s-style racism, revealing the fact that they have absolutely no disciplinary procedures at all for dealing with racism in the ranks!

This shockingly lax attitude to dealing with racism is hardly surprising from a group who all either abstained on, or actually voted in favour of Theresa may's racist "Hostile Environment" legislation that created the Windrush Scandal, and resulted in black Britons being deported to their deaths overseas.

This bizarre and hypocritical "funny tinge" episode was always going to provoke derision, and the word "tinge" has subsequently been used to ridicule the Independent Group.

Nicknames, satire, and political shorthand have always been a fundamental part of UK political discourse, but ever since "tinge" became a thing there have been an awful lot of people turning up in comments threads to cry that calling Independent Group "tinge" is unfair, improper, offensive, and even Trumpian!

Amazingly these are people who will willingly and uncritically accept the explanation that Angela Smith slurred British Asians as "funny tinges" because she was "very tired" but then get hyper-offended at other people using the term "tinge" to refer to the group of MPs who continue to side with Smith, and who fully accept her outrageous 'I was only racist because I was tired' excuse!

In this warped worldview it's apparently perfectly fine to refer to the "tinge" of British Asians' skin as being "funny", but then unspeakably offensive to use the word "tinge" as satirical shorthand for the group the woman who did this belongs to!

The same thing happens when you use the political shorthand "parliamentary squatters" to describe the fact these MPs have refused to call by-elections in their constituencies because they're a bunch of democracy-fearing cowards who know they'd lose their seats if they actually put their divisive and egotistical actions to the vote.

The reason pro-austerity centrists are getting so upset about the use of satirical shorthand like "tinge" and "squatter" to describe the Independent Group actually has nothing to do with these words being offensive in their own right, it's that these people know that satire and shorthand are very effective ways of influencing public opinion.

If nicknames and descriptions like "tinge" and "squatter" are allowed to stick, people will be continually reminded about this group's shockingly lax attitude to racism in their ranks and the fact that they're so terrified of democracy that they're treating the constituencies that elected them with contempt.

So they react with outrage, and attempt to impose a form of political correctness to police political satire (meta political correctness if you like) because they desperately want to stamp out the kind of political satire that satirises the opaquely funded, self-serving, Tory-facilitating, pro-austerity centrism they approve of.

These people are not upset because the words "tinge" and "squatter" are offensive, they're upset because they're effective.

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OR

"Politics is Broken" and guess what? Only they can save us!

The 11 (and counting) squatter MPs are all pushing this populist "politics is broken" trope as hard as they can, and positioning themselves as the heroic saviours.

In this article I'm going to look at the absolute chaos this "politics is broken" trope has already unleashed in three other major economies, before looking at the squatter MPs and their Independent Group (AKA 'Tinge') in more detail.

What I'm not going to do is argue that politics isn't broken. Britain wouldn't be in this farcical Brexit shit-show if the political establishment class hadn't put us here, and anti-vaxxers, grifters, and smarmy charlatans would never have got their hands on the levers of power in Italy, the United States, and France had their political systems not been flawed enough to allow them to either.

The point is that just because someone is repeatedly saying "politics is broken" doesn't mean you have to unquestioningly accept the way they position themselves as the only possible saviours.

Italy

The Five Star Movement is a populist anti-politics political party founded in 2009 by the stand-up comedian and polemicist Beppe Grillo.

This party has used the big tent political strategy to build a disparate coalition of all kinds of people with eurosceptics, anti-globalists, direct democracy advocates, and anti-vaxxers making up several of their core demographics.

Initially attractive to people on the left for their anti-establishment, environmentalist, and direct democracy advocacy, it soon became clear that this party was shifting rapidly towards the extreme-right.

This rightwards shift became absolutely indisputable when the 5 Star MEPs in the European Parliament joined Nigel Farage's rag-tag band of far-right eurosceptics in 2014, but unfortunately, as in Britain, Italians pay very little attention to the internal machinations of the European Parliament, so this collusion with far-right fanatics and outright fascists went virtually unnoticed.

The March 2018 Italian General Election was the huge M5S breakthrough moment, they won the most votes and landed enough seats to make them kingmakers in the Italian parliament. In May 2018 they created a coalition with the fascist party Lega Nord bringing fascism back to the Italian government for the first time in decades.

Since then the popularity of Five Star has waned (although they're still extremely popular with the anti-vaxxer movement for the radical anti-science policies they've enacted) while the fascists they enabled into power have soared in popularity from the 3rd most popular party to by far the most popular.

So the lesson from Italy is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get anti-vaxxers and fascism.

United States

I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain all that much about the last few years in US politics.

Donald Trump used "politics is Broken" style populism to position himself as the ideological saviour who was going to "drain the swamp" and "bring the jobs back" to places like the rust belt.

People believed him, he got elected, he immediately filled the top administration jobs with more Wall Street bankers, corporate stooges, and inherited wealth billionaires than any government in US history, then he set about attacking the health care and social security systems, and then he implemented the biggest tax handout for the mega-rich ever.

Nothing for the little people who voted him into power, and a massive windfall for his mega-rich mates. Who would have thought such a thing could happen when you elect billionaire from the international speculator class as your President?

So the lesson from the United States is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get Trumpism.

France

The situation in France is by far the most analogous to what's currently happening in Britain.

Emmanuel Macron was a right-wing neoliberal who embedded himself within the centre-left socialist party. 

As minister of economy and finance in the socialist government he set about implementing spectacularly unpopular labour reforms that triggered mass protests and trashed the government's popularity.

After destroying the socialist government from within he walked away to set up a shiny new "centrist" party called En Marche which used the whole "politics is broken" and "we are the saviours" schtick to great effect.

What better way to sell neoliberalism to the public than point out all of the failings of neoliberalism (several of which you were personally involved with), then present yourself as the shiny new alternative?

The problem of course is that when you promise people change, but then deliver more of the same but even worse in the form of massive tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich, fuel price increases loaded on the poor, even more ideological attacks on labour rights, deeply unpopular education reforms, and significantly collapsing living standards - people tend to get angry.

And when the French get angry they don't just unthinkingly vote in favour of a massive act of national self-harm and then grovellingly re-elect the bastards who trashed their living standards in the first place like us Brits do. They revolt, they protest, they riot.

France has been wracked by 14 consecutive weeks of mass protests and Macron has gone from winning the Presidency and an absolute landslide in the French parliament, to being the most unpopular President in French history with an approval rating only slightly better than cancer.

The most incredible thing about it is that he's managed to nose-dive his Presidency and reduce his nation to mass protests, riots, division, police brutality, and chaos in significantly less than two years!

So the lesson from France is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get absolute bloody chaos.

Britain

So the Independent Group ('Tinge') parliamentary squatters are pushing the exact same rhetoric as these other populist movements. "Politics is broken", and guess what? Only they can save us!

The problem of course is that every single one of them is an establishment insider to the core, with several of them being particularly to blame for the current shit-show.

Before the EU referendum Chuka Umunna added fuel to the anti-EU bonfire by fulminating against Freedom of Movement and scapegoating European immigrants. Now he actually expects us to believe him when he positions himself as the glorious saviour to the Brexit mess that he actually helped to create by actively turning Labour Party members against free movement!

Mike Gapes, Joan Ryan, and Ann Coffey are all responsible for the thing that created the biggest ever rift in trust between British people and the Westminster political establishment class. Despite the biggest public protests in British history in 2003, these people voted in favour of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq on the grounds of terrifying Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Hundreds of thousands died, millions were displaced, these terrifying WMDs were never found because they didn't exist, and Iraq was turned into a lawless terrorism breeding ground that eventually gave birth to the monstrosity of ISIS.

To make matters even worse these warmongers all repeatedly voted against holding an inquiry into their disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, and all hate Jeremy Corbyn on the basis that he was absolutely right that Iraq was going to be a disaster, and because they simply can't bear to admit that they have the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands.

Anna Soubry is one of the three Tories to have joined the squatters citing her opposition to Brexit as a factor in her decision, but incredibly she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right EU Withdrawal Act in January 2018 while Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour front bench opposed it! Some brave and principled Brexit saviour eh?
 

Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that all 11 of the squatter MPs are either austerity-enforcers who actually voted in favour of the ruinous Tory austerity dogma that trashed British living standards and created the massive wave of public anger that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line, or they're austerity abstainers from the right-wing fringe of the Labour Party who actually turned a blind eye to the suffering of millions of their fellow citizens to sit on their hands as the Tories voted though the biggest package of social security cuts in British history in 2015.

Anyone who imagines that this opportunistic group of pro-austerity fanatics, ideological contortionists, self-serving opportunists, and unrepentant warmongers from deep within the ranks of the political establishment class is going to fix our "broken politics" and lead a glorious British revival is clearly working at the same extraordinary level of delusion as those who voted in favour of Brexit thinking a Tory administered abandonment of the EU would immediately turn the UK into the land of milk and honey for all.

But the worrying thing is that there is already a lot of support for this fake political party (established as a private company in order to evade scrutiny of their financial affairs) with no policies, no members, no internal democracy, no leader, no respect for the people in their constituencies, and no disciplinary procedures for bigoted MPs who spout racist nonsense on the TV!

It's looking a lot like the shiny but empty promise of Macronism all over again, built by another bunch of hopeless charlatans desperately trying to keep orthodox neoliberalism alive by rebranding it as a wonderful new form of 'centrism' that will somehow miraculously "fix our broken politics".

Unfortunately this blatant con trick has been shown to work effectively in other major economies with predictably disastrous results, so only the complacent would imagine that it couldn't possibly work here too.

 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

A spectacular inconsistency of principle

All 11 of the MPs to have joined the Independent Group have outright declared their intentions to squat in their parliamentary seats without calling by-elections to put their defections to the electoral test.

This behaviour is technically within the rules, although 2 MPs who defected from David Cameron's Tories to UKIP back in 2014 (Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless) tried to set the electoral precedent that political defectors should respect democracy and call by-elections.

The problem of course is that this refusal to call by-elections to give their constituents another say under the dramatically changed circumstances is that it betrays a searing hypocrisy because they all also advocate another Brexit referendum.

These people believe in putting things to the vote again when it suits their interests, but vehemently oppose the idea of voting again when they'd be in danger of losing their privileged positions in parliament.

This hypocrisy is so obvious, and so clearly motivated by self-interest and entitlement that it's obviously going to be a massive problem for everyone in the another referendum campaign.

Not only are People's Vote advocates going to have to deal with the (unfair and manipulative) characterisation that they're a "sore loser" campaign, they're now also going to have to deal with (entirely legitimate and justified) criticism of this extraordinary anti-democratic hypocrisy from 11 of their most high profile advocates.

If I was involved in the People's Vote campaign I'd be absolutely furious with these self-serving narcissistic cowards for giving opponents an absolutely devastating attack point, but somehow no.

Not only are the anti-Brexit pockets of the Internet so busy having raptures about the formation of this new opaquely funded pro-austerity "centrist" party that they can't even see that it's actually a massive distraction from the fact that a Tory Brexit meltdown is less than 1,000 hours away, they also refuse to see that this self-serving refusal to call by-elections is such glaring hypocrisy that it's created a devastating attack point against the People's Vote campaign.

What's even more concerning from a Brexit-sceptic perspective is that several of these people are the same strategically inept idiots who tied the nation up in a pointless and self-serving Anyone But Corbyn coup plot in the immediate aftermath of Brexit.

When the nation desperately needed to focus on coherent objectives (like fixing blame for the Brexit chaos squarely on the Tories who delivered it, demanding a wide ranging Brexit commission instead of allowing Theresa May to run it as a closed Tory shop exclusively for Tory party advantage, and unifying the Brexit resistance rather than creating even more divisions) Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie, Mike Gapes and their ilk instead delivered a massive political distraction by seeking to undermine the will of the Labour Party membership with a naval-gazing coup plot they'd been planning to launch for weeks beforehand, no matter what the outcome of the Brexit referendum.

Instead of any coherent form of action to deal with the Tory Brexit mess these idiots completely wasted the vital first few months on a brazenly self-serving, ridiculously divisive, and spectacularly failed anti-Corbyn coup that actually ended up actually increasing Corbyn's legitimacy as Labour leader with a resounding double-mandate from party members!

The anti-democratic and profoundly hypocritical way this political squatter group has been formed is proof that they've learned absolutely nothing about the elitist self-serving attitudes that resulted in their previous humiliating failure.

By refusing to call by-elections they're demonstrating exactly the same elitist entitlement as before, and by handing Brexiteers a devastating attack point to undermine calls for another referendum, they're in danger of delivering another spectacular political whopping by their political opponents too.

Just when the nation needs strong leadership in the face of an impending Tory Brexit meltdown, the same useless bunch of strategically inept, ridiculously self-serving, democracy-defying political narcissists have pushed themselves to centre stage in such a tone-deaf and hypocritical manner that they're actually freely handing out ammunition to their political opponents.

If this ludicrously unprincipled vanity project is really the best our political system can come up with in the face of an unprecedented self-inflicted socio-economic disaster looming on the horizon, we're absolutely fucked aren't we?

 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.

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What you need to know about the seven Labour splitters

In this article I'm going to detail some essential facts on the 7 Labour splitters who are trying to keep Tory austerity dogma, public service cuts, and wage repression policies alive by splitting the Labour vote.

The seven are a diverse bunch with differing political backgrounds, but they do have several things in common. One is that they've continually expended far more time and effort on attacking their own party than on stuff like explaining Labour Party policies, or criticising the Tory government over the countless scandals and outrages they've inflicted on the British public since 2010.

Another thing that these 7 have in common is that every single one of them refused to oppose Tory austerity dogma in 2015 when the Tories passed the biggest package of social security cuts of all, cuts that are ruining people's lives to this day, especially those who live in the unfortunate areas where the Tory Universal Credit fiasco has been rolled out.

All seven of these supposedly moderate MPs also abstained on Theresa May's outrageous Hostile Environment legislation, even after she bragged about how her new rules could be used to "deport now, hear appeals later". Since then these rules have been used to deny jobs, housing, social security, banking services, and even lefe-saving health care to black Britons without the correct paperwork. Many Black Britons were even deported to their deaths overseas as a result of this despicable Tory legislation.

What could be more moderate than helping Theresa May deport black Britons to their deaths?

One other thing to note is that they've all colluded to join a breakaway faction called the Independent Group, but in order to hide who is funding them they've registered their website in Panama, and registered the organisation as a private business rather than a political party in order to evade declaring their funding to the electoral commission. Any politician who is willing to subvert the accountability rules in order to evade scrutiny like this should definitely never be trusted or taken at their word.

Chris Leslie

Many people would put Chuka Umunna down as the most significant of the Labour-splitters, but that honour goes to Chris Leslie who was one of the leading architects of Labour's ludicrously unappealing and self-defeating austerity-lite policy at the 2015 general election.

Had Labour opposed ruinous Tory austerity dogma in 2015 rather than pathetically imitating it Ed Miliband would probably have won, austerity would be over, Corbyn would still be an obscure backbencher, and there would be no such thing as Brexit!

Yes Brexit is a Tory instigated, Tory administered shambles that couldn't have happened without the Tory party, but it didn't happen in a vacuum, and Chris Leslie's idiotic pro-austerity posturing in 2015 is one of the main reasons the Tories actually won the majority that allowed them to set about inflicting this chaos.

Chuka Umunna

Chuka is an extraordinary self-serving chameleon of a politician. Before David Cameron and the Tories even called the EU referendum Umunna was a vocal opponent of Freedom of Movement, and then after the referendum he vehemently opposed a 2nd referendum on the final deal, and even argued that Britain should quit the Single Market.

But once Umunna saw the anti-Brexit movement as a useful vehicle for attacking the Labour leadership and furthering his own career he conducted a polar political switch to pro-EU radicalism!

Then there's the nonsense about anti-Semitism. Chuka Umunna was one of the MPs who sat on the Home Affairs Select Committee that called for clarifications of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and declared that "no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party".

None of this stopped Umunna later attacking Labour for proposing the IHRA clarifications that his own committee admitted the need for, and describing the party as "institutionally racist".

The only thing that's reliable about Chuka Umunna's political positioning is that he'll abandon it in an instant if he thinks it's in his personal advantage to do so.

Mike Gapes

Gapes is best known for the fact that he voted in favour of the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, and then consistently voted against inquiries into the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Gapes has never apologised for his role in the Iraq invasion, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, or the creation of a lawless terrorism breeding ground which Al Qaida and ISIS have used as a base to spread their murderous fanaticism throughout the middle east for 16 devastating years.

Aside from triggering carnage in Iraq, Gapes is a big fan of the anti-democratic, homophobic, misogynistic, head-chopping, terrorism-spreading, journalist-dismembering tyrants who run Saudi Arabia. He's enjoyed several jollies in the Kingdom at the tyrants' expense, and opposes calls for Britain to stop selling them weapons because they keep using them to commit war crimes in Yemen with.

Luciana Berger

Luciana has suffered an awful lot of anti-Semitic abuse, to such an extent that three extreme-right fanatics have been jailed for abusing her and sending her death threats. On this she has my sympathy because alongside Diane Abbott, Sadiq Khan, and Jeremy Corbyn she's one of the most abused and threatened politicians in Britain.

What I can't stand is the way that cynical propagandists have taken these barrages of extreme-right abuse against Luciana in order to use them to attack the left with.

Berger was parachuted into the super-safe Liverpool Wavertree constituency where she had no connection and no knowledge of the local area whatever (to the point of not knowing who Bill Shankly was!). She was living at the incumbent MPs home at the time she was selected, and the incumbent MP's wife was in charge of running the selection process!

Berger isn't personally responsible for the extraordinarily corrupt selection procedure that put her in place, but she's certainly the beneficiary of the kind of anti-democratic Blairite constituency rigging that Labour is finally putting behind it.

In the end Berger's repeated threats to quit the Labour Party to join a new "centrist" party eventually resulted in a vote of no confidence from her local constituency.

The reaction of Labour right-wingers and the mainstream media was to claim the vote of no confidence was motivated by anti-Semitism and to ridicule the idea that it was actually motivated by her repeated threats to ... errr ... join a right-wing split away from the Labour Party.

The really sad thing about Berger is that she's done some really good work on mental health awareness. If she'd have just worked with the Labour leadership rather than constantly attacking and undermining her own party she could have made a real positive difference to people's lives.

Instead she's focused her efforts on scheming and plotting with Chuka Umunna and Chris Leslie in order to damage the Labour Party, keep the Tories in power, and ensure continued austerity-driven cuts to mental health funding, youth services, community groups, adult education and countless other services that do wonders for people's mental health.

Angela Smith

Until the day she quit Labour as one of the seven splitters Smith was perhaps most famous for bitterly opposing Labour's manifesto pledge to renationalise the water companies despite the remarkable 'coincidence' that she's also accepted a load of freebies from the water industry lobby!

But on the very day she became a splitter she made an extraordinary blunder that will no doubt be her defining political legacy. On the very day she cited "racism" as one of her reasons for quitting the Labour Party she described British Asians as being "funny tinged".

FFS. This ludicrous woman has just quit Labour citing "racism" and now she's describing British Asians as having "funny tinged" skin on national television!

Brilliant when the racist rubbish takes itself out isn't it?pic.twitter.com/nwde0RLnnL

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) February 18, 2019

She also claimed the cost of four beds at the public expense for the one-bedroom flat she'd declared as her second home!

Ann Coffey

Few people have ever heard of Ann Coffey. During the 2009 expenses scandal it was revealed that Coffey was claiming £1,000 per month at the taxpayers expense to fund the mortgage on her second home, and a further £160 per month on a cleaner.

She has done valuable work campaigning against child sex exploitation, but then she also made a remarkable call for the scrapping of the right to trial by jury for rape accusations.

She doesn't seem like all that bad a person, just someone who is politically confused and a bit of a money-grabbing expenses pisstaker.

Gavin Shuker

Gavin Shuker (AKA "Gavin who?") is most famous for being one of the tiny minority of Labour MPs who opposed gay equal rights, in fact he resisted gay rights so vehemently that he threatened to quit Ed Miliband's cabinet if Labour supported Gay Marriage.

Thankfully the bigotry of religious extremists like Gavin was overcome in a free parliamentary vote thanks to the fact that around half of the Tory party was less bigoted than he was and sided with the majority of Labour, Lib-Dem, SNP, and Plaid Cymru MPs.

Gay equality remains one of the very few positive things the Tory party have achieved since 2010, and it's absolutely telling that Gavin was one of the bigots who tried to oppose it.

Due to his constant attacks on his own party his local Labour constituency eventually upheld a vote of no confidence in him, meaning Shuker was highly likely to have been deselected as Labour's representative in the Luton South constituency at the next election. So it's pretty clear that he only decided to join this splitter rebellion in order to jump before he was pushed.

Conclusion

A pro-austerity right-winger who helped wreck Labour's chances at the 2015 general election, a shameless self-serving opportunist who changes his political principles more often than his underpants, an unrepentant war-monger who detests the idea of political accountability as much as he adores the tyrannical regime in Saudi Arabia, a private water industry shill who spouts racism on national television, a hangover from the Blairite era where people with no connection to the local community whatever were parachuted into super-safe Labour seats, an egregious expenses scammer who opposes the right to trial by jury, and an anti-gay bigot who jumped before he was pushed, all jumping ship to an incredibly dodgy opaquely-funded private company masquerading as a political party.

Good luck to any political illiterates who imagine that this useless lot are worthy of their political support.

 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.

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