The Labour coup-plotters have been circulating that list of appalling people who have been thrown out of the Labour Party for stuff like racist, anti-Semitic, foul mouthed and violent abuse and for openly bragging about having voted for UKIP whilst being a card-carrying member of the Labour Party as if this list constitutes a rebuttal of the complaints about the Labour purge.
This list absolutely does not rebut the complaints. Nobody has a problem with the policy of withdrawing the membership awful abusive people or people who openly support other political parties whilst pretending to support Labour. But if the system malfunctions (or is deliberately misappropriated) resulting in countless people being hurled out of the party for "crimes" such as liking the Foo Fighters too much or having voted Green years before they even joined Labour, then bragging about the legitimate cases is no answer at all to the concerns about the punishment of innocent people and the lack of due process.
The absolute lack of concern about innocent people getting caught in the intensely hypocritical Labour social media dragnet and this spate of spurious excuse-making from members of the Anyone But Corbyn camp is telling.
If the system the coup-plotters are defending sweeps up and punishes innocent people, then it's morally unjustifiable. It absolutely doesn't matter how many sinners they boast about having caught if the original complaint was that their system is punishing innocent people for trivial offences when members of the party elite have been allowed to get w]away with much much worse (like calling Labour members Nazi stormtroopers in the national press, or donating two million quid to a rival political party).
Many Anyone But Corbyn campaigners have been prepared to deflect attention away from the punishment of innocent people because as far as they're concerned most of the cases people have been complaining about are Corbyn supporters, therefore they're already guilty of thought crime anyway and they're therefore undeserving of natural justice.
This attitude is deeply problematic because as John Adams (lawyer, author, diplomat and 2nd President of the USA) said, if the people get the idea that they'll be punished whether they do bad things or not then the result will be chaos.
When Anyone But Corbyn campaigners like Luke Akehurst and Tom Copley are prepared to pretend that the expulsion of some guilty people constitutes a rebuttal of complaints about the punishment of innocent people it creates the impression that they really don't care about things like guilt and innocence or natural justice at all.
Just a few months ago the Chakrabarti Report into the way that Labour deals with abuse recommended that Labour stop retroactively trawling people's social media accounts and that they respect natural justice by giving people the right to appeal.
The NEC agreed to abide by the findings of the Chakrabarti Report, then they turned around and set in motion possibly the largest social media trawling operation in British political history. Not only did they ignore the recommendation that they avoid social media trawling, they've also ignored the advice on natural justice by expelling hundreds of people with no explanation of what the specific breech of the rules is that they stand accused of, but just a few vague hastily typed adjustments to identikit expulsion letters.
It's astonishing that these people want to oust Corbyn in the hope that their faction of the Labour Party can one day become the legislative authority of the United Kingdom, yet they're displaying such brazen disregard for the concept of natural justice, and for the fundamental importance of avoiding the punishment of the innocent.
It really doesn't matter how many "nasties" they brag about having caught. If they don't respect natural justice and the rights of the innocent, they're clearly hopelessly unfit for government.
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 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.
