The thing with bullies is that they will always cry victim if the tables are turned and their victims begin standing up for themselves, and so it has come to pass with the right-wing internal wreckers in the Labour Party.
For three infuriating years of deliberately trying to wreck the Labour Party within by continually plotting against the party leadership, and regularly abusing hundreds of thousands of ordinary Labour members ("arm-twisting trots", "dogs", "rabble", "cultists", "communists", "entryists", "Stalinists", "Nazi storm troopers" ...) the ordinary members have begun to fight back with a series of no confidence votes in the most divisive anti-Corbyn Labour MPs.
But after "no confidence" votes in several of the worst offenders like Chris Leslie (one of the architects of Labour's disastrous austerity-lite strategy at the 2015 General Election), Joan Ryan (who was caught on camera fabricating fake anti-Semitism smears) and Gavin Shuker (a guy who keeps threatening to quit the Labour Party in order to inflict as much damage as possible from the inside) the Labour right-wingers are suddenly crying victim.
The extraordinary thing is that it never needed to be this way. If the likes of Joan Ryan, Chuka Umunna, Jess Phillips, Chris Leslie, Gavin Shuker, Ian Austin, and Stephen Kinnock had got with the new programme they would never have ended up facing no confidence votes and the looming prospect of mandatory reselection of all Labour MPs.
Jeremy Corbyn made it clear over and again that he was prepared to work with the Labour right-wingers, but every time he extended the hand of friendship and invited them into his shadow cabinet they ended up petulantly refusing to serve, knifing him in the back, andor slagging off the ordinary Labour Party members who twice decided that they wanted a genuine democratic socialist as their leader, not another run-of-the-mill pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-war, anti-welfare neoliberal.
Corbyn also expressed his personal opposition to the idea of mandatory reselection of Labour MPs in the past, but after three damaging years of internal wrecking from these neoliberal plants in the Labour Party, it's not Corbyn calling for democratic reselection, it's the Labour Party membership.
Yet somehow these right-wing internal wreckers have the absolute brass neck to suddenly begin arguing that membership dissatisfaction with their three years of divisive and damaging conduct is a distraction from the main task of criticising the Tories!
So for three years they expended far more effort on attacking their own party and slandering the membership than they did on criticising the Tories, but as soon as the prospect of democratic reselection is looming on the horizon they're suddenly painting the idea of being held to account for their actions by ordinary people as a terrible distraction from the main job of criticising the Tories.
And aside from the utter hypocrisy of suddenly deciding that criticising the Tories is the main objective after three years letting the Tories run wild as they concentrate on internal wrecking, some of the worst offenders are lobbing insults again too.
After the vote of "no conficence" against Joan Ryan, she issued an extraordinary Tweet describing her own party members as "trots, Stalinists and communists" instead of seeking to make amends with the people she's so badly let down!
It's as if she's so lacking in self-awareness that she can't even see that bitterly slandering the people who have lost confidence in her as a perfect demonstration that she's completely unsuited to be their representative in parliament.
Then there's Chuka Umunna who has returned to the Labour right-winger trope of calling left-leaning Labour members "dogs" in an effort to get Jeremy Corbyn to quash the move towards democratic reselection of all Labour MPs.
These people are terrified of democracy and the concept of actually being held to account for their actions by ordinary people.
It's no wonder they're acting so incoherently given how wrong everything has gone for them in the last three years.
They've gone from heirs apparent who would get to walk into the top jobs in the Labour Party without the faintest worry about ever being held to account by anyone, through petulantly refusing to participate in Corbyn's cabinet; and then their spectacularly failed chicken coup; and then their failed effort to ban Jeremy Corbyn from participating in the 2nd Labour leadership election; and then their outrageous purge of left-wing Labour members for "crimes" like retweeting Caroline Lucas or liking the Foo Fighters; and then seeing their predictions of a Labour General Election wipe-out under Corbyn ruined by the biggest surge in the Labour vote since 1945; and now they're facing the very real prospect of being democratically replaced by their local Labour Party as a result of this bullying and constant internal wrecking.
So the over-entitled Labour right-wingers are angrily lashing out again, but making the same mistakes as before: Insulting the Labour Party members they're soon going to have to justify their behaviour to, and resorting to the laziest and most hypocritical cry-bully arguments in the expectation that ordinary Labour Party members are suddenly going to start lapping up their ridiculously fact-averse narratives now, after three years of getting ever more pissed off by them.
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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?
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.
In the feverish atmosphere in the wake of the Salisbury nerve agent attack there have been some absolutely bonkers conspiracy theories flying around.
In this article I'm going to attempt to give a measured perspective on the attack before detailing some of the nuttiest reactions.
The difference between questions and conspiracy theories
Like almost everyone reading this article, I don't have access to the chemical analysis that's been conducted on the nerve agent, and I don't have access to any intelligence that may have been gathered in relation to the attack.
This lack of information means that it's impossible to fly off into alternative explanations for the attack without the danger of wandering off into the tinfoil hat conspiracy zone.
However this lack of vital information doesn't prevent us from asking questions about the official position, which according to Tory ministers like Boris Johnson, involved Vladimir Putin directly ordering this hopelessly botched hit on a long-retired double agent.
The glaring problem with this theory is that it relies on the idea that Putin is some kind of idiot with no regard for consequences. Of course Putin is your archetypal strong-man tyrant with a disregard for human rights, but if you've ever actually paid attention to any of his speeches, he's clearly an intelligent man, not an idiot.
So, given that just a couple of weeks ago the Tory government pliantly did Putin's bidding by obstructing Labour's efforts to introduce Magnitsky powers to clamp down on all the Russian dark money sloshing around in the City of London, the UK housing market, and the coffers of the Tory party, why would Putin then decide to personally authorise an attack that would massively increase the chances of Magnitsky sanctions being imposed?
You can attempt to answer this kind of question in whatever way you like, but be careful you don't end up wandering off into the tinfoil hat twilight zone ...
The fireman conspiracy
The first conspiracy theory to deal with is the idea that the attack was faked because of one out-of-context photograph of firemen with no biohazard suits standing next to people with biohazard suits.
It says a lot about the kind of person you are if you can look at a single photo and deduce a convoluted conspiracy theory from it, which you then believe without giving thought to other potential explanations, like maybe the fact that people in biohazard suits need to take off their biohazard suits at some point.
Perhaps a much simpler explanation that the whole attack being an elaborate hoax, is that that's what was going on?
The evil mother-in-law
Then there's the theory that Yulia Skripal was poisoned by her future mother-in-law who supposedly doesn't want her son to marry the daughter of an ex-spy.
How the evil mother-in-law got her hands on a supply of highly toxic nerve agent isn't related in this particular conspiracy theory.
It was the CIA
If you really want to get into the kooky conspiracy shit, then UKIP is definitely a great place to turn. I mean who could forget the Ukipper "Somerset floods were caused by gay marriage" theory from a few years ago?
Well Godfrey Bloom has publicly stated his suspicion that the attack was carried out by the CIA in order to ringfence the budget for the military industrial complex.
It's interesting to see the way the hard-right UKIP mob have moved from adoration of anything American to outright hostility and conspiracy theorising against the US intelligence services ever since the Mueller investigation into links between Russia and the Trump campaign started getting serious.
It's all about Brexit
Another bizarre UKIP conspiracy theory is that the Salisbury attack is a false flag attack orchestrated by the British government in order to derail Brexit!
Here's what Richard Wood of UKIP told Sputnik News:
"Theresa May has been absolutely stupid because she is now in a hole over Brexit with the European Union and the EU is doing its best to keep Britain in and we want to be out. The whole point about this fiasco is that something happened and Mrs. May is now being able to point another finger at Russia and say this is our enemy. They are finding some excuse to actually blame Russia for something else so Russia becomes a big bad man again to take the pressure off Theresa May with the Brexit negotiations because she is not getting anywhere. Everybody I speak to is not on her side and not against Russia. I do think it was staged."
Trust the UKIP loons to come up with a load of batshit crazy nonsense about how it's all a conspiracy to undermine their beloved Brexit.
It's all about the UN
Another theory doing the rounds is that the Salisbury incident was a "false flag" attack designed to ramp up international pressure to get Russia thrown off the UN Security Council.
The idea that Russia could be removed from the Security Council over this incident is as impractical as it is unrealistic.
If Russia and the United States managed to stay part of the UN Security Council together throughout the theft of US nuclear weapons secrets, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Olympic boycotts, countless near misses and sanctions impositions, and all of that, how on earth is an incident like Salisbury going to register enough impact to essentially destroy the United Nations?
Even if the endgame was to get Russia thrown off the UN Security Council, how would that be achieved given that Russia has a Security Council veto, and China (another of the 5 permanent members) would obviously never let it happen either?
It's all about football
Then there's the probably the most ridiculous theory that the attack was staged to somehow undermine Russia's hosting of the FIFA World Cup, as if football is somehow the most important thing in the world.
The problem with wild conspiracy theories like this is that there's always some absolute dullard who comes along to give credence to such nonsense. In this case the right-wing Labour MP Stephen Kinnock, who has started gabbing on about how the UK should somehow form a global alliance to pressurise FIFA to delay the World Cup until 2019 and ban Russia as the hosts!
If Argentina being over-run by one of the most violent and repressive military dictatorships of the late 20th Century wasn't enough to stop the World Cup in 1978, then it seems a tad unlikely that Kinnock is going to succeed with his plot to get this summer's World Cup taken off Russia.
Trust a right-wing Labour melt like Kinnock to hear the most bonkers conspiracy theory of all, think it's actually a really good idea, and then try to pass it off as his own policy!
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.
