The Blairite Berserkers

Jeremy Corbyn is the twice-elected leader of the Labour Party, and Prime Minister in-waiting after securing the biggest increase in the Labour vote since 1945.

This return to genuine democratic socialism within the Labour Party would have seemed like an impossible fantasy just a few years ago when they were completely dominated by the right-wing element of the party and the neoliberal 'party within a party' Progress faction.

Labour's transformation back into a centre-left party has been one of the extraordinary political developments of the early 21st Century, and it's no surprise at all that this transformation has attracted hundreds of thousands of new members, and millions of new voters.

Obviously members of the centre-right neoliberal faction are absolutely incandescent with rage as the vice-like grip on the party that they maintained for well over two decades has been broken, and now they've realised that they've lost control, they're regularly going completely berserk in order to do as much internal wrecking as the can before they leave the Labour Party.

Tom Blenkinsop

One of the most high profile of these destructive Berserkers was the MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, Tom Blenkinsop.

Blenkinsop bitterly opposed Jeremy Corbyn and sent streams of Twitter abuse at anyone who opposed his deliberate wrecking tactics. He quit as an MP at the 2017 General Election, but he'd already done so much damage in his constituency that his successor couldn't hold the seat, meaning a Tory win in a seat that Labour had held since it's establishment in 1997.

Blenkinsop didn't just take his ball home because he was losing at football, he stabbed the ball (that wasn't even his) and then spread shards of broken glass all over the pitch to make sure nobody else could play.

Michael Foster

Another notable Berserker was the major Labour Party donor Michael Foster who decided to launch an extraordinary cry-bully rant in the fanatically right-wing Daily Mail propaganda rag in which he bullied and abused Jeremy Corbyn supporters as "Nazi stormtroopers" before crying that he's the victim of abuse!

Foster was eventually thrown out of the Labour Party for this abusive rant, but his Berserking didn't stop there, he actually decided to stand against Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 General Election but his attempt to damage the Labour Party resulted in a huge humiliation as Corbyn romped to victory in Islington North with over 40,000 votes to Foster's 208.

The Haringey Berserkers

A new Berserker attack is going on in the London Borough of Haringey, where the Labour right still held control of the council. The Labour Council leaders there were so right-wing that they devised an enormous and highly controversial £2 billion privatisation plan called the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV).

The HDV privatisation plan is vehemently opposed by both Labour MPs in the area, a significant swathe of the local population, and numerous Labour councillors on either side of the Corbyn divide, who consider it a monstrous concoction of corporate profiteering, autocratic rule, and social cleansing.

After a string of setbacks over the HDV the Labour Council leader Claire Kober realised the game is up and her vast privatisation scam is going to be binned, so she decided to announce her resignation in the most damaging manner possible for the Labour Party, smearing the widespread public resistance to the HDV as some kind of sinister and sexist Corbynite plot against her personally.

These allegations were like manna from heaven to the mainstream media and the BBC Politics team, who have presented numerous extraordinarily one-sided accounts of the chaos in Haringey, often completely failing to mention the massive HDV privatisation plot in their haste to attack Momentum and the Labour left.
 

Kober's Berserker attack also been a massive gift to the Tory party, with Tory MPs gleefully retweeting her attacks on the Labour Party in order to score as many political points as possible for themselves.

Very few mainstream media accounts bothered to give the other side of the story, that Kober's downfall was the result of massive local opposition to the HDV, and the fact that over two dozen women signed a letter saying that "vocal opposition to an unpopular policy which is being implemented in a paternalistic way without proper consultation is not bullying or sexism, it is democracy" has not been mentioned at all.

Kober is so furious that she's not going to get her own way on the controversial HDV privatisation that she's intent on doing as much wrecking as possible. If she can't rule over Haringey like an unaccountable tyrant then she's going to damage the Labour Party as much as she possibly can in revenge. 

Nora Mulready is another pro-HDV right-winger to quit the party with as much noise as possible, even writing a prolonged anti-Labour diatribe in the hard-right Daily Mail propaganda rag in an effort to inflict as much damage as she possibly can.

What Mulready "forgot" to mention in her furious Daily Mail article is that on the day after she resigned and went berserk she was due to face a disciplinary panel over complaints made about her behaviour back in the summer of 2016 (such a coincidence eh?).

Would someone who is as innocent as Mulready claims to be really decide to resign one day before their disciplinary hearing so that it doesn't go ahead, or would they stay and fight to clear their name?

Imagine being such a misleading person that you'd write a massive screed for the Daily Mail crying about the supposedly abusive behaviour of your rivals, without even mentioning that you're quitting one day before you face a disciplinary procedure of your own!

The Blair cult


Just as the ancient Norse Berserker warriors were devoted to the bear cult, these modern day Labour Party Berserkers are devoted to the Blair cult.

From the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup plot, through the torrents of abuse lobbed around by cry-bully Blairite Berserkers like Tom Blenkinsop and Michael Foster, to the damaging antics of the Haringey wreckers, these Blair cultists are clearly very much more wedded to their right-wing ideologies than they are to the Labour movement.

Sadly it's beyond doubt that ever more Labour right-wingers are going to go Berserk and deliberately inflict as much damage as the can on the the Labour Party and the labour movement because they can't have everything their own way any more.

The Blairite Berserkers behave in this extraordinary manner because they'd clearly rather have the Tories running the country than a Labour Party that is being run on genuine democratic socialist principles.

Don't just take my word for it that they feel this way, take their idol Tony Blair at his own word (see picture).

The Labour right

Many on the right of the Labour Party will stay and try to work constructively to promote their own view of the direction the Labour Party should take, and they have every right to of course, because the Labour Party has always been a broad church.

Just as left-wingers like Corbyn, Skinner, McDonnell and Abbott stayed within the party when it was under the complete control of Blair and the right-wing Progress faction, right-wingers can stay now that they find themselves as the fringe element as the party is led genuine democratic socialists.

But there's a huge difference between staying and trying to constructively promote your own view of the direction Labour Party should take, and actively supporting these highly destructive Berserker attacks.

Not only are these Berserker attacks damaging the Labour Party and materially assisting the Tories, they're also tarnishing the already battered reputation of the Labour right by association.

If Labour right-wingers ever want to be taken seriously again, they need to sort their acts out sharpish and actively disassociate themselves from the appalling antics of these Berserkers, rather than siding with them and actually retweeting their outrageously misleading Daily Mail hatchet jobs.

The more the right-wing of the party actually associate themselves with these Berserker attacks, the more they create the impression that they too actually hate the Labour movement, and only ever joined the Labour Party because they considered it a convenient vehicle for their right-wing political agendas.

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Right-wing Labour MPs are making fools of themselves on Twitter

Right-wing Labour MPs are so determined to attack the genuine democratic socialists in the Labour Party that they're making absolute fools of themselves on Twitter.

Anyone would have thought that the 2017 election result would have given Corbyn-sceptic orthodox neoliberal Labour MPs a reason to reconsider their right-wing views and unite behind the party leadership. 

Corbyn reversed two decades of Labour Party decline by becoming the first Labour leader to actually gain parliamentary seats since 1997 by securing the biggest increase in the Labour share of the vote since Clement Attlee in 1945.

If Corbyn could achieve this turnaround in Labour Party fortunes with a bitterly divided party full of right-wing backstabbing MPs who hate Jeremy Corbyn with as much passion as they hate his idea of democratising the Labour Party to give ordinary members more say, then what could he achieve with a more united party?

That was the question an awful lot of Labour members and supporters have been thinking about since the election results came in, but obviously not the right-wing Labour MPs themselves.

For them the election result was an absolute disaster because it ruined their chances of launching yet another destructive coup against Jeremy Corbyn. So they're now fixated on a different question:

What can we do now to inflict as much damage as possible on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership?

the Manchester Central MP Lucy Powell decided to damage the Labour Party publicly attack Momentum and the Labour MP Chris Williamson for supposedly setting up a Momentum campaign in another MPs constituency without consulting them.

Unfortunately for Powell her attack backfired spectacularly when it turned out the new Momentum group was actually being set up in the Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East constituency that was one of just six Labour losses during the 2017 election, not Anna Turley's constituency in Redcar. 

This constituency was lost because of the obnoxious behaviour of the fanatically right-wing and rabidly anti-Corbyn local MP Tom Blenkinsop, who salted the constituency by turning the locals against the Labour Party then quit as an MP because he knew he was facing the humiliation of a thumping defeat in the once safe Labour seat he was parachuted into.

The Momentum group was being set up to help Tracy Harvey who worked hard to undo the damage inflicted by Blenkinsop's ridiculously divisive tantrums, but fell short of retaining the seat against the odds by just over 1,000 votes after UKIP stood down in order to help the Tories win the seat.

Apparently, according to Lucy Powell, Momentum and the Labour left are wrong to try to win back a seat lost to Tory-UKIP collusion due to the dismal antics of an abusive Blairite MP!

What's even worse than the idiocy of her criticism is the fact that the sanctimonious pillock even had the lack of self awareness to lecture the fellow Labour Party members she was publicly and inaccurately lambasting about the need to "unite to fight the Tories"!

This is a woman who participated in the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup lecturing other people about party unity!

Then there's the behaviour of Anna Turley herself, the right-wing privately educated Blairite MP who was parachuted into the Labour safe seat of Redcar (and who better to represent a poverty stricken, working class, steel industry dominated northern town like Redcar than a privately educated right-winger parachuted in from London against the will of the local Labour Party eh?)

Having witnessed Powell make such a fool of herself on Twitter over the weekend you would have thought Turley would at least be a bit careful about her own Twitter utterances. 

But no. She was so desperate to wade into the debate and attack the Labour Party left that she fell for a ridiculously obvious bit of Tory concern trolling.

Concern trolling is where a supporter of a rival group or party poses as a supporter in order to create divisions by expressing disingenuous concerns.

Turley decided to use the whole incident to promise a Twitter user called Eileen Robinson who claimed that she would abandon Labour and vote Tory for the first time in her life if there was a Momentum candidate in Redcar.

Turley was quick to promise Eileen that there would be no Momentum candidate but
the problem of course is that Eileen was a lying Tory concern troll who has used Twitter to praise the Tory party, attacked Labour and spread extreme-right nonsense for years, as anyone who could be bothered to check could have found out easily.

So instead of steering well clear of the divisive stink created by Powell, and definitely steering clear of the divisive antics of a glaringly obvious Tory concern troll, Turley decided to use the incident to attack the Labour Party left by making a promise to one of the worst and most dishonest people in Redcar.

The continued divisive behaviour of these Labour Party right-wingers just goes to show how frightened they are.

They know that Jeremy Corbyn is now within touching distance of an outright win, and they know that he's getting ever closer to achieving a mandate to democratise the Labour Party by allowing local party members to remove MPs who are corrupt, divisive, negligent, incompetent or fanatically right-wing.

The orthodox neoliberal Labour MPs who have been parachuted into Labour safe seats are absolutely terrified of Jeremy Corbyn's success because they're actually terrified of their own constituents unifying to demand a better candidate.

The grand irony is that the likes of Powell, Turley and other internal Labour Party wreckers like Wes Streeting is that the only strategy they can think of to try to avert re-selection for bad MPs is to continue with exactly the kind of bitter divisive feuding that makes it even more likely that their own Labour Party members would want to get rid of them.

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Smearing for sympathy

Over the last few years I've written numerous articles decrying the appalling decline in the standard of political debate and outlining many of the most commonly occurring bits of fallacious political reasoning, but few things are as annoying as the increasingly common smearing for sympathy tactic.

The strategy

The smearing for sympathy tactic relies on a combination of a number of unseemly attitudes and debating techniques.

The first step in the smearing for sympathy strategy is to straw man the debating opponent by misrepresenting their actual views by falsely attributing insulting comments or attitudes to them. Making up generalisations about people on their own side of the debate and ascribing these views to their opponent is a particularly common approach.

The second step is to fish for sympathy using the so-called abusive/insulting generalisation that they just invented as bait. "Look at how the other side abuse and insult our side" they can cry, safe in the knowledge that few or any of the people they're trying to manipulate will actually go back to the source material to check that the insulting generalisation was actually even made.

This smearing for sympathy tactic isn't just appalling because it's fundamentally reliant upon dishonest straw man misrepresentations of what has actually been said, it's also incredibly distasteful because it feeds into and nourishes people's unhealthy victim complex mentalities.

Brexiters

In some people's minds it's completely justifiable to just make up a deliberately weak straw man debating position for the person they don't like, then attack that instead of addressing any of the things that were actually said.

People have been straw man misrepresenting my views for years in desperate attempts to undermine my work, but ever since the EU referendum debate kicked off, the volume of these straw man attacks has increased dramatically. 

The essence of these smearing for sympathy attacks from Brexiters is always the same. The Brexiter accuses me of generalising about all Brexiters without presenting any evidence whatever that I have actually generalised (I always try to avoid relying on generalisations in my work), then they cry for sympathy claiming that it's unfair that they have to put up with such abuse.

Here's a real example from the Another Angry Voice Facebook page.

In response to a question about who the public should believe when there are so many lying politicians about, I suggested that people should "listen to the experts rather than to the most loudmouthed of the lying self-serving political class" and posted a link to an article I wrote about Michael Gove's absurd pre-Brexit suggestion that people should discount expert opinion because in Britain "we've had enough of experts" as a counter-point.

At no point did I state (or even imply) that all of the experts were on one side of the debate, nor did I claim that all of the loudmouthed lying self-serving politicians were on the other side of the debate, but this is how how a furious Brexiter responded:

"You can't resist the cheap shots AAV.  Ideology too much so you go ad hominem ... I'm sick of the lazy stereotyping of all people who voted leave."

The guy tried to make himself appear intelligent by using the term "ad hominem" but he didn't even vaguely attempt to justify the accusation. There's clearly no personal attack in criticising a politician for the words that they actually said. The accusation of personal abuse was clearly plucked out of nowhere and entirely unsubstantiated.

Then he accused me of lazily stereotyping "all people who voted leave" without presenting a single example of me actually doing that. Here's a link to the article I posted. Feel free to read through it and check that it contains not a single generalisation about "all Brexiters".

When asked for a single quote of me generalising about "all people who voted leave" the guy refused to substantiate his assertion and instead went off on a rant about how I don't respect my readers.

I do respect most of my readers, but I definitely refuse to respect those who falsely misrepresent my views in order to play the victim and cry for sympathy, especially if they refuse to either substantiate their assertions (which they can't) or apologise (which they won't) even when directly challenged to. I don't respect them at all. In fact I'll openly state that they're cowards and I'd rather they stopped following my page.

'Kippers

Before the EU referendum debate the smearing for sympathy tactic was most commonly seen from UKIP supporters. I'm pretty sure most people have had the experience of reading a political thread about immigration or the EU and coming across a comment from a 'Kipper decrying the way that it's unfair that their concerns about immigration are being unfairly dismissed as racism, then thinking "hang on a sec, this guy is the first person on the whole damned thread to even mention racism".

This "they called me racist" card is another example of the smearing for sympathy tactic. It's incredibly effective because it creates an intense sense of injustice. Of course it's wrong to dismiss legitimate concerns about immigration as racism. It's not racist to think that perhaps the all time record highs in net migration (that happened under Theresa May's watch at the Home Office) that coincided with an appalling slump in housebuilding (one of David Cameron's most disgraceful legacies) is likely to make the house price inflation problem even worse, so to dismiss a fact based concern like that as "racism" would be appalling.

The problem is that an awful lot of 'Kippers like to misrepresent any criticism of their party as "they called me a racist" because fishing for sympathy with blatant misrepresentations is a hell of a lot easier than actually addressing and refuting concerns about UKIP, their dodgy donors, their appalling track record of laziness and hypocrisy in the European Parliament, their collection of failed, disgraced and defected Tories, their dangerous anti-refugee fearmongering, their disgraceful political opportunism, their alliances with extremist parties in Europe in order to secure £millions in EU funding for their party, their leaflets full of disgraceful lies, and their hard-right Thatcherism on steroids agenda.

The 'Kipper victim complex is a disgusting thing to behold. The mentality that wealthy, white men are the most discriminated against in the UK is utterly appalling, as is the incredibly common tactic of dismissing any criticism of their party (no matter how fact-based) as "they called me a racist"*.

The Anyone But Corbyn coup

It's not just Brexiters and 'Kippers who resort to smearing for sympathy. A significant number of people who support the Anyone But Corbyn coup have taken to misrepresenting my articles on the subject as doing nothing more than calling anyone who is opposed to Jeremy Corbyn "Blairites".

It's absolutely undeniable that the pre-planned anti-Corbyn coup plot was drawn up by the right-wing of the Labour Party, and it's also undeniable that every single Blairite in the Labour Party is lining up in support of the Anyone But Corbyn candidate Owen Smith, but this doesn't mean that everyone who participated in the coup or has voted for Owen Smith is a Blairite.

Some of the MPs who tried to oust Corbyn clearly caved in to peer pressure, or got leaned on by more experienced parliamentary colleagues. The Blairites decided to use the biggest Tory cock-up in decades as an excuse to launch a coup attempt against Jeremy Corbyn, but many of the Labour MPs who went along with it clearly just got caught up in the moment and went along with the tide rather than stopping to think about whether spurning the best opportunity in decades to kick the Tories in order to launch an internal attack on their own party leader was such a great idea.

The same goes for Owen Smith supporters within the party membership. It's undeniable that all of the self-serving Blairites and their cheerleaders have lined up behind him, but others are entitled to their view that he's more "electable" than Jeremy Corbyn. I'd beg to differ on the grounds that he's incredibly gaffe-prone, blatantly insincere and backed by appalling bunch of the worst New Labour types like John McTernan, Tristram Hunt and Ed Balls. If Smith wins and fills his inner circle with people like that, Labour are absolutely doomed. 

You don't have to be a Blairite to be delusional, but you do have to be delusional to be a Blairite.

It suits the Anyone But Corbyn narrative to misrepresent any criticism of the coup-plotters, Owen Smith or the shockingly anti-democratic behaviour of the Labour Party elitists as "They called us Blairites" because it deflects from the actual criticisms and fosters a sense of victimhood.

It's no surprise that many Anyone But Corbyn supporters are prone to these smearing for sympathy tactics given the atrocious behaviour of numerous Labour MPs like Angela Eagle and her fabricated evidence of abuse and Tom Blenkinsop's disgraceful cry-bully Twitter tantrum. If the elitist managerial class they want to see re-establish control over the party are using these tactics, it's no wonder that ordinary members imitate them.

Conclusion
Now that I've detailed the smearing for sympathy tactic you can keep an eye out for it. If you see anyone fishing for sympathy it's important to consider the source material and whether these people were actually insulted, generalised about, called a racist or a Blairite, or if they just made it up to fish for sympathy.

When you spot someone using the smearing for sympathy strategy, the next step is to consider their motivations. Either they were well aware that they've misrepresented the material they were responding to in order to fish for sympathy or they were unaware that they've misrepresented what was actually said.

If they are unaware that their counter argument bears no relation to the material they're responding to, that indicates that they're so immersed in their own sense of victimhood and so tragically lacking in comprehension skills that they were incapable of following what was actually said, and simply fell back on regurgitating the same defensive points they've seen other people use, irregardless of the fact they're not applicable. 

It's fruitless to get angry that some people are simply not intelligent enough to understand that their counter arguments rely on misrepresentations and fallacious reasoning, but when people use smearing for sympathy tactics deliberately it's a completely different matter. 

When people know that using misrepresentations and unsubstantiated assertions are bad faith debating tactics but choose to use them anyway, they're demonstrating that they are a fundamentally dishonest and manipulative person.

The next time you come across someone using the smearing for sympathy tactic, it's worth considering whether they're an appallingly dishonest person who is doing it deliberately, or if they're simply not smart enough to know any better.

Feel free to link to this article when you catch people out for using the smearing for sympathy tactic.

 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.

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* = Given that the "they called me racist" card is invariably presented with no evidence that they were actually called a racist, and definitely no evidence of what their supposedly "legitimate concern" about immigration or the EU was, it could be fair to consider the possibility that if they're not just making the whole thing up to fish for sympathy, and loads of people have actually been calling them racist, that they could actually be a racist who got called a racist because they were saying racist things.

Beware of the cry-bullies

The cry-bully debating strategy is a disgustingly cynical and manipulative bad faith debating tactic that is becoming increasingly common in UK political discourse. 

In this article I'm going to describe what cry-bully tactics are in the context of the lamentable decline in the standards of political debate, and then detail some of the worst offenders.

Bad Faith vs Good Faith debating tactics

The vilification of Jeremy Corbyn after the EU referendum debate for daring to treat the electorate like adults by presenting a considered fact-based case for remaining in the UK is evidence that in modern politics good faith debating tactics are considered "useless", "inept", "lacklustre", "half-hearted" and all of the other criticisms hurled at him.

What people apparently wanted from Corbyn was  more of the kind of manipulative absolutist propaganda that the rest of the political class were spewing. They didn't want him to treat the electorate like adults, they wanted him to treat us like a bunch of sub-juvenile halfwits who can be goaded into supporting one position or the other through fearmongering, false promises, threats, naive wishful thinking, flag-waving and a great big mound of outright lies.

Political debate has been so corrupted that people haven't just become normalised to bad faith debating tactics, bad faith is now so ubiquitous that people react with horror and derision when they notice someone like Jeremy Corbyn who actually uses good faith debating tactics.

Cry-bully tactics

There are all manner of bad faith debating tactics, but one the most disgusting of all is the cry-bully strategy. This deeply cynical and desperately hypocritical tactic entails goading people with a barrage of insults and smears, then reacting with synthetic outrage when someone eventually retorts in kind with insults of their own.

One of the things that makes cry-bully tactics so effective is that the people using them are usually professional writers or media trained politicians, which means they're adept at finding ways of structuring their insults to really wind people up without resorting to foul language or actual threats, while a certain percentage of the people they infuriate with their insults are bound to be nowhere near as well-educated and articulate, meaning they will retort by slinging abuse laden insults at them.

Cry-bullies are basically above-the-line trolls who deliberately wind up large cohorts of people in order to fish for insults in order to then shriek "look at the abuse I'm suffering"  to smear everyone within the cohort of people that they insulted first.

The cry-bullies

Alex Andreou

The ex-Guardian columnist Alex Andreou gave a masterclass in cry-bully tactics in his Acid Attack article against Jeremy Corbyn and anyone who supports him. The article was absolutely full of smears and insults aimed at riling up anyone who is sympathetic to Jeremy Corbyn, but the article was book-ended with complaints about how he's been bullied for expressing his anti-Corbyn views, and how it's all been so stressful that he had to take a "Twitter break" over it.

Funnily enough Andreou's "Twitter break" didn't stop him from turning up on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page to sling insulting generalisations at everyone who follows my work and to make defamatory claims that I'd falsely attributed quotes to him in my critique of his article (a claim he was far too much of a coward to retract and apologise for after I clearly disproved it).

Apparently it's absolutely fine for members of the punditariat class like Andreou to deliberately wind people up by insulting them and their ideas, to dismiss all criticisms of these utterly cynical tactics by labelling them "nothing but seething abuse" and to deliberately make defamatory accusations in desperate efforts to discredit their debating opponents, but anyone who gets angry with them and retorts in kind is held up as evidence that all Corbynistas are nasty aggressive bullies.

Michael Foster

Michael Foster is the millionaire Labour Party donor who tried to get Jeremy Corbyn barred from the Labour leadership election. After his effort to use the courts to oust Corbyn was thwarted he wrote an extraordinary diatribe for the Daily Mail  entitled "Why I despise Jeremy Corbyn and his Nazi stormtroopers".

In his article he called all Jeremy Corbyn supporters "bullies", "arrivistas", "a divisive, aggressive holier-than-thou cadre of hard-Left socialists", "bullies and arm-twisters", "economically illiterate people", "a mob", "second-rate minds", "the extreme left" and "Nazi stormtroopers" who are guilty of  "wave after wave of inappropriate, democratically damaging and wrongful actions".

After writing an insult laden diatribe like that he had the absolute gall to complain that Corbyn supporters are bullies based on pathetically weak stuff like lies about that notorious brick (you know, the one that wasn't actually thrown through Angela Eagle's constituency office window at all).

Andreou's article was a clear example of cry-bulling, but Foster's article went so much further it's actually quite extraordinary. Imagine the kind of gullible fool it would take to mindlessly accept that the guy slurring his political opponents as "Nazis" in the Daily Mail (of all places) is the innocent victim, while the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people on the other end of this appalling public smear (with no massive mainstream media platform of their own to sling insults, even if they wanted to) are the nasty bullies!

Sadly a lot of people are that gullible, otherwise cry-bully tactics wouldn't work and would be widely held up to ridicule in the mainstream press, instead of the job being left to independent bloggers like me.

Tom Blenkinsop

The Labour MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland has been having a spectacular Twitter meltdown which includes repeatedly yelling "entryist" at people (including lifelong Labour voters), calling for a Stalinist style purge of left-wingers from the Labour Party and blocking thousands of accounts (including me, Harry Leslie Smith, Tom Pride, Owen Jones, The Morning Star and huge numbers of people who have never even interacted with him!).

Blenkinsop is clearly using cry-bully tactics. The vitriol on his Twitter feed is extraordinarily provocative and it's no wonder it's made a number of people absolutely furious. 

The only messages Blenkinsop ever draws attention to by replying to them are the tiny minority that include insults or abusive words and phrases. He has received hundreds of politely worded messages questioning his behaviour, but he just instantly blocks them all. Just check out the #BlockedbyBlenkinsop and #Blenkinblocked Twitter hashtags to see how many people he's been blocking.

It's bad enough that coup-supporting political pundits and a major Labour party donor have been using cry-bully tactics, but it's absolutely outrageous to see an actual Labour MP deliberately riling Labour Party members and voters with a torrent of insults and smears, then cherry-picking only the tiny minority of abusive replies in order to cry about the abuse he's suffering.

Right-wing cry-bullies

The three examples above are all Anyone But Corbyn coup-supporters, which certainly makes it look like there's a concerted effort to use cry-bully tactics to undermine Jeremy Corbyn, but there are plenty of other non-Labour cry-bullies out there too.

One of the most glaring examples of cry-bully tactics happened when a notorious right-wing attention-seeking troll woman (who I have sworn never to name on this blog) read out a selection of mean Tweets that people have sent her. This woman has insulted pretty much everyone on the face of the planet with her attention-seeking right-wing diatribes, so crying about the abuse people send back to her is an absolutely blatant display of cry-bully hypocrisy.

David Torrance

The cry-bully strategy is increasingly common in wider-UK politics thanks to the Anyone But Corbyn coup-plotters, but the people of Scotland are much more familiar with it because the Scottish columnist David Torrance is an absolute master of slinging insults at huge cohorts of people then crying for sympathy when a minority of the people who argue back use insulting words and phrases.

Torrance's use of cry-bully tactics was brilliantly skewered by Stuart Campbell in an article entitled "The Formula". This section relies heavily on the points raised in that article. I strongly advise you to read it for yourself, it really is one of the most devastating take-downs I've seen in years.

Torrance loves to insult people. In one article he referred to all Scottish nationalists, Leave voters and Corbyn supporters as "utterly vacuous". Not just some of them, but all of them. Every single one of them.

The maths is a bit complicated because there is some overlap between the three groups, but it's clear that Torrance has called something like three quarters of the entire Scottish population "utterly vacuous".

Insulting as many people as possible is a very good strategy for provoking angry insult laden diatribes in response so that you can cry about all the abuse that horrible "cyber-nats", "Bexiters" and "Corbynistas" are slinging at you, and imply that it's representative of all of the people you insulted, rather than just the tiny minority who swallowed the bait.

After years of using his public platform to sling abuse at all kinds of people, retweeting severe misogynistic abuse, gratuitously comparing people to Donald Trump, and taking people's words completely out of context to score lame political points, Torrance decided to flounce off Twitter and then write an article for the (Rupert Murdoch owned) Times about the trauma of being supposedly bullied off Twitter.

Stuart Campbell explains that when using Torrance style cry-bully tactics it’s important to "emphasise that it’s never your fault for being wrong or deliberately provocative, of course. None of the subjects of your attacks, whether they be powerful politicians or powerless members of the public are ever permitted legitimate anger in reaction to your provocation. They must simply endure it forever in meek silence, even when they’ve been obliged to pay for it through a legally-enforced licence fee. They must ON NO ACCOUNT call you a 'disgruntled walnut' or 'angry Weetabix', for example. The vacuous, dishonest, stupid, bullying cultist cyber-scum".

Campbell concludes his article about Torrance's cry-bully formula with a couple of useful observations:

"The political landscape is shifting faster than anyone can keep up with, and those who see themselves as gatekeepers, interpreting events for the benefit of the poor dumb plebs live in terror of being rendered obsolete by change and by ridicule. Any voices ranged against them must be tainted and discredited, painted as a vicious lynchmob of thugs and bullies ... so expect this routine to be played out many more times over the coming months and years (not just against Scottish independence, but also Jeremy Corbyn and anything else perceived as a threat to the existing order). Because the one thing that can never be allowed to happen is normal people being allowed to speak and think for themselves".

Dealing with cry-bullies

The conclusion is simple. Cry-bullies are appallingly manipulative people. Beware of giving them what they want by retorting to their abuse with insults of your own, because if you do, you're giving them precisely what they're fishing for. You're handing them exactly the ammunition they're looking for to attack you, your ideas, and anyone they care to identify you with.

It's often best to just ignore cry-bullies, but if you do feel compelled to respond to a journalist or politician who has taken to slinging insults in the hope of goading people into insulting them back, it's vital to stay calm.

An "I can see what you're doing" response is one of the best approaches. You could calmly identify the insults and smears they've used, then explain that you know that they're just using such insults in order to provoke inarticulate people into slinging insults back at them so that they can then start crying about the terrible "abuse" they're suffering.

Once they've been rumbled like this. other people can become aware of their cynical and manipulative cry-bully tactics, and any abuse that does get thrown back at them elsewhere in the comments can be seen in its proper context.

 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.

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Tom Blenkinsop's vitriolic Twitter tantrum

The Labour MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland Tom Blenkinsop has been having a quite extraordinary cry-bully tantrum on Twitter.

Months of anti-Corbyn drivel
 
Ever since the inept Anyone But Corbyn coup was launched Tom Blenkinsop's Twitter feed has been absolute abomination, with dozens and dozens of tweets attacking the Labour Party leadership and party members, and barely anything criticising the Tories, but over the weekend before ballot papers for the Labour leadership election were sent out he went into complete-meltdown mode.

Here's an example of Blenkinsop's anti-Corbyn drivel before his complete meltdown: "Corbyn is more wooden than a wooden spoon sitting in the wooden draw of a wooden kitchen...in the woods". The guy obviously thinks he's got some kind of searing rapier wit, but before his meltdown it was just cringeworthy babbling like that, retweeting hatchet-job articles from the likes of hard-right blogger and Murdoch stooge Guido Fawkes and repeatedly calling for Stalinist style purges of the Labour Party.

Something snapped

Over the weekend before the ballot papers were sent out something clearly snapped in Blenkinsop. He went from cringeworthy anti-Corbyn chuntering and calling for a Stalinist style purge of the Labour Party to rid it of all Corbyn supporters to repeatedly yelling "entryist" and "idiot" at anyone who dared question his ridiculous behaviour.

Calling for a purge of left-wing Labour Party members is bad enough, but repeatedly yelling "entryist" at anyone who dared question his attitude (including someone who clearly identified as a lifelong Labour voter) is sickening.

Stalinism

Blenkinsop followed up his bizarre calls for a Stalinist style Labour Party purge with an even more explicit call for a purge of anyone who booed Sadiq Khan's divisive attack on Jeremy Corbyn (just a few weeks after Khan had vowed to stay neutral in the Labour leadership election).

The most ridiculous thing of all is that after repeatedly calling for an ideological purge of the Labour Party, he then had the absolute gall to retweet someone who was chuntering on about Jeremy Corbyn supporters being a bunch of Stalinists.

One of the interesting things that arises from Blenkinsop's repeated calls for an anti-democratic purge of the Labour Party is that he clearly won't have a leg to stand on if Corbyn defeats the coup-plotters then decides to do the sensible thing and allow democratic re-selection of appallingly divisive and self-serving Labour MPs.

Blenkinsop wouldn't have a leg to stand on if the Labour Party allowed his local constituency Labour members to hold a democratic ballot to deselect him as their MP when he's openly and repeatedly called for an anti-democratic purge of the Labour Party.

It would obviously take a very brazen individual to object to democratic re-selection of MPs after calling for an anti-democratic purge of Labour Party left-wingers, but judging by the constant stream of divisiveness and abuse that passes for his Twitter feed, it's beyond doubt that Blenkinsop is capable of such brazenness.

Owen Jones is not an idiot

The fact that Blenkinsop calls Owen Jones an "idiot" is indicative of the guy's mentality. He's using a public platform to hurl abuse and insults at members of his own party, he writes dozens of anti-Corbyn tweets for every one he writes criticising the Tory government, and he's repeatedly called for a Stalinist style purge of the Labour Party, then his response to someone criticising his attitude is to call them an "idiot".

Personal abuse is pretty the lowest possible level of debate, and Blenkinsop's Twitter tantrum is a perfect illustration of the fact that he's a political gutter-dweller.

If you want some proof that Owen Jones isn't an idiot you could read his 9 questions for Corbyn supporters article and my response to it to see how the Labour leadership debate could have been conducted if it wasn't for people like Tom Blenkinsop who would clearly rather ruin the Labour Party completely than allow Jeremy Corbyn any chance of success.

Cry-bully tactics

Blenkinsop is clearly utilising the cry-bully tactic. The objective of which is to repeatedly insult and abuse people to the point that they respond in kind with abuse and insults of their own, then cry about the terrible abuse you're suffering. We've seen it already from the ex-Guardian hack Alex Andreou in his Acid Attack article on Jeremy Corbyn and anyone who supports him, and now we've got a classic example of an actual Labour MP using the same dirty underhand tactics.

This guy is supposed to be an intellectual!

One of the strangest things about Blenkinsop is that he's apparently got a degree in PPE and a Masters in Continental Philosophy from Warwick university, but on Twitter he comes across as having the debating skills of a petulant child having a tantrum.

Perhaps the philosophy department at Warwick University taught him that the ideal way to structure an argument is to repeatedly hurl insults at your opponents and then accuse them of things that you yourself are arguing for?

Blenkinsop is clearly acting as a very poor advert for the post graduate philosophy department Warwick University. If  an abuse-hurling intellectual lightwieght like Tom Blenkinsop is the calibre of person they churn out, then what value do their qualifications actually hold?

Blenkinsop's echo chamber

I first became aware of Blenkinsop's Twitter tantrum when someone posted a screenshot of one of his comments on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page, but when I went to check out whether such a ludicrously divisive comment could be real I discovered that he's blocked me, which is odd because I've never had any interaction with him on Twitter whatever.

It subsequently turns out that Blenkinsop has blocked pretty much every left-wing Twitter account out there, including Harry Leslie Smith, anyone who disagrees with him, a load of other people who haven't ever even interacted with him and even his own constituents!

There are only two reasons to use the Twitter block button. One is to stop people hurling abuse at you and the other is to create a closed ideology echo chamber where all views that contradict your own are silenced. Given that an awful lot of people who are blocked by Tom Blenkinsop have never even interacted with him, it's absolutely obvious what he's been doing.

I'm definitely going to consider the fact that I've been blocked by Tom Blenkinsop despite never having interacted with him as a badge of honour.

Worse than Britain First

The extreme-right hate group Britain First operate a similar kind of closed ideology echo chamber to Tom Blenkinsop, but with one crucial difference. They wait for people to actually leave dissenting comments before they hit the block button, they don't just go around randomly blocking anyone who might challenge their precious closed ideology.

It's incredibly sad that there's a Labour MP out there with an even more censorious attitude than the fascist britain First hatemongers.

Bringing the Labour Party into disrepute

Labour Party politicians like Sadiq Khan and Kezia Dugdale have every right to back whichever candidate they prefer (even though their stated reasons are laughable), but what the likes of Tom Blenkinsop and Ian Austin are doing with their divisive Twitter hate campaigns is completely unacceptable.

Any other party would have launched disciplinary proceedings against such divisive and vitriolic abuse aimed at fellow party politicians and members. Could you imagine Theresa May standing for a Tory MP who has taken it upon themselves to wage a one-man Twitter war against her, her cabinet and a significant percentage of the party membership? Of course she wouldn't.

Once the leadership election is over, I'd be amazed if muck-hurling Labour MPs like Tom Blenkinsop aren't at least put up for re-selection by their constituents, which seems to be a fair guess at why he's having such a tantrum. He can see that his toys are going to be confiscated because of his bad behaviour, and he's having a screaming tantrum about it.

Sadly for Tom, he doesn't even seem to realise that resorting to screaming tantrums rarely ever result in sensible adults changing their minds.

 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.

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