Keir Starmer: A Misunderstood Political Genius

He may have his detractors on the left, but Keir Starmer is a true political phenomenon who has already proven himself perhaps the greatest politician in the history of British politics. 

Just consider his remarkable track record.

You have to admit that it takes a certain amount of genius to get parachuted into a safe Labour seat that's never been lost to the Tories since it was created in 1983.

Then to participate in an internal coup against the party's democratically elected leader just over a year later was a demonstration of his breath taking audacity (it's just a shame that silly Labour Party members failed to appreciate Owen Smith's ice cream van of political delights isn't it?).

After the Labour right's failed 2016 chicken coup, they then almost failed in their efforts to sabotage the 2017 election meaning the Labour surge delivered the biggest swing in the party's favour since 1945.

Something needed to be done, and Keir Starmer was the man to do it.

In 2019 the Labour right desperately needed to lose the next general election in order to take back control of the Labour Party, and handing Boris Johnson a whopping great majority to impose a ruinous radical-right Brexit shambles was clearly a small price to pay for to achieve this over-riding objective, wasn't it?

These people clearly have their priorities absolutely spot on.

So Keir Starmer came up with the ideal plan to drive away pesky northern Labour voters in their millions. He was going to tell the 150+ Labour held constituencies that voted leave in 2016 that Labour was now "The Party of Remain", and indicate to everyone, that after three tedious years of Brexit horse trading he was going to prolong the whole interminable process even longer by holding a "sore loser" referendum.

And if anyone needed to be shown that they had no place in the Labour Party, it's the stupid gullible idiots who thought Britain would be better off outside the EU. Am I right?

2017 proved that it's much harder to deliberately throw a general election than anyone had ever imagined, but in 2019 Keir Starmer turned out to be the man to deliver Labour the electoral thumping that so many of their MPs were craving.

This guy really delivers doesn't he?

Then Starmer delivered again with a masterful Labour leadership election campaign, in which he lied through his teeth about virtually everything in order to dupe Labour members into believing in the absolute fantasy that he was going to continue with Corbyn's humanist democratic socialist policies, when he was, and always will be, a loyal servant of capitalism and establishment interests.

It's been genuinely delightful to see Starmer backtrack on all of his pro public ownership pledges and impassioned speeches against NHS privatisation, hasn't it?

And if anyone needed to suffer a cruel betrayal, it's the stupid gullible socialists who genuinely believe that some things (public transport, energy, water, mail, education, health ...) are too important to be left in the hands of greedy and reckless capitalist profiteers. Am I right?

Then in another political masterstroke Starmer bragged to Andrew Marr that he would lie to people again if he thought it would win him more political power, proving that he's every bit as dishonest as Boris Johnson, but somehow even more open and upfront about being a cynical and opportunistic political liar than the bloviating oaf.

If anyone deserved to be shown that Labour's not the political party for them, it's people who are sick of being lied to by politicians, isn't it?

After winning the Labour leadership election Keir Starmer immediately binned all of his pro-Remain posturing, rubber stamped Boris Johnson's shambolic Brexit mess, and pledged never to try to make any substantial improvements to it.

And if anyone needed to be shown that the Labour Party delights in betraying them, it's stupid gullible Remainiacs who thought Britain made a mistake in quitting the EU in a hailstorm of Tory jingoism, incompetence, and hubris. Am I right?

After he cleverly cheated his way to the top of the party Starmer immediately brought in new leadership election rules to make sure the Labour Party would always be led by people like him. We all rolled around laughing at the way his new rules would have excluded every person of colour who has ever stood to be Labour leader, as well as all but two of the women who have ever been nominated too, including both of the women who had the temerity to stand against him in 2020.

If anyone needed to be given a right good kicking by the Labour Party it's uppity women and pesky people of colour isn't it?

One of the absolute best things about Starmer is the way he's finally got to grips with antisemitism.

Instead of endlessly apologising and desperately trying to get the right-wing dominated Labour Party bureaucracy to deal with antisemitism allegations in a quick and efficient manner like his disgraced predecessor, Starmer's playing an absolute blinder by having his goons systematically accuse left-wing Jews of being self-hating antisemites, and driving more Jews out of the Labour Party than any Labour leader in history!

After the shambles of the Corbyn years, Starmer honestly doesn't get enough credit for turning Labour into an institutionally antisemitic party that weaponises the antisemitic "self-hating Jew" trope to bully and exclude scores of Jews.

And if anyone needed to be subjected to systematic persecution by Starmer's Labour Party it's the Jews isn't it?

Another of Starmer's great achievements is his development of an excellent "Hierarchy of Racism" within the Labour Party, and making Labour a Hostile Environment for people of colour. Imagine the balls it takes to block 19 mainly Black and Asian Labour councillors from seeking re-election in Britain's most multicultural city of Leicester, after having deliberately thrown the Forde Report and all of its anti-racism recommendations in the bin! 

Starmer is a man who takes a no-nonsense approach to telling Black and Asian voters that Labour isn't the party for them, and he deserves a lot of credit for it.

Not only is Starmer doing a wonderful job of maintaining a "Hierarchy of Racism", he's also brought back all the anti-immigrant mug people like Yvette Cooper who so wisely abstained on Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment in 2014, facilitating the Windrush scandal and the systematic abuse of thousands of Black and Asian Brits across the country.

And if anyone needed to be made unwelcome in Starmer's Brave New Labour Party it's Windrush Brits and those stupid, annoying anti-racists, isn't it?

Another of Starmer's major political achievements was driving anyone with any kind of socially liberal principles out of his shadow cabinet by instructing them to abstain on Tory legislation to give impunity to rape cops, and to those who commit war crimes in British military uniforms.

If anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of wishy washy social liberal who thinks British soldiers shouldn't be committing war crimes, and that undercover cops shouldn't be tricking unsuspecting women into having sexual relationships with them. Am I right?

Another of Starmer's triumphs was banning several Labour-affiliated organisations, and then retroactively purging loads of Labour Party members for having shared links and social media posts in the times before they were banned.

It's genuinely hilarious that Labour is led by a lawyer who clearly detests the concept of due process, and if anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of naive idiot who believes in fairness and natural justice, isn't it?

One of the best things about Starmer is the way he's actively turned his back on ordinary workers in the midst of an unprecedented inflation crisis. He's absolutely right to ignore the pleas of British workers who have simply had it too easy for too long, and fully deserve to have their living standards eroded away by inflation and capitalist greed. It's not like the founding principle of the Labour Party was to represent the interests of workers in the corridors of power, is it?

And if anyone needed to to be shown the cold shoulder by the Labour Party it's those tiresome workers and irksome trade unionists, isn't it?

And Keir's made it absolutely clear that when he tries to drag Britain into another foolish, unwinnable, and unlawful war of aggression, he'll viciously purge anyone within the Labour Party who tries to warn him not to.

If anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of pathetic snowflake who thinks Britain shouldn't be arming apartheid states and blood-soaked tyrannies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, or creating terrorism breeding grounds and vast refugee crises by reducing foreign countries to rubble, isn't it?

Another of Keir's genius moves was to get a trendy bunch of London image consultants to tell him to try to trick working class people into voting for him with a fascism-adjacent ultranationalist propaganda blitz of "flags, family, and fatherlandism", before rigging Labour selection processes to exclude working class people in favour of the kind of upper middle class, comfortably wealthy liberal-capitalists the Labour Party is meant to be represented by.

If anyone needed to be patronised like a bunch of idiots and excluded from participation in the Parliamentary Labour Party, it's the working class, isn't it?

You have to applaud Starmer's judgement in appointing a private health bankrolled lickspittle like Wes Streeting as his shadow health minister, and allowing him to publicly attack NHS workers and repeatedly spout NHS privatisation propaganda.

If anyone needed to be completely disillusioned by the Labour Party it's those daft idiots who love the NHS, and consider it the finest achievement of any Labour government in history, isn't it?

These awful leftists have tried to claim that Starmer's politics is just reheated Blairism, but this is incredibly unfair. In 1997 Blair stupidly tried to give people hope that Britain deserved better than Tory sleaze, chaos and continued national decline, and he foolishly tolerated alternative views within the Labour ranks, allowing the likes of Tony Benn, Robin Cook, and Jeremy Corbyn to defy him over the Iraq invasion, without even mercilessly hounding them out of the party to create a closed ideological echo chamber like Starmer obviously would have done.

Keir Starmer is just a man with the the downright good sense to tell centrists exactly what they want to hear? "We're lying to you, we don't care, nothing is going to get better, and we're just going to be marginally more competent than the Tories at managing Britain's inevitable economic decline", and he deserves a lot of credit for that.

So it's sickening to see all these Jews, people of colour, socialists, trade unionists, social progressives, and Remainers queuing up to air their petty grievances about being lied to and abused by Starmer's Labour when people have been saying literally the most horrible things about our beloved leader.

They've called him "The Silent Knight", and "Keith Stalin", and "a haircut in a suit", and they've even deliberately misspelled his name as "Kier"!

Just think about the pain and trauma these awful people have caused to poor old Keir with their horrible mouth words ... and then they have the absolute temerity to whine that they're merely being systematically purged, marginalised, discriminated against, abused, and ignored!

Have they no sense of perspective?

Keir Starmer is like a 1997 era Tony Blair without any of the useless and unimportant things like charisma, inspiration, oratory skills, verve, or tolerance of other people's opinions.

All in all, he's an absolute dream boat for sensible liberal-capitalist centrists isn't he?

It's as clear as day that Keir Starmer is so much more than a "boring haircut in a suit". He's as dishonest, vindictive, and profoundly unlikeable as politicians get, and isn't this exactly the kind of person that us Brits demonstrably love to be ruled over by?

And who could possibly doubt Starmer's genius strategy of driving away pesky, annoying, and unimportant minorities like:

• People who wanted the UK to leave the EU
• People who wanted the UK to remain in the EU
• People who are sick of political liars
• Workers
• The trade unionists who actually fund the Labour Party
• The clear majority of Brits who believe in public ownership
• People who disapprove of rape cops and war criminals
• Genuine socialists
• 200,000+ Labour Party members and activists
• People who don't want Britain to repeat horrifying foreign policy disasters like Iraq
• Social progressives
• The working class
• People who believe in democracy and natural justice
• People who love the NHS and respect NHS workers
• Anti-racists
• Women
• People of colour
• Jews

In order to appeal exclusively to important core political demographics like:

• Comfortably wealthy Guardian hacks on six figure salaries
• Fading celebrities who remember their receding heydays coinciding with Blairism
• Liberal-capitalist twonks who support political liars, as long as it's their political liar
• Billionaire capitalists, media moguls, and private health profiteers
• "Soft Tories" who want vicious, dishonest, radical-right neoliberalism that's just a fraction less malicious than the Tories themselves

The man's a misunderstood political genius, and there's no way that the British public could ever be foolish enough to believe that they deserve better.

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OR

In modern Britain incompetence is tolerated as the norm and strong leadership is met with howls of condemnation

If we set aside our views on Brexit for a moment and try to look at Jeremy Corbyn's decision to sack Owen Smith for publicly criticising Labour's six tests position from a reasonably objective stance, it's obvious that Smith had to go.

Love them or loathe them Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher were strong leaders, as were Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee in the mid 20th Century.

It's inconceivable that any of these strong leaders would ever have allowed a member of their cabinet to publicly defy the party policy to set out their own personal policy in a newspaper article. Any cabinet member who did that, would have been sacked, and rightly so.

The problem of course is that after eight years of shockingly weak leadership under the Tories, people have got used to the government behaving like a total rabble, where gross incompetence is the norm, and with ministers regularly making up policy on the hoof and getting away with it. So when they see a party leader actually imposing discipline it comes as a shock to them.

Things were bad enough under David Cameron, whose tolerance to the incompetence of his ministers was so extreme that George Osborne and Theresa May survived easily despite six years of endlessly missed targets and hopelessly botched legislation, and the even more incompetent Iain Duncan Smith remained unsacked until he chose to betray Cameron by walking out of the government at the most damaging moment possible.

But under Theresa May things have become utterly farcical. We had the former Defence Secretary Michael Fallon announce the off the hoof policy that Britain was abandoning the "Mutually Assured Destruction" stance to announce the policy of Britain being open to using nuclear weapons as attack weapons. Not only did Theresa May not sack Fallon on the spot for announcing such a reckless abandonment of Britain's longstanding nuclear weapons policy, she actually let this insane new policy stand.

Then Fallon's replacement as Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson embarrassed Britain by saying that "Russia should just go away, and shut up". Theresa May is such a weak leader that once again she didn't correct this nonsense with a firm reiteration of the government's actual position, or ask for Williamson's resignation.

Then worst of all there's the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who even set out his own bespoke "Manifesto for EU Withdrawal" in a 4,000 word essay for the Daily Telegraph. This wasn't just the usual foot in mouth blabbering we've all come to expect from Johnson, it was a deliberate and calculated effort to undermine his own government's Brexit negotiating position.

Does anyone imagine that strong leaders like Thatcher, Blair, Churchill, or Attlee would have just sat back and done absolutely nothing when their own Foreign Secretary publicly undermined the official party position?

Regardless of whether you agree with Boris Johnson's decision to publicly undermine the Tory government by calling for a much harder form of Brexit, or with Owen Smith's decision to break collective responsibility to call for a second EU referendum, it's obvious both needed to be sacked, otherwise we'd end up with rudderless political parties full of ministers who feel entitled to just make up policies as they go along.

The reality of the situation is that Teresa May is such a weak and incompetent leader that she allowed a senior cabinet minister to go completely unpunished for brazenly undermining the official party stance.

Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn behaved in the way any competent political leader would when one of his shadow cabinet ministers publicly criticises the official stance of their party in a newspaper column, rather than raising his concerns within the shadow cabinet, or through the democratic apparatus of the Labour Party.

The remarkable thing is that Theresa May's display of weakness and incompetence towards Boris Johnson's absurd display of disloyalty barely elicited barely a whisper of criticism from mainstream media hacks.

Then just a few months later we've had to endure howls of outrage from the very same hacks who remained silent about Theresa May's weakness and incompetence after Jeremy Corbyn rightly sacked Owen Smith for timing his attack on the Labour Party position just before the local elections in a calculated effort to do as much damage as possible to Labour's election chances.

It's as if eight years of Tory incompetence has done so much damage to the fabric of the United Kingdom that weakness and poor leadership are now accepted as the standard, and any signs of competence and strong leadership are met with furious condemnation and howls of outrage!

Regardless of our views on the important issues of the day (Brexit, austerity dogma, wage repression, rising poverty, the productivity crisis, NHS and social care funding ...) surely nobody thinks it's right that modern Britain is a place where unmistakably weak leadership goes almost completely uncriticised, while displays of routine political competence are attacked and derided as being somehow shocking and unacceptable?

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OR

Why do so many Corbyn critics insist on outright lying about what Labour's Brexit position actually is?

I've got no problem with people expressing opposition to Labour's six tests Brexit policy if they're still strongly in favour of remaining in the EU. The right to criticise and dissent are absolutely vital in any kind of democracy.

What I object to is the number of Remainers and Corbyn critics who insist on outright lying about what Labour's Brexit position actually is.

Labour's position

Despite continual misrepresentations by their political opponents, the Labour shadow cabinet position on Brexit is actually pretty clear and simple. 

Labour have devised a compromise position that respects the result of the referendum, but which insists that the final Brexit deal is subjected to Keir Starmer's six tests. 

This means that if the final Brexit deal the Tories negotiate with the EU is going to be a disaster for Britain (as the Tory government's own impact assessments indicate it will), the Labour Party will oppose it.

Labour have already shown their determination to fight against a hard-right Tory interpretation of Brexit by seeking to add amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill in order to prevent the Tory government from using Brexit as a Trojan Horse to attack our workers' rights, consumer protections, environmental laws, equality rules, and food standards.

After the Tories ripped up these amendments Labour were left with no choice but to vote against the EU Withdrawal Bill (which is hardly colluding with the Tories as so many people like to claim they are).

Unfortunately Labour and the other opposition parties didn't have the parliamentary numbers to stop the Tory EU Withdrawal Bill because a whole load of so-called "mutineer" Tory MPs like Anna Soubry who make a lot of noise about opposing hard Brexit decided to back Theresa May and the secretive cabal of ERG Brextremists who dictate her every move, and actually voted in favour of it.

Owen Smith

The reason Owen Smith was sacked from the Labour Shadow cabinet is obvious. He decided to break ranks with the agreed position that Labour needs to subject the final deal to Keir Starmer's six tests, and publicly set out his own bespoke Brexit policy.

Any competent political leader can't have their ministers going off and making up their own policies on the hoof, because that's the path towards the kind of incompetence and directionless of Theresa May who has so little authority over her own party that she couldn't even sack Boris Johnson from her cabinet after he made up his own Brexit policy that totally contradicted her own!

Love them or loathe them, strong leaders like Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher would never have allowed their ministers to just make up their own policies on the hoof. That's why Corbyn was right to sack Owen Smith, just as he was right to force out the unmistakably Corbynite MP Chris Williamson a few months ago after Williamson decided to announce his own bespoke policy on Council Tax.

Of Course Owen Smith has every right to criticise Labour's Brexit position from the back benches, but only a ridiculously weak and directionless leader like Theresa May would allow him to criticise the party position from within the party leadership.

The timing

Perhaps the worst thing about Owen Smith's decision to announce his own Brexit policy from within the shadow cabinet is the appalling timing just as the 2018 local election campaign is gearing up.

You'd have to be astoundingly gullible to imagine that Smith only just realised his opposition to the agreed Labour position right now, just when attacking his own party from within the cabinet would do the maximum damage to Labour's chances at the local elections.

Agree with Smith's call for a second EU referendum or not, it's impossible to argue that the timing of his decision to cause chaos by breaking from the agreed party line is incredibly damaging to the chances of thousands of Labour local election candidates up and down the country.

The lies

I wrote an article pointing out that the Labour right-wingers have form for this kind of internal wrecking behaviour, and that Smith's decision to publicly defy the agreed party line looks an awful lot like a deliberate effort to damage Labour's chances at the 2018 local elections in order to use the poor result as an excuse to have another crack at deposing Jeremy Corbyn as party leader.

The response to this article was an absolute cascade of lies and misrepresentations from Remainers, and the anti-Corbyn faction of the Labour Party. Here are just a few of the examples:

Aside from these examples of various different lies and misrepresentations of Labour's Brexit position, it's easy to find plenty more. Just peruse through the #FBPE hashtag on Twitter and you'll find dozens upon dozens of people outright lying with claims that Labour support Tory hard Brexit.

Why people lie

As I said before I've got no objection to people opposing Labour's position under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, that's an essential part of democracy. What I object to is this bombardment of lies, smears, and brazen misrepresentations of what Labour's position actually is.

So why do so many people insist on lying like this?

In my view there are two plausible answers:

They're either ignorant people who have heard the lies elsewhere, and uncritically regurgitate them as their own opinions, rather than actually checking the facts and rejecting them as lies.

The other alternative is that they do actually understand Labour's Brexit position, but they also know that the Brexiters won with a campaign of absolute lies, so they're adopting the same staggeringly dishonest tactics because they think it's the most effective way of attacking Corbyn.

It basically comes down to stupidity or mendacity.

Are these people just ignorant rote learners who don't even understand Labour's actual Brexit policy, but insist on attacking it with lies? Or are they cynical propagandists who believe that lying about Labour's position will have more impact than any kind of fact-based critique?

Why the truth is important

The thing is that whatever our political stance (pro-Corbyn, Corbyn-sceptic, Remainer ...) it's absolutely vital to demonstrate that we're actually better than the lying right-wing Brextremists.

The Brextremists use deceptions, smears, false promises and lies to get what they want. 

That they rely on lies to achieve their objectives is absolutely undeniable after the Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings admitted that they would never have won without the "£350 million for the NHS" lie.

We know this because the other even more right-wing and dishonest Leave.EU Brexit campaign worked with Cambridge Analytica to con people into voting for Brexit, and that Cambridge Analytica openly admitted that their strategy is that "it doesn't have to be true, people just have to believe it".

Whether we support Labour's position of subjecting the Brexit deal to Keir Starmer's six tests or not, those of us who oppose the Tories and the hard-right Brexit liars must ensure that the foundations of our political positions are facts, evidence, cogent analysis, and honest presentation. 

Otherwise we come across as being just as dishonest as they are, which leaves all the decent honest people in society with nowhere to turn but political apathy.

 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

Why every single Labour member should be aghast at the cynical scheming of right-wing Labour MPs

The sheer cynicism of the Labour right-wingers never ceases to amaze. The timing of their latest manoeuvres just before the local election campaign doesn't just give their game away, it shows what a ruthlessly self-serving bunch they really are.

Remember Jeremy Corbyn's first set of local elections in 2016 when the right-wing Progress mob planned to use a poor set of results to instigate a leadership challenge, but their plot was foiled when Corbyn managed to hold onto Miliband's best ever set of local election results?

Remember when the coup plotters briefed the Daily Telegraph that they were going to use the Brexit result to get rid of Corbyn whichever side won, then they were stumped when he refused to bow to their anti-democratic plot by resigning, forcing them to run the hapless Owen Smith to stand as the Anyone But Corbyn candidate.

Well this time it's obvious what they're up to. They're going to create as much internal mess as possible in the run up to the 2018 local elections in the hope of creating a poor result for Labour, with the aim of using these poor results as another excuse to oust Corbyn.

Owen Smith coming out and defying the party line (which is that Labour will vote against Tory Brexit if it fails to meet the six conditions laid out by Kier Starmer) is the first blow in a internal wrecking campaign designed to reduce the Labour vote.

They know that in order for this strategy to work hundreds of Labour councillors will have to lose their jobs, and multiple local authorities will need to be ceded to the austerity fixated Tories. But they see these disastrous outcomes as a price worth paying in order to have another stab at getting rid of Corbyn and turning Labour back into a centre-right, pro-austerity, orthodox neoliberal party they want it to be, so that they can hover ever so slightly to the left of the barkingly right-wing Tories and deny the electorate any real economic choice.

The thing that makes this strategy of the right-wing Labour MPs so damned cynical is that that they definitely didn't want to try this kind of electoral own goal tactic at the General Election last year, because they knew that they'd be in danger of losing their own jobs if they conducted an internal wrecking campaign during a General Election.

Pure self-interest was the reason they gave up their coup-plotting for a while, backed Corbyn's fantastic 2017 election manifesto, and actually showed a bit of unity during the election campaign.

Instead of taking the hit themselves, they're brazenly looking to load the consequences of their scheming onto ordinary hard working Labour councillors up and down the country.

The fact is that the victims of this wrecking behaviour won't just be Momentum-backed candidates by a long stretch, it'll be Labour candidates from across the party, including those who support the right-wing Progress "party within a party" too.

Then there are all the innocent members of the public who will have to suffer even more austerity dogma under local Tory rule, because these right-wing MPs want to throw away the chance for Labour to win big because they're far too fixated on their own myopic agenda of getting rid of Corbyn at any cost.

Even Labour members who have serious doubts about Jeremy Corbyn must be able to see how cynical the timing of these moves are. Is anyone gullible enough to believe that Owen Smith only just realised his objections to Keir Starmer's six tests policy now, right when it would do the most harm to Labour's local election chances? 

The reality is that Smith sat in the Labour shadow cabinet and cynically waited for the most damaging moment to attack the party line, safe in the knowledge it would be other people within the Labour Party who pay the price, not him and the right-wing Progress MPs.

Every single Labour Councillor up for re-election,and every one of the tens of thousands of Labour activists who are gearing up to fight for Labour to win in their local area needs to understand that as far as the Labour right-wingers are concerned, you people are just pathetic disposable little pawns in their power game.

They don't care if you lose your job, or miss your best ever opportunity to serve your local community, or have to suffer another five years of catastrophic Tory rule in your local area. Their priority is having another crack at deposing Jeremy Corbyn, so "fuck you".

 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

Brexit is a shambles and the political class are floundering

The political class have had ten weeks to come up with some kind of plan to deal with the vote for Brexit, but the woeful state of the drivel most of them have come up with so far has actually left us with the situation where the confusion over what Brexit is actually going to mean for the British economy is actually growing rather than diminishing!

No plan

The Brexiteers who goaded 37% of the public into voting for Brexit clearly had no plan whatever about what to do if they got their way. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson made that absolutely clear by the way they immediately scarpered after the event.

This total lack of anything even remotely resembling a plan of action that the political class could be held to in the result of a Brexit vote was the main objection of anyone who considered the subject with any degree of seriousness. Had the pro-Brexit camp actually presented their plan we could have considered it on its merits. The fact that they just had a random jumble of slogans, utopian fantasies and false promises instead of an actual strategy for what comes next meant there really was nothing serious to consider.

Even worse than the Brexiteers having no plan for Brexit was the fact that David Cameron's government had no contingency plan whatever in case their gamble with the entire future of the UK economy backfired. Cameron's choice to risk the future of the country for a bit of short-term party political advantage at the 2015 General Election was bad enough, but having no plan in case it backfired and then just resigning and washing his hands of the whole mess he created was truly abysmal stuff, even judged against his own utterly woeful track record as Prime Minister.

Making it up as they go along 

David Davis' long-awaited Brexit speech was truly abysmal stuff. Flanked by the other merry Brexiteers Boris Johnson and Liam Fox, Davis' wasted fifteen minutes with a hopeless display of unfocused waffling. In the process he managed to clarify very little other that the fact that even after ten weeks these charlatans have got no coherent strategy for removing the UK from the European Union.

One of the only concrete Brexit policies that Davies actually bothered to detail in his rambling speech was the plan to retain of the EU's system of landowner subsidies, under which wealthy landowners are showered with taxpayers' cash simply for owning vast tracts of land, with no obligation to actually cultivate anything whatever in return for their handouts.

In guaranteeing the continuance of these farcical landowner handouts, Davies made it absolutely clear that the Tories are determined to keep one of the very worst and most iniquitous elements of EU membership simply because it benefits the land monopolist class who bankroll the Tory party (and make up a significant proportion of their MPs too).

The next day Davis had to be slapped down by the Prime Minister's office because his prognosis that the UK retaining membership of the single market would be "very improbable" is not government policy.

It's clear that one hand doesn't even know what the other hand is doing. An extraordinary mess!

Davis may have been speaking above his station when he publicly poo-pooed the idea of the UK staying in the single market, but what the actual government policy is remains entirely unclear, which brings us to Theresa May.

Theresa May

It seemed unlikely that anyone could put on a less reassuring performance than David Davis (who guaranteed that taxpayer funded handouts to his landowner Tory mates but had not a single word of reassurance for vital sectors of the economy like manufacturing, retail, science, education, energy, transport or health) but Theresa May managed to trump him the next day with an utterly vapid performance at Prime Minister's Questions.

After trying to score points against Jeremy Corbyn by giving a massive and unprecedented boost of free publicity to an extremely distasteful hard-right Twitter ranter by name-checking him on the public record, she then repeatedly and egregiously evaded a perfectly clear, sensible and simple question from the SNP's Angus Robertson, about whether Theresa May wants the UK to stay in the European Single Market or leave.

All Theresa May could come up with was a load of flustered and patronising waffle while the Tory benches tried to save her embarrassment by trying to drown out Robertson's questions with their now customary barrages of hooting, jeering, braying and assorted animal noises.

It's absolutely inconceivable that Theresa May will be able to keep on stalling for years on end about whether the UK is going to seek to retain membership of the single market with vacuous platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit", but that's all she's been doing for 10 weeks already, so maybe endless stalling is actually her plan? Who knows?

It's hardly a rabidly left-wing Trotskyite position to say that vital sectors of the UK economy like manufacturing, retail and services will suffer if this uncertainty continues. If the UK government is not going to seek membership of the single market, UK businesses need to know about it, and they need to know about it soon so they can come up with business plans to try to mitigate the economic fallout.

The "Norwegian option" or "Hard Brexit"

Assuming that the stalling is one day going to come to an end and that Brexit is eventually going to go ahead, a lot of people think that "the Norwegian option" is the best of a bad situation. 

The problem is that single market access comes with certain stipulations, including the free movement of labour within the single market zone. It's inconceivable that the EU would allow the UK to keep access to the single market without us agreeing to the free movement of labour (because it would clearly incentivise a chaotic disintegration of the EU as other states quit in the hope of their own cherry-picked sweetheart deals).

Keeping single market access and scrapping the free movement of labour is a complete fantasy. You couldn't really get a purer political example of people wanting to have their cake and eat it. When Theresa May says she wants to scrap free movement but refuses to say that she wants to quit the single market, she's blatantly playing utopian fantasy land politics and taking anyone she expects to believe it for an idiot.

Keeping the single market and not scrapping the free movement of people from the EU into the UK would cause an apoplectic storm of protest from the huge xenophobic-Brexiter contingent. The very reason these people voted out of the EU was to get rid of the pesky foreigners. Any deal that involved keeping the free movement of labour would have them wailing and shrieking even louder than they were before, or perhaps even descending into the violent lynch mob mentality eluded to by Nigel Farage and openly promoted by the leaders of Britain First.

That just leaves "Hard Brexit" which would have severe economic consequences for huge numbers of businesses and jobs. Anyone rooting for Hard Brexit whilst working for a Japanese car company in Sunderland (where a majority of people actually voted for Brexit!) really doesn't know their arse from their elbow. They'd actually be rooting for the endangerment of their own jobs and livelihoods because they've swallowed some Brexit fairy tale about "taking back control"!

Jeremy Corbyn

Lot's of people see me as completely biased in favour of Jeremy Corbyn because I generally swim against the tide of savagely anti-Corbyn propaganda that is passed off as news these days, but I'm not. Nobody is beyond criticism.

Corbyn has outlined a stance that the UK should try to negotiate a settlement that keeps access to the single market but frees us from the EU obligations that bar the UK state from intervening to rescue our industries* and that force us to keep privatising public property and services.

These toxic hard-right economic rules are one of my biggest criticisms of the EU, so I understand why Jeremy Corbyn would want them scrapped, but the problem with this stance is that it's pretty much as unrealistic as the single market + no free labour pipe dream that Theresa May keeps pandering to. It's unrealistic because it's against the EU's own interests to allow departing nations to cherry-pick the best bit and scrap all the absolute crap that comes along with it. If they allow that, everyone would want to leave.

The only way that the UK could have stood a chance of scrapping the hard-right pro-privatisation, anti-interventionist neoliberal dogma at the core of the EU would have been to stay in and try to form a pan-European left-wing alliance demanding reform for the whole of the EU. Pleading for a spectacularly unlikely special deal just for the UK at the moment we strop out of the door is an utterly futile strategy.

A second referendum

If you think Jeremy Corbyn's policy is silly, Owen Smith's is even worse. A second referendum on whatever settlement the Tories eventually cobble together could only have negative outcomes.

Either some 37% of the public actually vote in favour of it and give the Tories an actual democratic mandate for the hard-right lunacy they're bound to come up with to please their donors (bankers, the landed gentry, corporate fat cats, tax-dodgers and private health profiteers), or the public vote against it causing years more of damaging economic chaos and uncertainty as the country descends into furious bickering about which referendum outcome is the more legitimate as we're left neither fully in, nor fully out of the EU with the clock ticking towards us being ejected anyway at the end of the two year Article 50 negotiation period.

It's telling how bad the situation is that this state of chaos and uncertainty is actually considered by some people to be the best case scenario!

Conclusion

The main reason I objected to a haphazard abandonment of the EU with no clear strategy for what comes next was not some misguided love of the EU**, it was an understanding of the near inevitability of such a vote resulting in a paralysing mess with a savagely right-wing bunch of Tories intent on running the show for the benefit of their financial backers.

It's really hard to say who is coming out of this the worst. David Cameron for gambling the whole future of the UK and losing; Brexiteers like Boris, Farage, Gove and IDS who were so full of false promises and utopian fantasies before the vote but clearly still have no plan ten weeks after it; the appalling Brexiter ranters who keep telling everyone who tries to discuss this mess to "shut up and get over it, you lost" as if the referendum was some kind of sodding football match; the naive opportunists who believe in Theresa May's cake of access to the single market without paying the price of it with free movement of labour; Jeremy Corbyn who now apparently thinks it's possible to ditch all of the hard-right economic dogma that comes with EU membership but keep access to the single market; Owen Smith and various others in the political establishment who are pinning their hopes on a second referendum to undo the result of the first referendum and further draw out this damaging uncertainty, or the 37% of the public who voted to dump our country into such a chaotic and unstable position under the delusion that it's even possible to "take back control" without anything even remotely resembling a plan of action for how that was to be done.

 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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* =  Apart from the banks of course, the EU turned a big blind eye to the £1.5 trillion in bailouts, subsidies and financial support we handed to them back when the global economy was paralysed in a huge insolvency crisis caused by their own reckless gambling.

** = I'm confident that I've written far more critiques of the EU than 99% of Brexit voters. Take this, or this, or this as examples.

The Labour Party purge

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

Retrospective trawling

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

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

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

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

Examples

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

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

Attracting other voters

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

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

The sheer hypocrisy of it

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

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

A Pyrrhic victory is their best possible outcome for Owen Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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