Before we even get started let's be absolutely clear that I'm not saying centrists are the same as the modern day extreme-right. I'm not doing that, so don't even dare try to misrepresent my point to pretend that I am.
Yes centrists wilfully collude with the extreme-right in preference to working with the left, as in the Lib-Dem pact with UKIP to take control of Bolton Council, or the Centre Party's fateful decision in 1933 to seal their own destruction by elevating Adolf Hitler to German Chancellor. And yes both ideologies revere capitalism. But nobody is pretending that they're the same.
What I am going to point out is that centrists and the modern day extreme-right have a tendency to use the exact same cynical debating trickery to delegitimise their critics, or anyone who dares question the groupthink of their ideology.
The extreme-right continually present their critics as being motivated by hatred of Britain and hatred of (their utterly warped interpretation of) "British values". They also regularly claim that opponents of their ideology are the victims of "brainwashing".
Centrists use the exact same tactic, repeatedly insinuating that criticism of their beloved ideology is motivated by hatred, bitterness, or insanity, and delighting in the accusation that anyone supporting the anti-austerity, anti-privatisation, pro-investment politics of the Labour left is a "cultist".
If you don't believe our propaganda, you're 'brainwashed'.
If you don't believe in our unquestionable centrist groupthink, then you're a 'cultist'.
It's the exact same delegitimisation tactic, and it's absolutely commonplace in both ideologies.
The point of it is to deter people from even considering the critique of their own ideology by labelling the critic as dangerous, unstable, insane, brainwashed, motivated by hate, or whatever other slur they can think of.
They don't want people actually debating the topic at hand, so they concentrate all of their effort on delegitimising the source, in the hope that others will not even bother looking into what the argument is actually about.
It's the tactic of bad faith cowards who know that they'd lose the argument if the debate was conducted fairly and decently, so they resort to cynical delegitimisation trickery to prevent that from happening.
Lib-Dems
I think it's important to criticise the Liberal Democrats for their role in helping the Tories enforce the living standards destroying austerity fanaticism that laid the groundwork for Brexit, then cashing in on the crisis they helped create by posing as glorious saviours who are going to rescue us all from the madness by ... errr ... printing up "Bollocks to Brexit" T-shirts" and begging for another referendum with no deal Tories running the show so they can totally rig the ballot by picking the options, wording, and timing of the vote to their own advantage.
It doesn't matter how much you base your criticism on facts, evidence, logic, and links to verifiable sources, the Lib-Dem response in the comments always consists of the same barrage of evasions, deflections, straw man misrepresentations, whataboutery, excuses, absurd Lib-Dem fairy stories, outright lies, and cynical delegitimisation tactics.
The strategy is to deflect debate away from the actual criticisms, and undermine the critic with claims that they must be insane, brainwashed, hysterical, deluded, or motivated by hate to even dare trying to criticise the ideological groupthink.
Ian Dunt
If you're not on Twitter you probably won't be familiar with this guy, but he's hot shit in the centrist and Remainer echo chambers like FBPE.
He's one of these noxious Remain Ultras who gets off on sneering at left-behind working class communities (rather than reaching out to try to explain that the living standards collapse they experienced was caused by domestic austerity fanaticism, not immigrants and the EU), smearing all Leave voters as horrible right-wingers,
and constructing bizarre fantasies that the UK was some kind of magnificent utopia under the Tory/Lib-Dem Austerity Coalition, before Brexit arrived, out of nowhere, and ruined everything.
He's a toxic Remainer who does more damage to the Brexit-sceptic cause with his wittering than good, and if other Remainers had any vague understanding of the strategic need to actually attract people to the cause rather than driving them away with toxic groupthink nonsense, they wouldn't revere and retweet him so god-damned much.
So the Guardian columnist Dawn Foster wrote an exceptional article in the Guardian criticising the Labour deputy leader Tom Watson for his campaign of internal wrecking tactics, and having a dig at the kind of centrist groupthink that Dunt and his ilk absolutely revel in.
Obviously Dunt hated it, but his Twitter response was absolutely telling.
Instead of critiquing any of the actual points raised in the article, or presenting anything even remotely counter-evidence, he resorted to ridiculing it as "off planet" insane, before questioning the fact that the mainstream media would allow such opinions to be published at all!
1. Refuse to debate or critique any of the actual points raised, simply deride opposing opinions as insane "thought crime".
2. Demand the mainstream media only ever promote the 'correct' groupthink worldview.
How is this mentality any different from the mentality of the far-right?
How is it even remotely possible to consider this kind of delegitimisation of non-conformist views, and craving for media censorship as any kind of liberalism?
Conclusion
As I said in the introduction I'm not arguing that centrism and the extreme-right are the same thing, so don't even try to pretend that I am.
What I'm saying is that their ideological adherents are prone to using the exact same delegitimisation tactics to deter people from even listening to their ideological opponents.
From deriding non-conformist opinions as insane, or deluded, or hate-motivated "thought crime" to demanding that the function of the mainstream media is solely to endlessly and unquestioningly repeat their own approved groupthink mentality.
Their politics may be different, but the illiberal and intolerant mindset, and the cynical debating trickery are very often exactly the same.
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.
It doesn't seem to matter what the Labour Party does, some people will simply not allow the subject of anti-Semitism to be dealt with calmly and rationally.
This hysteria is clear on both sides. This is clear whether we're talking about:
- Chris Williamson's latest crass comments about Labour being "too apologetic" (comments that have drawn me back into writing about this subject again).
- Margaret Hodge publicly bombarding the Labour disciplinary bods with dozens upon dozens of anti-Semitism cases to investigate 90% of which turned out to not even be Labour Party members, then having the absolute gall to complain that they're taking too long to investigate the actual genuine cases!
- Or social media conspiracists outright denying that there's even a problem at all.
Moral perspective
From a moral perspective it's obvious that Labour should be apologetic every time an example of anti-Semitism is found amongst the 500,000+ people in the Labour ranks.
It's obviously fair to add context too by pointing out the facts and evidence that partisan anti-Labour critics would never provide. Stuff like the fact that the rates of anti-Semetic views amongst Labour supporters have gone down dramatically since Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015, the fact that disciplinary procedures have been sped up significantly since Jennie Formby took over from the Blairite Ian McNicol at the NEC, and the fact that anti-Semitism is and always has been way more prevalent in the Tory party than Labour.
However, it's beyond obvious that whenever anti-Semites are caught in the Labour Party, the party needs to apologise and demonstrate their continued commitment to combating all forms of racism and bigotry with disciplinary procedures and bans.
Realpolitik perspective
From a realpolitik perspective Labour is obviously getting the whole thing completely wrong.
Instead of apologising and seeking to actively deal with the issue, the mainstream media have educated us about what the correct response is with their absolute dearth of coverage about the Tory Islamophobia scandal.
The Tory party has been accused of tolerating despicable anti-Muslim bigotry by several senior Tory politicians, including Sayeeda Warsi. For over a year the Tories have been refusing to apologise, refusing to investigate, and outright refusing to listen to calls by the Muslim Council of Britain for an inquiry into anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks.
The Tories have simply stonewalled the subject, and a result the mainstream media have rewarded them with an absolutely minuscule fraction of the negative coverage they've heaped on the Labour anti-Semitism issue!
As far as the mainstream press are concerned Labour talking about and debating anti-Semitism in order to deal with the issue is worthy of inordinately more coverage that the Tories staying silent about anti-Muslim bigotry, and outright refusing to do anything whatever to deal with the problem in their party!
The ones who talk about the issue and take action are continually bombarded with criticism, while the ones who stay silent and refuse to take action are given a free pass.
Given these circumstances, from a realpolitik perspective it's obviously absolutely stupid for Labour to keep talking about anti-Semitism when the strategy of steadfastly refusing to engage has worked so well for the Tories when it comes to anti-Muslim hate in their ranks.
History
One of the main reasons Labour can't stop talking about the issue is that the party has a long history of standing up for minorities. It was the left who stood with the Jewish people at Cable Street to oppose Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in 1936 while the Tories we're signing up in droves to anti-Semitic pro-Nazi pressure groups like the Right Club.
And it was the left who stood with the Jewish community at Wood Green in the 1970s to face down the National Front thugs too.
Given this history it's obvious that any level of anti-Semitism in the Labour ranks feels like a betrayal that needs to be apologised for, and rightly so.
With the Tories it's a different story. In the 1930s they embraced the new fad of Nazism and joined up to anti-Semitic hate groups in their droves. In the 1960s they ran racist "If you want a coloured for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour" leaflet campaigns in by-elections. In the 1980s they sided with Apartheid South Africa while the Tory youth were parading around in "Hang Mandela" T-shirts. And Theresa May is personally responsible for the introduction of sickeningly racist legislation in 2014 that was used to deny black Britons the right to housing, employment, banking services, social security, health care, and the right to return to Britain. This vile "Hostile Environment" legislation even resulted in black Britons dying in exile overseas.
The Tory party has a long history of racism stretching from their adoration of Nazism in the 1930s all the way to the present and their current policies of deporting black Britons and turning a blind eye to anti-Muslim bigotry in their own ranks.
Bigotry in the Tory ranks isn't a touchstone issue because there have always been loads of bigots in the Tory party. It's not news, and never will be, because it's just accepted as the norm.
Weaponisation
If you're the kind of person who can hold two thoughts in your head simultaneously then try this:
1. A tiny minority of Labour's 500,000+ members have expressed anti-Semitic views. They people should be weeded out because racism and bigotry of all types are unacceptable.
2. A lot of very bad faith opportunists are deliberately weaponising the Labour anti-Semitism issue for their own cynical political purposes.
There are no contradictions whatever between these two statements because they're both observable facts, however you have to be extremely careful stating the second fact because the very opportunists the statement refers to will attempt to misrepresent it as if it's a denial of the first statement that anti-Semitism is a problem.
There's obviously a huge distinction between pointing out the that Labour-opponents and mainstream media hacks like to use super-cynical tricks to weaponise anti-Semitism (like deliberately conflating the anti-Semetic abuse of jailed extreme-right thugs with the Labour Party, or taking quotations miles out of context in order to manufacture outrage), and outright denial that there's any problem at all.
But if cynical opportunists are prepared to mislead, manipulate, and lie in order to weaponise anti-Semitism for their own political purposes, why on earth wouldn't they use the same dishonest tactics to attack anyone who calls them out?
Tory glee
The weaponisation of anti-Semitism for political purposes is particularly galling when it comes from Tory MPs and partisan pro-Tory pro-austerity hacks in the mainstream media.
What's even more galling still is their barely suppressed glee whenever anyone tries to argue back that they're hypocrites due to the brazen Tory refusal to even address anti-Muslim bigotry in their own party.
They respond with glee because they know that not only are they winning from a realpolitik perspective by simply refusing to talk about or address their own bigotry issues, they also know that the perception that they're an anti-Muslim party actually plays extremely well with the sizeable extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic they've been openly courting and welcoming on board with open arms ever since the collapse of UKIP.
They know that anti-Semitism is a hugely problematic issue for Labour because of the left's history of solidarity with Jewish people, and they also know that accusations of anti-Muslim hate in the Tory ranks actually serve as recruitment calling cards amongst the far-right demographics they're actively targeting for support.
And they know they're being opportunistic hypocrites by banging on about Labour anti-Semitism when they have no intention whatever of dealing with much more serious problems of bigotry in their own ranks, but that's just how amoral opportunists roll.
From a realpolitik perspective they'd be idiots to actually investigate accusations of anti-Muslim bigotry in their party and root out the worst offenders because they know that doing the right thing like Labour have been doing would just invite media scrutiny and lots of negative commentary.
Conclusion
The conclusion is that the moral thing to do is to fight anti-Semitism and all other forms of bigotry, and apologise whenever bigots are exposed in your own party's ranks.
But the behaviour of the Tories and the mainstream media proves that from a realpolitik perspective any kind of apology whatever is "too apologetic" because why apologise when the media give you an infinitely easier ride when you just stonewall the bigotry problem like the Tories have?
So the answer to the question of "have Labour been too apologetic on anti-Semitism?" depends entirely on whether you believe in doing the right thing, or you've got such a tribal win at all costs mentality that you'll steadfastly ignore evidence of bigotry within your party purely for party political advantage.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The Labour deputy leader Tom Watson has realised that despite his "Reds under the bed!" fearmongering nonsense, the Labour Party membership is decisively rejecting the Anyone But Corbyn coup-plotters who chose to throw the party into turmoil instead of holding the Tories to account for their Brexit shambles.
A majority of the membership are furious that the coup-plotters spurned the best chance to attack the Tories in decades with their self-serving coup attempt, but Watson's reaction isn't going to be to accept the will of the membership and knuckle down to oppose the Tories, it's going to be the submission of a plan to scrap the democratic One Member One Vote system for Labour Party elections and replace it with an electoral stitch up where just 230 Labour MPs get the same amount of influence over the outcome of the election as some 600,000+ ordinary members.
This plot to reverse the democratisation of the Labour Party has clearly been on the cards since Watson made his absurd claim that democratisation of the Labour party was "a terrible error of judgement" back in August.
Watson and the coup-plotters know they have to try and force such an anti-democratic move through the NEC before the anti-Corbyn members like the appalling Luke Akehurst are replaced by the newly elected NEC members, because the new members will tip the balance of power away from the coup-plotters and make such a cynical anti-democratic vote-rigging move impossible to pull off.
This obvious effort to rig the next leadership election is absolute proof that Tom Watson and the Anyone But Corbyn camp are anti-democrats.
Their anti-democratic attitudes were already clear before from their decision to retroactively disenfranchise 130,000 Labour members from the leadership election and the ongoing purge of Corbyn supporters for "crimes" such as liking the Foo Fighters too much, voting Green years before they even joined Labour and even posting one single Tweet saying the Green Party should be allowed to participate in the 2015 General Election TV debates. However the idea of rejecting the will of the membership again by submitting a plan to rig the next leadership election in favour of the coup-plotter MPs is another staggering escalation of the Labour Party elites' "war on democracy".
It's essentially a demonstration that the coup-plotters are determined to continue forcing leadership elections until they get their own way, and if they don't get the result they want, they'll continue rigging the election process until they do. They're a bunch of petulant elitists who are refusing to take "no" for an answer and are now determined to demonstrate how much they despise ordinary Labour Party members by seeking to disempower them.
This is undeniably the behaviour of anti-democratic elitists. The original purpose of the Labour Party was to give a voice to ordinary people, but the party hierarchy has become so over-run by self-serving elitists these days that Labour MPs like Tom Watson are intent on forcing their will on the ordinary party membership, no matter what it takes.
The Labour Leadership election is a battle between a tiny cabal of elitists who see themselves as an untouchable managerial class with the exclusive right to dictate what is best for the party against the majority of the party membership.
It doesn't surprise me that some people have reservations about Jeremy Corbyn and his leadership. He clearly has personal limitations and significant change always comes with uncertainties. What does baffle me is how people who consider themselves even remotely left-wing or democratic could align themselves with an Anyone But Corbyn coup that is backed by every right-wing Blairite in the party, outrageous Labour Party elitists like Tristram Hunt, abusive cry bullies like Michael Foster and the brazen anti-democrat Tom Watson.
The choice is simple. The choice is between the the Labour Party democrats who want to make Labour MPs more accountable to the people who actually elected them, and the anti-democratic Labour Party elitists who are convinced that they alone know what is best for the party, and who are determined to continue disempowering the Labour Party lower orders until they get their own way.
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.
For a while I naively assumed that Sadiq Khan had a little bit of tactical sense. He kept his distance from the Anyone But Corbyn coup plot, and then adopted a neutral stance in the leadership election. If the Labour Party was ever going to recover from this spectacularly ill-timed and incompetently executed coup plot, it was going to need high profile bridge-builders. The deputy leader Tom Watson had already demonstrated his intention to burn any potential bridges to their foundations with his bizarre "Reds Under The Bed!" fearmongering attack on Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, and now Sadiq Khan has decided to follow suit with a confused and self-contradictory endorsement of the Anyone But Corbyn candidate Owen Smith.
Khan published his Anyone But Corbyn in the Guardian, which has clearly established the tactic of posting one anti-Corbyn hatchet job per day alongside another article reporting the fact that some Labour Party figure has written an article attacking Jeremy Corbyn. The Guardian know that the Labour leadership ballot papers are being sent out this week so they're engaging in one last desperate propaganda push to sway their readers against Jeremy Corbyn. Interestingly their drip-feeding of anti-Corbyn attacks to their readership closely mirrors the coordinated sequence of resignations that the coup-plotters used to try to bully Jeremy Corbyn into quitting as Labour Party leader.
There have been some woeful attempts to undermine Jeremy Corbyn, but Sadiq Khan's is one of the weakest to date choosing to recycle tired mainstream media "Corbyn Bad" tropes and outright lies in lieu of any coherent justification for voting for Owen Smith.
Khan's article relies heavily on lazy rehashes of the "unelectable" trope, and on the "Blame Corbyn for Brexit" nonsense.
The closes Khan gets to providing an actual reason to vote for Smith is that apparently "poll after poll shows that Owen is far more popular with the public than Jeremy – and far more likely to win the next election". So the general public prefer the guy they haven't heard of to the guy who has been subjected to a savagely biased mainstream media propaganda campaign? Instead of trying to construct a counter-narrative you just fold and then put a new guy forward to be subjected to exactly the same kind of right-wing smear campaign that Corbyn has been hit with, and Miliband before him, and Brown before him.
In the space of his short leadership campaign Smith has proven time and again that he's extremely gaffe prone. He's displayed utter contempt for the plight of exploited Sports Direct workers, he's kicked up a media shit-storm over his comments about Theresa May and he even suggested that ISIS should be invited to the negotiating table. It's laughably naive to imagine that the right-wing press wouldn't rip Owen Smith to shreds over gaffes like those once they'd succeeded in their primary objective of getting Corbyn out of the picture.
Khan even has the gall to blame Corbyn for the fact that a a lot of Labour Party members were reportedly confused about the official Labour position on the EU referendum when he knows full well that this was the fault of a Labour Leave campaign that was completely bankrolled by Tory money and Labour Party politicians like Gisela Stewart riding around on that bloody £350 million for the NHS bus with her mates Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and the UKIP MP Douglas Carswell.
Given that Corbyn's arguments for Remain were undermined by the Tory bankrolled Labour Leave campaign and Gisela Stewart's open cavorting with the lying Vote Leave mob it's remarkable that 63% of Labour voters voted Remain. That's just 1% below the 64% of SNP voters who voted Remain, and they didn't have a Tory Trojan Horse Leave campaign operating in their ranks.
Why is Khan's anger over Brexit aimed at Corbyn rather than the Labour Party MPs who took Tory party cash to bankroll their campaign to undermine the official Labour Party position? It just doesn't make any sense.
Neither does it make any sense to continue blaming Corbyn for Brexit when David Cameron was the one who decided to gamble the entire future of the UK economy in return for a little bit of party political advantage at the 2015 General Election, then lost the gamble when 58% of Tory voters ignored him and voted to quit the EU.
Maybe Corbyn didn't engage in the same kind of hysterical project fear and false-promises as the majority of politicians on either side of the debate, but in many people's judgement it's actually to his credit that he decided to treat the electorate like adults rather than a bunch of sub-juvenile halfwits who can be goaded into supporting one side or another through threats, fearmongering, false-promises and outright lies.
Khan's article also includes a very interesting lie that paints Owen Smith as an opponent to the Iraq war. There's absolutely no evidence whatever that Owen Smith was involved in opposition to the Iraq war, and if there had've been, he would surely have used it during his leadership bid. In fact there is very clear evidence that in 2006, even after years of unplanned post-war chaos and looting, deadly sectarian violence, a massive refugee crisis and the revelation of sick US torture centres like Abu Ghraib, Smith still couldn't bring himself to admit that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a catastrophe, and still defended the illegal concept of regime change.
Aside from offering nothing but the same old mainstream media anti-Corbyn tropes instead of anything even remotely resembling a policy-based reason for backing Owen Smith the thing that really sticks out is the way that Khan contradicts himself so readily throughout the article.
One of the most contradictory things is the way that Khan says he welcomes the surge of new members who have joined the party since Jeremy Corbyn powered onto the scene, but then states that he's going to vote for Owen Smith, which would undoubtedly result in huge numbers of Labour Party members quitting in absolute disgust and vowing never to vote Labour again.
"It is undoubtedly a good thing that our party membership is growing. Vibrant political parties are vital to the health of our democracy. Our new members, like all of us, are desperate for a Labour government to make Britain fairer. And that is why I have decided to vote for Owen Smith"
In saying this Khan has demonstrated beyond doubt that he has no understanding of the reason that hundreds of thousands of people have joined the Labour Party in the last year.
Labour now has more members than all of the other political parties in the UK combined because people have been enthused by a leader who actually opposes the hard-right Thatcherite economic dogma of the last four decades rather than pathetically imitating it like his predecessors, and because he's an honest straight-talking politician rather than a glib rolled-up white sleeves, sound bite repeating Westminster establishment clone.
If Corbyn gets replaced by a style-above-substance politician who is backed by every single Blairite in the Labour Party, then huge numbers of people will give up hope of Labour ever offering an alternative to the political status quo.
Towards the end of the article Khan condemns the idea of a Labour Party split saying "talk of a split or a new party is deeply irresponsible and would make it easier for the Tories to win again", but he fails to address the fact that Owen Smith is the leadership candidate who keeps on bringing up the subject of a Labour Party split in order to fearmonger people into voting for him.
Khan also neglects to address the fact that Smith has repeatedly refused to condemn the right-wing Blairite faction who keep writing anonymous threats to the newspapers threatening to paralyse the party with one leadership election after another if they don't get their way, a rebel shadow cabinet, legal action to steal the Labour Party name and assets or a breakaway party. Sadiq Khan and Owen Smith are on the same side as these appalling Blairites who would clearly rather destroy the Labour Party than allow Jeremy Corbyn a chance of success, yet they refuse to condemn them or name-and-shame the ones who keep making these anonymous threats to the press.
Khan's pro-Smith piece is full of lazily rehashed mainstream media attack points, paints an extremely dishonest picture of Owen Smith as an anti-Iraq campaigner and seeks to blame Jeremy Corbyn for Brexit.
The most telling thing about Khan's article is the brazenly self-contradictory nature of it. For a guy who says that "we can’t afford to spend another moment fighting each other" and that "no matter who wins the leadership contest, the Labour party must ultimately unite again" he spends an awful lot of his article hammering wedges into party divisions rather than trying to heal them. And for a guy to say that Labour needs to focus their efforts to "oppose this new Tory government" in an article that consists of nothing more than a long rambling criticism of his own party leader (without a word of criticism of the Tories) demonstrates a staggering lack of self-awareness.
Sadiq Khan had a brilliant opportunity to position himself as a very high profile bridge-builder, but he's completely ruined it by jumping feet first into the Anyone But Corbyn camp. The really disappointing thing is that throughout the entire article justifying his decision to join the Anyone But Corbyn camp, he's so fixated on explaining why he thinks people shouldn't vote for Jeremy Corbyn that he completely forgets to express a single compelling reason why people should vote for Owen Smith.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The leadership battle between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith isn't actually about policy or competence, it's actually a power struggle between the Labour Party establishment and the Labour Party membership. It's an attempt by the party elite to crush the move towards democratisation and re-establish their control of the party by returning to the managerialist style.
Policy
In policy terms the contrast between the 2015 Labour Party leadership election and the 2016 re-election forced by the Anyone But Corbyn coup plotters couldn't be stronger. In 2015 Jeremy Corbyn was a lone voice of reason amongst four candidates arguing that the Labour Party must begin actually opposing George Osborne's socially and economically ruinous austerity agenda rather than weakly imitating it.
Within a year of Corbyn's victory the consensus has changed because the Anyone But Corbyn faction have realised that the only chance they have of beating him is by fielding a candidate who imitates his policies.
Within a year Jeremy Corbyn has forced a complete change of direction out of the Labour Party establishment. After the 2015 General Election Labour Party right-wingers brazenly tried to claim that Labour had lost the election because they hadn't done a good enough job of imitating George Osborne's ideologically driven economic madness. Jeremy Corbyn has forced them to recognise that what people actually want from the Labour Party is opposition to the massive upwards redistribution of wealth that the Tories have overseen for the last six years. Millions of ordinary people are furious that an economic crisis caused by the super-rich bankers has been used as an excuse to transfer as much wealth as possible from the poor and ordinary to the super rich, and they want Labour to offer an alternative rather than "more of the same but not quite as nasty" austerity-lite rubbish.
The fact that Owen Smith is posturing as a radical left-winger and pillaging a load of Jeremy Corbyn's policies is more than a demonstration that Corbyn has won the argument on opposing austerity, it's also a demonstration that the rebellion against Corbyn isn't motivated by his left-wingness but by something else.
Competence
The coup-plotters have clearly realised that they can't beat Corbyn in a leadership ballot by pushing deeply unpopular right-wing austerity economics, so they've tried to reframe the debate by claiming that their objection to Corbyn is his incompetence.
The problem with this narrative is that it that hardly rings true coming from people who loyally stuck with Ed Miliband for five excruciating years as he stumbled incompetently from one miscalculation or missed opportunity to another.
These people whingeing about Corbyn's competence are the same people who obeyed Ed Miliband when he told them to help Iain Duncan Smith write himself a "get out of jail free card" by abstaining on his retroactive legislation to cover up his unlawful treatment of unemployed people.
Labour could have dragged Iain Duncan Smith over the coals for years over that appalling incompetence, but they just let him off the hook completely. The most incredible thing is that the retroactive legislation Miliband let the Tories ram through parliament in a single day was subsequently found to be unlawful too!
Jeremy Corbyn was one of the 50 odd Labour MPs with sense enough to defy Ed Miliband's demand that Labour MPs collude with Iain Duncan Smith's effort to write himself an unlawful "get out of jail free" card.
When Jeremy Corbyn does something as staggeringly incompetent as repeatedly abstaining on a bill in order to let the Tories ram an unlawful piece of legislation through parliament to cover up their previous bit of unlawful behaviour, then the concerns of people who abstained on that vote can be taken at face value. Until then nobody with any sense would allow those people to appoint themselves arbiters of who is and isn't politically competent.
Everyone could see that the Labour Party was sleepwalking into a disaster at the 2015 General Election apart from the factions of the Labour Party who now keep slamming Corbyn as "incompetent" as if they've got a proven track record of spotting and eliminating incompetence, rather than one of incompetently losing five million voters between 1997 and 2010 and losing 40 out of their 41 seats in Scotland with their watered-down Tory slop in 2015.
Managerialism vs Participatory democracy
Issues like policy and competence are clearly not the main motivation behind the Anyone But Corbyn coup. The real reason is that the Labour Party establishment are increasingly terrified about the direction the Labour Party is taking because they see their own power and authority being eroded.
Since Jeremy Corbyn busts onto the scene in the summer of 2015 the Labour Party membership has almost tripled to make them by far the biggest political party in the UK. In fact they now have more members than all other UK political parties combined.
Bizarrely the Labour Party establishment refuse to see this remarkable growth in party membership as a remarkable success. In fact clearly see this influx of new members as a terrible threat, hence the decision to deliberately stem the tide of new members flowing into the party by introducing retroactive rules to disenfranchise new members.
Had they not introduced these terror-motivated anti-democratic rule changes the leadership re-election would likely have enthused hundreds of thousands more people into joining the party, but the Labour Party establishment seem intent on driving new members away by disenfranchising them and then repeatedly smearing them as "arm-twisting Trotskyists", "quasi-communists", "entryists", "dogs", "infiltrators", "cultists" and even "Nazi stormtroopers".
The reason the Labour Party establishment are so terrified of all of these new members that they're resorted to sickening tactics like election rigging and an appalling tide of abuse is that they can see their power and influence evaporating. They can see that Jeremy Corbyn is steering the Labour Party towards participatory democracy where Labour Party members have much more democratic say in how the party is run, which obviously means that the power is less centralised in the hands of Labour Party MPs, millionaire donors and political insiders like them.
The Labour Party deputy leader Tom Watson really gave the game away completely during his "Reds under the bed!" fearmongering diatribe about "arm-twisting Trotskysists" when he went on to describe the democratisation of the Labour Party under Ed Miliband as a "terrible error of judgement" and expressed a desire to see the One Member One Vote electoral system replaced with one where Labour Party MPs have the power to over-rule the will of the party membership.
Self-entitled Labour Party MPs like Tom Watson are so terrified about the threat that participatory democracy represents to their power and privilege they have become almost rabid in their efforts to oust Jeremy Corbyn and reverse the democratisation of the Labour Party.
Launching a coup against the democratically elected leader of the Labour Party within ten months of Corbyn taking office with the most convincing democratic mandate a Labour Party leader has ever won was a very clear demonstration that an awful lot of Labour MP see their opinion as being far more important that Labour Party members. The decision by the Labour Party NEC to enforce a complete lockdown on local Labour Party democracy in order to stop local constituency parties from holding votes of no confidence in their coup-plotter MPs was another demonstration that the Labour Party machine is terrified of democracy. Tom Watson's explicit attack on the democratisation of the Labour Party as a "terrible error of judgment" merely confirms what was already clear by their actions.
The coup-plotter MPs hate the idea of participatory democracy because they don't want to be accountable to the people who elect them. They see themselves as a superior managerial class who get to dictate the political agenda and drip-feed it downwards to the lower ranks who will then do their bidding. The idea of politicians as public servants elected to represent the will of the people who elected them fills them with fear and revulsion, hence their incredibly poorly timed and incompetently executed coup attempt.
The concept of participatory democracy is fundamentally incompatible with an aloof bunch of self-entitled politicians who see themselves as a managerial class who, by virtue of their positions, better understand the political will of the lower orders than they do themselves.
As far as this managerialist class of politicians are concerned the new members who have flooded into the party are delusional idiots who need to be disempowered and driven away as quickly as possible so that things can return to business as usual. As far as coup-supporting MPs like Tom Watson are concerned it was a terrible mistake to let ordinary people ever think that they could have any real influence over the political realm, and the sooner these insolent plebs are shown the error of their ways, the better.
The Labour Party leadership re-election isn't about policy or about competence, it's about an aloof and self-entitled bunch of managerialists declaring war on the party membership on order to stop the erosion of their own power and privilege.
Make no mistake, if Jeremy Corbyn wins he would have a second mandate to reaffirm the move towards participatory democracy. If Owen Smith wins he will be under enormous pressure from Tom Watson and the Blairite coup-plotter MPs to immediately get rid of the One Member One Vote electoral system so that the ordinary members never get the chance to threaten the supremacy of the Labour Party managerial class again.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
On Monday August 8th 2016 the High Court ruled that the Labour Party NEC had unlawfully blocked members from voting because retroactively redrawing the voter eligibility rules to bar 130,000+ people from voting in leadership elections was a breach of contract.
The Labour Party NEC then decided to challenge the ruling in the Appeal Court in a case that was heard just a few days later. The Labour NEC's argument was that they were entitled to retroactively redraw the rules in order to disenfranchise party members because there was nothing in their rule book saying that they couldn't make up the rules as they go along.
There was much disdain for the argument that contracts can be retroactively altered as long as whoever issued it hasn't specifically barred themselves from retroactively tampering with the contract in order to suit their own interests. The interest in this case being to rig the Labour leadership election in favour of the Anyone But Corbyn candidate.
Incredibly the three Appeal Court judges ruled in favour of the Labour Party NEC, and that they do indeed have the right to retroactively disbar 130,000+ from voting after selling them membership on the understanding that they would be allowed to vote.
Ironically several thousand of the people the Labour Party establishment decided to bar from participation are Anyone But Corbyn supporters who were enticed into joining up to vote against Corbyn by the shadowy Saving Labour faction who still refuse to admit where their funding comes from.
There are three main considerations here. The first is that if the Labour Party are allowed to falsely advertise the benefits of Labour Party membership because their rule book doesn't expressly prohibit it, does this set a legal precedent that other organisations can falsely advertise the benefits of buying their products as long as their own internal rules don't prohibit retroactive tinkering with what's on offer? If this precedent doesn't apply to other organisations (corporations, small businesses, individuals, schools, charities ...) then does this mean that the Labour Party are subject to a different (much laxer) version of the law to the rest of us?
Another consideration is that if the Labour Party can just retroactively disenfranchise people going back to an arbitrary date in January 2016, what's to stop them from retroactively changing the rules to disbar anyone who joined the party from any other arbitrary date? If they can tinker with the rules to bar anyone who joined after January 12th 2016, why not January 12th 2015, or January 12th 2011, or January 12th 1997?
Presumably given this farcical ruling, the Labour Party could now reconvene the NEC and vote to retroactively disenfranchise anyone who joined the party since Jeremy Corbyn set about more than doubling the party membership in the space of a year, or anyone who joined the party since Ed Miliband changed the voting rules to make them more democratic, or since Tony Blair was at the peak of his popularity?
The other main consideration is that the decision to bar 130,000 members, and then the decision to use Labour Party funds (a significant proportion of which come from the membership fees the party elite are intent on disenfranchising) to appeal the decision are both displays of abject anti-democratic contempt for party members.
Retroactively barring people from voting because you don't like the way you suspect they're going to vote is appallingly anti-democratic, whether it's sanctioned by the courts or not.
If anyone was in need of proof that the Labour Party hierarchy is desperately in need of reform, then this contemptuous anti-democratic attitude is a prime example of an out-of-touch party elite being absolutely terrified of the will of ordinary party members.
Owen Smith is highly unlikely to make the Labour Party elitists more accountable to the membership, in fact he's backed by people like Tom Watson who want to strip power away from party members in order to hand it to Labour Party MPs like him.
If you are Labour Party member Jeremy Corbyn is clearly the candidate to vote for if you want to see the party made more democratic, and more accountable to ordinary party members.
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.
