The right-wing Labour MP John Woodcock is one of the most duplicitous wreckers in the entire party. Whenever there's an opportunity to attack Jeremy Corbyn and the hundreds of thousands of Labour members who support him, Woodcock is always at the forefront slinging as much political abuse as possible.
Now it turns out that Woodcock has been going around threatening to quit the Labour Party in order to inflict as much damage on the party as possible before the local elections.
The reasons he gives are the usual stuff. The Corbyn's a "Russian stooge" smears (despite the Tories taking £800,000 in donations from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies and Labour taking £0 since Corbyn took over) and the anti-Semitism smears (despite the fact that Jeremy Corbyn can point to a track record of opposing all forms of racism and bigotry all the way back to before he became an MP in the 1980s).
Woodcock is also whining that the Labour MP Dan Jarvis is being asked to stand down as an MP if he wants to become the mayor of the Sheffield region, because of the Labour Party policy of no double-jobbing.
Jarvis is trying to claim he should be allowed to do both jobs, but the precedent is absolutely clear. Sadiq Khan stood down as an MP in 2016 to become London Mayor, Andy Burnham stood down as an MP in 2017 to become Mayor of Greater Manchester, and Steve Rotherham also stood down in 2017 to become the mayor of the Liverpool City Region.
Why Jarvis thinks he shouldn't follow this precedent is anyone's guess, and why Woodcock has decided that this particular argument is the one he wants to have a final ruinous tantrum over is anyone's guess too.
If Woodcock does go ahead with his threat to quit the Labour Party and see out the parliament as an independent MP he won't just be betraying his constituents in Barrow who voted for him to serve as a Labour MP, he'll also be demonstrating that he's got significantly less integrity than Ukippers.
When Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless quit the Tory party in 2014 to defect to UKIP, they at least had the decency to call by-elections to give their local constituents the right to choose whether they were still wanted. By-elections they both won by the way.
Woodcock has no intention of doing that because he'd almost certainly lose his seat to the replacement Labour candidate, so he's planning on squatting in the seat for as long as possible in order to attack the Labour Party at every move, which is hardly what his constituents voted for.
If Woodcock does go ahead with this threat to quit the Labour Party and then squat in the seat for as long as possible, it'd be proof that he's got less integrity, less regard for his constituents, and less commitment to democracy than the Ukipper fruitcakes on the extreme-right fringe of UK politics!
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Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell were two of two of the most influential politicians in delivering Brexit. It was their defections to UKIP that spooked David Cameron into offering an EU referendum manifesto pledge in order to prevent even more Tory politicians and voters abandoning the party for UKIP.
Of course David Cameron's short-term EU referendum gamble failed. His gamble did deliver an unexpected Tory majority at the 2015 General Election, but within a little over a year Cameron was resigning in disgrace after throwing the entire economic future of the UK into uncertainty.
Cameron and his cabinet were so full of hubris that they didn't even bother to develop any kind of contingency plan for what to do if the public ignored his pitiful fearmongering and voted for Brexit, so after the Brexit vote the Tories spent the next seven months desperately trying to cobble together some kind of Brexit strategy whilst fobbing the public off with utterly inane drivel like "Brexit means Brexit".
When Theresa May finally got around to announcing her Brexit strategy in her woeful January 2017 clown costume speech it turned out that all they had come up with was the diplomatic equivalent of a toddler tantrum; "give us what we want or we'll blow up an economic bomb by quitting the EU without any kind of trade agreement"!
It's clear that with their diplomatic ineptitude the Tories are slow-marching the UK towards a catastrophic nuclear Brexit with no access to the Single Market, and Mark Reckless is terribly complicit in getting us into this precarious situation.
After losing his Westminster seat at the 2015 General Election Mark Reckless soon resurfaced as a UKIP representative in the Welsh Assembly, where he now heads up the Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee. This committee has been looking at the potential impact of Brexit on agriculture, the environment and rural communities, and some of their findings are astounding given who their chairman is.
As chairman of the committee Reckless has stated that there is "access to the Single Market place, continuation of financial support and assurances over migrant labour are critical priorities"! [source]
Given that Reckless and his ilk played such a critical role in taking the UK to the brink of a catastrophic "no deal" Tory nuclear Brexit he has some gall to suddenly start crying that the Single Market and EU migrant labour from are actually critically important for Wales!
In a way it's indicative of what a farcical shambles Brexit is, that one of the leading proponents of quitting the EU is now crying about the damage that Theresa May and the three Brexiteers are about to inflict on Wales by quitting the EU.
If Reckless really cared so much about these critically important issues for Wales, how did he ever think it was appropriate to campaign for Brexit when he knew perfectly well that nobody, not least the Tory government, had an actual plan for how to handle it?
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.
