Nick Timothy: Blame the Irish, don't blame me

If you're not a politics nerd you may not even know who Nick Timothy is, nor how he played such an instrumental role in causing the current Brexit chaos.

Nick Timothy

He's one of those Rasputin type characters who skulks around in the political background giving terrible advice, while other more prominent figures take the blame when it all goes wrong.

He was one of Theresa May's top advisers during her time at the Home Office (where she dreamt up "Go Home" vans, the unlawfully racist Hostile Environment, brutally misogynistic spouse immigration rules and all kinds of other shockingly inept and hard-right authoritarian nonsense) and then during her time as Prime Minister too.

Nick Timothy is widely credited as the adviser who insisted that Theresa May completely eschew political consensus and then draw her ridiculous red lines to completely rule out any form of membership of the Single Market and Customs Union.

He's also advised her to call her snap "hubris" election in 2017, and advised her to continually hide herself away in Tory safe spaces, chicken out of the leadership debates, and make their disgraceful "Dementia Tax" a central feature of the campaign!

As a result of this idiocy the Tories squandered their 20+ point lead in the space of seven weeks, and pissed away their parliamentary majority, leaving them begging and bribing the bigoted DUP sectarians into propping up their absolute shambles of a government.

Oracles of ineptitude

Shortly after the 2017 general election meltdown Timothy was understandably sacked, and soon took up residence as a columnist for the dreadful Barclay brothers' Daily Telegraph propaganda rag, which he uses to settle old scores and blame everyone else for his own messes.

Essentially he's like the Tory version of Labour's John McTernan. The shadowy adviser who oversaw Labour's annihilation of their own Scottish heartlands in 2015, when they lost 40 of their 41 seats with an absolutely useless pro-austerity and rabidly British unionist campaign, both of which were widely regarded as unacceptable Tory collusion.

But somehow both of these useless characters are still given well-remunerated public platforms to spout their lamentable nonsense, as if they're infinitely wise political oracles, rather than two of the most inept political advisers in living memory.

Blame the Irish

Timothy's Telegraph column could, and probably should, be sub-headed "How everyone else is to blame except for me".

In this week's instalment he desperately seeks to blame the Irish, and specifically the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar for the Irish border deadlock with a claim that Varadkar is "playing fast & loose with peace in Northern Ireland"!

This is an extraordinary claim from one of the masterminds behind the "red lines" that created the Irish border deadlock in the first place.

Ruling out regulatory alignment with the EU was always going to end up contradicting the Good Friday Agreement, and endangering the open border between the Republic of Ireland and the North.

That's why political commentators at the time accused Theresa May of lobbing peace in Northern Ireland onto her raging Brexit bonfire.

We could see that she'd put herself into an irresolvable bind, but she was so relentlessly stubborn that she just ploughed on belligerently until this impossible contradiction eventualy destroyed her political career.

Thick Nimothy

○ Nick Timothy was Theresa May's main adviser when she decided to run Brexit as a closed Tory shop exclusively for Tory party advantage, rather than seeking some kind of national consensus (under which we would probably have already left by now).

○ Nick Timothy advised Theresa May to put herself in an impossible bind by drawing ridiculous red lines all over her shambles of a negotiating strategy.

○ Nick Timothy advised Theresa May to call her hubris election.

○ Nick Timothy helped Theresa May throw away her parliamentary majority and render herself utterly reliant on the DUP sectarians with nonsense like "Dementia Tax" and the endless repetition of "Strong and Stable government" from within the Tory safe spaces she sealed herself within.

And now this absolute nincompoop is attempting to shift blame away from himself by cynically whipping up anti-Irish sentiments!

He's not alone

Brexit has already gone spectacularly wrong. The government missed their own self-imposed Brexit deadline in March 2019 and ended up pathetically begging the EU for an extension because we'd failed to sort our shit out in time.

And now we're heading full throttle towards a "no deal" Brexit meltdown administered by Boris Johnson and the most shockingly right-wing Tory cabinet in history.

When it all comes crashing down, the people responsible will obviously resort to the same kinds of Timothyisms:

It's not our fault ... it's the EU ... it's the Irish ... it's the civil service ... it's Merkel and the Germans ... it's the pessimistic Remainers ... it's the social liberals ... it's the EU citizens in the UK ... it's left-wing bloggers ... it's Corbyn and the Labour Party ...

It's always everyone else to blame except for the people who actually did it!

And to think that the Tories are the political party who endlessly bang on about the importance of taking "personal responsibility"!

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OR

Right-wing ideologues are weaponising anti-Semitism to silence criticism of capitalism

People who follow Scottish politics may remember John McTernan as the unbelievably inept political strategist who managed to lose 40 of Labour's 41 Scottish seats in Westminster at the 2015 general election.

After masterminding the most catastrophic electoral collapse in British political history one would have thought that McTernan would be treated as the political joke that he is.

However the man with such boundless incompetence that he actually managed to kill the Labour Party in their Scottish heartlands is still routinely given mainstream media platforms and treated as if he's some kind of wise and knowledgeable political oracle, rather than the nonsense-spewing clown-like political figure that he actually is.

For some reason the normally reputable (but always right-leaning) Financial Times has given McTernan a platform to push his cartoonish political nonsense in a column entitled "Labour’s mistake is to believe there are no enemies to the left".

McTernan starts out with a number of obvious lies about Labour anti-Semitism claiming that anti-Semitism in the Labour ranks is "a recent phenomenon", which "coincides with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader".
 

The evidence is absolutely clear that support for anti-Semitic views have fallen dramatically since Jeremy Corbyn became party leader. This is almost certainly due to the massive influx of genuinely left-wing people into the party, many of them from the younger demographics who generally have way more socially liberal and progressive views than the older generations.

And as for the idea that anti-Semitism in Labour is a "recent phenomenon", how is it possible to explain how Labour's chief spin-doctor Alistair Campbell produced vile anti-Semitic attack posters in 2008? How is it possible to explain Campbell telling the journalists who uncovered the scandal to "fuck off and cover something important you twats"? And how is it possible to explain away the fact that the Blairite party leadership decided to take absolutely no action whatever to discipline him for either the anti-Semitic posters, or the abusive and 100% unapologetic reaction to the scandal?

After rambling on pretentiously for paragraph after paragraph McTernan eventually comes out with surely one of the most delusional and self-awareness deficient sentences ever to have featured in the Financial Times.

"Rhetoric about the 1 per cent and economic inequality has the same underlying theme [as anti-Semitic tropes] — a small group of very rich people who cleverly manipulate others to defend their interests. So anti-capitalism masks and normalises anti-Semitism"

This extraordinary effort to conflate legitimate criticisms of issues like capitalism and inequality with anti-Jewish bigotry is extraordinary on so many levels.

According to McTernan's warped worldview anyone who points out that just 8 men own the same wealth as half the world is being anti-Semitic!

Anyone who attempts to critique the excesses of the reckless over-financialised speculation frenzy that late stage capitalism has degenerated into is being anti-Semitic!

Anyone who points out that Tory austerity dogma has resulted in a vast transfer of wealth from the poor and ordinary to the mega-rich elitist class is being anti-Semitic!

Anyone who raises concerns about how mega-rich individuals and corporations routinely buy political influence and use their wealth to cynically manipulate others is being anti-Semitic!

The agenda here is obvious. It's an attempt to defend capitalism from any form of criticism by cynically equating the language of dissent against the hard-right economic status quo with unacceptable racist bigotry.

McTernan is hoping to construct a right-wing mindset where anyone who ever complains about the excesses of capitalism or the problem of rising inequality can be instantly dismissed as a racist bigot so as to permanently evade discussion of any of the actual issues they're trying to raise.

It's an attempt to create a right-wing version of political correctness whereby any attempt to ever question the capitalist system can be instantly shouted down and ignored as if it's nothing more than vile and unacceptable bigotry.

But the grotesque cynicism isn't even the worst thing about it. The worst thing is the vile self-righteousness that manifests as an absolute lack of self-awareness.

Even though he'd already proven himself to be an anti-Semitism denialist by whitewashing Labour's issues before 2015 when Blairites like him were running the show, McTernan imagines himself to be some kind of righteous white knight figure who is right, and just, and proper in his opposition to anti-Semitism. But his attempt to use anti-Semitism as a smokescreen to defend corporations and the mega-rich from any kind of systemic critique relies on an obvious anti-Semitic trope in itself.

In order to define any criticism of the greed, wealth-hoarding, manipulation, corruption, and influence-buying that goes on in late-stage capitalism as anti-Semitism, it's necessary to identify all of these issues as being inherently Jewish traits.

McTernan's line of thinking is that 1. Jews are greedy 2. the political left criticise greed: Therefore the political left are anti-Semites.

McTernan's hopeless effort to conflate criticism of the hard-right economic status quo with anti-Semitism is further demolished if we consider the fact that Jewish intellectuals from across the political spectrum have a long history of critiquing capitalism and inequality. Karl Marx was Jewish. Rosa Luxemburg was Jewish. Helen Suzman was Jewish. Hyman Minsky was Jewish. Robert Skidelsky is Jewish. Noam Chomsky is Jewish.

Are we expected to believe that all of these Jewish activists, academics and intellectuals are raving anti-Semites because they have critiqued capitalism and inequality?

Are we expected to believe that all left-wing Jewish people are 'self-hating Jews' simply because this obnoxious (non-Jewish) failure of a political strategist crudely conflates criticism of capitalism with anti-Semitism?

The problem with vile and conniving opportunists like McTernan is that they've realised accusations of anti-Semitism can be weaponised to discredit and silence their political opponents, but they're so base and crude that they end up actually spreading vile anti-Semitic tropes like 'greedy Jews' and 'self-hating Jews' around in their efforts to weaponise the issue for their own partisan purposes.

Conclusion

Criticism of the problems and excesses of late stage capitalism is not anti-Semitism.

John McTernan is cynically using the anti-Semitism issue to smear anyone who dares question what he considers to be the natural order of things.

However in order to weaponise anti-Semitism in this manner he's produced a vile article that stumbles through anti-Semitism denialism, invocation of the vile anti-Semitic 'greedy Jew' trope, to the implication that Jews who dare to ever critique capitalism or inequality must be 'self -hating Jews' who are engaging in anti-Semitism simply by raising their concerns about the state of the world.

Just like almost everything McTernan says, it's entirely useless in actually understanding the world around us, but it does serve to highlight the grotesque self-awareness deficient worldview that him and people like him occupy.

Is it any wonder Labour annihilated their own political heartlands in Scotland after their party became so dysfunctional that utterly repugnant hard-right ideologues like this ended up running the show?

 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

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

The Labour Party purge

The ongoing Labour Party purge is an extraordinary thing to behold. Not only is it a demonstration that a bunch of out-of-touch Labour Party elitists are intent on waging an anti-democratic war of attrition against the party's own membership, it's also being conducted in a searingly hypocritical manner.

Retrospective trawling

It's bad enough that Jeremy Corbyn supporters are being purged from the party for stuff as trivial as liking the Foo Fighters too much on their personal Facebook feed, while anti-Corbyn members of the Labour Party establishment are allowed to get away with abuse like calling other members of the party "Nazi stormtroopers" in the mainstream press, but one of the most disgraceful things is the people are being purged for having posted social media comments supporting other political parties long before they joined Labour.

When the civil rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti delivered her report into alleged cases of anti-Semitism the Labour Party and the NEC agreed to abide by its findings. One of the clearest recommendations of the whole report was her call for "a moratorium on the retrospective trawling of members' social media accounts and past comments".

Instead of heeding this call for a moratorium on social media trawling, the Labour Party NEC has instead decided to orchestrate what is almost certainly the most invasive Stasiesque mass trawling exercise in British political history.

Not only are they trawling back through people's social media accounts to look for signs of disloyalty or thought crime from when people became party members, they're clearly and undeniably trawling back through comments that were made long before the intended victims of their witch-hunt ever even joined the Labour Party.

Examples

One of the worst examples of someone being purged for supporting other parties long before Corbyn even became Labour leader is the case of Dr Gemma Angel who was purged from the Labour Party over a Tweet from May 2014 in which she explained her reasons for voting Green.

Gemma Angel is far from the only example of someone being purged from the Labour Party for having supported other parties long before Jeremy Corbyn became leader and inspired them to join Labour. Another example is Ben Crawford who was also purged for the "crime" of posting Tweets in support of the Green Party between 2014 and 2015 (see letter).

Attracting other voters

Before the Anyone But Corbyn coup was launched the right-wing of the Labour Party constantly chelped away about how Corbyn couldn't appeal to supporters of other parties, but now that they've realised that tens of thousands of people who used to support other parties have joined Labour in order to support Jeremy Corbyn, they've set about trawling through their social media accounts desperately searching for any reason to prevent them voting for Corbyn in the leadership election!

A political party that is determined to bar people from joining them if they've ever supported a rival political party is so ridiculous it's like an unwitting self-parody. It's hardly possible to think of a more effective way of making sure your political party becomes an increasingly irrelevant dissent-banning closed ideology echo chamber than the orchestration of a massive witch-hunt of any members who ever dared to support another party in the past.

The sheer hypocrisy of it

The idea of setting a load of Labour Party minions the task of trawling through the social media postings of pro-Corbyn party members and supporters to look for any excuse to bar them from voting in the leadership election is appalling enough in its own right, but punishing people for supporting other parties before they even became Labour Party members is staggeringly hypocritical when actual members of the Labour Party establishment have been allowed to get away with making a £2 million+ donation to the Liberal Democrats (David Sainsbury), openly stating that they'd rather the Tories win the next election than a Labour Party that represents the will of its membership (Tony Blair), speaking at a Tory party conference and praising their hard-right economic agenda (John McTernan), and accepting a load of Tory party cash to run an anti-EU campaign to undermine the official position of the party (the Labour Leave shills).

It's staggeringly hypocritical for the Labour Party NEC to purge ordinary members for stuff they said long before they even joined the party when they've proven themselves so willing to turn a blind-eye to blatant examples of disloyalty from high profile Labour people who were members of the party at the time of their disloyalty.

A Pyrrhic victory is their best possible outcome for Owen Smith

If the terrified Labour Party establishment do succeed in purging 200,000+ Labour Party members in order to hand victory to the Anyone But Corbyn candidate Owen Smith it will clearly be a Pyrrhic victory.

Corbyn supporters won't be the only ones to delegitimise Smith and the Labour Party by pointing out that he only managed to win because the leadership election was rigged in his favour. All of Labour's political rivals would gleefully use this anti-democratic shambles as a stick to whack him with too.

Do the Anyone But Corbyn supporters really believe that Theresa May and the Tories wouldn't use this disgraceful anti-democratic purge to score points against Owen Smith if he won? Do they really think the tories and other rival parties would go easy on him just because he helped to get Jeremy Corbyn out of the picture?

Even if Owen Smith wins, he's doomed and the Labour's reputation as a democratic party will be in tatters because of the manner of his victory. The only way to repair the damage is for the Labour members who haven't been purged to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and to then demand democratic reforms of the party so that Labour Party elitists will never be able to go on such an appallingly damaging anti-democratic rampage against the party membership again.

 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

Party elitists vs ordinary members: The Labour civil war

Richard Burgon is the Labour MP for Leeds East and the shadow Justice Secretary. On the 27th of August 2016 he summed up what the Labour Party civil war is all about when he said:

"I believe it's important to stand up for Labour members. MPs are not 'a cut above' the membership. Myself and other MPs are just ordinary members who have been given the privilege of serving as representatives of our communities." 

Contempt for the membership

A look at the behaviour of the Labour Party establishment since September 2015 Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the party with an astonishing 59.5% of the vote in a four horse race provides plenty of proof of the contempt that a lot of Labour Party elitists have towards the ordinary members.

• A number of right-wing Blairite MPs petulantly defied the will of the majority of Labour Party membership by flatly refusing to participate in the shadow cabinet from day one, then set about constantly briefing against the party leadership to the press, openly parading their elitist attitudes and even accusing the Labour Party membership of petulance!

• Other right-wing Labour MPs agreed to serve in the cabinet but secretly plotted to try to overthrow the members' choice of leader with a series of pre-planned resignations. They were so confident of success that they even briefed the Daily Telegraph about their plot two weeks before they launched it.

• In launching their plot to bully the members' choice of leader into resignation in the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum, the coup-plotters completely spurned the best opportunity to attack the Tories in decades.

• When Corbyn made it clear that he would only leave if he was defeated in a democratic election the coup-plotters tried to have him excluded from the ballot because they suspected that the Labour membership would vote for him again.

• Certain coup-plotter MPs have taken to distorting events and outright lying in order to paint ordinary party members as a violent mob of bigoted brick-lobbing thugs. Angela Eagle is a particularly egregious offender in this regard having brazenly misrepresented the "notorious brick" incident, refused to correct allegations that she suffered homophobic abuse at a meeting she didn't even attend and outright lying about an even being cancelled due to "threats" when in reality the venue owner pulled the plug because he didn't want a political event in his hotel.

• The coup-plotters then decided to retroactively disenfranchise some 130,000 Labour Party members from participating in the leadership election in order to rig it in favour of their Anyone But Corbyn candidate.

• When numerous local Labour constituency parties began holding votes of no confidence in their coup-plotter MPs the party establishment quickly imposed a complete lockdown on local party democracy to prevent them.

All of these actions demonstrate that the party hierarchy and the coup-plotters see themselves as a cut above the party membership. As far as they're concerned the will of 172 MPs completely outweighs the will of 250,000+ party members. Their opinions are well over 1,000 times as important as ordinary party members.

The deputy leader Tom Watson clearly expressed this contempt for the party membership when he described the decision to introduce a properly democratic One Member One Vote electoral system within the Labour Party as "a terrible error of judgement".

All of the above things demonstrate that certain Labour Party politicians see themselves as "a cut above" ordinary party members, but this disgusting elitist attitude is best demonstrated by the ongoing Labour Party purge.

The contrast between the standards of behaviour being applied to ordinary party members and people at the top of the party couldn't be starker.

Abuse

Ordinary members are being purged from the party for all kinds of spurious reasons, perhaps the most of all being the woman who was slung out of the party for posting "I fucking love the Foo Fighters" on her personal Facebook wall. Many others have been suspended with no explanation of what they are supposed to have done wrong other than generic "comments on social media" or "comments on Twitter" meaning they have pretty much no means to appeal the suspension because they don't even know what they stand accused of saying.

The fact that Labour Party minions are trawling through people's social media activities to search for reasons to exclude them from voting in the leadership election is bad enough in its own right, but the contrast between the trivial "crimes" committed by purged Labour members and the unpunished behaviour of members of the party elite couldn't be stronger.

Here are a few examples:

• The millionaire Labour donor Michael Foster writing an article for the Daily Mail in which he called members of the Labour Party "nazi stormtroopers" and a tide of other insults - Not suspended.

• The Labour Party adviser John McTernan bringing the party into disrepute by threatening to fight an MP from another party - Not suspended

• The Labour Party MP Tom Blenkinsop turning his Twitter feed into a tide of cry-bully abuse in which he yelled "idiot" and "entryist" at anyone who disagreed with his appalling behaviour, including a life-long Labour voter - Not suspended

• Another coup-supporting MP to turn his Twitter feed into a severely damaging tide of abuse against the party leadership and other party members is the Labour MP Ian Austin. He was also allowed to get away with telling the leader of his party to "sit down and shut up" when he was speaking about the damning findings of the Chilcot report.

It's absolutely clear that when it comes to abusive and disreputable behaviour, ordinary members are being held to a much higher standard than members of the party establishment who seem to be able to get away with pretty much whatever they like.

Disloyalty

Another reason the Labour Party establishment have come up with for slinging ordinary members out of the party is "disloyalty". Several people have been purged for Twitter comments in favour of other political parties such as the Green Party dating from as far back as May 2014, long before they even became members of the Labour Party.

Contrast the ludicrous attitude that ordinary members who used to support other parties are unwelcome with what members of the Labour Party establishment have been allowed to get away with despite being high-profile members of the party.

• The unelected Labour Peer David Sainsbury gave a donation of over two million pounds to the Liberal Democrats in the second quarter of 2016 - Not suspended

• In 2015 the Labour Party adviser John McTernan made an appearance at the Tory Party conference for the right-wing thinktank Progress. During the presentation he described Margaret Thatcher's toxic political legacy as a good thing! - Not suspended

• During the EU referendum debate the Labour Leave faction accepted hundreds of thousands of pounds in funding from a bunch of Tories in order to campaign against the official party line. Evey single one of their declared donations came from either a major Tory donor or a Tory afilliated organisation! - No suspensions at all

• Tony Blair openly declared that he'd rather have the Tories win the next General Election rather than see Labour win on a genuinely left-wing platform - Not suspended

It's utterly preposterous that Tweeting about having voted for the Green Party years before they even joined Labour is considered a "crime" that ordinary members must be suspended for, while people within the party establishment go completely unpunished for bankrolling rival political parties to the tune of £millions, appearing at rival party conferences and endorsing their political agendas, accepting Tory cash to campaign against the official party line and openly declaring that they'd rather Labour loses the next election to the Tories.

It's also worth considering the party establishment's attitude towards defectors from other parties.

• A Lib-Dem councillor who stood against Labour at the last local election welcomed into the party with open arms, with no condemnation of the fact she was a member of the Lib-Dems just the day before!

• During the Blair era numerous Tory politicians defected directly from the Tory party to Labour. Probably the most high profile was Shaun Woodward who defected to Labour in 1999 and was pretty much immediately put in charge of Labour's 2001 Election campaign. He was then rewarded by the party elite by being parachuted into the ultra-safe Labour seat of St Helens.

The fact that Labour has repeatedly accepted defectors from other parties shows how remarkable their double standards are. If you're party of the political club you can switch allegiance immediately, but if you're an ordinary person you can be barred from the Labour Party for having voted for another political party years previously.

Conclusion

It's beyond doubt that a large number of people in the Labour Party establishment (politicians, party donors, advisers, party administrators ...) see themselves and their ilk as "a cut above" the ordinary members. The coup plot has proven their contempt for the will of the party membership clearly enough, but the abject hypocrisy of the ongoing Labour Party purge is absolute proof that these people have the same mentality as elitists across the political spectrum, that there should be one set of rules for the little people, and an altogether more lenient set of rules for members of the elite inner circle.

The battle for the future of the Labour Party isn't really so much about policy (Owen Smith is blatantly pilfering Corbyn's policies) and neither is it about personality (If Corbyn is "unelectable" because of his lack of media training then putting up a gaffe-prone blunderer who pretty much nobody has heard to challenge him is utterly ludicrous).

What it's really all about is whether the Labour Party membership believe that the party is best run by a managerialist elite who see themselves as a "a cut above the lower orders", or whether they think it's best run in the actual interests of the Labour Party members and voters.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The Labour Party edict banning the word "Blairite"

It has been reported that the Labour Party establishment have decided to ban Labour Party members from using the word "Blairite" under threat of being barred from voting in the upcoming leadership election.

According to a report on the Croydon Today website the word "Blairite" has been added to "the list of proscribed words, apparently provided by Labour HQ which was read out to a meeting of party members in Croydon last week".

We already know that just like they did in 2015, minions at Labour Party HQ are busy trawling the social media accounts of people who signed up to vote in the Labour Leadership election in search of "thought crime" such as previous support for the Green Party*, so it will be no surprise if they start weeding out anyone who has ever referred to the likes of Peter Mandelson, Ian Austin, John McTernan, Hillary Benn, Tristram Hunt and other Labour right-wingers as what they are: "Blairites".

Interestingly the edict from Labour Party HQ hasn't banned Labour right-wingers from using slanderous, misleading and downright abusive terms like "trots", "infiltrators", "extremists", "thugs", "dogs", "brick-lobbers", "quasi-Marxists", "entryists", "cultists", "communists" and "bullies" to describe the 300,000+ new members from all ages, areas and demographic groups attracted to the Labour Party since Jeremy Corbyn burst onto the scene in the summer of 2015.

As far as the Labour Party establishment are concerned it's perfectly fine for Labour right-wingers to severely damage the reputation of the party by referring to hundreds of thousands of their own party members with vicious and inaccurate slurs, yet anyone who refers to Tony Blair acolytes as the "Blairites" that they actually are has committed such a severe crime that they could be stripped of their right to vote in the leadership election!

I'm not, and never have been a Labour Party member so I'm not afraid of saying what I see. The right-wing Labour coup-plotters like Hillary Benn, Tristram Hunt, Will Straw, John McTernan and their ilk are a bunch of Blairites doing their master's bidding. 

Tony Blair clearly explained that he'd rather the Tories win the next General Election than allow Jeremy Corbyn to have a chance of success, and the coup-plotters are behaving exactly like brainwashed members of a cult by committing mass suicide because their demagogue has demanded of them. They would rather destroy the Labour Party and their own political careers in the process than go against the will of their leader.

In trying to bully Jeremy Corbyn into resignation so that they didn't have to fight him in a leadership election, making sinister anonymous threats to split the party or to paralyse it with one leadership challenge after another, they're clearly acting like bullies.

It's pretty obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of British politics that the Blairites are the "entryists" who took over a left-wing political party and switched it to the promotion of Rupert Murdoch approved Thatcherism (driving away 5 million Labour voters between 1997 and 2010 in the process).

It's remarkable how so many of the terms of abuse that the Labour right-wingers hurl at Jeremy Corbyn supporters ("bullies", "infiltrators", "cultists", "entryists") are so much more applicable to themselves than the victims of their slurs, but that's how psychological bullies operate. They project their own disgusting character traits onto their victims, and then continually blame their victims for the abuse they subject them to. 

I can say what I like because these bullies can't punish me for expressing my opinions. If you are a Labour Party member or supporter who wants to vote for Jeremy Corbyn it's a different story. You should be very careful to moderate your language to comply with the demands of the Labour Party thought police. Their decision to expel some 130,000 Labour Party members from voting in the leadership election and their complete lockdown on local party democracy are very clear indicators that the Blairite riddled Labour Party establishment are terrified of democracy and will go to extraordinary lengths to deny ordinary Labour Party members their right to vote. 

This abject fear of democracy and free speech, and their desperate efforts to rig the leadership election in favour of their Anyone But Corbyn candidate is a perfect illustration of why it is so important for Labour Party members to ensure that these people don't get to take over the Labour Party again.

 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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* = One would have thought that attracting supporters and members from other political parties would have been a core objective of any party intent on increasing their share of the vote, but it appears that the only supporters of other parties the Blairites are intent on attracting are Tories!

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.

 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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