The kinder, gentler gaslighters

Remember when Jeremy Corbyn said he wanted a find a less abusive way of doing politics?

And how the commentariat class absolutely ridiculed him for it, using the phrase "kinder gentler politics" whenever anyone from the left as much as used a swear word, despite Corbyn himself remaining calm, polite, and dignified in the face of undoubtedly the most concerted UK media vilification campaign in living memory.

The political establishment class and corporate media hack pack worked together to whip up raging firestorms of anti-left hatred; they accused Corbyn of disrespecting veterans by not bowing deeply enough at the Cenotaph; the next year they faked photos of Corbyn supposedly dancing at the Cenotaph; they faked photos of him wearing a Russian-style hat on a Kremlin background; they endlessly platformed every deranged anti-Corbyn ranter they could find; they spliced the wrong answers onto different questions to create outrage-mongering 'fake news' (and kept their jobs when caught red-handed); they derided Corbyn's "Chairman Mao style bicycle"; they spread nonsensical conspiracy theories about Corbyn being some kind of Czech Spy, Russian stooge, terrorism-loving, communist, Jew-hater; they ridiculed and grossly misrepresented virtually every policy position Corbyn ever took ("nationalise sausages"!); and they churned out endless hate-mongering rabble-rousing articles like "Labour Must Kill Vampire Jezza".

Just some of the political and media figures to switch
seamlessly from vilifying Corbyn to pretending they
oppose online hatred and abuse!

Then oh how they erupted in fits of laughter and frivolity when Corbyn was violently assaulted by that right-wing extremist; and how they chuckled and then instantly forgot about it when British soldiers used Corbyn's face as a target on a shooting range; and then they just ignored the multiple assaults on elderly Labour Party campaigners during the 2019 election (whilst uncritically amplifying outright Tory lies about Matt Hancock's aide supposedly being "punched" by a Corbyn-supporter).

To top it all off, they barely even bothered to object to the terrorist assassination plot against Corbyn and Sadiq Khan by the extreme-right Finsbury Park killer; or any of the numerous other examples of abuse and death threats against Corbyn and the Labour leadership team.

In fact their priorities were so utterly warped that they created vastly more faux outrage about a so-called "brick" through Angela Eagle's window in 2016, despite no evidence of who actually did it ever emerging, than coverage of an actual death threat made against Corbyn in the same week as brick-gate!

The political establishment and the commentariat class deliberately whipped up these firestorms of hatred because they detested normal democratic socialist policies like nationalised rail, energy, and water so much, and outright rejected the idea that the very-rich should just pay a bit more into the pot.

Then when their hate-mongering delivered the inevitable abusive, violent, and potentially deadly consequences, they simply turned their backs, refused to report it, belittled it, or even outright laughed at it.

Well now the very same people are all suddenly saying they want a 'kinder, gentler politics' in order to promote a right-wing authoritarian Tory crackdown on our Internet freedoms.

The gaslighting bastards!




NOTE: Of course these people and their supporters will resort to victim posturing, and pretending that proven facts about the vilification of Corbyn, and the conclusion "gaslighting bastards!" constitute the kind of horrifying abuse they're suddenly so concerned about. They didn't get where they were within the establishment order without knowing how to distort and manipulate everything to their advantage.

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Why you'd have to be an idiot to oppose wage rises when the cost of living is soaring

Wes Streeting is Labour's Shadow Secretary for Child Poverty. Today he's been on the television to agree with the radically right-wing Adam Smith institute that rising wages would be a bad thing because they would cause a "wage price spiral".

Just a Labour Party shadow minister agreeing with a radically right-wing think tank that rising wages would be awful.

Starmer's Labour is an absolute shamblespic.twitter.com/puiw9wg0St

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) October 7, 2021

There are very many reasons that this is a profoundly stupid position for a Labour Party minister to take.

Labour is supposed to be the party of the workers (the clue is in the name), so spouting radically right-wing rhetoric against wage rises is a completely extraordinary thing for a Labour minister to be doing.

Streeting was obviously attracted to the Adam Smith propaganda because it used the term "economically illiterate" to chastise Boris Johnson's Tory conference speech.

But for years people on the left have been using the phrase "economically illiterate" to describe economy-strangling idiocy of 'lets cut our way to prosperity' austerity ruination, but Wes never really had a problem with austerity (he abstained on George Osborne's brutal austerity cut in 2015), but suddenly he's enamoured with the phrase, because a radically right wing think tank pinched it to attack wage rises!

Anyone with any sense knows that Johnson's rhetoric about rising wages is pure bluster. He's been in a party that's overseen the worst decade of wage stagnation in economic history. But it's unbelievable strategic ineptitude for an opposition MP to adopt the position that Johnson's blustering that wage growth is good, so I'll say it's bad.

The supposed justification for opposing wage growth is that it would cause inflation, but this is utterly backwards. The inflation is already happening, largely because of Brexit, so keeping wages repressed at this moment would actually create wage deflation (real terms income cuts).

Imagine being such an economically clueless dweeb that you put the effect before cause like this, and end up calling for wage devaluation, just as the prices of energy, food, and housing are spiralling out of control.

'Derp, the opaquely funded and radically right wing pressure group say Boris Johnson is wrong to say wage rises are good, so I'll argue that wage rises are bad!' - this actually appears to be the way Streeting thinks!

I know thinking is a wildly over-generous description of whatever's going on in Streeting's head, but the thinking seems to be that Corbyn and the Labour left would have supported wage rises for ordinary workers while prices are soaring out of control, so it's the duty of Labour's much-vaunted "new management" to oppose them!

A few months ago the junior Labour minister Alex Sobel criticised capitalism over climate change, and Starmer reacted with indignant fury, forcing him to issue a grovelling apology for offending capitalists!

Today another Labour minister is parroting ultra right-wing rhetoric in order to attack the interests of UK workers, and Starmer says nothing!

In the raging battle between workers and the capitalists who exploit them, Starmer's clearly on the side of the capitalists, even though he's supposed to be the leader of the party of the workers!

Starmer's surrounded himself with such idiots that Johnson doesn't even have to do anything to outflank Labour to the left, and appeal to British workers.

All the Bodger has to do is issue absolute platitudes like 'wage rises are good' (even if he doesn't actually believe it himself) and then watch on passively as the strategically incompetent divs in Starmer's top team rush out to argue that 'wage rises are bad actually', and that what British workers really need is another punishing dose of wage stagnation, supposedly in order to prevent the inflation that's already happened!

This short clip perfectly illustrates the problem with liberal capitalist 'centrism'. These people don't actually stand for anything at all.

They've got no convictions; no firmly held beliefs; no understanding of political or economic history; no empathy for other people; no point that they wouldn't argue with equal vehemence for or against, depending on the circumstances; no reason behind anything they do besides self-advancement and political point scoring.

If Johnson had said 'wage rises are bad', the likes of Wes Streeting, Neil Coyle, David Lammy, and Jess Phillips, would have argued that 'wage rises are good actually'.

David Lammy was on the telly the other day using his oratory skills to attack the idea of transitioning towards a £15 per hour minimum wage, but everyone watching surely knew perfectly well that had he been ordered to argue in favour of the policy, he'd have summoned up the exact same faux passion to say what a fabulous idea it is.

These people believe in nothing.

If their party leader tells them to abstain on Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment", or George Osborne's brutal austerity cuts, or Priti Patel's despicable legislation to allow undercover cops to rape women with impunity, then that's exactly what the Labour right-wingers will do, because they don't believe in anything.

That's why they hated Corbyn so much, and worked tirelessly to sabotage Labour from within between 2015 and 2019, and keep the Tories in power.

They hate people with actual principles with a burning rage, and use the word "ideological" as a slur, as if it's some kind of sickening aberration to actually believe in anything, and have a principle that can't be bought.

They knew that having a principled person lead the Labour Party meant their career advancement options were curtailed, so they burned the Labour house down from within to get rid of him.

They put their own narrow self-interest above the unspeakable agonies of millions of others who were suffering under Tory austerity, Tory wage repression, Tory public service cuts, Tory disability persecution, Tory welfare vandalism ... and now they've succeeded in getting rid of Corbyn, we're stuck with a truly horrific Tory government, and an opposition composed almost exclusively of these dreadful people.

So this is why we're witnessing the strategic stupidity of a Labour minister attacking the interests of workers.

He doesn't know anything; or believe in anything; or care about the history and traditions of the labour movement; or have any strategic plan for winning power and making the nation a better place.

He was simply bewitched by a load of radically right wing nonsense, and then mindlessly regurgitated it for the cameras, without even giving a moment's thought to what he was actually saying.

 

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How are "centrists" fine with this demeaning and degrading language?

"Centrist" hack Suzanne Moore has written a truly execrable article for the Guardian whining that Jeremy Corbyn hasn't got any women in his inner circle.

The weirdest thing is that Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinets have demonstrably been the most gender-balanced in history, with incredible and capable women in key positions, many of whom would never have been given a chance at the top table had the pro-austerity pro-privatisation orthodox neoliberal "centrists" managed to maintain their grip on the party after they pathetically tanked the 2015 General Election.

She's deliberately seeking to downplay and erase the role of capable and intelligent Labour women like Diane Abbott, and Angela Rayner, and Dawn Butler, and Rebecca Long-Bailey, to create the reality-reversed narrative that Corbyn's somehow a misogynist intent on keeping women down, rather than the Labour leader who has actually done the most to lift capable women into positions of responsibility within the party.

It's not difficult to see what the real agenda is, given that the article hearer image is of "centrist" self-publicity merchant Jess Phillips.

After her call for a "centrist" woman like Jess Phillips or Stella Creasy to take over the Labour Party, the author resorts to the most despicable line of the whole incontinent diatribe by referring to the women in Corbyn's cabinet in the most demeaning language with the phrase "a suitable female pet has to be groomed or the revolution may stall".

Suzanne Moore and all of the "centrist" dupes who have shared this noxious diatribe have deliberately invisibalised and demeaned intelligent and capable non-white, and working class, and genuinely left-wing Labour MPs.

And they've done it purely in order to promote their favoured choice of white, centre-right women from extremely privileged backgrounds (Creasy comes from an aristocratic family, and despite her faux working class pretensions Jess Phillips grew up in an incredibly wealthy household).

And what makes referring to Labour women in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet as if they're just mindless groomed pets on display, rather than strong independent capable women with minds and political views of their own all the worse is that Suzanne Moore and her "centrist" ilk would immediately assume the role of furious language police if it was anyone else (from either the political right or from the left) who was using such demeaning language about women with diferrent political views to their own.

These people are hypocritically spreading this undisguised misogynist contempt because they simply don't want to have, or even acknowledge the existence of black, or left-wing, or working class Labour women at all, because the only women they're interested in acknowledging or being represented by are white wealthy women who are exactly like them.

They're a bunch of arrogant, racist, classist, prigs, but they're so wrapped up in their self-righteous bubbles of "centrist" delusion that they've convinced themselves that speaking about other women in this grotesque and demeaning way is perfectly acceptable, because they actually believe that any woman who serves with Corbyn is fully deserving of all the contempt, and ridicule, and marginalisation, and abuse that they get.

In reality Moore and her ilk are just a couple of steps away from far-right bigots ripping veils off Muslim women and calling them "letterboxes" because these women won't do as they're told, but this type are so self-righteous in their "centrism" that they can't even see what kind of people they've become.

Suzanne Moore should be ashamed of writing this fact-averse and misogynistic diatribe. The Guardian should be ashamed for commissioning and publishing it. And anyone who shared it for any other reason than criticism of it needs to have a good hard look at themselves 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.

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No wonder the internal wreckers are terrified of democratic reselection

The thing with bullies is that they will always cry victim if the tables are turned and their victims begin standing up for themselves, and so it has come to pass with the right-wing internal wreckers in the Labour Party.

For three infuriating years of deliberately trying to wreck the Labour Party within by continually plotting against the party leadership, and regularly abusing hundreds of thousands of ordinary Labour members ("arm-twisting trots", "dogs", "rabble", "cultists", "communists", "entryists", "Stalinists", "Nazi storm troopers" ...) the ordinary members have begun to fight back with a series of no confidence votes in the most divisive anti-Corbyn Labour MPs.

But after "no confidence" votes in several of the worst offenders like Chris Leslie (one of the architects of Labour's disastrous austerity-lite strategy at the 2015 General Election), Joan Ryan (who was caught on camera fabricating fake anti-Semitism smears) and Gavin Shuker (a guy who keeps threatening to quit the Labour Party in order to inflict as much damage as possible from the inside) the Labour right-wingers are suddenly crying victim.

The extraordinary thing is that it never needed to be this way. If the likes of Joan Ryan, Chuka Umunna, Jess Phillips, Chris Leslie, Gavin Shuker, Ian Austin, and Stephen Kinnock had got with the new programme they would never have ended up facing no confidence votes and the looming prospect of mandatory reselection of all Labour MPs.

Jeremy Corbyn made it clear over and again that he was prepared to work with the Labour right-wingers, but every time he extended the hand of friendship and invited them into his shadow cabinet they ended up petulantly refusing to serve, knifing him in the back, andor slagging off the ordinary Labour Party members who twice decided that they wanted a genuine democratic socialist as their leader, not another run-of-the-mill pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-war, anti-welfare neoliberal.

Corbyn also expressed his personal opposition to the idea of mandatory reselection of Labour MPs in the past, but after three damaging years of internal wrecking from these neoliberal plants in the Labour Party, it's not Corbyn calling for democratic reselection, it's the Labour Party membership.

Yet somehow these right-wing internal wreckers have the absolute brass neck to suddenly begin arguing that membership dissatisfaction with their three years of divisive and damaging conduct is a distraction from the main task of criticising the Tories!

So for three years they expended far more effort on attacking their own party and slandering the membership than they did on criticising the Tories, but as soon as the prospect of democratic reselection is looming on the horizon they're suddenly painting the idea of being held to account for their actions by ordinary people as a terrible distraction from the main job of criticising the Tories.

And aside from the utter hypocrisy of suddenly deciding that criticising the Tories is the main objective after three years letting the Tories run wild as they concentrate on internal wrecking, some of the worst offenders are lobbing insults again too.

After the vote of "no conficence" against Joan Ryan, she issued an extraordinary Tweet describing her own party members as "trots, Stalinists and communists" instead of seeking to make amends with the people she's so badly let down!

It's as if she's so lacking in self-awareness that she can't even see that bitterly slandering the people who have lost confidence in her as a perfect demonstration that she's completely unsuited to be their representative in parliament.

Then there's Chuka Umunna who has returned to the Labour right-winger trope of calling left-leaning Labour members "dogs" in an effort to get Jeremy Corbyn to quash the move towards democratic reselection of all Labour MPs.

These people are terrified of democracy and the concept of actually being held to account for their actions by ordinary people.

It's no wonder they're acting so incoherently given how wrong everything has gone for them in the last three years. 

They've gone from heirs apparent who would get to walk into the top jobs in the Labour Party without the faintest worry about ever being held to account by anyone, through petulantly refusing to participate in Corbyn's cabinet; and then their spectacularly failed chicken coup; and then their failed effort to ban Jeremy Corbyn from participating in the 2nd Labour leadership election; and then their outrageous purge of left-wing Labour members for "crimes" like retweeting Caroline Lucas or liking the Foo Fighters; and then seeing their predictions of a Labour General Election wipe-out under Corbyn ruined by the biggest surge in the Labour vote since 1945; and now they're facing the very real prospect of being democratically replaced by their local Labour Party as a result of this bullying and constant internal wrecking.

So the over-entitled Labour right-wingers are angrily lashing out again, but making the same mistakes as before: Insulting the Labour Party members they're soon going to have to justify their behaviour to, and resorting to the laziest and most hypocritical cry-bully arguments in the expectation that ordinary Labour Party members are suddenly going to start lapping up their ridiculously fact-averse narratives now, after three years of getting ever more pissed off by them.

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Jess Phillips' bid to become literally the worst Labour Party troll

A little over a year ago Jess Phillips' Labour Party colleague Jo Cox was brutally stabbed and shot to death in the street by an extreme-right fanatic.

Another of Jess Phillips' Labour Party colleagues Luciana Berger has suffered a tide of outrageous anti-Semitic abuse and death threats for which three extreme-right fanatics have been jailed.

Another of Jess Phillips' Labour Party colleagues Diane Abbott suffered a massive surge of sexist and racist abuse from right-wingers during the General Election.

But who does Jess Phillips describe as "literally the worst" when it comes to sexism?

Left-wing men!

Not only is Phillips willing to overlook the actual killing of a Labour Party MP in order to spew her hatred towards a hefty chunk of Labour Party voters, she's also staggeringly hypocritical about it too.

Being abusive towards a diverse demographic like "left-wing men" is absolutely outrageous from a so-called equality champion. 

Sure some left-wing men have sexist attitudes (rendering them idiots because equality of opportunity no matter your sex, age, ethnicity or creed is one of the bedrocks of left-wing politics), but to generalise about all left-wing men as "literally the worst" in light of the absolute tide of sexist and bigoted abuse coming from the right is unbelievable stuff from someone who poses as an equality champion and a campaigner against political abuse.

Just imagine if someone used such incredibly tenuous reasoning to generalise that self-styled centrist women are "literally the worst" at politics. 

The likes of Jess Phillips would be spewing outrage in moments over such a crass generalisation wouldn't they?But they're apparently free to make crass generalisations of their own.

Phillips went on to generalise that when left-wing men "close their eyes at night and think of amazing people who have changed the world, it’s always some white dude that pops into their head".
Just imagine the outrage she would spew if anyone deigned to generalise about the sexist thoughts that all feminists have at night.

Justifiable outrage.

Phillips' so-called reasoning for launching yet another divisive and damaging attack on the Labour left is just as bad as her hypocrisy. She argued that sometimes men have objected to all-women shortlists and the like as justification for giving right-wing hacks at the Daily Telegraph yet another anti-Labour attack line by tarring all left-wing men as "literally the worst".

In her worldview it's as if working class communities objecting to the exclusion of several popular local candidates in order to parachute in a privately educated elitist candidate with absolutely no connection to the region whatever just because she's female (the Blairite special adviser Anna Turley being handed the Labour safe seat of Redcar for example) is somehow worse than right-wing fanatics sending anti-Semetic and racist abuse to female MPs, making death threats and rape threats, and even murdering female Labour Party politicians in the street!

The problem for Jess Phillips is that her rhetoric just doesn't stack up. She bases her claims that left-wing men are "literally the worst" on the fact that they sometimes object to all-female shortlists, but she must understand that the consequence of her constant trolling of her own party is to turn people away in droves.

Revulsion at the constant divisive backstabbing from Jess Phillips and her ilk will mean fewer female Labour MPs in parliament than there could have been without the deliberate wrecking tactics, and fewer female MPs overall as a consequence (because at 45% Labour have by far the best gender balance of any party with more than one MP).

Jess Phillips is so intent on continuing her strategy of internal party wrecking that she's demonstrably willing to sacrifice future female MPs at the next general election because she'd rather see future female Labour MPs lose to the Tories (just 21% of Tory MPs are women) than a left-wing man like Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister.

It's a wonder how on earth Jess Phillips ended up in the Labour Party at all if she's so filled with hatred and revulsion at left-wing men. Well it isn't really. Phillips must have known that Labour have the best gender balance of any party so it's impossible to avoid imagining that she decided that spending time with all the left-wing men she so clearly hates and despises was worth it because it was the best choice for her political career given that she'd be half as likely to make it as an MP in the male dominated Tory party.

Aside from driving people away from Labour with her divisive generalisations and constant attacks on the party leadership, Phillips is also doing something else. The kind of elitist identity-politics fixated feminism espoused by Phillips, Harriet Harman and Theresa May is exactly the kind of thing that drives people away from feminism too.

All three of these women supported more brutal Tory austerity measures (which impact poor and ordinary women a lot harder than poor and ordinary men). 

Theresa May has actively voted in favour of sexist austerity dogma time and again, and as temporary Labour leader Harriet Harman whipped her MPs into letting the savage Tory welfare bill pass by abstaining, which Jess Phillips dutifully went along with while over two dozen male Labour MPs (like Jeremy Corbyn, Sadiq Khan, Dennis Skinner and Richard Burgon) outright defied Harriet Harman's instructions to support sexist Tory austerity through political inaction, and voted against the bill.

The reason these women willingly trampled on millions of women from less privileged backgrounds by supporting the Tory policy of loading the financial burden of the bankers' crisis onto women's shoulders is that their elitist version of feminism is fixated on stuff like the percentage of women who are chairs of parliamentary select committees, the number of female FTSE100 directors, or the pay rates of millionaires at the BBC, not on helping women in the most need first.

Of course Phillips and her supporters will try to play sub-juvenile identity politics by saying that as a left-wing male I'm somehow proving her point by objecting to her divisive trolling and criticising her elitist version of feminism that allows her to trample on women from less privileged backgrounds while playing the victim herself. 

They'll pretend that pointing out that someone is talking hypocritical self-defeating crap is somehow worse than the tsunami of sexist and racist abuse Diane Abbott suffered during the 2017 General Election, or the constant stream of death threats and rape threats against women in politics from right-wingers, or the actual murder of a Labour Party MP by an extreme-right fanatic, but people who are motivated by hate (of genuine socialists, or men) tend to make extremely poor arguments.

The fact that Phillips and her ilk have already resorted to this tried and tested cry-bully tactic (sling abuse at a large cohort of people and then cry victim when any of them have the temerity to defend themselves or argue back) just goes to show what appalling trolls they are.

Now that the outrageously abusive troll Tom Blenkinsop has quit the party (deliberately salting his once safe Labour constituency on his way out so that it fell to the Tories) Jess Phillips has to be considered one of the prime contenders for absolute worst troll in the Parliamentary Labour Party, although she has stiff competition from men like Wes Streeting, Chris Leslie and Ian Austin.
It would be a victory of sorts for Jess Phillips' crap identity politics fixated version of feminism if she could snatch the title of "literally the worst troll in the Parliamentary Labour Party" off the men who have completely dominated the role over the years. 

By continually attacking her fellow Labour Party members, discrediting herself, discrediting the party and expending way more effort on attacking the party leadership instead of the Tories and their sexist austerity dogma, she's definitely putting up a heck of a fight to be recognised as Labour's worst troll.

 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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