Keir Starmer: A Misunderstood Political Genius

He may have his detractors on the left, but Keir Starmer is a true political phenomenon who has already proven himself perhaps the greatest politician in the history of British politics. 

Just consider his remarkable track record.

You have to admit that it takes a certain amount of genius to get parachuted into a safe Labour seat that's never been lost to the Tories since it was created in 1983.

Then to participate in an internal coup against the party's democratically elected leader just over a year later was a demonstration of his breath taking audacity (it's just a shame that silly Labour Party members failed to appreciate Owen Smith's ice cream van of political delights isn't it?).

After the Labour right's failed 2016 chicken coup, they then almost failed in their efforts to sabotage the 2017 election meaning the Labour surge delivered the biggest swing in the party's favour since 1945.

Something needed to be done, and Keir Starmer was the man to do it.

In 2019 the Labour right desperately needed to lose the next general election in order to take back control of the Labour Party, and handing Boris Johnson a whopping great majority to impose a ruinous radical-right Brexit shambles was clearly a small price to pay for to achieve this over-riding objective, wasn't it?

These people clearly have their priorities absolutely spot on.

So Keir Starmer came up with the ideal plan to drive away pesky northern Labour voters in their millions. He was going to tell the 150+ Labour held constituencies that voted leave in 2016 that Labour was now "The Party of Remain", and indicate to everyone, that after three tedious years of Brexit horse trading he was going to prolong the whole interminable process even longer by holding a "sore loser" referendum.

And if anyone needed to be shown that they had no place in the Labour Party, it's the stupid gullible idiots who thought Britain would be better off outside the EU. Am I right?

2017 proved that it's much harder to deliberately throw a general election than anyone had ever imagined, but in 2019 Keir Starmer turned out to be the man to deliver Labour the electoral thumping that so many of their MPs were craving.

This guy really delivers doesn't he?

Then Starmer delivered again with a masterful Labour leadership election campaign, in which he lied through his teeth about virtually everything in order to dupe Labour members into believing in the absolute fantasy that he was going to continue with Corbyn's humanist democratic socialist policies, when he was, and always will be, a loyal servant of capitalism and establishment interests.

It's been genuinely delightful to see Starmer backtrack on all of his pro public ownership pledges and impassioned speeches against NHS privatisation, hasn't it?

And if anyone needed to suffer a cruel betrayal, it's the stupid gullible socialists who genuinely believe that some things (public transport, energy, water, mail, education, health ...) are too important to be left in the hands of greedy and reckless capitalist profiteers. Am I right?

Then in another political masterstroke Starmer bragged to Andrew Marr that he would lie to people again if he thought it would win him more political power, proving that he's every bit as dishonest as Boris Johnson, but somehow even more open and upfront about being a cynical and opportunistic political liar than the bloviating oaf.

If anyone deserved to be shown that Labour's not the political party for them, it's people who are sick of being lied to by politicians, isn't it?

After winning the Labour leadership election Keir Starmer immediately binned all of his pro-Remain posturing, rubber stamped Boris Johnson's shambolic Brexit mess, and pledged never to try to make any substantial improvements to it.

And if anyone needed to be shown that the Labour Party delights in betraying them, it's stupid gullible Remainiacs who thought Britain made a mistake in quitting the EU in a hailstorm of Tory jingoism, incompetence, and hubris. Am I right?

After he cleverly cheated his way to the top of the party Starmer immediately brought in new leadership election rules to make sure the Labour Party would always be led by people like him. We all rolled around laughing at the way his new rules would have excluded every person of colour who has ever stood to be Labour leader, as well as all but two of the women who have ever been nominated too, including both of the women who had the temerity to stand against him in 2020.

If anyone needed to be given a right good kicking by the Labour Party it's uppity women and pesky people of colour isn't it?

One of the absolute best things about Starmer is the way he's finally got to grips with antisemitism.

Instead of endlessly apologising and desperately trying to get the right-wing dominated Labour Party bureaucracy to deal with antisemitism allegations in a quick and efficient manner like his disgraced predecessor, Starmer's playing an absolute blinder by having his goons systematically accuse left-wing Jews of being self-hating antisemites, and driving more Jews out of the Labour Party than any Labour leader in history!

After the shambles of the Corbyn years, Starmer honestly doesn't get enough credit for turning Labour into an institutionally antisemitic party that weaponises the antisemitic "self-hating Jew" trope to bully and exclude scores of Jews.

And if anyone needed to be subjected to systematic persecution by Starmer's Labour Party it's the Jews isn't it?

Another of Starmer's great achievements is his development of an excellent "Hierarchy of Racism" within the Labour Party, and making Labour a Hostile Environment for people of colour. Imagine the balls it takes to block 19 mainly Black and Asian Labour councillors from seeking re-election in Britain's most multicultural city of Leicester, after having deliberately thrown the Forde Report and all of its anti-racism recommendations in the bin! 

Starmer is a man who takes a no-nonsense approach to telling Black and Asian voters that Labour isn't the party for them, and he deserves a lot of credit for it.

Not only is Starmer doing a wonderful job of maintaining a "Hierarchy of Racism", he's also brought back all the anti-immigrant mug people like Yvette Cooper who so wisely abstained on Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment in 2014, facilitating the Windrush scandal and the systematic abuse of thousands of Black and Asian Brits across the country.

And if anyone needed to be made unwelcome in Starmer's Brave New Labour Party it's Windrush Brits and those stupid, annoying anti-racists, isn't it?

Another of Starmer's major political achievements was driving anyone with any kind of socially liberal principles out of his shadow cabinet by instructing them to abstain on Tory legislation to give impunity to rape cops, and to those who commit war crimes in British military uniforms.

If anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of wishy washy social liberal who thinks British soldiers shouldn't be committing war crimes, and that undercover cops shouldn't be tricking unsuspecting women into having sexual relationships with them. Am I right?

Another of Starmer's triumphs was banning several Labour-affiliated organisations, and then retroactively purging loads of Labour Party members for having shared links and social media posts in the times before they were banned.

It's genuinely hilarious that Labour is led by a lawyer who clearly detests the concept of due process, and if anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of naive idiot who believes in fairness and natural justice, isn't it?

One of the best things about Starmer is the way he's actively turned his back on ordinary workers in the midst of an unprecedented inflation crisis. He's absolutely right to ignore the pleas of British workers who have simply had it too easy for too long, and fully deserve to have their living standards eroded away by inflation and capitalist greed. It's not like the founding principle of the Labour Party was to represent the interests of workers in the corridors of power, is it?

And if anyone needed to to be shown the cold shoulder by the Labour Party it's those tiresome workers and irksome trade unionists, isn't it?

And Keir's made it absolutely clear that when he tries to drag Britain into another foolish, unwinnable, and unlawful war of aggression, he'll viciously purge anyone within the Labour Party who tries to warn him not to.

If anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of pathetic snowflake who thinks Britain shouldn't be arming apartheid states and blood-soaked tyrannies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, or creating terrorism breeding grounds and vast refugee crises by reducing foreign countries to rubble, isn't it?

Another of Keir's genius moves was to get a trendy bunch of London image consultants to tell him to try to trick working class people into voting for him with a fascism-adjacent ultranationalist propaganda blitz of "flags, family, and fatherlandism", before rigging Labour selection processes to exclude working class people in favour of the kind of upper middle class, comfortably wealthy liberal-capitalists the Labour Party is meant to be represented by.

If anyone needed to be patronised like a bunch of idiots and excluded from participation in the Parliamentary Labour Party, it's the working class, isn't it?

You have to applaud Starmer's judgement in appointing a private health bankrolled lickspittle like Wes Streeting as his shadow health minister, and allowing him to publicly attack NHS workers and repeatedly spout NHS privatisation propaganda.

If anyone needed to be completely disillusioned by the Labour Party it's those daft idiots who love the NHS, and consider it the finest achievement of any Labour government in history, isn't it?

These awful leftists have tried to claim that Starmer's politics is just reheated Blairism, but this is incredibly unfair. In 1997 Blair stupidly tried to give people hope that Britain deserved better than Tory sleaze, chaos and continued national decline, and he foolishly tolerated alternative views within the Labour ranks, allowing the likes of Tony Benn, Robin Cook, and Jeremy Corbyn to defy him over the Iraq invasion, without even mercilessly hounding them out of the party to create a closed ideological echo chamber like Starmer obviously would have done.

Keir Starmer is just a man with the the downright good sense to tell centrists exactly what they want to hear? "We're lying to you, we don't care, nothing is going to get better, and we're just going to be marginally more competent than the Tories at managing Britain's inevitable economic decline", and he deserves a lot of credit for that.

So it's sickening to see all these Jews, people of colour, socialists, trade unionists, social progressives, and Remainers queuing up to air their petty grievances about being lied to and abused by Starmer's Labour when people have been saying literally the most horrible things about our beloved leader.

They've called him "The Silent Knight", and "Keith Stalin", and "a haircut in a suit", and they've even deliberately misspelled his name as "Kier"!

Just think about the pain and trauma these awful people have caused to poor old Keir with their horrible mouth words ... and then they have the absolute temerity to whine that they're merely being systematically purged, marginalised, discriminated against, abused, and ignored!

Have they no sense of perspective?

Keir Starmer is like a 1997 era Tony Blair without any of the useless and unimportant things like charisma, inspiration, oratory skills, verve, or tolerance of other people's opinions.

All in all, he's an absolute dream boat for sensible liberal-capitalist centrists isn't he?

It's as clear as day that Keir Starmer is so much more than a "boring haircut in a suit". He's as dishonest, vindictive, and profoundly unlikeable as politicians get, and isn't this exactly the kind of person that us Brits demonstrably love to be ruled over by?

And who could possibly doubt Starmer's genius strategy of driving away pesky, annoying, and unimportant minorities like:

• People who wanted the UK to leave the EU
• People who wanted the UK to remain in the EU
• People who are sick of political liars
• Workers
• The trade unionists who actually fund the Labour Party
• The clear majority of Brits who believe in public ownership
• People who disapprove of rape cops and war criminals
• Genuine socialists
• 200,000+ Labour Party members and activists
• People who don't want Britain to repeat horrifying foreign policy disasters like Iraq
• Social progressives
• The working class
• People who believe in democracy and natural justice
• People who love the NHS and respect NHS workers
• Anti-racists
• Women
• People of colour
• Jews

In order to appeal exclusively to important core political demographics like:

• Comfortably wealthy Guardian hacks on six figure salaries
• Fading celebrities who remember their receding heydays coinciding with Blairism
• Liberal-capitalist twonks who support political liars, as long as it's their political liar
• Billionaire capitalists, media moguls, and private health profiteers
• "Soft Tories" who want vicious, dishonest, radical-right neoliberalism that's just a fraction less malicious than the Tories themselves

The man's a misunderstood political genius, and there's no way that the British public could ever be foolish enough to believe that they deserve better.

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Why is Starmer so intent on reanimating the corpse of late-stage Blairism?

Keir Starmer’s inner circle is heavily dominated by Blairite loyalists. That’s a pretty indisputable assertion right?

Starmer’s Blair-hagiography of a Conference Speech made it absolutely clear that he’s worshipping at the altar of Blairism (to anyone who had the misfortune of actually listening to it at least).

And to match his words with actions, it’s also crystal clear from his strategy of removing and demoting the soft-left, which has followed his purge of all the genuine socialists and social liberals from his so called “unity cabinet” (via his depraved loyalty tests of whipping Labour MPs to abstain on vile Tory stuff like rape cops and war crime impunity, and booting them out of his cabinet if they refused).

One of the most interesting aspects of this Blairite involvement in Starmer’s vapid form of managerialist posture politics is the way they fail to even recognise the way Starmer has been imitating the failing late-stage Blairism that ended up driving millions of traditional Labour voters away, rather than the exciting early Blairism that promised to do away with a shambolic and sleaze ridden Tory government, that should surely have been removed from power at least half a decade previously.

In order to make the case that they’re imitating the wrong kind of Blairism, it’s necessary to admit that Blair and his government actually got some things right, which I’ve always been willing to do.

The increased investment in public services that began in 1997 was a damned-sight better than the privatisation-obsessed Tory shambles that preceded it, or the economically ruinous austerity extremism that succeeded it.

Other positives included The Good Friday Agreement and improved economic freedom for Scotland and Wales. But it’s the economic investment in infrastructure and services and the living standards increases that are most relevant here. We don’t need to talk about their lamentable policy failings here, because everyone who has even read this far should be well aware of where Blairism went badly wrong.

Blair did some things right to win power and then delivered some good policies in the early years in government ,and the parallels with now are pretty damned obvious. Yet for some absurd reason Starmer and his inner circle are intent on bringing back the hectoring and unpopular late-stage Blairism that drove people away instead.

In 1997 Blair absolutely trounced Major’s Tories by giving people a bit of hope, then he cemented his position in power by being seen to deliver: Rising wages, economic growth, resuscitating the UK’s vandalised social safety net, education, and NHS funding.

So if Starmer and the people who surround him idealise Blair so much, and have so much nostalgia for the Blair years, why aren’t they following Blair’s recipe for electoral success, rather than desperately trying to reanimate the risible and unpopular politics that Labour slumped into after they’d been in power for ages, run out of ideas, and complacently imagined themselves invincible after winning a third straight election, even after creating a disaster like the invasion of Iraq?

Why are they like this?

The answer seems to be that most of the architects and big players in the early Blair years are past it, retired, or deceased, leaving a pathetic residue of obsequious yes people, who were parachuted into positions of power and influence by Blair’s inner circle, without ever having learned where the power actually comes from.

The power comes from the people.

Even in a country like the UK that suffers a hopelessly rigged, archaic, unrepresentative, and decaying democratic institution like Westminster, you have to offer people what they want, rather than overtly mocking and ridiculing their desires for policies that would actually make life just a bit better and fairer for ordinary people.

But the Labour right Blair-loyalists who control the party now have no idea how to offer this, because they were raised in an environment in which it was their job to bend public will to fit the objectives of the Labour government, and to castigate anyone who argued that they should actually be doing things better.

How many of the big figures from Blair’s 1997 triumph are still kicking around? Blair retired to his riches a decade and a half ago. Brown only pops up occasionally. Prescott’s long-gone. Darling, Milburn, Straw, Hoon, and Blunkett are dinosaurs. Beckett and Harman are among the last in still serving in the Commons, and they’re both retiring next time around. Robin Cook, Frank Dobson, Tessa Jowell, Mo Mowlam, and Donald Dewar are all dead. And long-standing Labour Chief Whip Nick Brown has recently been kicked to the sidelines by Starmer.

What’s left of Blairism now is a profoundly unpleasant residue of arrogant and complacent career politicians who mainly got their positions through privilege and patronage, without ever having put in the the hard work of creating genuine public appeal.

Between 2015 and 2019 these second generation Blairites saw Corbyn trying to offer hope, But they clearly thought that he was ‘doing politics wrong’ by trying to appeal to the public, especially his efforts to woo young voters and new demographics who had rarely or never voted before.

As far as they were concerned he should have been offering uninspiring neoliberal gruel,  performing parlour tricks for the media, rehashing the arrogant “this is all you’re getting” stance they cut their political teeth on, and bitterly chastising any objectors for the impertinence of suggesting politicians could and should be doing better.

They were so convinced that Corbyn was wrong, that once they took control of the Labour Party again, they even made it an immediate party priority to  kill off public hopes and aspirations by systematically salting Corbyn’s allotment of policies, and deliberately driving away the hundreds of thousands of politically engaged and active supporters he’d attracted to the cause.

Rather than picking the best and most popular of Corbyn’s policy crop for their own use (investment economics, public ownership of essential infrastructure and services, workers’ rights, higher wages, better education, mass party membership rather than reliance on mega-rich donors ...) and discarding anything they really disliked, they decided to salt the lot, and revert to the only kind of politics they’re familiar with:

Telling people what to think, playing parlour tricks for the media, and chastising the public for daring to want any better from them.

So here’s the challenge for any Blairites who have managed to read this far without suffering fits of rage at the “thoughtcrime” of believing that Labour actually needs to be doing miles better at the moment:

Can you offer a better explanation than mine for why Starmer and his supporters have failed to adopt the positive, vibrant, hope-inspiring and ultimately winning version of Blairism, in favour of trying to reanimate the rotting corpse of late-stage Blairism that the electorate had already had more than enough of 12 years ago?

And more importantly, do you think it’s even possible to make them change course now, after watching them try to flog the same rotting corpse into action for two interminable years?

I mean these are people who steadfastly refused to learn or utilise the power-winning tactics of their own political figurehead before they resumed control over the Labour Party, so what would it actually take to make such a bunch of nitwits suddenly and dramatically improve their game now, after two years of this mind-numbing inertia?

Essays and video clips from from the likes of Another Angry Voice, Novara Media, and Owen Jones certainly aren’t going to wake them up to what they’re doing wrong.

So unless you’re going to sit there and actually try to convince people, including yourself, that these hopelessly inept people aren’t asleep at the wheel, what is it that you need to do to wake them up?

And I say “you do” because they’re only ever going to listen to it from their supporters, if they listen to it from anyone at all. Never from anyone like me.

Do you guys want to wake the sleeping driver? Or do you want to just sit tight, pretend they're doing an excellent job, and hope that everything’s somehow going to work out fine through pure luck?

It’s clearly up to you lot if you want to save your own project from itself, isn’t it?

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How to lose support and alienate people: The Progressive Alliance communication strategy

When attempting to build a broad political coalition you've decided to call "The Progressive Alliance", it may be considered wise not to deliberately antagonise pretty much anyone with vaguely progressive or left-leaning views ... but there's no telling liberal capitalist aggro-centrists how to do political communication is there?

• Liberal capitalists laid the groundwork for Brexit by propping up the ruinous Austerity Coalition, which caused the unprecedented wage collapse, failing public services, the housing crisis, and the devastating under-investment that the Brexiteers then cynically weaponised by blaming on immigrants and the EU.

• They delivered their own worst nightmare of Brexit with their condescending and ineffective "jobs for the boys" non-campaign.

• They blew probably the best opportunity ever to hammer the Tories by turning the Brexit referendum result into an excuse to launch a bitter factionalist coup to get rid of Labour's democratically elected leader instead!

• Then they handed the keys of Downing Street to Boris Johnson by turning the 2019 General Election into a rerun of the Brexit referendum they'd already lost. 

If these people has 1% of the strategic capabilities they imagine themselves to have, we wouldn't be in anything like as much of a mess as a nation, but they will keep insisting that tepid, unappealing, liberal capitalist gruel must be the only alternative to radically right-wing conservative capitalist poison.

A lot of the People's Vote campaigners who invested so much work in throwing the 2019 general election have respawned themselves as The Progressive Alliance, which apparently aims to remove the Tories from power by building an astonishingly unlikely political coalition.

I won't spend too much time explaining why it's so unlikely, you just have to consider the vitriolic anti-SNP bile in Keir Starmer's much-lauded Labour conference speech to understand that the Labour right detest the SNP Westminster-outsiders infinitely more than they mildly disapprove of their Tory Westminster brethren.

Anyway. Onto the astonishing infographic in the article header image.

This is a real thing, that was actually designed and approved by Progressive Alliance people, and posted on their social media accounts (here's the link on Facebook, at least until they delete it).

"But The Lib-Dems went into coalition with the Tories"

The Progressive Alliance may try to trivialise this with the misleading claim that it all happened "a decade ago" when the Lib-Dems were still enabling Tory malice will into 2015, and the Brexiteer-style cry of "get over it", but the fact is that the ruinous Austerity Coalition imposed a shocking range of anti-progressive policies that are still causing devastating social and economic consequences today. 

What's more, the Lib-Dems are completely unapologetic about it, to the extent that they picked one of the very worst Tory-collaborators, Ed Davey, as their their new leader, when they had the chance to turn over a new leaf with the much more progressive Layla Moran.

The message here is that if you're horrified by austerity ruination; systematic "fit for work" disability persecution; Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment and the ensuing the Windrush scandal; the worst period of wage repression in recorded history; unlawful Tribunal Fees; the Royal Mail scam and £billions in other privatisation rip-offs; the student loan betrayal; the brutal social security sanctions regime; arms sales to tyrants, despots and war criminals; privatising literally thousands of schools into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers; devastating local government cuts; economically illiterate cuts to the drivers of future economic prosperity (education, infrastructure, R&D); or any of the other profoundly anti-progressive policies enacted between 2010 and 2015, you can just piss off, because this lot don't want your vote.

"Jeremy Corbyn is no longer Labour leader"

The logic of attacking Jeremy Corbyn supporters and socialists in general is unclear.

Apparently sneering at them with the Brexiteer style slogan "he lost, get over it" is going to magically win them over to the Progressive Alliance cause!

Who cares that Corbyn was demonised by the press and repeatedly sabotaged from within his own party, purely for promoting progressive social and economic policies?

If you supported Corbyn's policy platform, you can also piss off, because the so-called Progressive Alliance don't want your vote!

"Blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair blah blah Iraq"

The UK government ignored the legitimate concerns of millions of British people, illegally invaded another country, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a refugee crisis of millions.

They triggered a cycle of terrorist violence that spread throughout the target country, across the entire region, and eventually culminated in terrorist atrocities across Europe perpetrated by the ISIS fanatics that metastasised out the lawless terrorism breeding grounds that Tony Blair and his ilk created in Iraq.

"Blah blah jabber jabber ... get over it": What an arrogant and offensive way to dismiss legitimate concerns over one of modern Britain's most horrific foreign policy catastrophes! 

If you're the kind of progressively-minded person who opposed the Iraq war, the so-called Progressive Alliance clearly hold your political opinions in the same regard as dog much on their shoes, they simply don't want your vote.

"The Lib-Dems will just flounce off with the Tories"

They want to re-argue point one over again, just to make their list look longer, but the essence of their case is that we should just trust the Lib-Dems this time, despite them being led by one of the worst Lib-Dem ministers in the ruinous Austerity Coalition!

This is less an effort to tell potential voters to piss off, more of a desperate appeal to the astonishingly gullible!

"But Keith ... [insert politically illiterate rant here]"

Ah right.

listen up!

Anyone who has any concerns whatever about Keir Starmer's pathetic abstention of a leadership so far; his broken pledges; his obsession with factionalist infighting; his campaign of abuse against left-wing and socially progressive Jews; his repeated purges of left-wing and progressive voices out of his shadow cabinet; his abject failure to hold the Tory government to account; his repeated abstentions on sickeningly anti-progressive pieces of Tory legislation like the Rape Cops Bill; or even just his robotic lack of charisma.

You can all piss off too!

"I will always vote for [party] out of loyalty"

Nobody doubts that tribal voters exist, but has anyone ever uttered such an unconvincing phrase to say that they won't tactically vote to get the Tories out?

I guess if we're expected to believe that people said "blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair jabber jabber Iraq". we're expected to believe anything!

And as for pointless tribally motivated voting, what about all the liberal capitalist dweebs who went out and belligerently voted Lib-Dem and Green in ultra tight Labour-Tory marginals in 2019, despite Labour caving in and offering them the sore loser referendum they said they wanted?

Loads of these people, who helped create a Tory mega-majority, have now quietly thrown away their "People's Vote" outfits, and come back wearing "Progressive Alliance" garb, to tell other people how to vote!

Conclusion

Given the shockingly outdated and unrepresentative Westminster voting system, I tend to agree with tactical voting, and have voted tactically myself in the past.

People like me should be the natural target audience for a campaign like The Progressive Alliance, but for whatever reason they've decided to tell me to "piss off" four different ways, taken me for a gullible idiot, and insulted my intelligence, all in a single infographic!

They're clearly more concerned with laundering the reputations of their liberal capitalist idols like Tory Blair, the Lib-Dem austerity enablers, the right-wing Labour saboteurs, and the democracy-defying CUK squatters, who all helped turn people away from progressive politics in different ways. and installed Boris Johnson in Downing Street, than in actually building a broad coalition of progressive and left-wing people.

If our hopes of a better future rely on the strategic capabilities of this lot, we're clearly doomed to Tory rule forever!

 

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Tony Blair hasn't got a leg to stand on when it comes to "moderate values"

On September 6th 2018 the Tony Blair Institute published accounts that confirmed earlier reports of payments from Saudi Arabia of up to £12 million, then the very next day he was given a slot on Radio 4 to attack the Jeremy Corbyn and the current Labour Party leadership, and to pretend that the right-wing Labour faction are somehow "moderates".

What everyone should know about Saudi Arabia

• Saudi Arabia is one of the most tyrannical regimes on earth which is ruled over by a large extended family of royal figures who enrich themselves on the vast oil wealth of the territory, whilst slave labour is rife in the kingdom.

• Saudi Arabia is a profoundly misogynistic society. Until recently women were not even allowed to drive cars. Under current Saudi law all women are subject to the male guardianship law, which means they are barred from travel, education, access to public services, employment, opening a bank account, and even medical procedures without the permission of their male guardian (typically a father, brother, husband, or uncle).

• Saudi Arabia is one of the many extremely homophobic regimes in the Muslim world where homosexuality carries a death sentence. Even the UK government's own website makes it clear that it's incredibly risky for gay or transgender people to visit Saudi Arabia.

• Saudi Arabia is the epicentre of extremist Salafi Islamist terrorism. 15 of the 19 September 11th attackers were Saudis. Saudi Arabia supplies arms, fighters, finance, and supplies to Islamist terrorist groups across North Africa and the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is also the biggest source of pro-ISIS Internet propaganda. The Saudi's are also suspected of promoting and funding Islamist terrorism in the UK too (but Theresa May and the Tories are still hiding the report).

• The Saudi Arabian regime is violently opposed to democratic values and multiple Saudi citizens have been sentenced to death by beheading and/or crucifixion for the "crime" of attending non-violent pro-democracy protests.

• Saudi Arabia is currently committing horrific war crimes in Yemen. Aside from their use of British and American weapons to attack civilian targets, they're also using starvation and disease as weapons through their ongoing blockades of food and medical supplies, and their deliberate targeting of public facilities like water treatment plants.

The hypocrisy of Tony Blair

Just imagine having the brass neck to accept £millions in donations from probably the most illiberal regime on the planet, then attempt to lecture the British public on the importance of "moderate values" as an effort to get rid of one of the only political leaders in Europe who dares to stand up to the Saudi tyrants, rather than raking in donations from them like Blair does.

Despite knowing that the Saudi tyrants are using British weapons to commit war crimes in Yemen, the Tory government continues issuing £billions worth of arms export licences to them, something that Jeremy Corbyn says he would put a stop to if Labour come to power.

Conflict of interests

So here we have a man who has raked in £12 million from the Saudi tyrants actively propagandising against another man who is promising to harden Britain's relationship with them, and stop selling them weapons to commit their war crimes with.

Doesn't it strike you as rather a serious conflict of interests that a man who is essentially working for Saudi Arabia is pushing their interests by creating the fiction that the right-wing pro-Saudi faction of the Labour Party are the ones with "moderate" values, while Jeremy Corbyn and the majority of Labour Party members who are disgusted by Saudi Arabia's lack of human rights at home, and their war crimes abroad are the scary extremists?

Interestingly the BBC didn't quiz Blair over his £multi-million donations from Saudi Arabia during the interview, or ask him whether he considered it a conflict of interests that he's taking their cash whilst simultaneously propagandising against one of the only politicians in the western world who dares stand up to them*.

Reality-reversal

Aside from the hypocrisy and conflict of interests, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Tony Blair's latest attack of Jeremy Corbyn is the fact that it relies on such a transparent reversal of reality.

What Tony Blair is trying to convince us to accept is the idea that the kind of people who cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and a massive lawless terrorism breeding ground through the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq are moderates while those who opposed it are scary extremists.

That the people who take cash and gifts from the Saudi tyrants in return for supporting arms sales to the war crime-committing regime are the moderates, while those who oppose selling arms to tyrants to commit war crimes with are the disgusting extremists.

That people who support the orthodox neoliberal status quo that has enriched corporations and the incredibly wealthy at the expense of everyone else (through austerity dogma, wage repression, undermined workers' rights, public service cutbacks, financial sector deregulation, social mobility barriers like tuition fees, tax cuts for the rich, social security cuts for the poor) are the moderates while those who seek to make Britain a fairer place are the nasty extremists.

It just goes to show that Blair still hasn't moved on from the days of "weapons of mass destruction" and his contemptuous belief that people are idiots who can be lied to and tricked over and again without clocking the truth.

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* = Credit to Justin Trudeau in Canada who triggered Saudi economic sanctions and even threats of terrorism against Canada for daring to push them on their despicable human rights record. Also credit to the left-leaning Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for cancelling the supply of 400 guided missiles to the Saudi tyrants.

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.

 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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Why is Nigel Farage suddenly talking in favour of a second EU referendum?

The former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has propelled himself back into the headlines by announcing that he's coming around to the idea of a second referendum on EU membership.

This is obviously quite a sensational announcement given the absolute bile Brexiters generally fling at people who suggest that perhaps the British people deserve a democratic vote once the terms and conditions of Brexit are actually known.

Most Brexiters strongly resist the idea of a second referendum because they know that the 2016 referendum was a freak result, won with a tiny minority against a backdrop of collapsing public services and stagnating wages caused by ruinous Tory austerity dogma.

Brextremists are understandably afraid that a second vote would result in a reversal of Brexit, especially in light of Theresa May's catastrophic, increasingly unpopular, and profoundly anti-democratic handling of the Brexit process so far.

The fact that Farage is going against the position held by the majority of Brexiters by suggesting a second referendum raises the obvious question of why?

If we take Farage at his word, he's claiming that a cancel-Brexit campaign fronted by the likes of Tony Blair and Nick Clegg would fail spectacularly, and anyone with a grain of political sense must be able to realise that Clegg and Blair are now so politically toxic they would undoubtedly damage any 2nd Remain campaign by association.

However, it's also worth noting that the likely leaders of the 2nd Leave campaign would also be politically toxic too. Only a fool would put their trust in the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove after their "£350 for the NHS" lies, and Theresa May would be at the forefront of the whole 2nd Brexit campaign trying to argue in favour of whatever lamentable deal she's managed to cobble together.

Even taking into account the fact that Blair and Clegg are politically toxic, a second EU referendum campaign looks like an almighty risk for Brexiters, given that their likely figureheads are just as politically toxic as the their opponents.

Aside from saying that he's coming around to the idea of a second referendum, Farage said something else telling. He said that the idea of a multiple choice referendum would confuse the British people.

This is interesting because he's clearly envisioning a binary choice between just two options.

Obviously the hard-right Brextremist mob have jumped on this idea saying that the choice should be a fake Brexit or Brexit choice between whatever hard-right Tory Brexit Theresa May manages to cobble together, and a totally catastrophic "no deal" flounce out of the EU.

But this kind of ridiculous false choice is clearly not what Farage has in mind, because it's impossible that Blair or Clegg would front either of those campaigns.

Farage clearly wants to re-fight the battle all over again and win a decisive Brexit victory against those who wish to remain in the EU.

This is interesting because it indicates that he's willing to shackle himself to whatever deal Theresa May and her three Brexiteer charlatans come up with. This seems like a pretty bold gamble given the chaotic and incompetent shambles the Tories have been making of the Brexit process so far.

Farage also doesn't seem to have considered the fact that that a second Brexit vote could be seen as a way of slapping the government in the face. 

Just as huge numbers of people saw the 2016 Brexit vote as an ideal opportunity to slap David Cameron and George Osborne in the face by voting Brexit, a second referendum could easily be seen as a means of slapping Theresa May in the face, but this time by voting to lob her chaotic Brexit shambles onto the scrapheap.

One of the more compelling explanations behind Farage's U-turn on the idea of a second referendum is pure self-interest.

Ever since Farage felt the euphoria of winning the Brexit vote in June 2016 his star has been fading. He's gone from being a leader of one of the most consequential political rebellions in decades to begging unsuccessfully to be made Donald Trump's butler, backing Marine Le Pen's failed National Front presidential bid in France, speaking at extreme-right rallies in Germany, and backing an alleged paedophile who actually managed to lose an election for the Republicans in Alabama!

Perhaps Farage wants a second referendum because he wants to be back in the limelight again?

Then there's Farage's financial backer Arron Banks who managed to build up a huge social media propaganda empire through the last EU referendum. Unlike the official Vote Leave campaign that folded up after the 2016 referendum, Banks' Leave.EU operation has continued churning out extreme-right propaganda and links to Banks' own Westmonster propaganda site ever since.

A second referendum campaign would obviously allow Banks to further expand his extreme-right propaganda empire, no matter what the final result.

All in all Farage's confidence that a second referendum would result in a landslide for Brexit seems massively over-optimistic given that such a scenario would offer the British public a chance to step back from the cliff edge, and to give Theresa May a massive slap in the face in the process.

However, whether Farage is motivated by exuberant over-confidence, or by self-interest, or just by a desperation to push himself back into the limelight, one thing is for sure; whether he intended it or not he's done a huge favour to those of us who believe democracy would be better served by a serious and properly informed Brexit referendum once the terms and conditions have been made clear, than by the hastily rushed and profoundly dishonest farce of a debate that happened in 2016.

Like him or not, Farage has completely shattered the Brextremist trope that a second referendum would be anti-democratic and against "the will of the people", because we now have one of the leading Brexiteers arguing that a second referendum would actually be a democratic opportunity to decide the situation once and for all.

 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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