In June 2016 the right-wing pro-privatisation, pro-austerity neoliberal faction of the Labour Party were so confident of success that they openly briefed the Daily Telegraph on their ludicrous plot to use the Brexit referendum result (whichever way it went) as an excuse to launch an internal labour Party coup against Jeremy Corbyn.
We all know how that turned out now. Their cowardly orchestrated bullying tactics to try and force Corbyn to resign; their disgraceful scheming to game the party rules in an effort to keep Corbyn off the ballot; their pathetic inability to find or field a unity candidate for weeks until they finally shoved the hapless Owen Smith into the jaws of almost certain defeat; and their ruthless systematic purge of left-leaning Labour members for the slightest of indiscretions (retweeting a non-Labour MP on one occasion, voting for another party long before they'd even joined Labour, and even liking the Foo Fighters too much) in a desperate last-ditch effort to rig the leadership vote in their favour.
You couldn't really imagine a more damaging and strategically inept failure than that, but they're actually at it again.
In August 2018 a different right-wing rag has broken the story, but the cynical underhand scheming is the same. The hallmarks of arrogance and absolute strategic ineptitude are the same. The names of those involved are the same (Chris Leslie, Liz Kendall, Chuka Umunna, Stephen Kinnock, Gavin Shuker, and disgraceful John Woodcock - until he resigned from the party to escape the investigation into his alleged sexual misconduct)
This time it's the Express, which is admittedly enough to get any right-thinking person's alarm bells ringing, but the article is full of corroborating details. The luxury country estate they hired to scheme away in, the cost of the booking (£144 per head), the number of MPs involved, and even the time of the train they caught to get there.
The scheming
One of the strategies these disgraceful plotters scratched together is to launch their putsch after a successful General Election, suddenly resigning as a bloc of rebel right-wing MPs to keep Corbyn out of power!
How they imagine the electorate would react with anything but unbridled fury at such a cynical and anti-democratic wrecking tactic to deny the nation the Prime Minister they'd just voted for is anyone's guess.
Coalition with the Tories?
How they would actually keep Corbyn out of power is another mystery. The only conceivable way would be for them to actually form some kind of political pact to form a coalition with what's left of the Tory Party.
How hard-Remainers like Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Liz Kendall and their ilk could actually share power with whichever of the fanatical Tory Brextremists manage to keep their seats (Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox, David Davis, Priti Patel, Boris Johnson, Chris Grayling, John Redwood, Peter Bone ...) is anyone's guess.
But then where there's utterly ruthless self-interest driving your every political move, there's likely a way isn't there?
Another leadership election?
Another of the coup-plotters' schemes is to keep flaming the anti-Semitism row as hard as they possibly can for as long as they possibly can in order to try to break Corbyn, then put forward one of their truly laughable selection of leadership candidates in a new leadership election:
The suggested candidates are the disgraceful Chris Leslie (one of the main architects of Labour's woeful election-losing austerity lite strategy at the 2015 General Election), Yvette Cooper (who finished 3rd in the 2015 leadership election with a paltry 17% of the vote and is married to one of the other main architects of austerity-lite!), Chuka Umunna (the absolute embodiment of the grossly unappealing career politician who will switch his 'principles' in a second if he thinks there's an advantage in it), and Stephen Kinnock (a man with no discernible political qualities at all other than the blessing of a great big dollop of nepotism).
How the hell the coup-plotters think that any of this unappealing bunch could win over the Labour Party membership is anyone's guess. Perhaps they'd look at some way of cheating the election again, maybe with ludicrous nonsense like back-dating the membership eligibility to vote date to 2005, or trying to cut the membership out of the decision altogether.
Rigging or evading the ballot seem like incredibly unlikely options given they'd need control of Labour's executive committee to make such changes, which was vanishingly unlikely even before an infuriated membership found out about this latest disgustingly cynical coup-plot to defy the will of the membership again.
This coup-plot just adds even more incentive for all genuinely left-wing Labour members to vote for the Momentum-backed NEC candidates, and against the right-wing Progress-backed slate who are aligned with the right-wing coup-plotter politicians.
Mandatory reselection
The consequence of this outright defiance against the Labour Party membership really must be the introduction of mandatory reselection of all Labour MPs by their local constituency parties.
Democratic reselection is hardly a radical idea because reselection is commonplace in democracies across the developed world. Just think of the primaries in US elections where other candidates from within the party can challenge the incumbent to go forward as the party's official candidate.
You don't even have to travel that far to see it. Just north of the border in Scotland the SNP have a mandatory reselection policy. Before the 2017 General Election all 54 of the SNP's Westminster MPs were reselected by their local party members without problems.
The only thing MPs have got to fear when it comes to reselection is whether they have done a good job of representing their party, and their local constituency.
No local Labour group is going to take the massive risk of ousting a loyal and hard-working MP, because replacing the familiar local MP with a new face would clearly increase them losing the seat to another party.
The only MPs who have anything to fear from democratic reselection would be lazy, arrogant, self-entitled MPs with reputations for working against the interests of the Labour Party, and against the interests of all of the local Labour activists who worked so hard to help them win their seats in the first place.
Given the absolute belligerence of the right-wing coup-plotter MPs, and their continual efforts to actively damage and run down the long-term reputation of the Labour Party solely in order to undermine Jeremy Corbyn, it's very likely that mandatory reselection will be very near the top of the agenda at the next Labour Party conference.
Theresa May to the rescue?
The looming prospect of reselection means only one thing: The only person who can save these disgraceful coup-plotters from deselection is Theresa May!
She can do it by calling another snap election in the autumn of 2018 so that Labour simply doesn't have the time to make the rule changes and carry out the reselection process before they have to throw themselves into the chaos of a general election campaign.
This kind of scenario would actually make their post-election putsch strategy seem a lot less incoherent, but only in a desperate, pathetic, disloyal, and disgustingly cynical way.
Theresa May saves the Labour right-wingers from the deselections they so richly deserve, then the Labour right-wingers break away from the Labour Party and prop up whoever the Tories select as Theresa May's replacement.
The big problem from the coup-plotter perspective of course is that if Labour manage to win more comfortably than the coup-plotters are gambling on. Then they simply wouldn't have the numbers to do the damage.
A comfortable Corbyn win isn't actually as far-fetched as it seems. In 2017 the Corbyn surge lifted Labour from the mid-20s when the election campaign kicked off to a final vote share of 40%. Since then Labour have hovered at around 40%, so another Corbyn surge from a much higher starting position, even a much smaller surge than last time, could lift Labour well clear of the Tories.
Then there's the utterly fickle blue-kip demographic to consider. Soaking up the majority of the voters fleeing the wreckage of UKIP with her hard-right ethno-nationalist Brexit sponge turned out to be absolutely crucial for the Theresa May in 2017, because without so many blue-kippers on board, the Tories would have fallen way short of even being in a position to bribe the DUP bigots into backing their shambles of a government.
So if Corbyn managed to deliver another mini-surge, while the Tories fell back as a lot of the fickle blue-kip demographic return to the UKIP fold, it could well end up being mathematically impossible for the right-wing coup-plotters to actually return the Tory favour by ruthlessly stabbing Jeremy Corbyn on the finishing line.
So would the Tories play their part in such a gamble by triggering another snap election, knowing that they'd be saving a load of their orthodox neoliberal comrades who are embedded within the Labour ranks, but at the risk of never actually receiving their payback?
I guess it just depends how desperate they are doesn't it?
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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.
The Jeremy Corbyn surge is continuing at the local Labour Party grassroots level with pro-Corbyn candidates winning democratic internal Labour Party elections all over the place, causing right-wingers from inside and outside the Labour Party to absolutely lose their minds over it.
The latest example is the Liverpool Wavertree branch of the Labour Party in which 9 out of 10 positions on the Executive Committee just went to Momentum-backed candidates in the elections, after which a single member of the Executive Committee said that they support the local MP Luciana Berger, but she should be answerable to the concerns of local Labour Party members if she ever decides to do anything else like vote to bomb Syria, or support another vote of no confidence against the party leader at the most damaging time imaginable for the party.
On the face of it this is bad news for Luciana Berger because she was one of the Labour Party cabinet members who participated in the spectacularly failed and extraordinarily damaging Anyone But Corbyn Coup last summer, but her response to the election result was actually pretty well considered:
"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. We had a great local result on June 8, with the Labour majority [in Wavertree] going up for the third election in a row and almost four in five people voting for Luciana Berger as the Labour candidate. That 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."
It's absolutely clear that the local Labour Party and Luciana Berger have both expressed a desire to work together, and Berger was very clear about her respect for the democratic result, but right-wingers who hate internal Labour Party democracy and would rather the party be run as an ideologically pure neoliberal dictatorship are desperately trying to spin this resounding election result as some kind of evil plot by leftie bullies to take over the Labour Party.
The lengths that right-wingers will go to to defend their hatred of democracy are quite extraordinary.
The Daily Mail writer Adam Crafton brazenly lied that Luciana Berger resigned from Corbyn's cabinet because of anti-Semitism in order to create a misleading sympathy narrative. But in reality her resignation letter was a ridiculous reality-reversing diatribe about how she had to ignore the will of the Labour Party membership and help launch a hugely damaging internal party civil war out of "loyalty" to the party and a desire to create party "unity"!
There was no mention of anti-Semitism in Berger's resignation letter whatever, meaning that the Daily Mail journalist was simply trying to create Labour Party divisions by inventing a total lie and trying to conflate the disgusting anti-Semitic abuse Berger has suffered from the extreme-right with the left of the Labour Party*.
Another right-winger to jump onto the concern trolling bandwagon was the Tory-loving slob Paul Staines (AKA Guido Fawkes), who invented a fictional threat from the Wavertree Executive Committee to "deselect" Luciana Berger, then cried crocodile tears about it as if he actually cares about the good of the Labour Party, rather than being the ridiculously biased pro-Tory muck-slinger that he actually is.
The comments beneath the Guido Fawkes article from his loyal hard-right hate mob are quite extraordinary, with one Tory fanatic claiming that the Tory spin machine failed during Theresa May's vanity election because they didn't smear Corbyn as a "left wing terrorist loving extremist" hard enough, rather than because of the appalling lack of Tory manifesto policies aimed at helping anyone apart from corporations and the mega-rich.
The right-wing of the Labour Party joined the Daily Mail and the most notorious right-wing blog in Britain in howling at the democratic result in Wavertree, and smearing the left of the party as "thugs" and "bullies" as if they'd taken over the executive committee of the local Wavertree party by force rather than by the ballot box.
Another Labour right-winger called Andrew Whiteside cried that the local party had been taken over by "communists" and then went on a spectacularly ironic Twitter blocking spree to eradicate all forms of dissent from his ideologically pure Twitter echo chamber!
The absurd thing of course is that right-wing Labour leaders like Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown spent years ideologically purging the Labour Party and parachuting loyal right-wingers (like Luciana Berger) into safe Labour seats, but the Progress mob had no complaints about thuggery or bullying then because they believed so strongly in the ideological purification of the Labour Party to make it a centre-right orthodox neoliberal party in line with their own agendas.
But suddenly when the left of the party is making a resurgence, not by force but by the ballot box, they're all suddenly shrieking and wailing about the nasty bullying lefties!
The hypocrisy of these Labour Party right-wingers isn't even the worst thing, it's the fact that they're queuing up to stand alongside the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the extreme-right Guido Fawkes blog to attack the democratic workings of their own party, and bitterly smear their fellow Labour Party members.
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.
Progress is the right-wing pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-imperialism, pro-globalisation, pro-PFI faction of the Labour Party that ruled the roost for two decades between 1994 and 2015, and they absolutely hate what's going on now so much that they've deliberately sidelined themselves from influence with their petulant refusals to serve in Jeremy Corbyn's cabinet, their coup-plotting and wrecking tactics, and their regular displays of naked contempt for the party membership.
The Progress ideology is that the only way to win an election in the UK is to imitate the Tory party.
It doesn't matter how far off into bonkers hard-right austerity dogma and privatisation mania the Tories go there are Labour right-wingers who are certain that the only course of action is to continually track rightwards to stay next to them, hence the shockingly inept 2015 General Election strategy of promoting austerity-lite instead of properly opposing Tory austerity dogma as the socially and economically ruinous ahistorical nonsense that it is, and always was.
Despite being vilified in the mainstream press like no other political leader before him, Jeremy Corbyn managed to win 3.6 million voters back to Labour in the first general election in decades that the party hasn't been dominated by the right-wing Progress faction.
Who would have thought that a Labour leader could appeal to millions by offering people what they want (decent wages; properly funded public services; repatriated national infrastructure; education as a right rather than a commodity; job security; more cops, nurses and firefighters; real action to combat the energy market profiteers; no more privatisation scams; no more warmongering in the Middle East) rather than lecturing them they they're too stupid to understand politics for themselves and that Tory-lite is the only alternative to pure Toryism?
It's almost as if Progress and their ilk are actually completely wrong about everything, and it's their determination that the role of the opposition is to imitate the government rather than oppose it that's the toxifying force that gradually rendered Labour "unelectable".
As Jeremy Corbyn was being cheered by tens of thousands at Glastonbury Paul Mason faced a much harder audience at the Progress conference.
Paul Mason was lied about, booed and hissed by the Progress mob as he tried to explain to them that they need to get with the project or form their own centre-right pro-EU, pro-war, pro-privatisation party.
Listen to how the leader of this mob Richard Angell desperately tries to spin and misrepresent what Mason is saying in order to make himself and his ilk out as the poor victims of censorship, even as the Progress mob simultaneously boo and hiss and shout at Paul Mason for expressing "thought crime"!.
This outrageous stuff is the behaviour of an out-of-touch and increasingly sidelined faction of the Labour Party that is absolutely intent on telling people what to think, rather than listening to what they're actually saying.
Mason's views went down like a lead balloon because the Progress mob still think that the Labour Party belongs to them and that this period of genuine democratic socialism is just a frustrating but brief interregnum before they can retake the party and top-down impose centre-right neoliberalism-lite again.
They've already shown that they will stop at nothing to try to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, and Angell has clearly expressed his anti-democratic determination to prevent local Labour Party members from choosing their own candidates in favour of parachuting in yet more Progress-approved centre-right political drones.
Angell also accused Paul Mason (first joined the party at the age of 19) of being an "entryist" on stage, a lie which elicited a round of applause from the Progress mob.
Not only do Progress want to ape hard-right Tory economic policy, they also ape the Tory tactic of accusing their opponents of that which they are guilty of themselves.
Progress are the "unelectable" ones who couldn't even beat David Cameron in 2015 despite five years of toxic austerity dogma, shockingly chaotic governance, near-constant lies and evasions, constant demeaning economic baby-talk, and extraordinary complacency about abject incompetence in his top team (Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne, Theresa May, Chris Grayling ...).
Progress are the "entryists" who took over a democratic socialist party and set about turning it into a centre-right neoliberal party and driving away millions of voters in the process.
And Progress MPs are the "extremists" who actually queued up to vote in favour of Tory austerity dogma in 2015 when the public were crying out for an opposition party to actually oppose it.
Make no mistake about it, the Progress mob will do everything in their power to hobble the Labour Party because they'd much rather exist in the political wilderness of the unpopular, unelectable and almost totally abandoned centre-right territory than actually win power from the centre-left.
Don't take my word for it, take Tony Blair's.
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.
The fact that David Sainsbury was even allowed to continue as a member of the Labour Party after breaking party rules by making a huge £2 million+ donation to the Liberal Democrats was an affront to justice after tens of thousands of grassroots members were systematically purged from the party for supposed "crimes" such as admitting they'd once voted Green years before joining the labour Party, retweeting Tweets non-Labour politicians, or even being too enthusiastic about how much they like the band Foo Fighters!
The desperate anti-democratic effort by embedded Labour Party right-wingers to topple Jeremy Corbyn by purging as many suspected Corbyn supporters as possible failed, but somehow Sainsbury was allowed to get away with funding a rival political party.
In the wake of Labour defying the political pundit class by winning seats and eradicating the Tory majority in Westminster, David Sainsbury has announced his decision to quit injecting cash into political parties.
This decision has come as a particularly heavy blow to the Progress faction of the Labour Party, which is no surprise given how they're a top-down millionaire-backed right-wing pressure group within the Labour Party.
They have very little enthusiastic support at the grassroots level and only really exist in order to promote the lie that the only route to political power is to weakly imitate Tory policy, no matter how far off into the bonkers hard-right realm of privatisation mania and ruinous austerity dogma they wander.
Their right-wing capture of the Labour Party succeeded for a while under Tony Blair, and to be fair Blair's prescription of neoliberalism-lite was a lot less damaging than the bonkers privatisation chaos served up by John Major's dead duck government between 1992 and 1997, or the ruinous hard-right austerity dogma the Tories have been forcing on the nation since 2010.
The big problem for the centre-right of the Labour Party is that despite a savagely biased media campaign against him, Jeremy Corbyn has demonstrated that there's very much more public appetite for a genuine democratic socialist alternative to Tory neoliberalism than for the kind of centre-right Tory-lite policies favoured by Progress.
The Guardian coverage of Sainsbury abandoning Progress is an absolute delight to read as their correspondent cries bitter tears of frustration for the demoralised centre-right Labour Party faction.
The Progress sympathisers at the Guardian even quoted the Progress director Richard Angell spouting desperate misrepresentations and outright anti-democratic contempt by claiming that there is lots of work to be done in "renewing the ideas of the centre-left" and "stopping a hard-left takeover in constituencies".
When he refers to "centre-left" he's actually talking about the pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, pro-PFI, pro-globalisation centre-right faction of the Labour Party.
And when he talks about "stopping a hard-left takeover in constituencies" he's talking about the deeply embedded right-wing of the Labour Party doing absolutely everything in their power to prevent local constituency Labour Party members choosing the election candidates that they actually want, in favour of parachuting in even more useless and unappealing centre-right Progress-approved candidates who think that the purpose of politics is to imitate, rather than to oppose the Tory party.
An awful lot of Progress types are blatant anti-democrats who regard Ed Miliband's decision to democratise the Labour Party as a terrible unforgivable mistake (rather than easily the best thing he ever did). They detest the majority of Labour Party members and the millions of people who flocked back to the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn presented a proper manifesto to undo some of the Tory damage, rather than weakly imitating the Tories like Labour did in 2015.
A lot of Progress people would rather that Labour existed in the political wilderness of a largely abandoned centre-right territory (the Tories have veered off to the hard-right well beyond Ukipper levels of fanaticism, the SNP occupies the centre ground, Labour under Corbyn occupy the traditional centre-left and the Lib-Dems won a pitiful 7.9% of the vote on their centre-right rabidly pro-EU platform).
I'm not a Labour Party member, but if you are a Labour Party supporter who wants to counter the toxic anti-democratic scheming of this centre-right pressure group, my advice is to join or make a donation to the centre-left group Momentum.
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.
