Tom Watson's declaration of war on Labour Party democracy

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.

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The Labour Party edict banning the word "Blairite"

It has been reported that the Labour Party establishment have decided to ban Labour Party members from using the word "Blairite" under threat of being barred from voting in the upcoming leadership election.

According to a report on the Croydon Today website the word "Blairite" has been added to "the list of proscribed words, apparently provided by Labour HQ which was read out to a meeting of party members in Croydon last week".

We already know that just like they did in 2015, minions at Labour Party HQ are busy trawling the social media accounts of people who signed up to vote in the Labour Leadership election in search of "thought crime" such as previous support for the Green Party*, so it will be no surprise if they start weeding out anyone who has ever referred to the likes of Peter Mandelson, Ian Austin, John McTernan, Hillary Benn, Tristram Hunt and other Labour right-wingers as what they are: "Blairites".

Interestingly the edict from Labour Party HQ hasn't banned Labour right-wingers from using slanderous, misleading and downright abusive terms like "trots", "infiltrators", "extremists", "thugs", "dogs", "brick-lobbers", "quasi-Marxists", "entryists", "cultists", "communists" and "bullies" to describe the 300,000+ new members from all ages, areas and demographic groups attracted to the Labour Party since Jeremy Corbyn burst onto the scene in the summer of 2015.

As far as the Labour Party establishment are concerned it's perfectly fine for Labour right-wingers to severely damage the reputation of the party by referring to hundreds of thousands of their own party members with vicious and inaccurate slurs, yet anyone who refers to Tony Blair acolytes as the "Blairites" that they actually are has committed such a severe crime that they could be stripped of their right to vote in the leadership election!

I'm not, and never have been a Labour Party member so I'm not afraid of saying what I see. The right-wing Labour coup-plotters like Hillary Benn, Tristram Hunt, Will Straw, John McTernan and their ilk are a bunch of Blairites doing their master's bidding. 

Tony Blair clearly explained that he'd rather the Tories win the next General Election than allow Jeremy Corbyn to have a chance of success, and the coup-plotters are behaving exactly like brainwashed members of a cult by committing mass suicide because their demagogue has demanded of them. They would rather destroy the Labour Party and their own political careers in the process than go against the will of their leader.

In trying to bully Jeremy Corbyn into resignation so that they didn't have to fight him in a leadership election, making sinister anonymous threats to split the party or to paralyse it with one leadership challenge after another, they're clearly acting like bullies.

It's pretty obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of British politics that the Blairites are the "entryists" who took over a left-wing political party and switched it to the promotion of Rupert Murdoch approved Thatcherism (driving away 5 million Labour voters between 1997 and 2010 in the process).

It's remarkable how so many of the terms of abuse that the Labour right-wingers hurl at Jeremy Corbyn supporters ("bullies", "infiltrators", "cultists", "entryists") are so much more applicable to themselves than the victims of their slurs, but that's how psychological bullies operate. They project their own disgusting character traits onto their victims, and then continually blame their victims for the abuse they subject them to. 

I can say what I like because these bullies can't punish me for expressing my opinions. If you are a Labour Party member or supporter who wants to vote for Jeremy Corbyn it's a different story. You should be very careful to moderate your language to comply with the demands of the Labour Party thought police. Their decision to expel some 130,000 Labour Party members from voting in the leadership election and their complete lockdown on local party democracy are very clear indicators that the Blairite riddled Labour Party establishment are terrified of democracy and will go to extraordinary lengths to deny ordinary Labour Party members their right to vote. 

This abject fear of democracy and free speech, and their desperate efforts to rig the leadership election in favour of their Anyone But Corbyn candidate is a perfect illustration of why it is so important for Labour Party members to ensure that these people don't get to take over the Labour Party again.

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* = One would have thought that attracting supporters and members from other political parties would have been a core objective of any party intent on increasing their share of the vote, but it appears that the only supporters of other parties the Blairites are intent on attracting are Tories!

Why Tristram Hunt and his ilk are far more of an electoral liability than Jeremy Corbyn

It was no surprise at all to see that the out-of-touch and elitist Labour Party MP Tristram Hunt was quick to throw his support behind the anti-democratic and unbelievably poorly timed "chicken coup" attempt against the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

It's no surprise that Hunt chose to back the coup because he had spent the last ten months since Corbyn's landslide victory in the Labour leadership election throwing petulant tantrums on the sidelines because the Labour Party membership voted for Corbyn (59.5%) rather than his own favoured candidate from the right-wing fringe of the Labour Party Liz Kendall (who ended up in last place with just 4.5% of the vote).

As soon as the coup attempt started unfolding Hunt was quick to publish an open letter lambasting Jeremy Corbyn for failing to do enough to return a vote for Remain, and demanding his resignation.

The polling evidence suggests that Jeremy Corbyn actually delivered 63% of the Labour Party vote for Remain (just 1% less than the SNP), which is a decent achievement considering the fact that the Labour Remain case was seriously undermined by a Labour Leave campaign that was massively bankrolled by millionaire Tories (funnily enough Hunt didn't reserve any of his Brexit anger for them).

A look at the EU referendum result in Tristram Hunt's constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central reveals that 69.4% of people voted for Leave, which was the 15th highest Leave vote in the entire country!

Talk about trying to shift the blame for your own failings!

This landslide of Leave voters in his own constituency demonstrates that Tristram Hunt is terribly out of step with his constituents. He clearly failed to mobilise the Remain vote in his own constituency, which is hardly surprising given the fact that he's an Oxbridge elitist who was parachuted into a working-class Labour Party safe seat, meaning he has very little in common with the people he's supposed to represent.

Tristram Hunt is the kind of guy who actually sneers at the hopes and aspirations of "little people" like his constituents. His vision for the future of the Labour Party is that it should be led by Oxbridge 1%ers like him, not by people from ordinary backgrounds like the vast majority of his constituents.

Aside from the fact that Hunt clearly failed to mobilise the Remain vote in his own constituency making his criticism of Jeremy Corbyn look more than a bit hypocritical, there's also the fact that his whinging about Brexit makes it look like he's not remotely interested in listening to his constituents or understanding why they voted for Leave in such overwhelming numbers. Hunt is clearly far more interested in scoring political points against the leader of his own party (who he has worked tirelessly to undermine since day one) than working to understand the anger and frustration that drove so many traditional Labour voters to vote Leave.

Dismissive attitudes like that from elitist Labour MPs like Tristram Hunt are precisely the kind of thing that ends up driving traditional Labour voters into the arms of Thatcherite snake oil merchants like UKIP.

Perhaps the most ridiculous part of Hunt's coup supporting letter was his assertion that "Labour urgently needs to play the role of effective opposition", which in his mind is apparently best achieved by immediately paralysing the Labour Party with an attempted anti-democratic coup against the leader, then a week long refusal to put up a candidate to take him on in a democratic contest!

It's beyond obvious that coup supporters like Tristram Hunt wanted to bully Corbyn into resigning because they knew that their Anyone But Corbyn candidate would get annihilated if a strategically inept, insincere, gaffe-prone political water carrier like Angela Eagle is anywhere near the top of the list for consideration. Now they're delaying and delaying because Corbyn's refusal to be bullied into resignation has backed them into a corner. They have to put up a candidate, but they don't have anyone even remotely capable of beating Corbyn in a democratic vote.

Instead of playing the role of effective opposition, the actions of MPs like Tristram Hunt have created an paralysing impasse. Hunt said he wanted to achieve one thing, but his actions resulted in the polar opposite.

If Hunt was capable of listening to his own advice, then as soon as the vote for Brexit became clear, he would have been demanding that the Labour Party speak with a unified voice in condemnation of David Cameron's failed gamble with the entire future of the UK and the blatant lack of a Tory plan of action for what comes next.

Even if this display of Labour Party unity had only lasted a few weeks, until the public narrative that Brexit was caused by Cameron's gamble was set firm, it would have been good for the party, and very good for the future leadership prospects of whichever Labour MPs made the loudest criticisms of the Tories.

Instead, out-of-touch MPs like Tristram Hunt were so giddy with excitement at the perceived opportunity to launch their pre-planned plot to depose their own leader that they completely failed to consider the wider perspective and ended up kicking the Labour Party down into the hole the Tories had just dug for themselves.

The decision to damage the Labour Party so seriously and then back themselves into a corner, instead just of unifying behind their leader (even if only temporarily) could end up being the eventual undoing of out-of-touch Labour Party elitists like Tristram Hunt. If Jeremy Corbyn fights his re-election campaign on a platform of allowing constituents to democratically deselect Labour MPs who fail to represent their interests (through greed, corruption, adherence to right-wing economic ideology, or petulant efforts to undermine the Labour Party), out-of-touch Labour MPs like Tristram Hunt could find themselves cleared out and replaced with other people who are more interested in actually representing the interests of the people who elected them.

Jeremy Corbyn clearly isn't the main problem with the Labour Party. The main problem is that it is riddled with right-wing out-of-touch elitists like Tristram Hunt who have been parachuted into safe Labour seats where they have nothing in common with the people they're supposed to represent. 

Not only have Hunt and his ilk spent the last 10 months petulantly undermining the Labour Party leadership at every opportunity, it's also no wonder that people feel that the Labour Party no longer represents their interests when their MP, with whom they have practically nothing in common, isn't even remotely interested why they actually voted Leave in such huge numbers, but instead is intent only on using the Brexit vote as ammunition to attack his own party leader with.

The Labour Party doesn't need to urgently rid itself of Jeremy Corbyn, it needs to rid itself of out-of-touch, right-wing, elitist Labour MPs like Tristram Hunt who clearly don't give the faintest damn about the views of their constituents.

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The ineptitude of the failed Corbyn coup

The most interesting thing about the failed anti-democratic attempt to bully Jeremy Corbyn into resigning as Labour leader (just 10 months after he was elected with the biggest democratic mandate of any UK party leader in history) is the sheer ineptitude of it.

If there was anything that the Blairite New Labour movement was undeniably good at in its heyday, it was stage managing the news agenda. They were masters at it. The glib soundbites, the cultivation of links between the party top brass and the press pack, the schmoozing with Rupert Murdoch, the pre-written editorials fed to the hacks to be lazily churnalised into newspaper column inches, the showy and modernistic presentation. In fact I'd say that stage management of the news agenda was the single most significant hallmark of the Blair years.

Damn, they were so persuasive that they even managed to convince about half the country that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was going to be a great idea!*

The remarkable thing about the pre-planned anti-democratic coup against Jeremy Corbyn was the sheer ineptitude of it. Not only did the Blairites carefully pre-planned operation leave their target still standing after they threw everything they had at him in a 24 hour "blitz", their explanatory narratives made no sense whatever and they left a trail of incriminating evidence all over the place.

Pre-planning

The coup was pre-planned. There is absolutely no doubt about that. The people who were planning it were so confident of success that they even briefed the Daily Telegraph about their plot to overthrow Corbyn ten days before the referendum result was even announced!

The fact the coup was pre-planned blew a large hole in the narrative that Corbyn had to be ousted because of his supposedly weak EU referendum arguments ruining the Remain campaign. In order for that narrative to make sense, the plotters would have had to have known the result of the referendum in advance, which they couldn't have done.

The Canary have done some sterling investigative work into the shady network of dodgy PR companies stuffed full of Blairites, shell companies, BBC collusion and so forth who are implicated in the coup attempt. It was inept enough to leave such a trail of evidence to follow up on, but the sheer hubris of telling the newspapers what they were going to do ten days before they did it looks like the kind of PR cock-up that Blair, Mandelson, Campbell and the like worked strenuously to avoid during their time at the top.

Apparently the methods are pretty much the same as classic Blairism, but the execution has become sloppy, over-confident and bizarrely incompetent.

A big misjudgement

Whatever the reason they decided to gamble on Corbyn caving in and resigning, it backfired terribly when he refused to go and defiantly challenged them to put up a candidate in a democratic election.

Perhaps the people who orchestrated this anti-democratic coup attempt believed their own propaganda a little too much? They'd spent the last 10 months, ever since Corbyn was elected as leader, briefing the press that he's a such weak leader, so maybe they thought he'd just meekly capitulate to their stage managed coup attempt?

Whatever the reason for this over-confident assumption that Jeremy Corbyn would simply roll over and resign (betraying the 250,000 Labour members who voted for him just ten months previously as a consequence), they got it badly wrong and put themselves in a terrible bind.

They've been scrabbling around looking for for their ideal "Anyone But Corbyn" candidate to stand in an election that Corbyn is almost certain to win, especially given the way he's attracted so many new people to the party that it's literally doubled in membership since he became the star of the Labour leadership election last summer.

An additional problem for them is the fact that 60,000 people have joined the Labour Party in the week since the attempted coup plot was launched. Anyone imagining that the majority of them are people enthused about voting for the as-yet-unnamed ABC candidate must be as delusional as the bunch of Labour MPs who actually seem to consider a low-profile, strategically inept, gaffe prone, insincere, iraq war approving political water carrier like Angela Eagle to be more electable than Jeremy Corbyn.

By putting themselves in a position where Jeremy Corbyn can take them on in re-election which he will almost certainly win with an even bigger mandate, they've clearly endangered themselves dramatically. Corbyn had demonstrated that he was willing to work with them and allow them to survive within the party, but by trying to stab him in the back and missing, they've now given him the chance to run a leadership election based on giving constituencies the right to deselect corrupt/right-wing/venal/self-serving/party damaging MPs and replacing them with people who might do a better job of actually representing their constituents interests rather than their own.

Just like David Cameron's EU referendum gamble, the Blairite coup gamble has backfired spectacularly too.

The bigger picture

The Labour MPs who were planning this post-Brexit coup obviously got so giddy with excitement, and so locked into the mindset of putting their narrow party political plot into action, that they completely lost sight of the bigger picture.

The aftermath of the biggest Tory cock-up in decades and the resignation of the Prime Minister was the least opportune moment to kick off an internal party political spat imaginable.

Just look at it from their strategic perspective for a moment. They claim to care about the Labour Party (so much so that they shed crocodile tears on the telly over it) and they claim that Corbyn doesn't do enough to hold the Tories to account.

If they had any strategic nous, and if these clims were true, instead of attempting their coup immediately after Brexit, the plotters (Hillary Benn, Angela Eagle and the like) could have made a huge show of attacking the Tories for Brexit, they could have used their friends in the media to give their criticisms prominence, whilst Corbyn's get ignored, belittled and disparaged.

Instead of helping the Tories out of the Brexit hole they'd dug for themselves and booting the Labour Party down there in their place as they did by launching their coup immediately, the plotters could have won plaudits for their own strong responses in the crisis situation, boosting the Labour Party rather than trashing it, and ensuring their own stars were rising in the process.

Thus, a few weeks, or months after Brexit, when the public narrative was clearly set that Brexit was the fault of the Tories, they could have tried their rebellion, pointing to the fact that they laid all the big hits on the Tories in the wake of Brexit, not Corbyn.

They didn't play it that way because they lost sight of the bigger picture: That some things in life are actually more important than who is the leader of the Labour Party, and the vote for Brexit was undeniably one of those things.

Insincerity, unjustifiable claims and delusional rubbish

The hubris of briefing the Telegraph about what they were planning to do before they did it was bad enough, but some of the dire stuff the plotters came out with after the coup attempt was launched was staggeringly bad. Angela Eagle's resignation letter was catastrophically insincere. Just two weeks after praising Corbyn's determined hard work and blasting the mainstream press for the lack of Labour coverage during the campaign, she bitterly criticised him for conducting the campaign with "half-hearted ambivalence"!

Another example of an utterly appalling resignation letter is that of the Darlington MP Jenny Chapman who joined in the carefully choreographed sequence of resignations desgned to inflict as much damage as possible on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. In her letter quitting the shadow education brief she claimed to be speaking on behalf of her constituents in saying that they had lost confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. When she posted this letter on her Facebook page she was inundated with furious comments along the lines of "how dare you presume to speak on my behalf". The overwhelming majority of replies expressed confidence in Corbyn and an extreme lack of confidence in her.

Tristram Hunt probably wins the prize for the worst resignation letter of all though. In it he actually claimed that "Labour urgently needs to play the role of effective opposition" because the current crisis is as bad as Suez in his opinion. Apparently launching a failed coup attempt against your own party leader and completely letting the Tories off the hook for their culpability is his definition of "effective opposition". He then went on to slam Corbyn for making a supposedly poor case for Remain. In Tristram Hunt's constituency of Stoke on Trent 69.4% voted for Leave (in Jeremy Corbyn's Islington constituency 75.2% voted for Remain). Talk about trying to shift the blame! Apparently Hunt's own Constituency Labour Party have already had a vote of confidence supporting Jeremy Corbyn followed by a vote of no confidence in Tristram Hunt.

Forged signatures

Making bizarre claims to be speaking on behalf of your constituents when resigning is one thing, but listing 500 local councillors who you claim have signed a letter supporting the coup against Corbyn when the list contains the names of numerous councillors who back Corbyn's leadership and are utterly furious that their name has been added to the letter without their consent.

Claiming that somebody has signed a letter when they haven't is tantamount to forging their signatures. LabourList should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for such deceitful behaviour, but they're not. They're far too concerned with their anti-democratic efforts to force Corbyn's resignation than they are with maintaining anything resembling decent standards of truth and honesty.

Conclusion

Blairism has undeniably lost its shine. Tony Blair was once the golden boy who won landslide after landslide, but he isn't anymore. He's widely reviled, and his sequence of attacks on Jeremy Corbyn during the leadership election in 2015 probably did more to raise Corbyn's profile than any other factor. Blairism lost two General Elections in a row (2010 and 2015) and in electing Corbyn with such a huge mandate the Labour members were crying out for a change of direction,. But Blairites think they know best, so they've been sabotaging Jeremy Corbyn at every turn culminating in their the launch of their inept coup attempt after just ten months.

The failed "chicken coup" demonstrates that the Blairites aren't even good at the stuff they used to be. In the age of social media, their attempts to manage the news agenda have failed spectacularly. They may have the entire press pack on their side supporting their grubby self-serving coup, but social media is alive with criticism of the mainstream narrative, and the more they try to force their version of events down people's throats, the more people are seeing their crude manipulative propaganda for what it is.

Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that the failure of their own coup attempt means they can be hoisted by their own petard. If Jeremy Corbyn is as weak and incompetent as they've always claimed, how incompetent must they be to have failed so spectacularly to overthrow him, despite planning it for weeks and then throwing everything they had at it?

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* - The million+ of us who marched in London on February 15th 2003 thought differently mind.

How the mainstream media frame the political debate

This ludicrous newspaper article in the Guardian provides a perfect example of how the mainstream media use false narratives and misleading language to frame the political debate. The headline clearly implies that the Labour leader Corbyn is some kind of extremist and that by taking these minor backbench positions the "moderates" have dealt Corbyn some kind of crucial strategic blow.

These people are not moderates, they are the unpopular right-wing fringe of the Labour Party

If you actually read the article you find that several of these so-called "moderates" are from the most right-wing fringe of the Labour Party. There's Caroline Flint (pictured) who is economically right-wing and has extremist right-wing authoritarian views on drug use. There's Tristram Hunt who did bollocks all as shadow education secretary to oppose the Tories as they privatised thousands of state schools into the hands of unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities (several of them operated by major Tory party donors), and only days previously was openly fantasising about how he'd love to see the "top 1%" taking control of the Labour Party away from the uppity plebs who elected Corbyn. And there's Chris Leslie, the Osbornite former caretaker shadow chancellor who expends far more effort attacking the current Labour leadership than he ever did criticising the Tories and their ideological austerity con.

The author (Patrick Wintour) even goes on to describe Chuka Umunna and Rachel Reeves as "moderates". Umunna is the absolute embodiment of the unmistakably right-wing self-serving Blairite careerist politician that pushes people away from the Labour Party in droves, and Rachel Reeves once promised to be even tougher on the most vulnerable people in society than Iain Duncan Smith's regime of terror!

It turns out that of the 17 Labour MPs to walk unopposed into these backbench roles, 10 of them openly supported Liz Kendall, who was the most right-wing of the four Labour Leadership candidates and ended up securing just 4.5% of the vote (compared to Jeremy Corbyn's 59.5%). That's pretty clear evidence that these people are not "moderates", but actually representatives of a tiny and deeply unpopular right-wing fringe of the Labour Party.

Jeremy Corbyn is a moderate

Jeremy Corbyn is an economic moderate. He's the kind of mild-mannered social democrat who would be considered quite normal in any of the Scandinavian social democratic countries. The problem is that the political spectrum in the UK has been skewed so far to the right over the last four decades that these days anyone who doesn't subscribe to George Osborne's fanatically right-wing economic agenda is derided as some kind of raving communist by the bulk of the mainstream press.

The idea that it's wrong to load the burden of austerity onto the poor and ordinary in order to pay for the excesses of the tiny super-rich minority isn't extremist. If more people understood that this is precisely what is happening right now, they'd see that Corbyn is actually talking a lot of sense.

The idea that the vital infrastructure and services should be run as not-for-profit public services isn't extremist, in fact the majority of the British public agree with Corbyn on that one.

The idea that the NHS shouldn't be deliberately starved of funding, carved up and given away to the private sector isn't extremist, once again the majority of people agree with Corbyn on that one too.

Jeremy Corbyn isn't an extremist and neither are the majority of the public who agree with many of his core economic policies. The problem is that right-wingers in the mainstream media have skewed the debate so far to the right that ideologically driven fanatics like George Osborne and David Cameron are described as the norm, while mild-mannered social democrats like Jeremy Corbyn are derided as dangerous extremists.

This was no kind of victory

As for their so-called flexing of muscles, most of these right-wingers obtained their backbench committee positions completely unopposed. Corbyn undeniably has the support of the Labour membership, but the Blairites who preceded him spent the last two decades parachuting in economically right-wing candidates into Labour safe seats, meaning there just aren't enough non-Blairite politicians left in the party to fill every minor position. It's hardly a victory for right-wingers like Flint, Hunt and Leslie that there's nobody left to oppose them taking up their minor backbench roles, it's a demonstration of how far the Parliamentary Labour Party has drifted from its founding principles.

It's absolutely clear that the vast majority of Labour Party supporters don't want these right-wingers running the party, but after two decades of New Labour purging the party of dissenting voices there just aren't enough non-Blairite MPs left to fill every minor backbench role, so some of these positions have ended up going to embarrassments like Caroline Flint, Tristram Hunt and Chris Leslie.

The agenda

The mainstream media agenda to demonise Jeremy Corbyn as an extremist and talk up the most right-wing elements of the Labour Party as "moderates" couldn't be clearer. 

The idea that by positioning themselves ever so slightly to the left of the most right-wing Tory government in living memory these people are somehow "moderates" is utterly ridiculous. As is the idea that a Labour Party led by these people would be remotely electable. These people couldn't even get 5% of Labour Party supporters to back their right-wing candidate during the Labour leadership election, so how on earth could they ever get some 25% of the entire electorate to buy into their disgusting brand of pink Thatcherism?

I think the conclusion here is pretty obvious. I'm pretty sure that most politically aware people know by now to take the Murdoch Press and the Daily Mail with a huge pinch of salt, but the obvious false narrative and biased language in this Guardian piece should serve as a warning that it's important to always use your critical judgement whatever the source.

 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.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
Jeremy Corbyn is not as radical as the media claim he is 
           
The incompatibility of Christian ethics and modern Conservatism
       
A letter to fans of Workfare
                             
Secret Courts and the very Illiberal Democrats
                          
The ideological vandalism of the English education system
                
Iain Duncan Smith's reign of terror
                      

The Tory ideological mission
                                
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
  

Why the Labour Party doesn't need even more Tristram Hunts

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown usurped the Labour Party back in 1994 and promised Rupert Murdoch that they would continue pushing Thatcherite economics in return for support from his vast media empire. Ever since then the party has been infiltrated by ever more self-serving careerist politicians with no real interest in the actual purpose of the Labour Party, and very little in common with the ordinary Labour voter. Perhaps the most glaring example of this kind of out-of-touch self-serving careerist is the former shadow education secretary and current self-appointed anti-Corbyn spokesperson Tristram Hunt.

Tristram Hunt comes from a wealthy establishment family, his father having been handed a seat in the unelected House of Lords by Tony Blair in 2000. In 2010 Hunt junior was handed the super-safe Labour seat of Stoke Central, which is an area with which he had no connection whatever. Hunt grew up in Cambridge, went to an exclusive private school in London, studied at university in Cambridge and has worked as a lecturer in London since 2001. In fact, before being parachuted in there, Hunt had more connection to Chicago, Illinois (where he studied briefly) than he did with Stoke-on-Trent.

Shadow education ineptitude

Before being parachuted into his super-safe Labour seat in Stoke, Hunt was best known as a TV historian, so perhaps the fact that he had some kind of rudimentary public profile is the reason that he was given the incredibly important role of shadow education secretary after just three years as an MP? Whatever the case, he was utterly inept at it, letting Michael Gove's ideological vandalism of the state education system go virtually unchallenged.

Of course Hunt wasn't the only one of Ed Miliband's shadow minister to do an utterly feeble job of holding the Tories to account. When Iain Duncan Smith was found guilty of unlawful abuse of the unemployed, the shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne let him write his "get out of jail free" card by allowing him pass some vile retroactive workfare rules as emergency legislation, and history must surely judge Ed Ball's austerity-lite economic agenda as one of the most inept and ill-conceived election strategies in modern political history.

Hunt's performance as shadow education minister was particularly inept though because of the severity of the Tory ideological lunacy being imposed on our schools and the fact that Michael Gove was spectacularly unpopular with the teaching profession and public alike. Instead of attacking what the Tories were doing Hunt actually ended up agreeing with most of it, and letting them completely off the hook.

Petulance

Tristram Hunt showed how much of a petulant mentality he has when he ruled himself out of ever serving in Jeremy Corbyn's cabinet, and has continued to demonstrate his petulance with regular toy-throwing tantrums about the fact that Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour Party leadership.

Instead of trying to constructively push the party in the kind of direction he would like, he's chosen to have repeated hissy fits and refused to play at all, preferring to throw bizarre childish tantrums on the sidelines in the vain hope that everyone will stop playing and begin celebrating him as the visionary champion that brought the "terrible" game of Labour Party democracy to an end.

Tristram Hunt has no qualms about continually attacking the Labour Party leadership in the vain hope that the Labour Party membership will meekly hand control of the party to his right-wing Blairite faction of the party.

Poor judgement

Tristram Hunt was one of the small clique of right-wing Labour MPs who backed Liz Kendall to lead the party. The fact that she came fourth and last in the Labour leadership contest with just 4.5% of the vote (as compared to Corbyn's 59.5%) just goes to show how out of touch Hunt is with the party he supposedly represents. 

Hunt speaks on behalf of the tiny minority within the Labour Party who believed that Ed Miliband failed to become prime minister not because he spectacularly failed to offer a clear alternative to Tory austerity, but because he didn't ape Tory party policy quite closely enough.

Social Media

One of the most blatant examples of Tristram Hunt's cluelessness is the utter contempt he has for social media. Instead of marvelling at the immense power of social media to dissect and destroy the right-wing pro-Tory narratives that so utterly dominate in the mainstream press, he has nothing but suspicion for social media, even claiming that social media has been guilty of disconnecting Labour from the public!

Instead of looking at the role social media played in countering the relentless tide of establishment anti-Corbyn propaganda (which was ubiquitous from the Daily Mail to the Guardian) and mobilising hundreds of thousands of people to vote for Corbyn, he's desperate to attack it. 

Instead of realising that intelligent use of social media represents an unprecedented opportunity to break the right-wing stranglehold on British political discourse, Hunt sees it as a dangerous threat to be condemned and belittled because it resulted in an outcome he was afraid of (the Labour Party shifting to the left, not even further to the right as he would have liked).

Public Services

Tristram Hunt is also prepared to launch desperately misleading public attacks on Jeremy Corbyn in order to undermine his leadership.

The overwhelming majority of the British public believe that essential public services like the NHS, the energy companies, the rail network and the Royal Mail should be run as not-for-profit public services. That Corbyn has been talking about renationalisation of public services is a demonstration that he's actually far more tuned in to what ordinary voters want than any other mainstream party leader in the last two decades. However, instead of lauding Jeremy Corbyn for giving the public a bit of what they want, Tristram Hunt has actually launched public attacks on Corbyn for having supposedly "marched decisively away from the views of voters" when it comes to public services!

One explanation for getting this issue so completely backwards this seems to be that he thinks that public opinion can be used interchangeably with the free-market fanaticism of the right-wing press barons. 

Another explanation is that he knows perfectly well that Corbyn is marching decisively towards the views of voters when it comes to public services, but his desire to undermine and overthrow Corbyn trumps observable reality, so he just decided to lie about it.

The one percenters

One of Hunt's most bizarre bits of backwards thinking was his assertion to a bunch of Cambridge students that by engaging with the public on social media, the Labour Party risks becoming a "sect", and that the solution to that problem is for the "top 1%" to take control of the Labour Party in the future.

It's utterly bizarre that Hunt thinks that a Labour Party with more paid up members than it's had for decades which is finally beginning to realise the awesome power of social media to erode the dominance of the right-wing media, is in danger of becoming a "sect". Even more bizarre is his proposed solution of disempowering the Labour Party membership by filling the party leadership with even more Oxbridge educated elitists like himself, and by abandoning efforts to use social media to engage with the public.

Which sounds more like a "sect"? A party led by a guy who goes on endlessly about giving more power to ordinary people to make important decisions, or a party led by a self-appointed clique of expensively educated one percenters?

Entitlement

What's even more appalling than Hunt's appallingly inept display as shadow education secretary, his bizarre public displays of backwards thinking and his staggeringly petulant reaction to things not going exactly his way, is his sickening sense of entitlement.

His comments about how the Labour Party needs to be run by the "top 1%", (as represented by Cambridge graduates like himself) illustrate his mentality. He believes that him, and people like him, have a natural entitlement to run the show, and he's clearly furious that uppity ordinary people have ignored his superior wisdom and overwhelmingly elected Jeremy Corbyn as their leader, rather than Liz Kendall (who got less than one vote for every 13 Corbyn did).

Instead of taking this walloping defeat with a bit of good grace, Hunt has been carping from the sidelines ever since. Instead of trying to learn the lessons of such a tremendous defeat for the most right-wing elements of the Labour Party, Hunt has vented his fury at ordinary Labour Party members and condemned the use of social media, because it's always easier to lash out like that than to admit that your own ideas were desperately unpopular.

Tristram Hunt clearly considers himself to be the kind of "top 1%" Cambridge graduate who has a natural entitlement to run the Labour Party if he chooses to, but his behaviour clearly indicated that he's actually nowhere near that smart. The most intelligent people don't go in for embarrassing public displays of petulance and blatantly backwards thinking. Neither do they attempt to pin blame on utterly bizarre things (like the use of social media) in the wake of resounding defeats, rather than trying to learn lessons about what they themsleves got so badly wrong.

Leadership

The fact that someone like Tristram Hunt rose so far in the Labour Party to begin with is an indicator of how desperately short of genuine talent the party has become (as a result of marginalising anyone who dared oppose the Blairite orthodoxy over the last two decades).

Hunt's performance as shadow education minister was abject; his decision to back Liz Kendall for Labour leader showed how out of touch he is with the party he supposedly represents; his refusal to participate in front bench politics demonstrates how childishly petulant he is; and his constant carping from the sidelines with displays of absurd backwards thinking illustrate the fact that he's nowhere near as brilliantly intelligent as he imagines himself to be.

I think it's entirely reasonable that people might have doubts about whether Jeremy Corbyn can be an effective enough leader of the Labour Party to overcome the awesome power of the right-wing press. Corbyn has got off to a reasonable start as Labour leader, but he's got an awful lot left to prove to his doubters. However, anyone who imagines that the rise of out-of-touch entitlement driven elitists like Tristram Hunt would represent a more effective opposition to the Tories must be as terminally confused about politics as Hunt is himself.

The Labour Party doesn't need an influx of new Tristram Hunts. What it actually needs is an awful lot fewer of them, and more people from ordinary backgrounds in positions of leadership.

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