Kezia Dugdale has quit and it is about time too

Kezia Dugdale has finally done the decent thing and resigned as leader of the Scottish Labour Party. 

In politics it's customary to say kind things about political rivals after their resignation, but the best anyone could seriously manage with Kez is that she wasn't quite as bad as her predecessor toxic Jim Murphy, she was apparently a likeable person according to people who met her, that she tried hard to overcome her obvious and extreme political limitations, and that she's right to realise that she's out of her depth and hand the leadership on to someone more capable.

Labour Party right-wingers will obviously try to gloss over Kezia's legacy of failure and foot-in-mouth moments by pointing out that she increased Labour's share of Westminster seats from one to seven, but this kind of blind hagiography is wrong for many reasons:

• The reason Labour lost 40 of their 41 Westminster seats in the first place was the decision to appoint the Labour Party right-winger Jim Murphy as party leader, electing another neoliberalism-lite Labour right-winger as his successor was a spectacularly bad move.

• Winning just seven Westminster seats is still the second worst performance by Scottish Labour since 1931, and by a very large distance. 

• Under Kezia's watch the Tories increased their representation in Scotland to 13 MPs, their best performance since 1983, and the first time Tories have outnumbered Labour MPs since 1955.

• Six of the twelve Tory gains in 2017 came in seats that were held by Labour until the wipe-out in 2015 (Ayr, Carrick & Cumnock, Dumfries & Galloway, East Renfrewshire, Aberdeen South, Ochil & South Perthshire, Stirling). The SNP were never going to be able to hold their high water mark of 56/59 seats, so it's massively disappointing from a Labour perspective that the Tories gained the same number of lost Labour seats as Labour did themselves.

• Dugdale was famously caught out promoting the idea of voting Tory in certain constituencies to beat the SNP, when anyone outside of the fanatical SNP-bad position would obviously promotetactical voting for the SNP (a fellow centre-left party) in order to keep the fanatically right-wing Tories out of the Westminster government.

• Things fared even worse for Kezia in the Scottish parliament where Labour slumped into 3rd position behind the Tories, a very sad demise for the party that created the Scottish parliament and led the Scottish government for the first 8 years.

Another propaganda theme being pushed hard by the bitter Labour right-wingers is that Kezia has been purged by Corbynites. This is wrong because Kezia's surprise resignation has taken everyone by surprise, even her opponents to the left of the Scottish Labour Party. Nobody forced her to go, In fact she specifically stated in her resignation statement that nobody forced her out and that it was her own decision.

Kezia walked away of her own volition saying that the best thing for the interests of the Labour Party is for her to pass the baton of leadership on, which is something that pretty much everyone apart from the bitter Anyone But Corbyn mob should be able to agree on.

Perhaps Kezia realised that her tactic of publicly attacking Jeremy Corbyn and predicting doom if he became leader had rendered her position untenable after Corbyn secured the biggest increase in the Labour vote since 1945 to prevent the Tory-UKIP Trojan Horse ploy from landing the fanatically right-wing super-majority almost everyone was expecting?

Perhaps she realised that allowing the Tories to overtake Labour as Scotland's second party in the Scottish Parliament, and in Westminster amounted to an unacceptable failure to bounce back from the damage Jim Murphy and John McTernan inflicted in 2015?

Perhaps she realised that she's such a hopelessly limited politician that she even makes the grotesquely hypocritical Tory leader Ruth Davidson look competent in comparison?

The problem with Scottish Labour is that they have operated like a cabal that only ever listens to their own rhetoric inside the party bubble, and shows no inclination to actually offer things that the Scottish public are actually crying out for. 

How else is it possible to explain the election of Jim Murphy as their leader than as a great big "fuck you" to anyone who voted for independence (45% of the Scottish electorate)?

How else is it possible to explain the fact that Kezia was allowed to continue as leader until she decided to quit, even after leading Labour into 3rd place in the Scottish Parliament and Westminster, and even urging people to vote Tory because she's so caught up in the blinkered SNP-bad mindset?

Maybe Scottish Labour will finally see some sense and elect a leader who is willing to support Jeremy Corbyn rather than attacking him at every turn, and capable of offering a left-wing opposition to the SNP government, rather than a hopelessly out-of-touch shell of a political party that refuses to change direction and exists by complacently relying on a severely diminished legacy vote, and desperately riding on Jeremy Corbyn's coat tails whilst simultaneously slagging him off.

Kezia's resignation was unexpected, so it's going to be a while before the new candidates are known, but hopefully the leadership election will give Scottish Labour an opportunity to elect a new leader capable of leading them out of the political wilderness that Labour Party right-wingers like Jim Murphy, John McTernan and Kezia Dugdale led them into.

 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

If anyone is an expert in "unelectability" and "preeching to the converted" it's Kezia Dugdale

The leader of the Scottish Labour Party Kezia Dugdale is the latest Labour politician to churn out an anti-Corbyn diatribe for the mainstream press in the hope of swinging the Labour leadership contest in favour of the Blairite backed Anyone But Corbyn candidate.

Yet again the crux of her argument is repetition of the endlessly recycled "unelectable" trope. If anyone in Britain has the right to call themselves an expert in unelectability then it's Kezia Dugdale who managed the incredible feat of reducing Labour to Scotland's 3rd political party in the May 2016 Scottish Parliament elections, significantly behind the widely detested Tories.

Anyone might have thought that the 2015 General Election result might have been the nadir for Scottish Labour. Losing 40 of their 41 seats was the worst political capitulation in the history of British politics, but Scottish Labour apparently exist in such a bubble of delusion that they chose Kezia Dugdale to replace the departing Jim Murphy.

After the wipe-out in 2015 anyone would have thought that the Labour leadership would do everything in their power to try to undo the damage and re-engage an electorate they've alienated, but Kezia just stuck with the woeful "SNP bad" playbook, and in so doing strongly re-affirmed people's belief that abandoning Labour was absolutely the right thing to do.

The result of this belligerence is that Labour got walloped again at the 2016 Scottish Parliament elections, where the Labour vote was reduced to a tiny hard-core of Labour Party loyalists.

Another of the bizarre things about Kezia Dugdale's attack on Jeremy Corbyn is the way she accuses him of "preaching to the converted", which is another thing she is clearly an expert in, having been a key player in the process of reducing the once powerful and seemingly unassailable Scottish Labour Party to a tiny rump of party loyalists who are now significantly outnumbered by Scottish Tories!

It's bad enough that Kezia Dugdale has clung onto her job as Scottish Labour leader after leading them into another feeble electoral capitulation, but to then go around lecturing other people on "electability" and "preaching to the converted" displays an extraordinary lack of self-awareness.

If the Scottish Labour Party are determined to allow Kezia Dugdale to continue steering the party towards electoral irrelevance, that's their prerogative, but they really should try to stop her from doing her unwitting self-parody act, because it's excruciatingly embarrassing to witness someone so hopelessly out of touch that they don't even realise that the criticisms they're slinging at other people apply a thousand times more strongly to themself.

 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

Why nobody should ever listen to this guy again

The guy in the picture is the Blairite political strategist John McTernan. Few people know who he is because he has operated in the unelected shadows for his entire political career, but his influence in Labour Party politics has been huge.

The reason nobody who gives a damn about the Labour Party should ever listen to a word McTernan says again is that he was the chief political adviser to Jim Murphy as he oversaw not just the biggest humiliation in the history of the Labour Party, but the most spectacular electoral collapse in British electoral history.

Back in 2014 the Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy put on a staggering display of hubris, bragging that Labour wouldn't lose a single seat in Scotland. Murphy and McTernan then decided to push a ultra-Blairite, ultra-Unionist campaign at a Labour Party membership who were already livid at Scottish Labour for taking them for granted for decades and then very publicly french kissing the Tories during the independence debate.

In a wonderfully ironic way Jim Murphy was right, the 2015 General Election saw Labour lose 40 of their 41 Westminster seats in a single night of carnage which meant that Labour did indeed not lose a single seat in Scotland; the single seat of Edinburgh South!

After involvement in a debacle like that one would have thought that McTernan would be ridiculed and shunned as demonstrably one of the worst political advisers in history, but the mainstream media continue to laud him as if he's some kind of wise all-knowing sage of Labour Party politics. 

Who on earth would take political advice from a political adviser who oversaw the most humiliating electoral wipe-out in the history of British politics?

It seems a tad strange that a political adviser with his fingerprints all over the biggest electoral meltdown in British political history is still getting loads of airtime and column inches from mainstream media sources , all of which conveniently forget to mention his role in the complete annihilation of the traditional Labour heartlands in Scotland.


However this mainstream media fawning over McTernan only seems a tad strange until you realise that he is savagely and offensively opposed to Jeremy Corbyn. The fact McTernan's agenda and the extraordinarily biased mainstream media agenda against Jeremy Corbyn are in alignment is enough to make them overlook the fact that he's a such a hopelessly discredited expert that he should be treated as a laughing stock, not some kind of oracle.

Some of McTernan's "insights" on Jeremy Corbyn include calling Labour MPs who support him "morons", accusing people who support Corbyn's policies of suffering "psychological emotional spasms", calling for a coup Corbyn's leadership before he was even elected, calling for a coup a month after he was elected, vociferously supporting the self-serving coup-plotters when they finally launched their shockingly ill-timed coup at a moment of national crisis, and then backing Owen Smith's belated leadership challenge when the inept "Chicken Coup" failed.

It's absolutely clear that McTernan is part of the entitled Blairite club who have no real interest in or insight into the huge increase in Labour Party membership since Jeremy Corbyn became party leader. All he has are insults and displays of utter contempt for the democratic decision of hundreds of thousands of Labour Party members. As far as McTernan is concerned he's the expert (despite managing to lose the whole of Scotland in one go!) and anyone who disagrees with him is a moron.

Why would anyone listen to a guy whose judgement is so poor that they supported a myopic internal party coup at a time of national crisis and whose "analyses" are stuffed full of insults, smears and anti-democratic sentiments?

McTernan is a classic example of a red Tory. He proclaims himself to be a socialist yet he supports all kinds of conservative ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with socialism. What kind of socialist would write articles for the Murdoch propaganda empire and the Daily Torygraph declaring stuff like  "Tax avoidance is an expression of basic British freedoms" and "Pirvatisation: what is it good for? Everything"?

A pro-privatisation, tax-dodger apologist who proclaims himself to be a socialist! Who in their right mind would take political advice from a contradiction in terms like that?

Aside from praising privatisation and making excuses for tax-dodging McTernan has also supported the destruction of British libraries caused by the Tories' savage local government funding cuts, opposed the Living Wage, demanded a 3rd invasion of Iraq, opposed renationalisation of the railways, and encouraged the Scottish Labour Party to print leaflets saying: "Muggers. Sex offenders. Burglars. Vote SNP".

Who on earth would take advice from a guy who supports the Tory destruction of local services, wants to invade Iraq again and thinks that filthy Lynton Crosbyesque smear campaigns are a way to beat a party that is absolutely hammering his own into the ground on policy, trustworthiness, delivery and electability?

As far as Owen Smith is concerned, if he had any sense at all he'd tell McTernan where to go.

Smith is going to have a hard enough campaign to unseat Jeremy Corbyn given that the Labour party membership has more than doubled since Corbyn burst onto the scene last summer, without receiving the political kiss of death from the guy who managed the incredible feat of eradicating the once fiercely loyal Scottish Labour heartlands in a single electoral campaign.

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OR

Jeremy Corbyn: The 3 main myths

Other UK political leaders have suffered sustained political attacks before, but there's been absolutely nothing to compare to the absolute bombardment of vitriol and abuse aimed at Jeremy Corbyn.

The ever escalating anti-Corbyn campaign started during the Labour leadership election last year, but criticism from desperately unpopular pariahs like Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson sounded like ringing endorsements in the ears of millions of people. Corbyn won the Labour leadership with the biggest mandate of any party political leader in UK history (over 250,000 votes).

The campaign to criticise Corbyn and to destabilise his leadership escalated after his resounding victory. Opponents within his own party regularly conducted staged resignations, fed negative stories to the press and generally spent far more time criticising their own democratically elected party leader than they spent criticising the Tory government they were supposed to be holding to account.

The press had it in for him too. In November the S*n ran their ludicrous "Nod in my name" smears about Corbyn's lack of patriotism, and the supposedly liberal-left Guardian has run numerous anti-Corbyn pieces practically every day for a year.

After Brexit was announced things reached fever pitch. The entire Westminster establishment club (including 172 of his own MPs) turned on him, Labour party grandees tried to intimidate him into resignation, and the supposedly left-liberal mainstream press (Guardian, Mirror, Independent) savaged him too, but somehow, against such an unprecedented tide of criticism, and with so many knives in his back, Corbyn has stood tall and refused to let the Labour Party membership down by capitulating to such an anti-democratic coup.

There have been three core themes that run through this ever escalating barrage of anti-Corbyn criticism. All of them are myths that are based on ideological propaganda and not on fact.

Unelectable

The Blairites settled on this epithet early on in the 2015 leadership election and Corbyn critics have stuck with it ever since. It's been rote learned by millions of people, and it's such a commonly used criticism that he could use it like an ironic middle name if he wanted to.

One of the biggest problems with the "unelectable" tag is that Corbyn has actually proven quite good at winning elections despite the constant barrage of criticism and the backstabbing antics of many of his own MPs. It must be quite difficult to perform at your best when you're constantly having to pull daggers out of your back, but Corbyn has still, somehow, managed to do quite well.

• To become leader he won the biggest electoral mandate of any UK party leader in history. More people voted for him as Labour Party leader than there are members of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties combined! He won 60% of the vote in a four horse race!

• Since becoming Labour leader Corbyn has overseen four by-election victories out of four. All with increased majorities.

• In May 2016 Corbyn defied the polls predicting heavy labour losses in the local elections. He didn't win many new seats, but he managed to hold firm and keep the huge percentage of council seats won at the absolute high point of Ed Miliband's leadership. The Labour plotters were hoping for failure but their coup attempt in May fizzled out when it became clear that Corbyn had done far too well, even despite a meticulously timed smear campaign designed to inflict as much damage as possible on the party.

• May 2016 also saw Labour win the mayoral contests in London and Bristol.

Aside from his track record proving that he's far from "unelectable", there is another argument too. The so-called "reasoning" behind the claim that Corbyn is "unelectable" is that he'd be incapable of winning over middle England Tory voters.

The idea that nicking voters off the Tory party is the only way to achieve electoral success is utterly absurd. At the 2015 General election 24% of the electorate voted Tory and 34% of the electorate didn't even vote! There's a huge demographic of disenfranchised voters who could be won over to backing an anti-establishment candidate who is promising to put an end to the Westminster gravy train and give them more say over how their lives are run.

Then there are the two thirds of Liberal Democrat voters who evaporated overnight when Nick Clegg decided to enable a savage bunch of Tories back into power. How about some Charles Kennedy style policies aimed at winning them over the the Labour Party?

After Brexit there are also UKIP voters to consider. Now that they've achieved what they set out to, surely it's time for Labour to try to win back the UKIP working class vote by demonstrating that UKIP is a hard-right Thatcherite political party, and that Thatcherism is the reason so many working class communities are in the appalling state that they are.

The idea that the only way to win an election is by seeking to nick Tory party voters by aping Tory party policy is so narrow-minded it's astonishing, but then there are an awful lot of people who don't bother to inspect the underlying argument behind a claim for logical flaws, they just hear it on multiple occasions and then start repeating it.

Too left-wing

The argument that Jeremy Corbyn is too left-wing is pretty weak too. If you believed the tabloid hype you'd think he was some kind of raving Stalinist lunatic who plans to nationalise the entire country including your own house and clothes, and turn the UK into a dire oppressive command and control economy like the Soviet Union at it's absolute worst.

A look at his actual policies (which the mainstream press almost never actually take the bother of explaining) reveal that he's a traditional social democrat who wants to have certain key services run by not-for-profit public institutions, such as the NHS, the railways, the police, the courts, the roads and our kids' schools, while trying to restructure the UK economy to make it more like the high-tech, high-skill, high-pay economies like Germany and Switzerland. 

Yes Corbyn is so left-wing that he wants more public control over the banks so as to avoid a repeat of the 2007-08 financial sector insolvency crisis, but who thinks that's a dangerously left-wing idea?

Corbyn isn't too left-wing for the British electorate, in fact he's just about right. 84% of people want the NHS run as a not-for-profit public service, 68% want the UK energy infrastructure renationalised, 67% think the Royal Mail should never have been sold off in the first place and 66% would support his policy of renationalising the railways.

Corbyn isn't too left-wing for the public, he's too left-wing for the sociopathic hard-right press barons like Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times, Sky), Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro) and the Barclay brothers (Telegraph, Spectator) who all see it as their job to control the spectrum of public debate.

Incompetence

As mentioned before, it's clearly difficult to perform to your best when you're repeatedly having to pull daggers out of your own back, but Jeremy Corbyn has actually done quite well, despite the constant attacks on him from inside and outside of his own party.

Since his sudden rise from backbench anonymity, Jeremy Corbyn has managed to literally double the membership of the Labour Party. An awful lot of the new recruits are young, educated and highly-skilled. Another key demographic in this membership surge is left-wing people returning after years of exile after the party was stolen by a bunch of Thatcherites,

Only a true Blairite could consider a doubling of the party membership to be some kind of disaster and a sign of the leaders' incompetence!

Another thing to note is that in less than a year as leader of the opposition Corbyn has managed to force more Tory backtracking and U-turns (the Tax Credit cuts, the disability benefit cuts, that sickening deal to run prisons in Saudi Arabia, the force privatisation of every school in England, police budget cuts ...) than his predecessor Ed Miliband managed in five inept years.

If anyone is looking for displays of Labour Party incompetence, how about some of these?

• Consider Ed Miliband's decision to whip his MPs into allowing the Tories to rush through a load of retroactive workfare legislation in a single day to allow cover up Iain Duncan Smith's unlawful use of unemployed people as a source of free labour for his corporate mates. Labour could have dragged that fiasco out for months, and probably even forced iain Duncan Smith out of his job, but they completely let them off the hook. Three years later the mess is still going on with the legislation that Ed Miliband whipped his MPs into abstaining on being found unlawful in the courts. Unlawful legislation to cover up unlawful legislation and Ed Miliband let it slide!

• How about Ed Miliband's Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls devising a bizarrely unattractive and uninspiring electoral strategy of presenting Labour as austerity-lite which clearly ruined Labour's chances at the 2015 General Election (in which he lost his own seat).

• How about the sheer bloody-minded incompetence of Jim Murphy and the Scottish Labour Party trying to push an austerity-lite agenda in Scotland (when they'd already pissed off the Scottish electorate by cosying up to the Tories during the independence referendum campaign) which resulted in them losing 40 of labour's 41 Scottish seats in the biggest massacre in British electoral history?

• How about the caretaker Labour leader Harriet Harman whipping Labour MPs into supporting even more savage Tory austerity, even after she'd seen what happened in Scotland?

Amazingly these incompetent nitwits are amongst the Labour Party figures clamouring most loudly for Corbyn to resign!

Even their claim that Jeremy Corbyn did badly in the EU referendum is sketchy as hell. 63% of Labour voters backed Remain, which is just 1% less than SNP supporters who had a massive incentive to vote Remain and hope that England voting Leave would give them grounds for triggering a second independence referendum.

The main criticism of Corbyn's approach seems to be that Jeremy Corbyn actually presented a balanced rational argument instead of engaging in the Doomsday fearmongering rhetoric of the Tory remain camp, and he didn't tell a load of blatant lies, or promote naive wishful thinking, or make fascistic appeals to anti-intellectualism like the appalling Vote Leave mob. 

Jeremy Corbyn was one of the only ones who spoke to the public as if we're adults. He didn't speak in simplistic black and white terms, because things are never black and white. Agree with him or not about the EU, he was one of the only ones who spoke to the public as if we're adults, rather than simple-minded idiots who can be swayed one way or another with fearmongering threats or by a load of spectacularly unrealistic spending pledges.

What people are saying when they criticise Jeremy Corbyn for "not campaigning passionately enough" is that in modern British politics, honesty and rational considerations are rubbish debating tactics. That Jeremy Corbyn was politically naive to try to speak to the electorate like we're adults, and that he should have assumed that we're all a bunch of intellectually lazy halfwits and pushed some crude absolutist propaganda at us.

The glaring problem with this argument is that Corbyn delivered 63% of Labour voters for Remain (despite the Tory funded Labour Leave campaign constantly undermining his work), while Cameron's crude threats, fearmongering and bizarre non-sequiters about the likes of Putin and ISIS ended up delivering 58% of Tory voters for Leave!

People who argue that Corbyn should have been more dramatic and passionate like David Cameron in order to win more votes are clearly arguing that black is white.

Conclusion

The three most oft-repeated criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn are all extremely tenuous when actually subjected to critical analysis, but the right-wing Labour MPs and propaganda merchants are relying on the idea that the general public are a pack of idiots who will midlessly rote learn and regurgitate whatever counter-factual gibberish the mainstream press drip feeds them.

 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

How Ed Ball's austerity-lite agenda ruined Labour's election chances

 

One of the great joys of election night is watching particularly despised politicians getting their comeuppance. These occurrences have become known as "Portillo moments" in homage to the unseating of the the Tory Defence Secretary Michael Portillo in 1997.

Thanks to the SNP landslide in Scotland and the implosion of the Lib-Dem party, General Election night 2015 was full of "Portillo moments" including Danny Alexander (George Osborne's Lib-Dem sidekick for the last 5 years), Esther McVey (Iain Duncan Smith's vile DWP henchwoman) Jim Murphy (the Blairite Scottish Labour leader), Vince Cable (the Lib-Dem who flogged off the Royal Mail on the cheap), Steve Webb (the Lib-Dem DWP minister who defended "Bedroom Tax" to the hilt), Douglas Alexander (A key Ed Miliband ally and adviser) and Ed Davey (the Lib-Dem energy minister with the incredibly flexible principles).

Despite all of these high profile oustings the biggest "Portillo moment" of the night belonged to the Labour Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Ed Balls, who lost his Morley and Outwood seat to a Tory.

I never liked Ed Balls. He always struck me as a pompous and patronising buffoon who would surely have been more at home in the Tory party. A "Tory in a red tie" of the kind that have become all too common since the Labour Party was usurped in the mid-90s by Tony Blair and converted from a social democratic party to a Thatcherism-lite one.

In my view, one of Ed Miliband's very biggest mistakes (of which there were many) was his decision to appoint Ed Balls as Shadow Chancellor and hand him control over the economic message that the Labour party conveyed to the electorate.

To be fair to Ed Balls he did start out with a fairly decent and coherent message. His oft repeated assertions that the Tories were cutting spending "too hard, too deep and too fast" was completely vindicated by the way that Tory ideological austerity completely killed off Labour's nascent post-crisis mini-recovery and plunged the whole UK economy into a prolonged economic stagnation between late 2010 and early 2013.

The problem is that instead of sticking to his story, or even strengthening his position with slogans like "Austerity is a con", "Osborne's economic incompetence" or "They've created more new public debt than every Labour government in history combined" he decided to backtrack and start mimicking George Osborne's failing austerity agenda with an austerity-lite agenda of his own.

The absolute nadir of this ludicrous austerity-lite strategy came in January 2015 when the Labour leadership whipped their MPs into actually endorsing Osborne's ideological austerity agenda in a parliamentary vote (just five Labour rebels defied this suicidal order from their leaders - see footnote).

This decision to begin copying the demonstrably failing economic policies of the Tories left the Labour Party in a serious bind. How on earth could the point out how badly Tory austerity has failed without looking like complete idiots when people point out that Labour voted in favour of continuing ideological austerity and promised to stick to George Osborne's spending plans?

The astonishing success of the SNP is a demonstration that it is possible to win an unprecedented electoral landslide with a coherently explained and passionately expressed message of opposition to ideological austerity. Ed Balls' ridiculous decision to adopt the language of austerity-lite robbed the Labour Party of their ability to set themselves up as a "real alternative" and ensured their electoral defeat.

I mean who on earth could ever get passionate about a political agenda defined by its advocates as "austerity-lite"? How is it even possible to to convince people to get passionate about defeating the other side when you're offering the same thing as them, just not quite as bad?

When Balls was appointed Shadow Chancellor I swore to myself that I would never support the Labour Party as long as he was in their cabinet. Now that he has been ousted I hope that they turn to someone from the left of the party who had the sense to oppose austerity, rather than going for someone from the right of the party in the hope of appeasing Rupert Murdoch. Judging by the Labour Party's appalling track record of strategic incompetence it wouldn't surprise me at all if they demanded an unelected seat in the House of Lords for Ed Balls and brought him back into their shadow cabinet as an unelected peer.

As I said before, Ed Balls always struck me as a "Tory in a red tie", so I can't help thinking that a Tory inside agent within the Labour Party probably couldn't have come up with a better election losing strategy than Ed Ball's ludicrous "austerity-lite" narrative.

 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.

Footnote

Only 20 MPs (including tellers) voted against George Osborne's absurd "Isn't Austerity Great" bill.

All six SNP MPs (Scotland) opposed it: Stewart Hosie, Angus Brendan, Angus Robertson, Mike Weir, Eilidh Whiteford, Pete Wishart

All three Plaid Cymru MPs (Wales) opposed it: Jonathan Edwards, Elfyn Llwyd, Hywel Williams
All three SDLP  MPs (Northern Ireland) opposed it: Mark Durkan, Alasdair McDonnell, Margaret Ritchie
The single Green MP opposed it: Caroline Lucas
The single Alliance MP (Northern Ireland) opposed it: Naomi Long
One of the eight DUP MPs (Northern Ireland) opposed it: Jim Shannon

Just five of the 258 Labour MPs opposed it: Dianne Abbot, Katie Clark, Roger Godsiff, Austin Mitchell, Dennis Skinner

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