In recent years the right-wing faction of the Labour Party have had an extraordinary track record of incompetence, but their misdirected criticisms, their furious berserker attacks on their own party, and their unfathomable willingness to mindlessly regurgitate hard-right propaganda tropes are in danger of ushering in something far worse than Theresa May's directionless and shambolic incarnation of the Tory party.
The track record of incompetence
We're all familiar with the way Labour's chance to walk the 2015 General Election was totally squandered when the Labour right insisted on meekly imitating ruinous Tory austerity dogma instead of actively confronting it and relentlessly criticising Tory austerity dogma as the economic vandalism that it undoubtedly is.
We saw them lose 40 of the 41 Scottish seats in 2015 and then we saw them conclude that the answer to this unprecedented electoral wipe-out was to replace their hopeless right-wing leader Jim Murphy with yet another Labour Party right-winger, the hapless Kezia Dugdale!
Then we saw the right-wing Labour leadership candidates get completely trounced by a 200-1 outsider candidate with a core principle that Labour should actually oppose the Tories instead of meekly imitating them.
Then we saw the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup, which only ended up in Corbyn strengthening his mandate to lead the party, and creating a second huge surge of enthusiastic pro-Corbyn people joining the Labour Party.
The damage they've done to the Labour Party is only rivalled by the way they've marginalised themselves within the party and completely trashed their own reputations.
The right-wing Progress "party within a party" was once the most powerful and formidable Labour faction by far, with Progress-backed MPs ruling the roost for over two decades, but now they're an absolute joke of an outfit who are clearly far more intent on their internal wrecking campaigns than actually presenting an alternative view of what Labour should be doing other than the centre-left democratic socialism that Jeremy Corbyn and the overwhelming majority of the membership want.
Haringey
The mainstream media have been desperately trying to create the fiction that the leader of Haringey Council Claire Kober has resigned because of bullying by the left-wing of the party, and the Labour right are loving it, retweeting her lurid accusations and highly damaging berserker attacks on the Labour Party. It's as if they imagine that helping her wreck the Labour Party in Haringey is some kind of master-strategy, rather than the next bout of self-defeating flailing by people who are incoherent with rage that they're still not getting their own way.
What the mainstream media have almost ubiquitously failed to explain is that Claire Kober had made her position as Haringey Council leader totally untenable by relentlessly pushing a hugely unpopular £2 billion privatisation/social cleansing scheme called the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), and that she was accused of using "wrecking ball tactics" and running Haringey council "like her own personal fifedom" by a resigning Labour councillor just weeks ago.
Aside from the Labour NEC and both of the local MPs urging Kober to stop the HDV privatisation scheme, she was also caught creating a secret dossier on six Labour council candidates in an attempt to have them purged as council candidates for the party.
So there's strong grounds for arguing that the woman who is loudly and relentlessly crying victim is actually the bully who won't listen to reason, and the ones being smeared as bullies are generally just local people and ordinary Labour Party members who didn't like her autocratic rule, and didn't want her £2 billion privatisation/social cleansing scheme to go ahead.
Northamptonshire
The mainstream media and the Labour Party right have made so much noise about Haringey you could be forgiven for having missed the fact that the Tory run Northamptonshire Council has completely run out of money and is effectively bankrupt.
The Tories there have banned all new spending and they're actually looking to sell off the £53 million council offices they just built, just to cover their own running costs!
This local government meltdown should be a national scandal, but instead of a concerted effort to draw attention to this Tory financial catastrophe, the Labour right are intent on keeping Haringey and Claire Kober's berserker attack on her own party in the headlines as much as possible!
Political intimidation
Last week an extreme-right terrorist admitted in court that he'd plotted to assassinate the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. A couple of days after admitting this assassination plot he was found guilty of carrying out the Finsbury Park extreme-right terrorist attack.
Hardly anyone on the Labour right took the time to condemn this outrageous plot to murder Corbyn and Khan, or to point out the link between the hateful rhetoric of the right-wing press and hate-mongering Tory MPs like Nadine Dorries, and the rise in extremist political intimidation.
They could easily have pointed to the massive waves of abuse and death threats the Brextremist blue-kip mob hurl at any Tory MP who dares question Theresa May's fanatically right-wing and staggeringly anti-democratic interpretation of Brexit. to create a very strong warning about the violent extremism of the far-right.
But no, they decided to bite their tongues and reserve their furious condemnation for a few days later when half a dozen or so anarchists protested noisily at a Jacob Rees-Mogg speech (even though the instigator of the violence at the event was clearly the white-shirted Rees-Mogg supporter who smacked a woman in the face).
It's beyond belief that Labour right-wingers who remained silent over a plot to actually kill the Labour Party leader all suddenly began pushing the Guido Fawkes outrage narrative that noisy but non-violent protest is now completely unacceptable, and that the left in general are somehow to blame for the violence instigated by the Rees-Mogg supporting thug who saw fit to smack a young woman in the face.
The danger
There's no doubt that there are many on the Labour right who would rather wreck the Labour Party and leave the Tories in power perpetually than see Jeremy Corbyn lead the party to victory.
Don't just take my word for it that they feel this way - take Tony Blair at his word. He's the one who wanted to be "absolutely clear" that he'd rather see the Tories win than a Labour Party led by a genuine democratic socialist.
The problem with this internal wrecking strategy is obvious: Theresa May is already dancing to the tune of the hard-right Brextremists, and it's only a matter of time before these fanatics pull the plug on her and attempt to install their leader Jacob Rees-Mogg as Prime Minister.
Rees-Mogg is supported by the lunatic right-wing fringe of the Tory party (who use taxpayers' cash to subsidise their secretive Brextremist ERG faction), the death threat hurling blue-kip mob, former Ukippers like Arron Banks and Nigel Farage (who now see an extreme-right Rees-Mogg takeover of the Tory party as a much easier prospect than breathing life back into the corpse of UKIP), the alt-right (who see Rees-Mogg as the British version of Trump), and even the Britain First hate mob who inspired the terrorist who plotted to kill Corbyn and the terrorist who succeeded in killing Jo Cox, and now see themselves as Rees-Mogg's Sturmabteilung thugs.
If the Labour right continue their utterly misguided thrashing around, then they're likely to hand power directly to Rees-Mogg and the extreme-right fanatics who adore him.
Instead of championing Clair Kober and her berserker attack on her own party because she's not going to get her own way on her massive privatisation scheme, they should be focusing attention on the catastrophic Tory economic meltdown in Northamptonshire.
And instead of mindlessly repeating hard-right Guido Fawkes tropes about how non-violently protesting against Jacob Rees-Mogg is supposedly shockingly unacceptable, they should be focusing their criticism on the extreme-right Brextremists who repeatedly send waves of death threats at the behest of Paul Dacre and the hard-right Daily Mail propaganda rag, glorify extreme-right terrorism, plot to raise a slush fund to incite more extreme-right terrorist attacks, plot to kill Labour politicians, and support Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Their motivation
It's difficult to know whether these Labour right-wingers mindlessly regurgitate Guido Fawkes propaganda tropes, continually attack their own party, and routinely ignore the catastrophic failings of the Tories because they're terminally stupid, or whether this behaviour is motivated by such a deep ideological hatred of democratic socialism that they'd rather help Jacob Rees-Mogg and his hard-right Brextremists into power than allow the Labour Party that they once controlled with an iron fist revert back to centre-left democratic socialism.
Their choice
It's becoming increasingly obvious that the only choice the Labour right are left with is between Jeremy Corbyn and a genuine democratic socialist pushback against four decades of neoliberal dogma, or the wanton destruction of Jacob Rees-Mogg and his coalition of the most fanatical hard-right Brextremists.
Astoundingly, their continued internal wrecking suggests that a significant section of the Labour right are intent on backing Rees-Mogg and the dangerous fanaticism of the extreme-right!
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.
With all of the attention Jeremy Corbyn has been generating with his bid to become Labour Party leader, it's easy to forget that the position of deputy leader of the Labour Party is also up for election.
Several people have written to me to request an article providing more information on the five candidates to become Labour's second in command, so here it is.
I'm going to profile the five candidates, then conclude by stating some general conclusions.
Tom Watson
Tom Watson is the runaway favourite to become deputy leader of the Labour Party. At 48 he is the second youngest of the candidates, and he's been an MP since 2001.
Watson picked up 61 nominations from his fellow MPs (more than any of the other candidates), many from the small band of Labour "good guys" like Dennis Skinner, Ian Mearns, Richard Burgon and Greame Morris. He also won 164 Constituency Labour Party nominations, which is almost as many as all of the other candidates added together (Stella Creasy came second with 77).
Watson served as Minister for Digital Economy between 2008 and 2009 where he worked to open up government data to public scrutiny, and encourage government departments to consider the use of in-house solutions and open source software instead of signing inflexible and expensive outsourcing contracts every time they needed to deal with an IT issue. It's always nice to see a government minister who has a bit of knowledge in their field and enthusiasm for what they're doing.
It's no surprise that he is the leading candidate for the job of deputy leader, he has a decent amount of ministerial experience, a track record of campaigning on issues like Phone Hacking, the paedophile politicians scandals, and in opposition to his own party's hopelessly botched Digital Economy Bill. Another thing that counts in his favour is that all of this public campaigning has made him a relatively well known face, at least amongst the politically engaged.
The only significant black mark against him is that he was caught out during the expenses scandal. He was nowhere near as egregious as many of his parliamentary colleagues, but he wasn't completely clean either, spending the maximum allowance of £4,800 on food in 2005 (the equivalent of 85 weeks worth of Jobseekers' Allowance in 2005 prices).
Watson has made it clear that he believes that Labour is at its strongest when it is standing up for ordinary people and campaigning against injustice. I'm pretty sure that's a message that anyone could get behind.
Tom Watson's voting record at They Work For You.
Stella Creasy
At 38 Stella Creasy is by far the youngest of the candidates, and having only been an MP since 2010, she's also the least experienced. Despite her age and lack of ministerial experience, she is running second in the race, comfortably ahead of the three other candidates, but significantly behind Tom Watson.
Before becoming an MP Creasy worked in PR and lobbying, which is hardly confidence inspiring stuff, but since entering parliament she's actually impressed a lot by leading the campaign against the exploitative practices of Payday loan companies (that have been known to charge vulnerable people annual interest rates of over 5,000% on their loans).
In 2013 Creasy was subject to vile misogynistic abuse on Twitter, and I couldn't agree more with her assertion that rape threats are criminal behaviour "not a matter of bad manners". The following year one of her abusers was jailed for the rape threats he had made against her.
Creasy has talked a lot about how Labour needs to become a modern grass roots organisation that listens to its party members and to ordinary people rather than dictating terms from above. Even if she doesn't become deputy leader, I'm sure her ideas will still be more than welcome.
Stella Creasy's voting record at They Work For You.
Angela Eagle
Angela Eagle is 54, and having been an MP since 1992, she's the most experienced of the five. Under Gordon Brown's leadership of the party she served in two treasury position and as pensions minister. In opposition she served as Shadow Leader of the Commons for Ed Miliband.
Eagle comes from a working class background, but then she's also an Oxford PPE graduate which is by far the most over-represented demographic in Westminster politics, with dozens of politicians having studied this Oxford University course.
In April 2008 Eagle, who was Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury at the time, made a howler every bit as bad as Liam Byrne's ludicrous "there's no money" note (if not worse because what she said wasn't even intended as a poorly considered joke). Her response to Liberal Democrat concerns that the UK was experiencing a housing bubble was to dismiss them as "a colourful and lurid fiction that has no real bearing on the macroeconomic reality". We all now know what was going on in 2007-08 and how property prices crashed and the financial sector ended up being rescued from complete insolvency with the biggest state sector interventions in history. If anyone had no understanding of the macroeconomic reality at the time it was actually Angela Eagle.
Eagle is probably best known as the MP who was on the receiving end of David Cameron's sexist "calm down dear" put down, which is a bit sad really because she's had a long and successful political career. I don't have anything against her, but she just doesn't strike me as the kind of inspirational politician Labour need in order to fight back against the Tories either.
Angela Eagle's voting record at They Work For You.
Caroline Flint
Caroline Flint is 53 and has been an MP since Tony Blair's landslide victory in 1997. She had a difficult upbringing and knows what it's like to struggle on the breadline, so one would expect her to be able to empathise with the many victims of Tory ideological austerity.
If you think Angela Eagle's gaffe about the state of the economy during the biggest economic crisis in generations was bad, then you're going to be horrified at some of Caroline Flint's blunders.
When Flint was Minister for Europe she made a public admission that she hadn't even read the Lisbon Treaty, which was quite extraordinary given that her role was to oversee the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty! In May 2008 she was photographed entering Downing Street with her briefing papers visible, which included an admission that "we can't tell how bad it will get" in relation to the ongoing economic meltdown that Angela Eagle had been dismissing as "a lurid and colourful fiction" just the month previously!
Flint made headlines again when she resigned from Gordon Brown's government with an attack on his personality and a claim that she'd been treated like "female window dressing". Regular readers will know that I'm no staunch defender of Gordon Brown, but if her job was to be more than "female window dressing" the least she could have done is read the vital documents she obviously should have, and not allowed the press to photograph her confidential briefing papers!
Flint is also responsible for an appalling piece of ideologically driven government legislation that completely ignored the scientific advice. During her stint in the Home Office she pushed through legislation to classify raw psylocybin mushrooms (magic mushrooms) as Class A drugs, meaning a potential 7 year prison sentence for anyone who as much as picks one of Britain's most commonly occurring wild mushrooms! The fact that she drove this illogical legislation through parliament marks her out as the kind of authoritarian ideologically driven moral puritan who stands in the way of this country ever adopting a rational evidence based drugs policy.
I find it alarming that Caroline Flint is running third in the contest, but then perhaps that says more about how poor Angela Eagle and Ben Bradshaw are as candidates than it does about her suitability for the job?
Caroline Flint's voting record at They Work For You.
Ben Bradshaw
Bradshaw is 54 and he too became an MP in 1997. Most of the polls having him vying with Angela Eagle to avoid finishing last in the contest, which is no surprise.
When he was a health minister he advised people who couldn't find an NHS dentist to go to their GP - advice that was ridiculed by the British Medical Association; his claim that GPs were operating "gentlemen's agreements" to stop patients moving between surgeries was described as "absolute nonsense" by the BMA, and he even launched a defence of excessive parking fees at NHS hospitals with a bizarre claim that the funds were needed in order to provide NHS services, even though the NHS ran a large £1.8 billion surplus that year.
What is worse than all of Bradshaw's gaffes is the fact that during his time at the Department of Health he oversaw a number of NHS privatisation schemes that laid the groundwork for the outright Tory assault on the NHS that was the Health and Social Care Act 2012.
Another black mark against Ben Bradshaw is the fact that he was a staunch defender of the disastrous NHS National Programme for IT that saw costs balloon from £2.3 billion to £12.4 billion before it was scrapped. In 2013 the scheme that Bradshaw was so keen to defend when he was a health minister was lambasted by the Public Accounts Committee as one of "the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos ever".
Despite his appalling track record as a health minister, Bradshaw is clearly a good constituency MP, having won his seat in Exeter off the Tories in 1997 and kept it ever since. On the electoral map of the UK Bradshaw's constituency is a tiny dot of red in a vast ocean of blue down south.
Ben Bradshaw's voting record at They Work For You.
Conclusions
It is worth noting that of the nine candidates for leader and deputy leader, five of them are female. It could be seen as a cause for celebration that there are so many women in the Labour leadership contests, however, in my opinion Stella Creasy is the only one of them with really good leadership potential, and three of the others (Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and Caroline Flint) would surely drive people away from the Labour Party in droves, so maybe it's not that good after all.
I don't have much time for Angela Eagle, but in my opinion she's nowhere near as bad as gaffe prone disasters like Caroline Flint and Ben Bradshaw. It should be a relief to most people that these three candidates are all vanishingly unlikely to get the job.
It gives me a bit of faith in the grass roots Labour Party membership that the two leading candidates in the deputy leadership election are the two I consider to be the outstanding candidates. Tom Watson looks very likely to win, but Stella Creasy is still very young so it wouldn't be a disaster for her to come second. I think she would make a very good shadow minister in a Corbyn-Watson led party, and judging by her first five years in parliament, she's got a bright future ahead of her whatever the outcome.
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.
You know what Wonga is right? You've seen their adverts offering payday loans to desperate people and you've seen their logo emblazoned on the tops of football clubs like Blackpool FC and next season you will see it on the Newcastle United strip too.
You know that their business model is based upon making predatory loans to vulnerable people don't you?
You know that Wonga loans can have APRs of up to and over 4,200%?
Well, that's about it for what I would expect any reasonably informed
person to know about Wonga and the "legal loan shark" industry, given
the mainstream media's reluctance to cover the subject in the detail it deserves.
Here's some of the stuff that the majority of the mainstream media seem happy to remain silent about.
Did you know that the payday loan sector has been booming since the economic crisis and the resulting "credit crunch"? In 2011 Wonga handed out an astonishing 2.5 million super-high interest loans. The predatory loan sector is one of the very few sectors of the UK economy that seems to be booming through the turgid economic climate created by George Osborne's ideologically driven, catastrophically miscalculated and economically destructive austerity agenda.
Did you know that these kinds of super-high interest loans are illegal in almost every other advanced western democracy? That other nations tend to protect their poor and vulnerable from this kind of brazen economic parasitism. Even the notoriously Ayn Rand inspired, free-trade preaching, banker friendly mob that run the United States have imposed a Federal maximum APR of 36% for loans to military personnel, which is less than one one hundredth of a typical Wonga APR. Predatory payday loans are illegal in 13 states and regulated in the other 37 states. In Canada these kinds of loan are prohibited by usury laws, with any loan exceeding 60% APR (including fees and brokerage) being considered criminal.
Did you know that some financial sector institutions use the receipt of a payday loan as evidence of credit-unworthiness? The fact that you can be credit blacklisted simply for taking out payday loans seriously damages the argument that these loans are just a "helping hand" and not predominantly marketed at the extremely poor, vulnerable and financially illiterate.
Did you know that these kinds of payday loan companies are so universally despised that even the Daily Mail readership are near unanimous in their condemnation (scroll down to the bottom of this article and click the "best rated" tab). Here's what Bob, a Daily Mail reader from Bridport, had to say about them:
"These rip off organisations should be properly regulated. Their interest
rates are appalling. Feeding on the vulnerable in society. The
adverts are a disgrace to elderly people. Shut them down now along with
all the other Payday loan sharks on TV."
Did you know that Labour MP Stella Creasy has been campaigning to bring in US style regulation of the payday loan sector she describes as "legal loan sharks" and that the Tories have steadfastly refused to take action? Creasy described the Tory refusal to address the exploitation of poor and vulnerable people as "unforgivable". Once you read the next few paragraphs you'll come to understand why the Tory party are desperate to avoid imposing regulation on the sector.
Did you know that a bunch of Wonga executives spent £1,250 a head to
attend a Conservative party "speed dating" event? An event which was held during the Tory party conference where paying guests (which also included representatives from companies such as Aviva, Barclays and PricewaterhouseCoopers) got to
spend 20 minutes apiece "chatting up" high-ranking Tories such as
Michael Fallon (the enterprise minister), David Gauke, (the Treasury’s
exchequer secretary), and Sajid Javid, (Tory economic secretary).
Did you know that David Cameron's senior digital economy advisor, Jonathan Luff quit and was allowed to go and work for Wonga as a political lobbyist, with immediate effect? A former Cameron advisor as a political lobbyist should be a valuable asset to Wonga, given that they are desperately fighting against mounting pressure for regulation of the predatory loan market and Canadian style caps on APR repayments.
Did you know that the revolving door between the Tory party and Wonga goes the other way too. Adrian Beecroft is the chairman of Dawn Capital, the private equity fund that Wonga.com belongs to. The Tory party invited him to draw up labour reform legislation for them, what he came back with was one of the most absurdly self-interested policy documents ever presented; the Beecroft Report. Aside from recommending a number of labour reforms that would benefit Dawn Capital directly, the report also recommended the introduction of fire-at-will legislation. Similar legislation was just passed in Spain and led to a huge spike in unemployment as companies saw the new legislation as a financial incentive to lay off their long-term staff and replace them with labor-rightless and low wage trainees. That the Wonga.com business model is fundamentally based upon the strategy of making super-high interest loans to desperate people, a large unemployment spike resulting from the introduction of Beecroft's fire-at-will legislation would certainly represent a significant boost for their business.
In March 2012 the Tory party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas was forced to resign after he was caught out offering direct political access to leading Tories including
David Cameron and George Osborne for donations of £250,000 and making
claims that donor's "issues" could be discussed at the Number 10 policy
unit given a large enough donation, however the Beecroft affair (£537,000 in donations to the party followed by an invitation to actually draw up their economic strategy for them) and the Wonga revolving door are far more serious, but the mainstream media refuse to treat these issues as such.
It is bad enough that the Tory party allowed one of their wealthy donors to draw up party policy for them, but that some of the most obvious beneficiaries from the implementation of such policies would be the man who wrote it, his venture capital company and their Wonga.com operation. Now the revolving door is going the other way with one of David Cameron's senior adviser going to work as a political lobbyist for Wonga.
Given this revolving door between Wonga and the Tories it is completely unsurprising that the Tory leadership are obstructing every effort to regulate or restrain the activities of predatory lenders.
