The Tory party are so short of reasons for anyone to actually support the Tory party that they're sharing ancient anti-Labour propaganda from eight years ago.
The first thing to note is that the notorious "no money" note from Liam Byrne was intended as a friendly joke with the incoming Tory administration along the lines of the "Good luck, old cock.... Sorry to leave it in such a mess." note from the former Tory Chancellor Reginald Maudling to his Labour Successor Jim Callaghan.
Then there's the fact that you'd have to be an absolute simpleton to actually believe that an assertion that there's no money left is a serious one, because the Bank of England can create money out of nothing whenever it likes (quantitative easing), and private banks create money out of nothing whenever they issue a loan, in fact the government only produces 3% of the money in circulation (coins and notes). So how can there be no money if the vast majority of money in the modern economy is simply magicked up out of nothing?
It's clear that "no money left" propaganda trope is the same kind of demeaning economic baby talk that the Tories' endlessly repeated "magic money tree" gibberish.
The fact that the Tories keep persisting with these demeaning economic fairy stories leaves us wondering whether they're so economically illiterate that they actually believe this rubbish, or whether they're so damned arrogant and elitist that they know it's absolute gibberish, but they view the general public as a hopelessly gullible bunch of halfwits who will believe literally anything they're told.
Then there's the fact that Labour are a very different party from what they were in 2010. Back then they were utterly dominated by the right-wing Progress faction who pushed ruinous hard-right policies like privatisation mania, corporate outsourcing, and bank deregulation. Now they've moved away from the hard-right neoliberal consensus that both Labour and Tory governments inflicted on the UK since 1979.
Then there's the Tory track record in government over the last eight years. We should all remember how they promised to eliminate the budget deficit by 2015, then failed so spectacularly that they're now projecting it won't be resolved until 2031. That's 21 years to achieve what they bragged that they would do in less than five!
Any Tory with a grain of sense would be hoping people forget about what was going on when they came to power in 2010, rather than actively reminding people about it.
Aside from their pathetic failure to achieve their number one headline economic target, the rest of the Tory track record is lamentable too: The longest sustained decline in the value of workers wages since records began, massive trade deficits, an unprecedented collapse in UK productivity, the lowest levels of infrastructure investment in the developed world, ruinous austerity dogma, millions of children growing up in poverty while the Tories lavish handouts on their mega-rich chums, and the impending economic chaos of Brexit too.
It's quite extraordinary that the British public have eight years of woeful Tory economic incompetence to consider, yet the Tory propaganda unit imagine that all of this demonstrable failure can be trumped by nothing more that a ridiculous joke note from eight years ago. That's how much contempt they have for the general public!
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It's now absolutely clear that a large majority of Labour MPs have completely lost touch with reality.
Brexit was a massive Tory disaster. Indisputably their biggest cock up in decades. Stuff like Black Wednesday dwindles into insignificance in comparison to the Prime Minister gambling the entire future of the UK in order to win a bit od short-term political advantage at the 2015 General Election, losing the bet and then announcing his resignation the next day, leaving the Tory party rudderless and the country in a bizarre state of limbo as the hopelessly divided Tory government decide to further infuriate the remaining 27 EU member states by announcing that they're going to delay the start of the EU withdrawal process for as long as they can get away with, because they don't actually have anything remotely resembling a sensible plan of action for what comes next.
The Labour response to this gaping open goal was not to unite in condemnation, furiously demand answers and begin explaining a clear Labour Party strategy for what should come next, but to immediately descend into outright civil war.
It's now absolutely clear that the anti-democratic coup attempt against Jeremy Corbyn was pre-planned. The Blairites behind it were so confident of success that they even briefed the Daily Telegraph about what they were going to do 10 days before the EU referendum result was even announced.
The Labour MPs who have participated in this coup attempt have inflicted enormous damage on the party. They saw the Tory party struggling in a deep hole of their own digging, but instead of aiming their concentrated fire at the stricken Tories, they gave them a helping hand to climb out and then kicked their own party down there in their place. By drawing the media spotlight away from the Tory chaos and onto Labour Party infighting they completely squandered the biggest party political advantage they've had in years.
These clueless Labour MPs were obviously so giddy with excitement at getting rid of their democratically elected leader, that they completely neglected to think about the bigger picture.
When the orchestrated "blitz" of resignations and the storm of negative newsbites about Corbyn fed to the mainstream media by some shady Blairite PR company failed to dislodge Corbyn, they were left with no choice but to call an unconstitutional vote of no confidence in the hope that Corbyn would resign in shame. But again he stood firm against a spectacular display of treachery against their own leader, the membership who elected him, and the entire labour movement.
The Labour Party constitution dictates that an incumbent leader automatically gets to stand in a leadership contest if they want to, so Corbyn will stand, which is a disaster for the Blairites.
In the last leadership election Corbyn won 60% of the vote in a four horse race! Since then his popularity amongst Labour members has soared and he's attracted so many new people into the party that it's literally doubled in size (only a Blairite could consider a doubling of the party membership to be disastrous!).
If the Parliamentary Labour Party want to defeat Jeremy Corbyn in a democratic election, they're going to have to pick someone truly magnificent from their pack to even stand the remotest chance of beating him, which brings us most inappropriately to Angela Eagle.
The PLP can clearly only field one candidate against Corbyn because they can't afford to split the vote, and the "unity" candidate they appear to have selected is Angela Eagle.
People may be forgiven for not knowing much/anything about her. After all, few people had heard of Jeremy Corbyn before his meteoric rise from the backbenches to the Labour Party leader with the biggest mandate in history in just a matter of months.
One of the most important things to note is that Angela Eagle voted in favour of the catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq, and then repeatedly voted against an independent inquiry about it. This is no surprise. Apparently they looked for a candidate without Iraqi blood on their hands, but found that all of them were actually in Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet!
Another important thing to note is that Angela Eagle has got no appreciation of the bigger picture. If she'd had any strategic sense whatever she would have pleaded with the Blairites to hold off their coup attempt at least until the public narrative had been set that the Tories were to blame for Brexit. Had she played it that way she could have made as big a show as possible of attacking the Tories, then when the pre-planned coup against Corbyn was launched, she could have pointed out that it was her, and not Corbyn landing all the heavy punches on the Tories.
Instead of playing it strategically she was as giddy as the rest of the Labour Party career politicians who have more in common with the Tories they pretend to oppose than with the Labour Party members and voters they pretend to represent.
In fact she was so giddy with excitement that she made herself look spectacularly insincere in her resignation letter. Within two weeks of praising Corbyn for "pursuing an itinerary that would make a 25-year-old tired" she was slamming him for making the case for Remain "with half hearted ambivalence". The sheer insincerity of such a volte face would be astounding if she was anyone but a professional politician, and stands in stark contrast to Jeremy Corbyn's track record of honesty.
Another interesting thing to note about Angela Eagle is that she has virtually no social media presence. She has just 13,300 odd Facebook followers compared to Jeremy Corbyn's 688,300+. To put Eagle's paltry social media following into perspective a bit, Corbyn has picked up 34,000+ new Facebook followers in just the last week.
Anyone who thinks social media is some kind of fad with no impact on modern politics is hopelessly out of touch. Of course Eagle will have the mainstream media on her side, but Corbyn will absolutely annihilate her in social media reach.
Another thing to note about Angela Eagle is an appalling foot in mouth moment that is bound to come back and haunt her if she ever makes it past Corbyn and faces the Tories and the right-wing press in a General Election.
In April 2008 when working as Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury she made a howler every bit as bad as Liam Byrne's ludicrous "there's no money" note (if not worse because what she said wasn't even intended as a poorly considered joke). Eagle's response to Liberal Democrat concerns that the UK was experiencing a housing bubble was to dismiss those concerns as "a colourful and lurid fiction that has no real bearing on the macroeconomic reality".
We all now know what was actually going on in 2007-08; how property prices crashed; and the financial sector ended up being rescued from complete insolvency which resulted in the biggest state sector interventions in history being handed out by her government. It's absolutely clear that if anyone in had no understanding of "the macroeconomic reality" back in April 2008 it was clearly Angela Eagle.
One final and important point is that just ten months ago Angela Eagle stood in the Labour Party deputy leadership election and finished fourth out of five candidates. It's absolutely incredible that a bunch of people who have been constantly smearing Jeremy Corbyn as "unelectable" have suddenly decided that a woman who practically nobody has heard of and who came nowhere near competing for the Labour party Deputy Leadership just ten months ago, will somehow be more electable than he is!
Angela Eagle is a strategically inept, insincere, gaffe-prone, Iraq invasion supporting career politician who has virtually no public or social media profile (despite being an MP for 24 years) and who could only finish fourth in the Labour Party deputy leadership election just 10 months ago.
Apparently there are a load of Labour MPs who think that Eagle has what it takes to beat Jeremy Corbyn in a re-run of the Labour leadership election. And then, if she somehow manages that, go on to beat Boris Johnson/Theresa May (and the Tory media machine) in a snap General Election, even after driving disgusted voters, members and (most importantly) activists away from the Tony Blair Party in their droves.
These people are so clearly out-of-touch with reality it's bizarre.
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Tony Blair and Gordon Brown usurped the Labour Party back in 1994 and promised Rupert Murdoch that they would continue pushing Thatcherite economics in return for support from his vast media empire. Ever since then the party has been infiltrated by ever more self-serving careerist politicians with no real interest in the actual purpose of the Labour Party, and very little in common with the ordinary Labour voter. Perhaps the most glaring example of this kind of out-of-touch self-serving careerist is the former shadow education secretary and current self-appointed anti-Corbyn spokesperson Tristram Hunt.
Tristram Hunt comes from a wealthy establishment family, his father having been handed a seat in the unelected House of Lords by Tony Blair in 2000. In 2010 Hunt junior was handed the super-safe Labour seat of Stoke Central, which is an area with which he had no connection whatever. Hunt grew up in Cambridge, went to an exclusive private school in London, studied at university in Cambridge and has worked as a lecturer in London since 2001. In fact, before being parachuted in there, Hunt had more connection to Chicago, Illinois (where he studied briefly) than he did with Stoke-on-Trent.
Shadow education ineptitude
Before being parachuted into his super-safe Labour seat in Stoke, Hunt was best known as a TV historian, so perhaps the fact that he had some kind of rudimentary public profile is the reason that he was given the incredibly important role of shadow education secretary after just three years as an MP? Whatever the case, he was utterly inept at it, letting Michael Gove's ideological vandalism of the state education system go virtually unchallenged.
Of course Hunt wasn't the only one of Ed Miliband's shadow minister to do an utterly feeble job of holding the Tories to account. When Iain Duncan Smith was found guilty of unlawful abuse of the unemployed, the shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne let him write his "get out of jail free" card by allowing him pass some vile retroactive workfare rules as emergency legislation, and history must surely judge Ed Ball's austerity-lite economic agenda as one of the most inept and ill-conceived election strategies in modern political history.
Hunt's performance as shadow education minister was particularly inept though because of the severity of the Tory ideological lunacy being imposed on our schools and the fact that Michael Gove was spectacularly unpopular with the teaching profession and public alike. Instead of attacking what the Tories were doing Hunt actually ended up agreeing with most of it, and letting them completely off the hook.
Petulance
Tristram Hunt showed how much of a petulant mentality he has when he ruled himself out of ever serving in Jeremy Corbyn's cabinet, and has continued to demonstrate his petulance with regular toy-throwing tantrums about the fact that Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour Party leadership.
Instead of trying to constructively push the party in the kind of direction he would like, he's chosen to have repeated hissy fits and refused to play at all, preferring to throw bizarre childish tantrums on the sidelines in the vain hope that everyone will stop playing and begin celebrating him as the visionary champion that brought the "terrible" game of Labour Party democracy to an end.
Tristram Hunt has no qualms about continually attacking the Labour Party leadership in the vain hope that the Labour Party membership will meekly hand control of the party to his right-wing Blairite faction of the party.
Poor judgement
Tristram Hunt was one of the small clique of right-wing Labour MPs who backed Liz Kendall to lead the party. The fact that she came fourth and last in the Labour leadership contest with just 4.5% of the vote (as compared to Corbyn's 59.5%) just goes to show how out of touch Hunt is with the party he supposedly represents.
Hunt speaks on behalf of the tiny minority within the Labour Party who believed that Ed Miliband failed to become prime minister not because he spectacularly failed to offer a clear alternative to Tory austerity, but because he didn't ape Tory party policy quite closely enough.
Social Media
One of the most blatant examples of Tristram Hunt's cluelessness is the utter contempt he has for social media. Instead of marvelling at the immense power of social media to dissect and destroy the right-wing pro-Tory narratives that so utterly dominate in the mainstream press, he has nothing but suspicion for social media, even claiming that social media has been guilty of disconnecting Labour from the public!
Instead of looking at the role social media played in countering the relentless tide of establishment anti-Corbyn propaganda (which was ubiquitous from the Daily Mail to the Guardian) and mobilising hundreds of thousands of people to vote for Corbyn, he's desperate to attack it.
Instead of realising that intelligent use of social media represents an unprecedented opportunity to break the right-wing stranglehold on British political discourse, Hunt sees it as a dangerous threat to be condemned and belittled because it resulted in an outcome he was afraid of (the Labour Party shifting to the left, not even further to the right as he would have liked).
Public Services
Tristram Hunt is also prepared to launch desperately misleading public attacks on Jeremy Corbyn in order to undermine his leadership.
The overwhelming majority of the British public believe that essential public services like the NHS, the energy companies, the rail network and the Royal Mail should be run as not-for-profit public services. That Corbyn has been talking about renationalisation of public services is a demonstration that he's actually far more tuned in to what ordinary voters want than any other mainstream party leader in the last two decades. However, instead of lauding Jeremy Corbyn for giving the public a bit of what they want, Tristram Hunt has actually launched public attacks on Corbyn for having supposedly "marched decisively away from the views of voters" when it comes to public services!
One explanation for getting this issue so completely backwards this seems to be that he thinks that public opinion can be used interchangeably with the free-market fanaticism of the right-wing press barons.
Another explanation is that he knows perfectly well that Corbyn is marching decisively towards the views of voters when it comes to public services, but his desire to undermine and overthrow Corbyn trumps observable reality, so he just decided to lie about it.
The one percenters
One of Hunt's most bizarre bits of backwards thinking was his assertion to a bunch of Cambridge students that by engaging with the public on social media, the Labour Party risks becoming a "sect", and that the solution to that problem is for the "top 1%" to take control of the Labour Party in the future.
It's utterly bizarre that Hunt thinks that a Labour Party with more paid up members than it's had for decades which is finally beginning to realise the awesome power of social media to erode the dominance of the right-wing media, is in danger of becoming a "sect". Even more bizarre is his proposed solution of disempowering the Labour Party membership by filling the party leadership with even more Oxbridge educated elitists like himself, and by abandoning efforts to use social media to engage with the public.
Which sounds more like a "sect"? A party led by a guy who goes on endlessly about giving more power to ordinary people to make important decisions, or a party led by a self-appointed clique of expensively educated one percenters?
Entitlement
What's even more appalling than Hunt's appallingly inept display as shadow education secretary, his bizarre public displays of backwards thinking and his staggeringly petulant reaction to things not going exactly his way, is his sickening sense of entitlement.
His comments about how the Labour Party needs to be run by the "top 1%", (as represented by Cambridge graduates like himself) illustrate his mentality. He believes that him, and people like him, have a natural entitlement to run the show, and he's clearly furious that uppity ordinary people have ignored his superior wisdom and overwhelmingly elected Jeremy Corbyn as their leader, rather than Liz Kendall (who got less than one vote for every 13 Corbyn did).
Instead of taking this walloping defeat with a bit of good grace, Hunt has been carping from the sidelines ever since. Instead of trying to learn the lessons of such a tremendous defeat for the most right-wing elements of the Labour Party, Hunt has vented his fury at ordinary Labour Party members and condemned the use of social media, because it's always easier to lash out like that than to admit that your own ideas were desperately unpopular.
Tristram Hunt clearly considers himself to be the kind of "top 1%" Cambridge graduate who has a natural entitlement to run the Labour Party if he chooses to, but his behaviour clearly indicated that he's actually nowhere near that smart. The most intelligent people don't go in for embarrassing public displays of petulance and blatantly backwards thinking. Neither do they attempt to pin blame on utterly bizarre things (like the use of social media) in the wake of resounding defeats, rather than trying to learn lessons about what they themsleves got so badly wrong.
Leadership
The fact that someone like Tristram Hunt rose so far in the Labour Party to begin with is an indicator of how desperately short of genuine talent the party has become (as a result of marginalising anyone who dared oppose the Blairite orthodoxy over the last two decades).
Hunt's performance as shadow education minister was abject; his decision to back Liz Kendall for Labour leader showed how out of touch he is with the party he supposedly represents; his refusal to participate in front bench politics demonstrates how childishly petulant he is; and his constant carping from the sidelines with displays of absurd backwards thinking illustrate the fact that he's nowhere near as brilliantly intelligent as he imagines himself to be.
I think it's entirely reasonable that people might have doubts about whether Jeremy Corbyn can be an effective enough leader of the Labour Party to overcome the awesome power of the right-wing press. Corbyn has got off to a reasonable start as Labour leader, but he's got an awful lot left to prove to his doubters. However, anyone who imagines that the rise of out-of-touch entitlement driven elitists like Tristram Hunt would represent a more effective opposition to the Tories must be as terminally confused about politics as Hunt is himself.
The Labour Party doesn't need an influx of new Tristram Hunts. What it actually needs is an awful lot fewer of them, and more people from ordinary backgrounds in positions of leadership.
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The Labour Party business secretary Chuka Umunna has waded into the party leadership debate with some incredibly ill-considered and divisive comments that can only possibly be seen as damaging to the Labour Party.
His comments in a Newsnight interview with Allegra Stratton included accusations that the Labour Party are "behaving like a petulant child who has been told you can't have all the sweeties in the sweetie shop" and "screaming at the electorate". He also launched a bizarre attack on the most left-wing of the leadership candidates Jeremy Corbyn, saying that his political views are "not a politics that can win" and hurling a totally unsubstantiated assertion that Corbyn supports increasing benefits to people who refuse to work.
The lack of self-awareness here is astounding. Umunna launches a scathing attack against elements of his own party for supposedly telling the electorate what they should think, but then in the very same tirade he blatantly presupposes what he thinks the electorate want when he says that Corbyn's politics simply can't win.
From what I've heard from Corbyn is that he believes Labour got it all wrong under Miliband (thanks to the woeful guidance of right-wingers like Ed Balls, Liam Byrne and Chuka Umunna himself), and that what he wants to do now is to offer the public is an actual coherent alternative to the Tory ideological austerity agenda that has already done such catastrophic social and economic damage to the UK.
For Umunna to claim that the public definitely don't want that, and would prefer the kind of Murdoch approved Blairite Red-Toryism he envisages for the party, is to show precisely the contempt for the electorate that he accuses Jeremy Corbyn of.
It hardly looks like a coincidence that a self-serving career politician like Chuka Umunna would make the presupposition that what the electorate want is precisely what would be best for his own political career. I mean if Corbyn wins the Labour leadership election it would have meant en end to Umunna's time near the top of the party hierarchy because Corbyn would have very little need of careerist red-Tories like him, but now that Umunna has launched such a divisive attack on his potential future leader, his political career will be all but over if Corbyn wins. In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Umunna cross the benches to join the Tory Party if Corbyn wins, or to quit politics altogether to work for one of the big businesses he's spent the last few years sucking up to.
To launch such a blistering attack on an increasingly popular potential future leader of the his own party looks like a pretty foolhardy move, but what must be more alarming to Labour Party supporters is the intense disloyalty he has shown to a significant number of Labour Party colleagues and supporters who support, or at least have sympathy for, what Jeremy Corbyn has actually been saying (rather than the unsubstantiated drivel that Umunna just made up to attack him with). Surely Umunna's ire would have been better aimed away from his own party rather than within it?
One of the most absurd assertions Umunna made during his attack on Jeremy Corbyn was that "ultimately we betray our people if we don't get elected", which is very easy indeed to counter with "ultimately we betray our people if we get elected by adopting the very same politics as the party that ours traditionally exists to oppose".
It's precisely this "no principle is important enough to stick to if it means pissing off Rupert Murdoch" attitude that has made the Labour Party such an unappealing and rudderless organisation that they couldn't even prevent an incredibly unpopular Tory Party from taking a parliamentary majority. The Labour Party needs to find some actual principles and stick to them, rather than relying on focus groups and think tanks to come up with Tory-lite policies that they think will play well in the pages of the right-wing press.
I'm not a member of the Labour Party, but if I was I'd be furious. First of all that Umunna's ill-considered tirade can only be seen as damaging and divisive, but more importantly that such a vacuous, imprudent, unprincipled waste of space of a career politician has risen so high within the party to begin with. It takes quite a breathtaking lack of self-awareness for Umunna to realise that it's the rise of hopelessly inadequate politicians like him that has made Labour so much more unelectable, not the fact that there are still a few people left in the party who stand for traditional Labour values like championing social justice, combating poverty and investing in good public services and infrastructure.
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I'd like to begin this post by saying that I used to dislike Russell Brand rather intensely, but that he has gradually won me over into thinking that he's actually becoming a decent kind of bloke who wants to do the right things, but just isn't sure how to.
I warmed to him a bit when I noticed his early forays into talking about politics, power and other important issues because I thought it looked like he was trying to do some growing up, but the moment he fully won me over was when he sued the S*n for writing lies about his personal life, then gave his compensation to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign.
Anyone who is going to expose Rupert Murdoch's minions as liars and then give their compensation money to the victims of one of the Murdoch Empire's most sickening hate campaigns can't be all bad can they?
Rejectionism
I'm not going to say much about Russell Brand's rejectionist views (that were blasted into mainstream public conscience as a result of his notorious 'no point in voting' interview with Jeremy Paxman) because I wrote an article about it at the time (you can read that here if you want).
While I agree with Russell Brand's basic premise that voting is a very very small party of civic engagement, and that direct action is a much more powerful tool for achieving progressive social reform, I feel that his early efforts to engage people in alternative politics have been severely counter-productive.
I'm not saying that everything he says is wrong, far from it, he raises numerable interesting points and his analysis is sometimes exceptional. It's just that he's let himself down really badly by presenting a confused message to his audience, and worse than that, allowing himself to become enticed by party politics in the excitement of a General Election.
The real absurdity of his switch from rejectionism to the blanket endorsement of a political party stems from the fact that when he began deciding that certain politicians within the system were actually worth a vote, the deadline to register to vote for them had long since passed.
I'm not sure whether Brand himself had actually bothered to register to vote (which would have been an odd thing for someone who had advocated not voting to do), but I'm sure that he did nothing to encourage his audience to register as the voter registration deadline approached. I'm also sure that many of his fans would have been rendered incapable of actually doing as he was urging them, even if they'd wanted to, because they hadn't bothered to register to vote.
Caroline Lucas
I can fully understand why Russell Brand decided to ease his rejectionist stance to in order to endorse Caroline Lucas as the candidate for Brighton Pavillion, because she is amazing.
Caroline Lucas has achieved far more as a lone Green Party MP in a hostile Westminster environment in just five years than most of the career politicians from the three establishment parties will achieve in their whole taxpayer funded lives on the green benches. She is a brilliant champion of progressive politics and an inspirational hard worker to boot. I can fully understand making an exception to support one lone, tirelessly hard working, radical MP in a parliament rammed full of indolent, expenses fiddling, self-serving careerists.
Nobody is going to quibble if an exception is made for such a remarkable politician. The problem though is that once you've started making exceptions to your rules, more exceptions can be found, and more exceptions can be demanded of you.
Ed Miliband
It is easy to understand that once Russell Brand made it clear that his rejectionist stance was flexible, the pressure was on him to endorse other party politicians too.
The outrages inflicted by the Tory Party over the last five years are far too innumerable to detail but I'll provide a non-exhaustive list of links to illustrate the sheer scale of it (Secret Courts, discrimination against British families, the Gagging Law, privatising the profits and nationalising the losses, supporting the TTIP corporate power grab, the 'bungled' investigation into the Westminster paedophilia ring, Fracking conflicts of interest, The Liam Fox-Adam Werritty scandal, "Bedroom Tax", the ideological vandalism of the education system, wage repression, aspiration tax, sanctions league tables, Eric Pickles spending half a million quid on luxury limos, David Cameron's repeated lies, the NHS carve-up, stuffing the unelected House of Lords with Tory party donors, letting wealthy Tory party donors actually write legislation for them, David Cameron hiring a criminal like Andy Coulson as his adviser, the unlawful treatment of the mentally ill, the introduction of huge charges to bring unfair dismissal cases, the Tory war on justice, unlawful forced labour schemes, shocking abuses of parliamentary process, the Peter Cruddas scandal, countless multi-million pound DWP fuckups, and the demonstrable failure of austerity economics). It's no wonder that Russell Brand wanted to see the back of them, because who on earth wouldn't if they actually knew anything about all of that?
The lesser of two evils
The whole problem with backing the Labour Party, as most progressives already know, is that the party has only been offering a slightly watered down version of the same Thatcherite agenda as the Tories since the 1990s. There's no grand vision, no inspirational progressive agenda, just a strategically inept political platform of austerity-lite, which commits the cardinal error of accepting the premise of the opposing party (that the austerity con is even necessary in the first place) and thus allows them complete freedom to frame the spectrum of debate.
Not only is the Labour Party the lesser of two evils in reality when compared to the Tory Party, but by adopting austerity-lite as their policy platform they actually used 'but we're the lesser of two evils' as their 2015 election strategy!
How on earth the Labour Party leadership concluded that 'but we're the lesser of two evils' would play better with the electorate than the presentation of a clearly explained and evidence based counter narrative is absolutely beyond me. If they are that extraordinarily inept at running an election campaign, what good could they possibly be at actually running the country?
All in all, I think that pretty much everyone can agree that people continually voting for 'the lesser of two evils' is what has allowed Labour and the Tories to hold a duopoly on power that has now lasted so long that both parties have become hopelessly complacent, riddled with self-serving career politicians and virtually impervious to public opinion.
A demonstration of exactly how not to do politics
In my view, deciding to engage with a mainstream political party just days before a General Election is a demonstration of exactly how not to engage in party politics.
Party politics isn't like a shop that you visit every five years in order to buy a product, only making your mind up about which of them to buy in the very moment before you make your purchase. Politics is all about engagement, not about picking a side at the last minute and hoping that it wins.
Perhaps things would have been very different if, instead of advising his followers to actively disengage from party politics, Russell Brand had advised his followers to join the Labour Party en masse in order to work from within to turn it into a more left-libertarian and more progressive party. Then perhaps he could have personally worked with their communication team to help them craft a progressive message of hope, rather than a dour and gut wrenchingly dispiriting platform of 'lesser of two evils' austerity-lite.
Who knows if such an audacious plan would have defeated the Tory plan to fearmonger and bamboozle the English public into supporting them? However what we can be sure of is that a plan to flood the Labour Party with tens, or even hundreds of thousands of mainly young, mainly progressive new members would surely have produced a very different, and very much more engaging election campaign from the Labour camp than the pathetic, hopelessly uninspiring drivel that the two Eds served up.
The unprecedented SNP landslide victory in Scotland is a shining example that it is possible to achieve seismic political change with a mass membership political party full of politically motivated people uniting behind a clearly articulated message of hope.
Anyone who thinks that the Labour Party can't rise again from the ashes to become a progressive mass membership party it just wrong. If course it's totally fair to assert that you think it won't happen (in all likelihood you're right, and it won't), but you can't say that the idea is completely impossible, because if enough people want it to happen, and they elect the right leader to allow it to happen, then it will happen.
More harm than good
Russell Brand has a public image problem. Not only has he styled himself as a champion of the kind of liberal progressive politics that drives fear into the hearts of billionaire right-wing authoritarian propaganda barons like Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times, Sky) and Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro), he's royally pissed one of them off by suing him and then making a big point of giving his winnings away to some of the other victims of the guy's powerful propaganda empire.
For all his talent at manufacturing a public image that has made him wealthier than most could ever imagine for themselves, he's utterly failed to see how the negative portrayal of himself in the right-wing propaganda sheets is another completely different public persona that is detrimental to any political campaign with which it is aligned.
Let's put it this way. Pretty much everyone who cares deeply about alleviating the suffering of others and stamping out political corruption would have been voting against the Tories anyway. We didn't need Russell Brand to spell it out for us that the Tories have been doing lots of unacceptable things, we damn well knew it already.
Now let's think about the average consumer of right-wing propaganda sheets (people who actually pay for their own indoctrination under the impression that they are 'just buying a newspaper'). Think about the fact that tabloids are written in very simple English, with very simple arguments for very simple people to rote learn and then mindlessly regurgitate in lieu of actually doing the hard work of doing the research and finding things out for themselves.
Think about the kind of person so hopelessly gullible that they still believe in the austerity con. The kind of person who believes that Liam Byrne's ridiculous 'no money left' letter was a serious admission that the UK was 'bankrupt'. The kind of person who thinks that an unflattering picture of a politician eating a sandwich constitutes some kind of magically decisive debate winning counter argument! The kind of person who believes that they've got to vote Tory in order to save themselves from the 'nasty Scottish woman' their propaganda sheet has taught them to fear (even though the very same propaganda sheet was actively endorsing her on the front page of their Scottish edition).
Now think of how this kind of person is going to react when confronted with the 'news' that a person they have been programmed to hate is endorsing the very same political party that their beloved daily propaganda sheet is constantly slagging off. They're quite obviously going to think "fuck that guy, I'm not letting him tell me how to think or what to do".
The idiocy of it is that they're unwilling to listen to one guy because their daily propaganda sheet has ridiculed him, but they're incapable of thinking about the wider picture, and the fact that by voting the other way they're simply doing the bidding of the much more powerful and much more skillfully manipulative guy (be that Rupert Murdoch or Jonathan Harmsworth).
I don't have the evidence to back it up, but I'm fairly convinced that Brand's blanket endorsement of the Labour Party will have cost them multiple times the votes they gained by it, simply because of the "fuck that guy" effect in people too lacking in awareness to think also think "fuck that guy" about Rupert Murdoch and Jonathan Harmsworth every time they see the blatantly biased coverage their daily propaganda sheets are trying to infect their minds with.
Get engaged properly
For me, the lesson from all of this is quite simple. If you're going to engage with the party political system at all, you need to choose a party early and invest some effort in making sure that it is set up to deliver what you want. Just leaving it until the last minute and then picking the 'lesser of two evils' options is completely the wrong way of doing it at the best of times, but when you've built a public reputation as a rejectionist, it comes across as hopeless confusion at best, and deliberate insincerity at worst - both of which can be used by your ideological enemies to ridicule your endorsement and convince people in droves to vote the other way.
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