Meet the "more of the same" party

The Independent Group of 11 MPs who are squatting in parliament, refusing to call by-elections, and pinning their political hopes on begging Theresa May for an opportunity to prop up her pro-austerity government have announced the positions they've given themselves, and you couldn't have picked more inappropriate roles for several of them if you'd actively tried.

Heidi Allen - Welfare, social care, pensions, and business

Source: Heidi Allen on They Work For You

Heidi Allen is one of the three ex-Tories to join the parliamentary squatter group, and by putting her in charge of welfare and social care this lot are sending a very clear message to their financial backers that they're intent on continuing the savage welfare policies that Allen repeatedly voted in favour of during her time on the Tory benches.

Any "centrists" hoping this new group might adopt a more humane approach than the Tories to issues like disability, social security, and social care will surely be sorely disappointed to see this position handed to a Tory with a proven track record of voting in favour of savage welfare cuts and crippling reduced local government funding in order to fund lavish tax cuts on corporations and the super-rich.

Greedy businessmen hoping for more unearned handouts on the other hand, they'll be punching the air with delight that this new group is intent on continuing the same old "something for nothing" Tory agenda, and actively begging Theresa May to let them prop up her shambles of a government.

Mike Gapes - Foreign affairs and defence

It's difficult to think of a less suitable individual to take responsibility for foreign affairs than the unapologetic warmonger Mike Gapes.

This is a man who voted in favour of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and then repeatedly voted against investigations into the ensuing catastrophe.

The Iraq war caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, triggered a refugee crisis of millions, and created a lawless power vacuum that eventually gave birth to ISIS.

Mike Gapes refuses to accept any moral responsibility whatever for any of this, and remains 100% unapologetic.

Gapes is also a big fan of the tyrannical, homophobic, misogynists, head-chopping, journalist-dismembering, terrorism-spreading Saudi war criminals, and was one of 13 MPs to receive a share of over £100,000 of gifts and freebies lavished on British politicians by the Saudi regime in 2018.

Gapes knows that the Saudis use British weapons to commit war crimes in Yemen because he was a member of the foreign affairs select committee that admitted that this was the case, but he simply doesn't care.

By appointing Gapes to their foreign affairs and defence brief the group are sending a very clear signal to arms manufacturers and the military-industrial complex that they're setting up as a pro-war, pro-imperialist party that is willing to turn a blind eye to the sickening war crimes of disgustingly tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia in order to flog them £billions more in weapons.

Chris Leslie - Treasury and trade

One of Ed Miliband's biggest mistakes as Labour leader was to allow a bunch of hard-right austerity fetishists rule the shadow treasury which resulted in Labour's ridiculously unappealing "austerity-lite" agenda that ruined their chances at the 2015 general election.

The 'thinking' behind this ludicrous policy was that Labour could pinch a few thousand soft-Tory votes in marginal constituencies by imitating ruinous Tory austerity rather than actively opposing it. What they clearly failed to factor into this mind-bogglingly stupid plan was the fact that an explicitly pro-austerity agenda would end up driving away vast numbers of natural Labour voters for every "soft-Tory" they managed to entice.

Hence Labour's share of the vote collapsing from 35% in 2010 to just 29% in 2015, despite the Tories overseeing unprecedented collapses in workers' wages and living standards, trashing Britain's AAA credit rating, and spectacularly missing all of their economic targets!

Had Labour actually opposed devastating Tory austerity dogma in 2015, Labour would probably have beaten the Tories, Ed Miliband would have become Prime Minister, austerity would be over, Jeremy Corbyn would still be an obscure Labour backbencher, and there's be no such thing as Brexit!

Chris Leslie was one of the ludicrous hard-right wonks in the shadow treasury who helped to lay the groundwork for Brexit by outright refusing to oppose the Tory austerity madness that was trashing wages, living standards, and public services, and he's still a pro-austerity fanatic now, even years after right-leaning international bodies like the IMF and OECD have rejected austerity dogma as an economically damaging ideology.

Appointing a hard-right economic illiterate like Chris Leslie to their economics brief is a very clear signal to the mega-rich beneficiaries of Tory austerity dogma that this group intends to continue the Tory agenda of using austerity as a means of transferring ever more wealth from to poor and ordinary to corporations and the mega-rich.

Angela Smith - Transport, Local government, housing, energy, environment, rural affairs

Angela Smith is such a talentless incompetent that she managed to completely screw up the biggest day of her entire political career by referring to British Asians as "funny tinge" on live TV on the Independent Group launch day.

Afterwards she excused this racist gaffe by repeatedly claiming that she was "very tired" which is actually significantly more offensive than the original gaffe because it implies that racist attitudes are somehow so natural and inherent that they accidentally slip out when people are tired, drunk, or stressed.

The idea that we're all inherently racists and it only depends how tired, drunk, or stressed we get before we start spouting bigoted racist slurs is absolutely extraordinary, but not quite as extraordinary as this group putting a pro-privatisation ideologue and lobbyist for private water companies in charge of their transport, energy, water, and housing policies.

With a hard-right pro-privatisation ideologue running this huge brief, it's absolutely clear that this group are committed to defying the public will by cementing private profiteering ownership of the railways, national grid, water companies, and other public services.

Putting Smith in charge of this brief is a clear signal to the private profiteers who are gouging vast profits out of our housing, public services, and utilities that this group is absolutely committed to delivering "more of the same". 

Anna Soubry - Brexit and justice

Of all of the squatter MPs Anna Soubry is perhaps the most distasteful because of her outright and glaring displays of hypocrisy.

When she's not praising the devastating 2010-15 austerity policies that laid the groundwork for Brexit by collapsing UK living standards as "marvellous" Soubry often talks a good talk, but when it comes to the actions her parliamentary voting record stands as absolute proof that she repeatedly does precisely the opposite.

Take her continual grandstanding on Brexit to pose as some kind of noble Brexit-critic which is completely contradicted by her actions. She poses as a Brexit-sceptic, but in parliament she's repeatedly voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right interpretation of Brexit.

Soubry's Brexit collusion including votes in favour of May's shambolic Withdrawal Bill in January 2018, votes against opposition amendments to protect workers' rights, environmental laws, equality rules, consumer protections and food standards, and even a vote of confidence in Theresa May after she humiliated Britain by postponing the scheduled "meaningful vote" for no reason other than the fact she knew she was going to lose it.

It's not just talking about opposing Brexit while repeatedly voting in favour of it either. When it comes to police cuts and violent crime she's also proven herself a despicable hypocrite too.

In response to Theresa May's ludicrous assertion that her policy of getting rid of 21,000 police and slashing police budgets has no relation with soaring rates of violent crime, Soubry stated that "of course there's a link between policing numbers and crime".

This Tweet is an admission that she knew that slashing police budgets would end up increasing rates of serious and violent crime all along, but she repeatedly voted in favour of Theresa May's ideologically driven assault on the police service regardless of the dire and deadly consequences she knew would happen. 

She blatantly put loyalty to the Tory party above the lives of violent crime victims, but now she's abandoned that party loyalty as worthless to join the parliamentary squatters, demonstrating that the victims of the violent crime wave she helped Theresa May to create are actually less than worthless in her estimations!

And she's got the absolute brass neck to start carping from the sidelines about the appalling consequences of the austerity fanaticism that she repeatedly and knowingly voted in favour of as if she's now some kind of heroic saviour!

Putting one of the most brazen hypocrites in the whole of parliament in charge of their Brexit brief is a signal to their financial backers that the group are actually extremely flexible on their Brexit position. If the secretive millionaires who are bankrolling this group want them to go all out for a referendum then that's what they'll do, but if the bankrollers decide that a hard-right Tory Brexit is actually in their interests, that's obviously what Soubry and the squatters will eventually vote in favour of.

Change Politics!

The parliamentary squatters' "change politics" slogan is every bit as Orwellian anything the Tory government have come up with over the years ("all in this together" - while transferring as much wealth as possible from the majority to the mega-rich minority, "making work pay" while overseeing the longest sustained collapse in workers wages in recorded history and slashing in-work benefits, "strong and stable" as their campaign slogan during the most shambolic and needless election in modern British history ...).

They repeatedly claim that they want to "change politics" but their actions demonstrate that on all manner of crucial issues from ruinous austerity dogma to war-mongering imperialism, and from privatisation mania to welfare policy, these are people who desperately want to keep things exactly the same.

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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.

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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.

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