The gullibility of some people never ceases to astound.
Even when it's absolutely obvious that a breakaway group of right-wing Labour MPs and Tories has absolutely nothing to do with Brexit, and everything to do with a desperate last-ditch effort to divide the Labour vote and keep the Tory austerity agenda rolling on, huge numbers of people who consider themselves rational, suddenly begin falling over themselves to continue believing the lies and deceptions of a bunch of egotistical fabulists.
If you look at the facts rather than mindlessly and uncritically absorbing mainstream media propaganda tropes, the entire justification for the existence of the Independent Group is obviously a fraud.
The ex-Labour component said they had to quit Labour because the party wasn't doing enough to oppose Brexit, and the ex-Tory component said they had to quit the Tories because they were in hock to Jacob Rees-Mogg's ERG Brextremists and the bigoted DUP sectarians that Theresa May bribed into propping up her shambles of a government.
But the evidence proves this to be absolutely false.
On January 29th Labour tabled a Brexit amendment proposing another referendum as an option in order to prevent Theresa May and the ERG Brextremists driving the UK economy off a cliff, but the three ex-Tory members of the squatter group of MPs all actively sided with Theresa May, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, and the 10 DUP sectarians to vote against this amendment [source].
If you ever needed absolute proof that opposing Brexit was never their true priority, the fact that these three voted against Labour's amendment 307 aimed at stopping Theresa May's reckless game of brinkmanship with the nation's future less than a month before becoming political squatters is it, isn't it?
And the fact that the ex-Labour component have joined up with these outrageous ex-Tories who less than a month previously were actively siding with the ERG Brextremsists and the DUP to prevent Labour's efforts to oppose Tory Brexit is proof that the priority isn't opposing Brexit for them either.
So if their stated justification is an easily demonstrable lie, what is the ulterior agenda?
Well the ex-Labour squatter MP Gavin Shuker (the one who decided to set their group up as a private company rather than a political party in order to hide who is bankrolling them) said that their primary objective was begging Theresa May to form a pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-welfare coalition with them. "I'm willing to extend confidence and supply to your government so it doesn’t fall over" being his exact words.
The ex-Labour squatter MP Chris Leslie (one of the right-wing idiots who came up with the staggeringly unappealing austerity-lite posturing that trashed Labour's election chances at the 2015 general election) went even further, saying that the group would refuse to do everything in their power to stop the Tory Brexit chaos, because if stopping hard-right Tory Brexit meant giving Jeremy Corbyn another shot at removing Theresa May from power, they'd vote with the Tories to prevent that from happening!
The ex-Tory squatter MP Anna Soubry made things absolutely clear when she used the word "marvellous" to describe the Coalition austerity-enforcing, wage-repressing, public service-wrecking, social security-slashing, privatisation obsessed dogma of the 2010-2015 period that collapsed living standards and created the wave of public fury that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line in 2016.
Instead of looking at the austerity disease that caused Brexit in the first place, Soubry is pretending to treat the symptoms (while actively voting against another referendum that may have helped to treat the symptoms) and actually continuing to praise the toxic Tory austerity dogma that caused the symptoms in the first place as "marvellous"!
And then Soubry went on the television to argue that she should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party and their ruinous austerity dogma from under the umbrella of the Independent Group, and her fellow squatter MP Chuka Umunna actually sat next to her nodding and agreeing that members of his absurd vanity project should be allowed to actively campaign for the Tories and promote Tory austerity dogma!
The obvious problem is that the hopelessly gullible are incredibly difficult to convince, because in order to see the squatter MPs as the cynical opportunists hiding a pro-Tory pro-austerity, anti-worker, anti-investment agenda behind a cloak of Brexit rhetoric, people need to accept that they were foolish to take these politicians from deep within the heart of the Westminster establishment class at their word, and admit that this gullibility is why they got so easily duped.
If we've learned anything from the last few years in politics it's that huge numbers of people would rather ignore the facts and evidence to continue believing absolute nonsense, rather than take the ego hit of accepting they got conned.
So even when we point out that the squatter group's entire justification for existing is a fraud, and that they're just a bunch of austerity fetishists openly scrounging for places in a Tory-led pro-austerity coalition, people's egos won't allow them to admit that they were hopelessly gullible rubes to ever fall for it in the first place.
But then the gossamer-like transparency of their fraud is so fragile that it's enough to make us suspect that Brexit isn't actually the main issue with a lot of these "centrists" at all, and that the actual unstated priority all along has been an absolute desperation to keep the Tories in power so they can carry on brutally punishing the poor and disabled, trashing ordinary workers' wages, gutting public services, and throttling Britain's economic potential with their toxic austerity dogma like they have been doing for the last 9 years.
The Independent Group is not a brave new challenge to the political orthodoxy, it's people from deep within the political orthodoxy desperately hawking "more of the same" under the guise of opposing the hard-right Brexit that several of their group were voting in favour of less than a month previously!
So the only people left promoting these democracy-fearing squatter MPs are either hopelessly gullible idiots who just rote learn and repeat their political opinions without doing even the most basic fact-checking, or cynical and malicious propagandists who are deliberately hiding their pro-Tory pro-austerity agenda behind a crude veneer of anti-Brexit rhetoric.
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Seven years of wilfully loading the burden of austerity dogma onto the poor and ordinary whilst lavishing tax breaks and handouts on corporations and the mega-rich is proof that there is no such thing as a good Tory. However it's clear that some Tories are certainly a lot less bad than others.
There are around two dozen potential Tory rebels who are expressing opposition to the fanatically right-wing Blue-kip takeover of their party that is happening under Theresa May's leadership. They don't like the way Theresa May is being edged ever closer to the "no deal" Brexit cliff edge by the ideological fanatics in their party, and they have strong reservations about Theresa May's efforts to sideline parliament and give her ministers the power to rewrite thousands of UK laws with no parliamentary scrutiny whatever.
They're not actually trying to stop Brexit completely, but they are determined to prevent the economic catastrophe that a "no deal" flounce out of Europe would entail.
Take a listen to Ken Clarke's speech during the Brexit bill debate to get an idea of where these "rebel" Tory MPs are actually coming from.
The Daily Telegraph's effort to bully these MPs into conformity to the Blue-kip extremism that Theresa May has embraced has backfired dramatically.
By attacking these MPs in the same way that the hatemongering Daily Mail attacked the judges who ruled in favour of parliamentary sovereignty, and the academics who dare to criticise or critique the shambolic Brexit process, the Telegraph have proven beyond doubt that their descent from respected broadsheet to the depths of the contemptible sewer press (Daily Mail, S*n, Express) is now complete.
It's also backfired because their attempt to bully and shame these MPs into conformity to the Blue-kip agenda has actually created a handy list of the minority of half-decent Tory MPs who still give a damn about stuff like the national economy, parliamentary sovereignty, and holding the government to account:
Heidi Allan, Kenneth Clarke, Jonathan Djanogy, Vicky Ford, Dominic Grieve, Stephen Hammond, Oliver Heald, Jeremy Lefroy, Paul Masterton, Nicky Morgan, Bob Neill, Antoinette Sandback, Anna Soubry, Tom Tugendhat, and Sarah Wollaston.
Assuming that this effort to bully these MPs into compliance is unsuccessful, and they do rebel against the lunatic decision to hard wire the exit date so that negotiations cannot be extended even if both sides desire it, and come out fighting to defend parliamentary sovereignty too, they'll be in the minority of Tory MPs who are prepared to put the interests of the nation above the narrow party political interests of the Tory party.
There's no doubt that these people are still complicit in forcing their ruinous austerity dogma on the nation, and in the savage mistreatment of disabled people, but they deserve credit for finally taking a stand against the fanatical hard-right Blue-kip insanity that Theresa May is embracing in order to cling onto power.
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We all saw the absolute hysteria that the Tories and their attack dogs in the right wing press whipped up about the Labour MP Clive Lewis using the word "bitch" at a man during an obscure comedy event and then over the unacceptable comments that the new Labour MP Jared O'Mara made long before he became an MP.
The Tory MP Sarah Wollaston was one of the most high profile grandstanders, posting an article from the disgusting right-wing Guido Fawkes blog alongside a demand that Labour sack O'Mara and call a by-election in his constituency.
Wollaston's fellow Tory MP Nus Ghani even tried to trigger an emergency parliamentary debate on Clive Lewis' "bitch" comment. A move that was dismissed by the Speaker John Bercow as "wholly absurd and inappropriate".
Everyone is familiar with the expression about people in glass houses throwing stones, and when it comes to stuff like homophobia and misogyny, the likes of Sarah Wollaston and Nus Ghani knew perfectly well that the Tory party is absolutely full of bigotry when they were kicking up such a stink about Clive Lawis and Jared O'Mara.
And so it came to pass. Within a week of the Tory hysteria over Jared O'Mara it was revealed that the former Tory minister and leadership candidate Stephen Crabb had been sending sexually explicit text messages to a teenager who had applied for a job in his office (the second time he's been caught out sexting women in the space of a year). Additionally another Tory MP Mark Garnier was exposed for calling his female assistant "sugar tits" and sending her out to buy sex toys.
Not only is Stephen Crabb a sex pest who thinks it's fine to abuse his position as an MP to send sexually explicit text messages to women less than half his age, he's also a brazen hypocrite and a homophobic bigot too.
Crabb is a glaring hypocrite because he loves to pose as if he's a devout Christian and happily married man.
And yes there's no 11th commandment "Thou shalt not send pervy messages to teenage girls on thy work phone", but it should be glaringly obvious to anyone who is serious about their Christian faith (or capable of basic human decency) that sending sexually explicit messages to teenagers is completely incompatible with having respect for your wife.
Despite having been twice caught out proving beyond doubt that he's willing to completely ignore the basic tenets of his professed Christian faith when it conflicts with his personal desire to send sexually explicit messages to women less than half his age, Crabb has repeatedly used Christianity as an excuse for interfering in other people's lives.
In 2007 Crabb voted against legislation to ban discrimination against LGBT people, and in 2014 he voted against gay equality legislation to allow same-sex couples the same right to marriage as heterosexual couples.
Both times he used Christianity as an excuse for his homophobic bigotry, and what's worse is that he's even taken political donations from a bigoted bunch of Christian extremists called CARE that advocate gay conversion "therapy".
Sarah Wollaston and other Tory MPs have every right to criticise the unacceptable comments that Jared O'Mara made. However if they don't speak out with the same fury when it's one of their fellow Tories speaking or acting like a pervert, homophobe, misogynist or bigot, then we can see that their previous complaints were just faux outrage motivated by a tribalistic urge to score political points against their political opponents.
So has Sarah Wollaston posted a hatchet job article about Stephen Crabb, slammed his misogynistic attitudes towards young women and his wife, attacked his bigoted attitudes towards LGBT people, and called for him to be sacked from the Tory party, and a by-election to be called in his constituency (where his majority over Labour is just 314)?
Of course she hasn't.
And has Nus Ghani decided to try to call an emergency parliamentary debate over Stephen Crabb's abuse of his position as an MP to send sexually explicit messages to a teenager?
Of course she hasn't.
This abject hypocrisy makes them part of the problem. If they're only willing to speak out when there are political points to be scored for their party, but they keep their lips tightly sealed when criticism of abuse, misogyny, homophobia or bigotry would damage the Tories, it's beyond obvious that they've got no real interest in confronting bigotry, and any criticism they aim at opposition politicians over bigoted words and actions is just artificial outrage expressed purely for party political advantage.
Nobody has a problem with people calling out bigotry. The issue here is consistency.
It shouldn't really matter whether you think politicians should be harshly punished for the things they wrote on the Internet long before they became parliamentary candidates, or the fact they got caught abusing their position as an MP to send sexually explicit texts to much younger women for a second time. Or whether you think they should be given the benefit of the doubt when they express regret and state that their views have changed and they won't behave like that in future.
What matters is consistency. If you're going to howl outrage over bigotry, then be consistent. Howl just as much outrage even when the bigot is a member of your own political party. And if you're going to give your political allies the benefit of the doubt, then you absolutely must give the benefit of the doubt to your political foes too.
In a way the double standards of Tories like Sarah Wollaston and Nus Ghani are perhaps even worse than Stephen Crabb's bigotry. Being a creepy pervert, homophobe and hypocrite just seems to be part of his personality. It's who he is.
Wollaston and Ghani on the other hand have displayed extreme double standards. Calling out bigotry on the opposition benches, but saying nothing about the bigots in their own party trivialises the issue by piggybacking their own party political agenda onto it.
They want to turn bigotry into a frenzied media circus when it's to their party's advantage, but just days later they won't even issue simple statements of condemnation when the bigot is one of their fellow Tories.
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Isn't it amazing how short some people's memories seem to be?
Of Course the Labour MP Jared O'Mara's bigoted comments about female celebrities and gays back in the early 2000s were unacceptable, and he's done the right thing by apologising for making them, explaining that his views have changed and then resigning from the Equalities Committee in shame.
However it's impossible not to notice the opportunism of point-scoring Tories like Sarah Wollaston who was literally dripping with hypocrisy when she decided to tweet "Hard to see how anyone with his views was selected and retains the Labour whip. Sheffield Hallam deserves a By-election".
Is it remotely possible that Wollaston has completely forgotten about the furore over the candidate the Tory party fielded in Darlington in the election just four months ago?
Has she really forgotten how it was revealed that the Tory candidate Peter Cuthbertson had written a load of quite extraordinary blog posts attacking the women's movement, LGBT activists and ethnic minorities, praising bigots and homophobes, criticising gay public figures, and whipping up outrage about gay couples adopting children?
Does she seriously expect anyone to believe that she's completely forgotten how Theresa May (who had even made personal visits to Tory target seat of Darlington in order to support Cuthbertson) leapt immediately to his defence by insisting that "Peter has made it clear that his views have changed"?
How, other than rank partisan hypocrisy, is it possible for points-scoring Tories like Sarah Wollaston to think it fine for Cuthbertson to remain their candidate in Darlington because his views from the early 2000s have changed, but bitterly attack O'Mara for his comments in the early 2000s, despite the fact he's apologised and explained how his views have changed?
If Wollaston is serious in calling for O'Mara to be punished by the Labour Party for what he wrote 15 years ago on a Morrisey fan page, surely she should have immediately demanded Cuthbertson's resignation as the Tory parliamentary candidate for the numerous displays of much more calculated bigotry he had posted on his blog "Conservative Commentary"?
Of course Wollaston would never have called for a fellow Tory party candidate to resign in the middle of a general election because it would have harmed the Tories' election campaign by drawing much more attention to a dirty little scandal the Tories were busy trying to bury.
It shouldn't really matter whether you think politicians should be harshly punished for the things they wrote on the Internet long before they became parliamentary candidates, or whether you think they should be given the benefit of the doubt when they express regret and state that their views have changed.
What matters is consistency. If you're going to howl outrage over the issue, then be consistent. Howl just as much outrage even when it's a member of your own political party. And if you're going to give your political allies the benefit of the doubt, then you absolutely must give the benefit of the doubt to your political foes too.
Anything else is just the worst kind of cheap partisan point-scoring. And worse too; it's an example of hypocritically piggybacking your personal political biases onto important issues like women's rights and the LGBT equality movement that affect the lives of millions of actual people.
In my view this kind of grotesquely hypocritical grandstanding from the likes of Sarah Wollaston is actually much more sickening than the fact that a couple of politicians said bigoted things years before they decided to stand for parliament, but now claim to have grown up and moved on from their bigotry.
This kind of point-scoring hypocrisy is worse because it exists in the present moment, not in the early 2000s like Cuthbertson and O'Mara's bigoted comments, and because this kind of integrity-deficient and highly partisan party political point scoring is one of the ugliest and most apathy inducing things about the current state of British politics.
Another issue to consider is why nobody in the mainstream media has bothered to draw parallels between these two remarkably similar cases. It's almost as if there's a deliberate agenda to create a narrative of Labour Party bigotry, which means a remarkably similar story of Tory party bigotry from just four months ago needs to be flushed down the collective memory hole, because noting the similarities would obviously destabilise the intended narrative.
Aside from clocking the repulsive hypocrisy of opportunistic Tories cashing in on this O'Mara scandal when their own party leader was making excuses just four months ago when one of their own Tory colleagues got busted for posting much more calculated examples of bigotry, and the remarkably suspicious forgetfulness of the mainstream media, there's also an important lesson for all of us.
Be careful what you post on the Internet kids. Because who knows what direction your life might have taken in a decade or two, and who knows who might consider it beneficial to go trawling through your Internet history to find damning comments you'd all but forgotten about making.
Whether it's a future political opponent, a disgusting muck-raker like Guido Fawkes, a potential employer digging around in your past, or someone with an interest in forcing you out of your job or wrecking your personal relationships. It should be pretty damned obvious that any careless/tasteless/bigoted/intolerant/extreme-right comments you make today could always come back to bite you in the arse in the future, because the Internet doesn't forget.
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.
