What you need to know about the seven Labour splitters

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Leslie

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

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

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

Chuka Umunna

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Gapes

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

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

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

Luciana Berger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angela Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ann Coffey

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

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

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

Gavin Shuker

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

OR

The 7 right-wing pro-austerity Labour splitters have even less integrity than Ukippers!

Seven of the most right-wing pro-austerity Labour Party MPs have quit the party in order to establish a new opaquely-funded "centrist" party designed to keep Labour out of power, and prevent them from ending ruinous Tory policies like austerity dogma, public service cuts, and wage repression.

The seven are Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Gavin Shuker, Mike Gapes, Angela Smith, Luciana Berger, and Ann Coffey. They're the same old faces, the internal wreckers who always expended far more time and effort attacking their own party, rather than explaining Labour Party policies, or criticising the countless failures of the Tory government.

One of the splitters is Chris Leslie, who was one of the Labour right-wingers who came up with the ludicrously unappealing austerity-lite policy of pathetically imitating Tory austerity dogma at the 2015 general election, rather than vehemently opposing it.

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

It was Miliband's lack of leadership (in not telling Chris Leslie, Ed Balls, and the other pro-austerity Labour right-wingers to naff off with their rubbish Tory-lite strategy) that got us in this mess in the first place, yet the other six splitters are throwing their support behind Leslie in the hope that their faction can keep Labour out of power and keep Tory austerity dogma alive.

Another of the splitters is Chuka Umunna who is the living embodiment of directionless self-serving opportunism. These days he parades around as a "people's vote" advocate hoping to soak up support from the stop-Brexit activists, but before this miraculous conversion he opposed Freedom of Movement even before the EU referendum, was adamantly opposed to a second referendum, and publicly advocated Britain quitting the Single Market.

And it's only six months since Umunna vehemently denied that he was plotting to form a breakaway party!

This is a shockingly dishonest guy who has crept from the most Europhobic hard-Brexit fringe of the Labour Party in 2016 through to the Europhile stop-Brexit fringe, lying and deceiving all the time, and then out of the door. Yet somehow some people actually see Umunna as a hero, rather than the brazenly self-serving charlatan that he so obviously is.

The parliamentary voting record of this group of seven is absolutely clear. Every single one of these splitters refused to oppose Tory austerity dogma when they had the chance in 2015 and every single one of them abstained on Theresa May's disgusting "deport now, hear appeals later" Hostile Environment policy that led to the Windrush scandal. 

Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that not a single one of the seven splitter had the decency to call a by-election after quitting the Labour Party.

These cynical opportunists have cynically ridden into Westminster on the Labour brand, using the unpaid support and activism of thousands of ordinary Labour members to get there. And now they're selfishly turning their backs on these people in a desperate last-ditch effort to prevent Labour coming to power and bringing ruinous Tory austerity dogma, public service cuts, and wage repression policies to an end.

Even the Brexity Tory MPs Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless had more integrity, because when they quit Cameron's Tory party to join UKIP in 2014 they both called by-elections out of respect for their constituents.

The fact these 7 pro-austerity Labour splitters have even less integrity than Ukippers tells us everything we need to know about how untrustworthy they are, how much contempt they have towards their constituents, and how much they fear the concept of democratic accountability.

There's also the very real risk that these 7 splitters will decide to vote in favour of Theresa May's hard-right Brexit shambles purely because Corbyn and the Labour Party will be opposing it (which would be breathtakingly hypocritical given all the abuse they've lobbed at Corbyn for the last 2 years for supposedly "enabling" Tory Brexit).

Anyone who buys into the splitters' pro-austerity politics, their brazenly self-serving nonsense, and their outright contempt for democratic accountability must be as politically clueless as they are delusional.

But sadly we know there are lots of political dupes out there who will vote for any old shit given the right branding (how else is it possible to explain the popularity of the economically illiterate, billionaire-bankrolled, bloated spiv David Cameron before his Brexit gamble backfired so spectacularly?).

The Labour splitter group will almost certainly end up a total failure like the SDP in the 1980s, but there's a serious danger that they'll nick just enough Labour votes to keep the Tories in power at the next election. Thus more ruinous austerity dogma, more education cuts, more privatisation mania, more ideologically driven defunding of public services, more systematic abuse of sick and disabled people, more tax cuts for the rich, more social security cuts for the working poor, more collapsing local government services, and more wage repression for ordinary working people.

But to the splitter group and those who support them, all this damage and suffering be a price worth paying in order to maintain the political status quo.

 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 anti-Corbyn programming works

The Guardian has hosted an article by the deputy editor of the New Statesman Helen Lewis that contains a highly deceptive piece of anti-Corbyn programming.

The title of the article suggests that it's broadly sympathetic to Corbyn and his supporters, but the content clearly gives the game away as an effort to shift public opinion against Jeremy Corbyn and anyone who supports him.

A one-sided article attacking Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Guardian should hardly come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with their track record of supporting every Blairite attempt to undermine him and oust him as leader, but one particular section of this article in particular is quite extraordinary.

Lewis brings up the fact that three people have been jailed for hurling grotesque anti-Semitic abuse at the Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger, but somehow forgets to mention that all three of these people were extreme-right fanatics, presumably in the hope that readers would associate her graphic description of extreme-right anti-Semitic abuse with Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left who are clearly mentioned in the initial sentence of the paragraph.

The cases of the three jailed extreme-right trolls can be read about here, here, and here.

In light of the fact that all three were notorious extreme-right trolls (one of whom threatened and abused the author of this blog too), it's exceptionally deceptive to mention the abuse they slung in a paragraph that starts out talking about Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.

There's no way that Lewis could have researched the actual words these abusive anti-Semits used without picking up on the fact that they were written by right-wing extremists, not Corbyn supporters. So the refusal to make the distinction is damning.

This conflation is especially vile given that extreme-right fanatics have also killed one Labour MP (Jo Cox) and plotted to kill the London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Corbyn himself.

The evidence is absolutely clear that anti-Semitism is way more common on the extreme-right than anywhere else on the political spectrum (see image), and that rates of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party have actually declined dramatically since hundreds of thousands of new left-wing people became Labour members to support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.

But none of this is important to Lewis, who's agenda seems to be to portray the vile anti-Semitic abuse of the extreme-right as if Jeremy Corbyn and Corbyn supporters somehow bear responsibility for the actions of people they actually vehemently oppose.

Of course Labour have a responsibility to confront any signs of anti-Semitism within their own ranks, but the data suggests that the commonplace anti-Semitic attitudes of the past are being rapidly outnumbered by the flood of new progressive left-liberal people to have joined Labour since Corbyn became leader (no other major party has seen such a rapid decline in anti-Semitic views since 2015).

The main purpose of the article seems to be an effort to belittle those who make the case that some people are weaponising allegations of anti-Semitism to attack the Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party, when it's so obvious that this is exactly what has been going on. Anyone who clocked Theresa May's use of the vile "self-hating Jew" trope to smear Jewish members of the Labour Party couldn't reasonably draw any other conclusion.

The conclusion of the article is equally warped, making out that Corbyn somehow carries the sole responsibility for addressing the anti-Semitism problem. 

Anyone with a basic understanding of how the Labour Party actually works (like a deputy editor of the political New Statesman magazine really should) will understand that disciplinary proceedings are actually carried out by the NEC administrative team, and that the party leader has no right to set about rewriting the rules or slinging people out of the party.

If Labour's response to anti-Semitism has been inadequate between 2015 and 2017, the Blairite General Secretary of the NEC Ian McNicol should surely be liable for at least some of the criticism, especially since the NEC devoted so much of their time and effort to purging left-wing Labour members during the two Corbyn leadership elections for "crimes against the party" such as once retweeting a non-Labour politician, voting Green years before they joined the Labour Party, and even liking the Foo Fighters too much!

Perhaps if McNicol and the NEC had devoted a fraction of the time and effort they expended on purging Corbyn supporters to the task of hoofing anti-Semites out of the party, Labour could point to a much stronger track record of dealing with anti-Semitism over the last few years?

Now that McNicol has quit to be replaced by Jennie Formby, maybe the NEC can move quickly to introduce new procedures to root out anti-Semitism and any other forms of bigotry that remain hidden within the Labour ranks?

We'll have to wait and see if that happens.

But bringing it back to the article, there are a number of questions to be asked:

• Why does Lewis bring up the vile anti-Semitic abuse by jailed extreme-right fanatics in an article about Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left without making it clear where the abuse actually came from, or that the political left have been the consistent allies of Jews and other minorities in the fight against the extreme-right?

• Why does Lewis ignore the fact that anti-Semitism within Labour has demonstrably fallen since Jeremy Corbyn became leader?

• Why does Lewis attempt to belittle the argument that certain people are attempting to weaponise allegations of anti-Semitism to attack the Labour leadership, when it's so damned obvious that this is exactly what is happening?

• And why does Lewis not ask questions about why the Labour right who controlled the party for two decades apparently did so little to confront anti-Semitism that it was a much bigger problem when Corbyn became leader just two years ago than it is now?

 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 political establishment club need to get their own houses in order

The problems of online radicalisation abuse are incredibly serious, and something does need to be done about it because it's not only toxifying political discourse, it's creating a dangerous political environment where people who have been radicalised online have ended up committing despicable criminal acts, from the barrage of sexist and anti-Semitic online abuse aimed at the Labour MP Luciana Berger, to actual acts of terrorism like the Finsbury Park attack suspect who is a Britain First follower, and the Beckton acid attack suspect with a history of sharing extreme-right memes.

One of the big problems with countering this online abuse problem is that members of the political establishment often display breathtaking hypocrisy when they complain about the problem of online political abuse.

• Take Theresa May reading out a extreme-right misogynist's Tweet in the House of Commons to score cheap political points against Jeremy Corbyn. How can anyone ever take her seriously when she complains about online abuse when she's willing to engage in the very worst of it if it suits her purposes?

• Take the notorious brick-gate incident that is still being endlessly recycled to smear Jeremy Corbyn supporters as thugs and bullies, even though there isn't a shred of evidence that the brick was thrown by a "Corbynista", or that it was targeted at Angela Eagle's office rather than just being a random act of late night vandalism, or even that the damage was actually caused by a brick at all!

• Take the desperate efforts by people with right-wing views to pretend that the disgusting anti-Semitic abuse of Luciana Berger is coming from the left, when the online abusers who have been jailed for making threats against her are actually from the extreme-right (John Nimmo, Joshua Bonehill, Garron Helm).

• Take the constant barrages of abuse, lies and smears that constituted both the Tory London Mayor campaign in 2016 and Theresa May's vanity election in 2017. If people see members of the political class resorting to lies, smears and utterly disgraceful character attacks, then how can anyone be even remotely surprised when ordinary people imitate Lynton Crosby style shit-smearing tactics in the online environment?

• Take the fact that Yvette Cooper tweeted abuse from a known hard-right sockpuppet account that pretends to be a Jeremy Corbyn adviser in order to falsely misrepresent the left of the Labour Party as anti-Semites, which was either an incredibly foolish thing for her to do, or a sickiningly cynical stunt if done deliberately in knowledge of the account's true nature.

All of these incidents provide incontrovertible evidence that the political establishment are perfectly prepared to get down in the sewer and sling the most disgusting lies, misrepresentations, smears, abuse, and threats about if it suits their own political purposes, but then the very same people climb up onto their moral high horses and sneer at the general public for engaging in the same kind of sewer politics that they use.

The slightest bit of research by Theresa May or Yvette Cooper would have revealed the true nature of the disgusting Twitter accounts they were publicising in order to score incredibly cheap political points with; the continued reliance upon brick-gate conjecture as proof of Corbynista thuggery is a demonstration that the establishment club are perfectly happy to rely on exaggerations and smears when it suits them; it takes an epic amount of intellectual dishonesty for right-wingers to pretend that it's not their right-wing bedfellows who are guilty of the very worst acts of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic abuse and violence; and the last two Tory election campaigns were massive establishment endorsements of exactly the kind of filthy political shit-smearing that they decry when it's aimed back at them by members of the public.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending online abuse. As a high-profile leftie I'm a magnet for abuse, insults, absolute misrepresentations of my beliefs, threats and much worse from right-wingers. I'd be very satisfied if this kind of disgusting abuse could be made to go away by the waving of a magic wand, but it's just not that simple.

My point isn't that there's any excuse for online abuse (there isn't), it's that the political establishment club should get their own damned houses in order before they start lecturing the public.

Yvette Cooper may well enjoy high-horsing it over the horrible plebs, but when she's chosen to give a well-known right-wing sockpuppet smear account a huge publicity boost by awarding them exactly the kind of attention they crave, she's slithered down into the political sewer just like the people she's criticising. 

Except with her it's worse, because to complain about other people's online behaviour, then (wittingly or unwittingly) engage in the very worst kind of dishonest fake-account misrepresentation possible is so astoundingly hypocritical that it actually does serious damage to the perfectly reasonable stance that online political abuse is unacceptable and should be confronted.

 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

Who thinks the real victim of UK political sexism is a statue?

Sometimes you see an article that is so excruciatingly bad it makes you wonder how the hell it got written, let alone published.

In this case the abomination of an article was written by an Lib-Dem politician called Annabel Mullin, and was somehow published in the Independent, which was actually one of the least-bad mainstream media sources during Theresa May's vanity election.

The article

The article is entitled "From Luciana Berger to Margaret Thatcher, women in politics are held to a completely different standard to men" which provides fair warning that it is likely to be an absolute abomination, but I clicked on it anyway in order to see what kind of mental gymnastics would be performed to conflate the experiences of two such different politicians from two different eras to draw such an obvious conclusion (that sexism in politics is still rife). 

What I found was one of the most ridiculously out-of-touch articles I've ever had the misfortune of reading.

Luciana Berger

The article starts out by reciting a highly misleading right-wing interpretation of what happened after Liverpool Wavertree Labour Party elected pro-Corbyn representatives to 9 out of the 10 positions on their executive committee.

In reality one of these newly elected figures said that the local MP Luciana Berger should apologise for her role in the extremely damaging and spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup last summer.

Annabel Mullin decided (either through ignorance, or deliberate political partisanship) to tell a different story, that it was the whole Executive Committee who formally demanded that Berger abandon her own political views.

These kinds of extremely exaggerated distortions of events have become very familiar to Labour Party members, most of whom will be familiar with the extreme exaggerations over brick-gate.

The author then weaves her distorted and politically partisan version of events in Liverpool Wavertree into the ridiculous narrative that Berger was only asked to apologise because of a "chilling" effort to force her into changing position because she is a woman, rather than because she betrayed the will of the party membership by trying to overthrow the leader they'd elected less than a year previously with an anti-democratic bullying campaign.

This shoehorned version of events doesn't even make sense at the most rudimentary levels. Mainly because other coup-plotter MPs who happen to be male have also been told (often by women) that they've betrayed the party and should apologise, but also because Luciana Berger has already changed position and aligned herself firmly behind the party leadership.

If anyone is treating Berger with sexist contempt here, it's the author for having completely ignored Berger's own opinion ("The Labour Party In Liverpool Wavertree is a vibrant, democratic organisation with around 1,800 members. Quite rightly, the members elect officers of the party to oversee its work. We are united in wanting to secure a new General Election and the return of a Labour government under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn as soon as possible .. it is thanks to the hard work of local members and a revitalised national party under Jeremy Corbyn. It is a fantastic foundation for the next General Election, whenever it comes.") in order to construct a highly misleading account of what actually happened.

Instead of listening to and respecting Berger's opinion, this appalling Lib-Dem has ignored it completely in order to weave a dishonest and demeaning "poor ickle woman" narrative.

I know I'm hardly an expert on the subject, but isn't rendering women voiceless and using them as objects in your own warped fantasies a classic example of sexism?

Hasn't Annabel Mullin just clearly proven that it's not only men who can be guilty of misogyny?

Margaret Thatcher

The misleading drivel about Luciana Berger pales into insignificance when it comes to the following bit about Margaret Thatcher, which revolves around the decision to not erect a £300,000 statue of Thatcher, which was, according to the author, motivated purely by sexism.

The author either deliberately avoids mentioning, or is shockingly ignorant of a number of crucial points including:

• It is customary to wait at least 10 years after the death until statues of political figures are erected, which means erecting a monument to Thatcher before 2023 would break protocol.

• Thatcher's family didn't like the statue and expressed their objections.

• Thatcher was an incredibly divisive figure who was hated for having wrecked millions of lives with her ideological attacks on workers, her shocking economic mismanagement (including crippling interest rates of 20%+) and her sickening habit of sucking up to dictators and tyrants like Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Suharto of Indonesia.

In order to force the statue decision into her sexism narrative Mullin not only decided to ignore the points above, she also decided to write a Thatcher hagiography in which Thatcher is fully "deserving" of having normal protocol broken and a statue that her family actually hate erected.

Apparently Thatcher's fixation with hard-right economics which caused mass unemployment, the decline of British manufacturing, the establishment of powerful privatised cartels in the former public utilities, the shocking waste of the Scottish oil bonanza, the loss and non-replacement of social housing stock, eye-watering interest rates that Mullin could never imagine paying on her mortgage, the reckless deregulation of the financial sector, and an apathy inducing hard-right political consensus that's only just coming to an end with the SNP in Scotland and the Corbyn surge in England and Wales.

No. Thatcher didn't deliver a toxic brew of neoliberalism, privatisation mania, centralisation of executive power, financial market deregulation ... she delivered wonderful and unquestionable "economic stability".

Tell people in the still-broken mining, steel working, ship building and train building communities of the north, midlands, and South Wales that Thatcher delivered them "economic stability" and see what reaction you get.

I'd like to see Annabel Mullin go and tell some of the wives and children of the millions of proud working men who were thrown on Thatcher's scrap heap to their faces that she deserves a statue so much that she needs to be held to a different standard to men, so that her effigy can be erected long before the usual 10 year waiting period is over.

It's difficult to imagine that this disgracefully out-of-touch Thatcher hagiography was actually authorised by the Lib-Dems, unless they're actually intent on chasing away even more of their voters than they already have.

Sexism in politics

One of the worst things about this absolute abomination of an article is that the subject is actually really important and deserves to be written about with respect, care and consideration.

• Just look at the abuse suffered by Diane Abbott during the election after she made a spectacle of herself by getting her numbers mixed up, and contrast it with the ridiculous blunders by male politicians like Philip Hammond and Michael Gove, and ask yourself why the Tory posh boys' blunders didn't make the headline news bulletins, which were reserved for the black, female from a non-establishment background.

• Just look at the vile misogynistic comments that are lobbed around every time a female politician (of whatever political persuasion) hits the headlines.

• Just look at the fact that 86% of the burden of Tory austerity dogma has been loaded onto the shoulders of women.

• Just look at the continuing under-representation of women in politics, and especially the under-representation of women from working class backgrounds.

• Just look at the way the few female politicians with non-elitist regional accents (Angela Rayner, Laura Pidcock, Diane Abbott) have been pilloried and abused as "thick" for not talking in upper-class cut glass accents. 

Recycling a misleading right-wing interpretation of what happened in Liverpool Wavertree and then idealising Margaret Thatcher in order to demand a protocol-shattering statue that would be seen as a grotesque insult by millions of women across the UK is a truly shocking effort to address the vitally important issue of political sexism, especially in light of the absolute mountain of real evidence that Mullin has glossed over or ignored completely.

Blinkered elitism

Perhaps the worst thing about the article is the way that the author ignores the lived experiences of real women in order to create her elitist narrative. 

Mullin started off by ignoring Luciana Berger's own views in order to recycle the hard-right Guido Fawkes/Daily Mail version of events in Liverpool Wavertree, then she went on to ignore the plight of the millions of actual women who suffered terrible deprivations because of Thatcher's ideological agenda.

Mullin doesn't have a word of condolence for the hundreds of thousands of miners' and steel workers' wives who suffered impoverishment, and often even the breakdown of their marriages because of Thatcher's ideological agenda; she doesn't have a word of condolence for the women who have grown up in blighted, high-unemployment, low-opportunity former industrial towns; she doesn't have a word of condolence for the women who lost their homes when Thatcher let mortgage interest rates spike above 20% not once, but twice; she doesn't have a word of condolence for the millions of women who are suffering under this latest incarnation of callous Thatcherite hard-right economics called "austerity".

No. Mullin lives in such an insulated bubble of wealth and privilege that she expects us to shed tears of pity for Margaret Thatcher because she doesn't get a protocol-shattering statue!

You see, in the mind of privileged elitists like Mullin, the real victims of the sexist political system are not the ordinary women who have suffered 86% of the burden of austerity; it's not the ordinary women who suffered the appalling consequences of Thatcherism; it's not the 1950s WASPI women who have had years worth of their pensions snatched away by a callous and uncaring political elite; it's not the women from working class backgrounds who find themselves locked out of the political system, and then cruelly ridiculed as "thick" for their regional accents if they somehow defy the odds and make it.

No, the real victim of political sexism in the minds of people like Annabel Mullin is a stone effigy of Thatcher!

The conclusion

The conclusion to the article is one of the most irritatingly delusional and condescending things I've read in weeks. The author actually concludes that "we must create a new home for those who, like me, currently find that speaking up for what is sensible feels more and more radical".

Openly declaring yourself one of the only ones talking sense in a world of madness is a very poor look even if you have some shred of justification to make such a claim, but after such a parade of senseless elitist drivel it's a display of absolutely ludicrous posturing.

Thankfully though there is already a home for people like Mullin.

It's a home for people who are hopelessly out of touch with the public mood; it's a home for people who care more about the welfare of unwanted statues than they do about millions of ordinary women; it's a home for people who mindlessly recycle right-wing propaganda and write uncritical hagiographies of the woman who did so much damage to the UK economy and political system; it's a home for people with no real political principles; and it's a home for people with an ability to render incredibly important issues unlikeable and annoying simply because they explain them in such outlandishly disengaging ways.

This home for people like Annabel Mullin is the Liberal Democrat party, and she's perfectly welcome to stay there and continue making them look as out-of-touch with reality as they are.

 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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Right-wing internal Labour Party wreckers are making anonymous threats again

Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times is reporting that cowardly anonymous right-wing Labour MPs are threatening to damage the Labour Party as much as possible by resigning and triggering by-elections.

One of the most important things to note about this story is that despite the content relying on nothing more than the word of cowardly Labour right-wingers who refused to give their names, they've used an image of the Liverpool Wavertree MP Luciana Berger to illustrate their story, creating the highly misleading impression that she's one of these internal Labour Party wreckers, when she's not.

Yes Luciana got duped into tarnishing her own reputation by supporting the pre-planned and spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup last summer, but she was hardly alone in falling for their toxic scheming, and since the coup plot failed so spectacularly she's regularly reaffirmed her determination to respect party democracy and the will of the membership, and now she's angrily demanded that the Sunday Times remove her image from the article because she's got nothing to do with these threats.

Luciana Berger clearly isn't the source of these deliberate destabilisation tactics, but someone is briefing the right-wing press with this divisive nonsense, and these latest threats are very consistent with the right-wing internal wreckers' pattern. 

There is a small group of right-wing Labour MPs who are determined to do as much damage to the Labour Party as possible by constantly plotting against the party leadership, smearing ordinary members, and anonymously briefing the press with their divisive bile to stoke internal party divisions.

After anonymously briefing the Telegraph about their (aborted) plot to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn after the May 2016 local elections, they were back at the Telegraph again a few weeks later to detail their new plot to use the EU referendum (whatever the outcome) to launch their coup against Jeremy Corbyn, which they duly did.

These are the people who, during Theresa May's vanity election, attacked left-wing independent media as "propaganda and ideological purity dressed up as news and views and beamed on the internet direct to the politically deranged" and anyone who ever reads sites like Another Angry Voice, Evolve Politics or The Canary as "junkies" during an election campaign in which the virality of left-wing independent media played a huge part in Theresa May losing her majority.

Then in May 2017 they were back at the Telegraph again, this time talking about how they were looking forward to Theresa May winning a landslide victory so that they could destroy the Labour Party from within by launching a breakaway party.

After briefing the press about their (hastily aborted, and then spectacularly failed) plots to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn, about their visceral hatred for left-wing independent media and anyone who reads it (millions of Labour Party members and voters), and their fantasy of using the Tory landslide they were craving to engineer a split in the Labour Party, they're now swearing to do like Jamie Reed did in Copeland and inflict as much damage on the party as possible by resigning and triggering tricky by-elections.

It's about time someone in the Labour Party did something about these right-wing internal wreckers, and perhaps the responsibility is with the people who see themselves as genuine centrist Labour MPs like Luciana Berger?

By publicly naming and shaming the deliberate wreckers behind all of these anonymous threats, plots and the abuse and contempt towards ordinary Labour voters, they'd be doing a great service to the Labour Party. 

I'm sure pretty much everyone in the Parliamentary Labour Party knows who the main internal wreckers are, and I'm pretty sure that there are quite a few significantly less fanatically hard-right Labour MPs who now know these constant divisive threats are going way too far, and who have plenty of evidence to expose the wreckers' identities.

Like all major political parties Labour will always have divergences of opinion and plenty of internal debate, but there's a huge difference between healthy political debate, and running off to bitterly brief the right-wing propaganda rags about your latest incredibly divisive threats to damage the Labour Party as much as possible when your faction continues not getting its own way.

The fact that these wreckers are too cowardly to put their names to all the threats and bile they anonymously spew to their chums in the right-wing media just goes to show what kind of obnoxious people they really are.

This constant stream of threats and abuse also goes to show how much work all the genuine Labour people have in front of them to reduce the toxifying influence of these right-wing wreckers who clearly value their hard-right neoliberal economic ideology way above the party they're pretending to serve as they regularly insult and smear its members and constantly plot to damage it as much as possible.

 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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