The ringleader of the Gove ambush was a Tory

When Michael Gove was accosted by protestors in the street, the self-righteous condemnation from establishment politicians and the corporate media hack pack was instantaneous.

The usual radical-right suspects like Julia Hartley Brewer and Tom Harwood shared clips of the incident to whip up outrage by exclaiming how "shocking" and "unacceptable" they found it.

Several senior Labour MPs rushed to join in the performative outrage with tweets condemning the incident.

Former Labour leadership candidate Yvette Cooper described the scene as "completely unacceptable" and thanked the police for stepping in.

The dreadful Chris Bryant dialled up the outrage with more vehement condemnation and the ludicrously over-dramatic declaration "what have we become?"

Labour's Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds took a break from his19 month invisibility act to proclaim that these scenes were particularly inappropriate because they happened in the week after the David Amess murder.

Obviously a load of Tories jumped into action too, attempting to weave the incident into their absurdist non-sequitur of a narrative about how the murder of an MP by a known Islamist extremist who slipped through a government anti-radicalisation programme ... means they now need to abolish Internet anonymity!

The thing that absolutely none of these establishment outrage mongers bothered to mention is that the ringleader of this harassment was until recently a Tory party councillor!

Will Coleshill was ejected from the Tory ranks in 2018 for hurling racist abuse at a Labour Party councillor, but he's come back to do his beloved former party a massive favour by giving the political establishment and corporate media outrage-mongers an incident to moral high-horse about, and weave into their authoritarian drive to crush Internet freedom.

Will Coleshill has never hidden behind Internet anonymity. He uses his real name on all of his social media accounts, and on his Resistance GB bio too, and on his abandoned Tory party councillor profile too.

He carries out all of his extremism in public, using his real name, and gets away with it.

Coleshill has got form for harassing MPs too, having accosted Jess Phillips in the street in 2019.

There's literally no excuse for Labour MPs to not know who this racist Tory-boy extremist is.

It's no wonder the Tories are playing along with the outrage-mongering narrative, because it could hardly fit their radically right-wing authoritarian agenda better, but what the hell are Labour playing at?

Why on earth are they spewing faux outrage about the incident, rather than pointing out that the ringleader was actually one of the Tories' own?

The answer seems to be that Keir Starmer is completely onboard with the Tory agenda. He's already declared that he'll whip Labour MPs into supporting the Tory attack on Internet freedom if they rush the legislation back into parliament this year!

I'm sure his dwindling band of apologists will be more than willing to do the required mental gymnastics to explain how "forensic" it is for Sir Abstainsalot to promise to support legislation that isn't even properly drafted yet ...

The fact that the ringleader of the Michael Gove ambush was actually a Tory would be a great attack point for any opposition worthy of the name, but instead Starmer and the useless nincompoops he's surrounded himself with have actually joined in with the Tory outrage-mongering, and the hard-selling of the Tories' authoritarian crackdown on Internet freedom!

It looks an awful lot like the entire political establishment class is colluding to attack our freedoms, and racist Tory-boy agitator Will Coleshill is actually helping them push this radically right-wing authoritarian agenda.


Big credit to Lloyd Hardy on Twitter for doing the digging on Will Coleshill's very recent Tory past. Make sure to give him a follow if you're on there.

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Who is in Caroline Lucas' all-female all-white Brexit-foiling "fantasy cabinet"?

The Green Party's only MP Caroline Lucas has completely and utterly lost the plot over Brexit.

For years she was one of my absolute favourite politicians. She led the Greens when they were the only UK-wide party opposing ruinous austerity fanaticism (Labour pushed pathetic austerity-lite rubbish until this pathetic non-opposition cost them the 2015 general election and triggered the Corbyn fightback against the "centrist" policy of imitating Tory austerity fanaticism, rather than opposing it). Lucas has also consistently been on the right side of important parliamentary votes (alongside Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, and Dennis Skinner she was the only other MP with sufficient principles to vote against Theresa May's racist hostile environment, David Cameron's disastrous war-mongering in Libya, and Theresa May's enhanced state snooping powers, and George Osborne's welfare vandalism bill).

Over the last few months it's been bad enough watching the Greens voluntarily turning themselves into recruitment agents for the austerity enabling, privatisation scamming, welfare vandalising, workers' rights attacking, fracking tax cutting, disability persecuting, student impoverishing, electoral reform abandoning Lib-Dem warmongers, but Lucas' "fantasy cabinet" of herself and ten all-white, all-female MPs is an extraordinary blowout.

Here are details on the ten other women Lucas wants to orchestrate a "foil Brexit at any cost" coup with:

Anna Soubry: Ex-Tory Soubry talks a good game pretending to oppose Brexit, but when it came to the crunch she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard Brexit shambles of a Withdrawal Agreement! Soubry has also made it absolutely clear that she'd prefer a ruinous Tory-administered Brexit than stopping Brexit under a Corbyn-led Labour government. She also referred to the ruinous living standards destroying policies of the austerity coalition that laid the groundwork for Brexit as "marvellous".

Heidi Allen: Another ex-Tory. As a Tory she once cried in parliament about the devastating impact of Tory welfare vandalism to gather "compassionate Conservative" headlines, before wilfully marching through the lobby to vote in favour of even more of the welfare vandalism and devastating cuts she was crying over. She's also responsible for the stupidest and most dangerous Remainer idea yet, which is to just let No Deal go ahead, then try to magically undo it using retroactive legislation!

Jo Swinson: She isn't a Tory, but she might as well be, having been more loyal to the Tory whip during the ruinous austerity coalition than numerous Tory MPs (including recent Tory leadership candidate Jeremy Hunt!). Whatever horrible abuse and economically illiterate nonsense the Tories were pushing, Swinson wilfully voted it all through, refusing to protest by resigning as Employment Minister, even when they launched their vile and unlawful policy of protecting bad bosses by pricing low-income workers out of the justice system with £1,200 upfront Tribunal Fees. She's also bankrolled by the owner of a fracking operation and voted in favour of Cameron and Osborne's massive tax cut for onshore fracking (which makes her a very odd bedfellow for a Green MP).

Justine Greening: If you're going to stuff your "fantasy cabinet" full of ex-Tory austerity enforcers and Lib-Dem austerity enablers, you might as well include a sitting Tory MP just to hammer home the point that opposing the austerity fanaticism that caused Brexit in the first place will be an absolute non-priority. Aside from being a horrifying austerity-enforcer, Greening was also personally in charge of the mass privatisation of state schools in England. The vast majority of Brits believe that schools should be run as not-for-profit public services, but somehow Lucas wants to include a hard-right school-privatising extremist in her "fantasy cabinet".

Nicola Sturgeon: Sturgeon does occasionally let herself down with cheap partisan political point scoring (which is regrettable, but understandable given the tides of absolute filth that are spewed in her direction), but in general she's a really strong and popular leader. The main problem with the inclusion of SNP figures like Sturgeon and Kirsty Blackman is that Swinson and the Lib-Dems have outright refused to work with the SNP to stop Brexit because they actually see preventing another Scottish independence referendum as a much higher priority than stopping Brexit.

Liz Saville Roberts: Including Plaid Cymru's only female MP is an obvious choice if you're doing a stupid identity politics driven all-female "fantasy cabinet". She has been a hard-working MP since arriving in parliament in 2015, and she's on the decent side of parliamentary divisions the majority of the time. It's hard to see how an alliance between a Welsh independence MP and the ultra-unionist Lib-Dems could ever really hold up for very long though.

Sylvia Hermon: Again, there's nothing particularly wrong with the former UUP, now independent Northern Irish MP Sylvia Hermon. It's just an odd selection to pick a solitary independent MP from Northern Ireland, unless the reason is the tokenism of picking the only Brexit-sceptic MP in Northern Ireland (the DUP are hard Brexit militants and Sinn Féin refuse their Westminster seats on principle).

Emily Thornberry: Reaching out to a serving Labour Party cabinet minister to engage in a plot to sideline Labour from the anti-No Deal fightback is a bold move, but Thornberry is surely far too sensible a political operator to ditch her career by joining this ludicrous identity politics publicity stunt.

Yvette Cooper: Cooper is one of the oddest picks of all. Yes she's involved herself in opposing Brexit, but she's stopped short of calling for another referendum (unlike Labour front bench MPs like Diane Abbott, who has repeatedly made the case for a final say referendum on Brexit).

• The inclusion of a load of pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-fracking, Heathrow expansion-supporting, solar subsidy slashing MPs in Lucas' "fantasy cabinet" just goes to show how wildly she's lost her way. She won so much admiration for her principled stances on austerity, welfare, privatisation, and the environment, and now she's bulldozing the lot into a fire pit in order to cavort with hard-right austerity enablers and fracking advocates!

• The idea of gender exclusion is absolutely terrible too. Anyone who is genuinely opposed to Brexit must understand that a ludicrous identity politics dick-counting exercise is a pointless distraction. Anyone who thinks an unprincipled loudmouth like Anna Soubry is more of an asset to the Brexit fightback than Dominic Grieve or Keir Starmer, simply because she's female, is absolutely out of their god-damned tree.

• An all-white cabinet which includes several Brexit enablers, whilst excluding significantly more anti-Brexit BAME women like Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler, Marsha de Cordova, and Rupa Huq is extraordinary. And their exclusion makes no sense either. Lucas reached out to Thornberry who is in Corbyn's shadow cabinet, so she could have reached out to Abbott and Butler too, and she reached out to Cooper who is a Labour back bencher, meaning there must be some other reason she decided not to involve BAME Labour backbenchers like Huq and de Cordova.

• One of the most worrying things is that nobody in the Green Party seems able or willing to take her to one side and ask her to stop this increasingly erratic and damaging behaviour. There's absolutely no way that this all-female all-white "fantasy cabinet" idea including a load of austerity-enablers, privatisation fanatics, and environmental vandals was approved at Green Party conference, so she's not only making a fool of herself, she's also making a mockery of the Green Party's claim to be the most democratic and accountable party in UK politics.

• The whole thing seems to be a desperate last-ditch effort to exclude Corbyn and the Labour-left from the process, even though it's absolutely obvious that the support of the Labour-left would be absolutely vital if Lucas ever gets the "another roll of the dice" referendum she's expended so much energy on demanding (whilst ignoring the role austerity fanaticism played in causing Brexit in the first place).

• And last but not least the whole idea of a "foil Brexit at any cost" cross-bench coup is absolutely terrible anyway. If you wanted to think of the ideal way of empowering Boris Johnson to seize the moral high ground and romp to a general election victory, an unelected Westminster establishment clique overturning Brexit without even a General Election or Referendum result to give them a mandate would be pretty much exactly what the Brextremists would be wishing for!

Caroline Lucas is far from the only person to have been driven to absolute insanity by Brexit, but seeing a strong and principled woman I really admired degenerate to the point of proposing ludicrous unworkable nonsense that burns all of her preexisting principles to ashes is definitely the saddest case of Brexit Brain Worms yet.

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The political establishment club need to get their own houses in order

The problems of online radicalisation abuse are incredibly serious, and something does need to be done about it because it's not only toxifying political discourse, it's creating a dangerous political environment where people who have been radicalised online have ended up committing despicable criminal acts, from the barrage of sexist and anti-Semitic online abuse aimed at the Labour MP Luciana Berger, to actual acts of terrorism like the Finsbury Park attack suspect who is a Britain First follower, and the Beckton acid attack suspect with a history of sharing extreme-right memes.

One of the big problems with countering this online abuse problem is that members of the political establishment often display breathtaking hypocrisy when they complain about the problem of online political abuse.

• Take Theresa May reading out a extreme-right misogynist's Tweet in the House of Commons to score cheap political points against Jeremy Corbyn. How can anyone ever take her seriously when she complains about online abuse when she's willing to engage in the very worst of it if it suits her purposes?

• Take the notorious brick-gate incident that is still being endlessly recycled to smear Jeremy Corbyn supporters as thugs and bullies, even though there isn't a shred of evidence that the brick was thrown by a "Corbynista", or that it was targeted at Angela Eagle's office rather than just being a random act of late night vandalism, or even that the damage was actually caused by a brick at all!

• Take the desperate efforts by people with right-wing views to pretend that the disgusting anti-Semitic abuse of Luciana Berger is coming from the left, when the online abusers who have been jailed for making threats against her are actually from the extreme-right (John Nimmo, Joshua Bonehill, Garron Helm).

• Take the constant barrages of abuse, lies and smears that constituted both the Tory London Mayor campaign in 2016 and Theresa May's vanity election in 2017. If people see members of the political class resorting to lies, smears and utterly disgraceful character attacks, then how can anyone be even remotely surprised when ordinary people imitate Lynton Crosby style shit-smearing tactics in the online environment?

• Take the fact that Yvette Cooper tweeted abuse from a known hard-right sockpuppet account that pretends to be a Jeremy Corbyn adviser in order to falsely misrepresent the left of the Labour Party as anti-Semites, which was either an incredibly foolish thing for her to do, or a sickiningly cynical stunt if done deliberately in knowledge of the account's true nature.

All of these incidents provide incontrovertible evidence that the political establishment are perfectly prepared to get down in the sewer and sling the most disgusting lies, misrepresentations, smears, abuse, and threats about if it suits their own political purposes, but then the very same people climb up onto their moral high horses and sneer at the general public for engaging in the same kind of sewer politics that they use.

The slightest bit of research by Theresa May or Yvette Cooper would have revealed the true nature of the disgusting Twitter accounts they were publicising in order to score incredibly cheap political points with; the continued reliance upon brick-gate conjecture as proof of Corbynista thuggery is a demonstration that the establishment club are perfectly happy to rely on exaggerations and smears when it suits them; it takes an epic amount of intellectual dishonesty for right-wingers to pretend that it's not their right-wing bedfellows who are guilty of the very worst acts of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic abuse and violence; and the last two Tory election campaigns were massive establishment endorsements of exactly the kind of filthy political shit-smearing that they decry when it's aimed back at them by members of the public.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending online abuse. As a high-profile leftie I'm a magnet for abuse, insults, absolute misrepresentations of my beliefs, threats and much worse from right-wingers. I'd be very satisfied if this kind of disgusting abuse could be made to go away by the waving of a magic wand, but it's just not that simple.

My point isn't that there's any excuse for online abuse (there isn't), it's that the political establishment club should get their own damned houses in order before they start lecturing the public.

Yvette Cooper may well enjoy high-horsing it over the horrible plebs, but when she's chosen to give a well-known right-wing sockpuppet smear account a huge publicity boost by awarding them exactly the kind of attention they crave, she's slithered down into the political sewer just like the people she's criticising. 

Except with her it's worse, because to complain about other people's online behaviour, then (wittingly or unwittingly) engage in the very worst kind of dishonest fake-account misrepresentation possible is so astoundingly hypocritical that it actually does serious damage to the perfectly reasonable stance that online political abuse is unacceptable and should be confronted.

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OR

Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom: Don't fall for the identity politics bullshit

I've always had reservations about identity politics because it defines us by what we are rather than what we do, and because it factionaises society into specific interest groups which is clearly an impediment to building solidarity against the powerful minority who have such strong vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

Some of the appalling reactions in the left-liberal press to the fact that the Tory party leadership contest will be fought between two women have turned my reservations about identity politics into outright revulsion. 

There were two particular articles in the left-liberal press that jumped out at me as being both identity politics driven and woefully misinformed. 

"We're still waiting for a female  Labour leader - and it's getting embarrassing" - New Statesman

This stomach-churningly bad article in the New Statesman used the fact that the two candidates left in the Tory leadership contest are both female to whine that (aside from the caretaker leader stints of Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman) the Labour Party has had no female leader. The conclusion of the article is that "time has run out" for Labour and that the next leader should be female. 

What the article utterly fails to do is point out who this next female leader should actually be. It doesn't explain that two of the four candidates to become Labour leader in 2015 were female, but that they were both routed by a massive surge of support for Jeremy Corbyn (who then appointed the most female dominated cabinet in UK political history). 

The article didn't explain that Liz Kendall was from the unpopular right-wing fringe of the Labour Party and that she only picked up 4.5% of the vote, and it didn't explain that Yvette Cooper is a Blairite loyalist who is married to Ed Balls (the guy who came up with Labour's disastrously uninspiring austerity-lite strategy that led to their defeat in the 2015 General Election and contributed to the absolute massacre in Scotland where Labour lost 40 of their 41 seats) and that she was routed too.

The article also failed to mention Angela Eagle, the low-profile, insincere, gaffe-prone political water carrier who lined herself up to replace Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader during the anti-democratic efforts to bully him out of his job, but then chickened out of launching a democratic leadership challenge when Corbyn steadfastly refused to be bullied into resignation.

The article didn't mention any names because it clearly doesn't matter to the author who this next female leader of the Labour Party is. It doesn't matter whether they are honest or insincere, from the left of the party or the right, an anti-democratic coup plotter or a supporter of Labour Party democracy, an austerity critic or an austerity supporter, or any other consideration, because the only important factor appears to be whether this future leader has a penis or not.

"Sturgeon, May, Leadsom: Women to the rescue amid political turmoil" - The Guardian

This article is even worse than the New Statesman one, so bad in fact that the Guardian decided to retroactively rewrite the title and a chunk of the article to replace the focus on the Tory leadership candidate Andrea Leadsom with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel (as if all female politicians are just nondescript and interchangeable pawns in a male game of chess).

The thrust of the article was that women are going to come along and clean up the mess made by men. This central theme is completely undermined by the way it just lumps a load of completely different women together despite the huge differences in their political standpoints, circumstances and experience. 

Nicola Sturgeon is an extremely popular political leader of a party on the left-liberal side of the political spectrum and Theresa May is a terrifying right-wing authoritarian with her fingerprints all over much of the most illiberal, vindictive, economically illiterate and downright unworkable legislation during David Cameron's tenure as PM. Lumping them together just because they're female is utterly demeaning because there are far more important political considerations than what sex they happen to be.

The decision to erase Andrea Leadsom from the article title and replace her with Angela Merkel is even more absurd. Leadsom is an inexperienced and transparently dishonest political chancer with a CV full of exaggerations and complete bullshit who opportunistically thrust herself into the political limelight during the Brexit debate. Merkel on the other hand has been Chancellor of Germany for ten years, which is four years longer than Leadsom has even been an MP! The idea that these women are interchangeable is absurd.

It's enough of an insult to a social democrat like Nicola Sturgeon to crudely bracket her alongside hard-right fanatics like Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom simply because they all happen to be female, but to consider an inexperienced political opportunist like Leadsom to be interchangeable with an undeniable political giant like Angela Merkel is ridiculous and demeaning.

Corrosive identity politics

The idea that women should automatically support the likes of Theresa May or Andrea Leadsom simply because they're female is such an absurd example of corrosive identity politics it's insulting.

A look at the politics of these two women reveals why it's never a good idea to judge a person simply by their identity, rather than by their actions.

In 2012 Theresa May oversaw the introduction of arbitrary income thresholds for British civilians wishing to live in the UK with their non-EU spouses. The figure was set at £18,600 per year, plus thousands of pounds more per child. It's obvious that such an arbitrary figure discriminates in favour of people who live in London and the Home Counties where incomes are higher, and against people from poorer areas like Cornwall, the north east and the Welsh valleys, but such an arbitrary figure also discriminates against women too, especially mothers. 

Despite the decades long fight for wage equality, women still earn significantly less than men. The upshot of Theresa May's arbitrary income thresholds is that 72% of British males can afford to bring their non-EU partner to live in the UK, while only 43% of British females can afford the same. Theresa May's arbitrary threshold is a blatant example of Tory discrimination against women (and especially mothers, and women from poorer regions of the UK), yet some people want you to ignore her actions and believe that Theresa May would somehow be better qualified to look after the interests of women just because she happens to be one.

Andrea Leadsom is just as bad. Back in 2013 she fantasised about stripping all workers rights from people employed by small businesses, which obviously includes millions of female workers. This is a woman who wants to strip other women of their rights to maternity pay, sick pay, holiday pay and even the right to claim unfair dismissal. 

In a case where a small business owner starts demanding sexual favours from his young female employees and then sacks them if they refuse his perverted demands, Andrea Leadsom is on the employers side because she thinks that victims of sexual harassment by their bosses shouldn't have the right to claim unfair dismissal. 

The fact that Andrea Leadsom is a woman doesn't mean that she's always going to side with other women, but the fact that she's a right-wing Tory MP means that she's always going to side with capital.

Aside from their own specific misogynistic policies both of these women have voted in favour of one set of savage austerity measures after another for the last six years, despite the mountain of evidence pointing to the fact that ideologically driven austerity policies disproportionately impact women.

It's spectacularly naive to imagine that just because someone is a woman, that they must be on the same side as other women. Both Andrea Leadsom and Theresa May have far more in common with male members of the privileged establishment class to which they belong, than with women from ordinary backgrounds.

Both of these women have proven themselves willing to discriminate against other women they deem to be part of the "lower orders", by voting in favour of ideological austerity, or through their own favoured discriminatory policies. However some people would have you believe that the fact that they were born without penises is by far the most important consideration in the matter.

Don't worry your pretty little head about all that boring politics stuff" they'll say, "look, they're a woman and so are you, so you should identify with them and vote for them", and the really sad thing is that many women will fall for this pathetic identity politics bullshit, just as people of either sex have fallen for all manner of equally ridiculous propaganda narratives over the years.

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OR

The fight for Labour Party democracy

The pre-planned, unbelievably poorly timed and staggeringly inept coup attempt against Jeremy Corbyn wasn't just an attack on a decent principled man designed to bully him into resigning so that the plotters didn't have to fight him in a democratic election (which they knew he would likely beat them in), it was also an attack on the concept of Labour Party democracy.

Hacks at the Guardian had already tried to set the narrative that Jeremy Corbyn and Labour Party democracy were a "failed experiment", but the grubby little coup they were supporting floundered and failed when Corbyn refused to resign.

If the plotters want to depose their leader (the guy with by far the biggest properly democratic mandate of any UK party leader in history) and then set about restructuring the Labour Party away from democracy, then they have to take him on in a democratic election.

The forthcoming Labour Party leadership election is going to be about more than Jeremy Corbyn or his social democratic policies. It's going to be about protecting Labour Party democracy from those who view it as a "failed experiment" because it didn't return their favoured Tory-lite candidates like Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper (the wife of the guy who devised Labour's catastrophically uninspiring austerity-lite campaign for the 2015 General Election).

There are Labour MPs who furiously resent the choices of the party membership, and sincerely believe that if only they could install their own Blair clone as leader, they'd storm to victory at the next General Election like Tony Blair did in 1997. They're delusional because the world has moved on from 1997. People don't want a watered down version of "more of the same", they want radical change. Perhaps these MPs were too busy plotting and executing their failed coup attempt to even bother considering the actual reasons that people voted for Brexit? (hint - it wasn't Jeremy Corbyn's fault)

If you support the idea of increased democracy and accountability within the Labour Party, and in the country as a whole, then Jeremy Corbyn is your man. Handing more political power to ordinary people, not taking it away, is one of Jeremy Corbyn's core principles.

If you support the Labour MPs who think their 172 votes in their unconstitutional vote of no confidence outweigh the 250,000+ votes of the Labour Party membership who elected Jeremy Corbyn to a landslide victory just 10 months ago, then throw your weight behind their "Anyone But Corbyn" (ABC) candidate the 172 pick between them. But maybe ask them to hurry up about picking one, because their prolonged failure to put up a candidate is making them look weak and frightened of democracy.

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OR

How we talk about the problem of online abuse is important

 

Identity politics is a controversial subject. I've been shouted down and had an awful lot of criticism and insults hurled at me for expressing my opinions in the past, but I'm going to have another go at it regardless.

On May 26th The Guardian ran a piece entitled "Research reveals huge scale of online misogyny" illustrated with a crudely doctored picture of a group of shouting men saying "Look out!" and "A woman's about to have her say" captioned with details of a study showing that over 80,000 women on Twitter had been called "slut" or "whore" in a three week period.

The article went on to detail cross-party collaboration between the Blairite Labour MP Yvette Cooper, the disgraced expenses scamming former Tory minister Maria Miller, the new Labour MP Jess Phillips and the former Lib-Dem MP Jo Swinson (who lost her Dumbarton seat in the 2015 SNP landslide).

What the headline, subheading, image and image caption and introductory paragraphs completely left out was the fact (grudgingly admitted in the fifth paragraph) that the majority of people abusing women by hurling online insults like "slut" and "whore" at them were actually other women!

 

Repeated use of the word misogyny by Demos and the Guardian to describe an appalling tide of online abuse that is mainly perpetrated by women against other women is clearly misleading. It shows an unwillingness to break out of the identity politics driven narrative that online abuse is mainly nasty men hurling gender specific insults at women in order to shut them up. They clearly continued this charade even when their very own evidence showed that the majority of gender specific insults hurled at women are hurled at them by other women.

 

Instead of simply labelling all of these insults by women against other women as misogyny, surely it would be more useful to actually ask why so many tens of thousands of women across the world consider it acceptable to call other women "sluts" and "whores"?

 

To illustrate how ludicrous the Guardian/Demos stance is; if all gender specific insults hurled at women by other women are categorised as misogyny, then surely it stands to reason that all gender specific insults by men against other men ("dick head", "wanker" "creep" ...) should be categorised as misandry? Is a guy a misandrist man-hater if he calls me a "dick head" because he hates my political opinions? Of course he isn't. He's just too inarticulate to argue against what I say which makes him so angry and frustrated that he bashes some insulting words into his keyboard.

There is no excuse for online abuse. It doesn't matter if it's men abusing women, women abusing women, women abusing men, men abusing eachother, or abuse towards or by transgender folk, it's all unacceptable.

Efforts to compartmentalise all abusive comments against women as misogyny are not helpful at all, especially if the majority of cases actually appear to be perpetrated by women against other women.

Misogynistic abuse is a real and very serious problem and more needs to be done to combat it, but making the numbers look more damning by lumping in every instance of a teenage girl calling a female rap star a "slut" because the rapper had a big Twitter spat with some ex-boyband singer doesn't make the case against online misogyny more compelling, it makes it significantly weaker.

The teenage girl isn't tweeting abuse at the female rapstar because she hates women and wishes to see successful women like the rapstar intimidated and repressed, she's doing it because she's too inarticulate to express her anger coherently, and because she thinks she can get away with it.

The root of the problem isn't the fact that most of the people who receive the worst online abuse are generally women (the evidence indicates that this is definitely the case). The fact that high profile women tend to get the worst of the abuse is one of the symptoms of the problem, and it's a lot more complicated than the misleading Guardian/Demos "misogyny" narrative. The actual root of the problem is twofold.

The first problem is that there are an awful lot of people who are so bad at debating that they consider insults, abusive comments and threats to be legitimate tactics, rather than open displays of their weak debating skills and childlike propensity to snap into tantrum-like rages. This problem is exascerbated by celebrities who resort to insults, abuse and threats at the slightest provocation. The LBC pundit Iain Dale calling Paul Mason a "twat" on Twitter (after Mason dared to question the neoliberal orthodoxy a bit on Question Time - which is normally a closed neoliberal talking shop) is a great example. Not only did Iain Dale resort to blatant abuse at hearing political opinions he didn't like, he then actually had the utter lack of self-awareness to start whinging about the "abuse" he was getting as a consequence of writing an abusive comment. When celebrities feel free to behave like this on social media, it's absolutely no wonder that ordinary social media users feel entitled to behave in similar ways.

 

The second problem is that people will continue slinging abuse as long as they feel that they can get away with it. It doesn't matter if it's horrible misogynistic blokes hurling abuse and threats at successful women, women slinging gender specific insults at other women, orchestrated online bullying campaigns by teenagers against their peers, people abusing the mentally ill and using mental health terminology as insults, homophobic or transphobic abuse, racism, or whatever. The perpetrators feel they can behave in these appalling ways because they don't suffer any negative consequences for it. In traditional community environments people who flip into slinging insults, appalling abuse, and threats of rape or other physical violence at the slightest provocation (or simply because they hate women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, the neuro-atypical ...) would soon be ostracised by the community, but on the Internet they roam free, with only a tiny minority of the worst offenders ever being held to account for their disgusting behaviour.

There is no denying that online abuse is a big problem, however compartmentalising it into different strata of abuse so that gender specific insults against women are "misogyny" (even if most of this abuse is actually perpetrated by other women), and making it somehow a distinct and more concerning problem than other forms of online abuse is a really misleading and counter-productive approach.

Reducing the problem of online abuse to crude men vs women stereotyes in some appalling identity politics parade is a distraction that sidesteps the main problems, which are that a lot of people (both men and women) are so inarticulate and emotionally unstable that they flip straight into slinging insults, abuse and threats at the slightest provocation, and that these people feel empowered to continue behaving in this appalling manner because they suffer no negative consequences when they do it.

Until the root causes of the problem are addressed, it won't matter which way the abuse is compartmentalised (misleadingly or not), because the problem won't be going away.

 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.

OR

Who really has "no credibility" in the Labour leadership debate?

In this article I'm going to look at some comments from the Blairite leadership candidate Yvette Cooper and Jack "cash for access" Straw slamming Jeremy Corbyn's economic policies with far more vitriol than they have ever used to describe George Osborne's ideologically driven austerity con.

Jack Straw

I'm not sure why the mainstream media are so keen to give Jack Straw such a big platform to spit his anti-Corbyn bile given that he was caught out with his corrupt "cash for access" scam just six months previously. I really don't believe that a disgraced influence pedlar like Jack Straw deserves to oxygen of publicity, but I do think it's worth noting that his accusation that Jeremy Corbyn;s economic policies are "economically illiterate" illustrate exactly where his ideological allegiances lie.

We never heard Jack Straw speaking out in such strong terms against the economic illiteracy of George Osborne's ideological austerity con, despite the fact that Osborne blatantly missed all of the hubristic economic projections he made in 2010; created more new public debt in just five years than every Labour government in history combined; oversaw the longest sustained decline in wages since records began; lost the UK's AAA credit ratings for the first time since the 1970s; caused the slowest post-crisis recovery in British history; and had his ideological austerity agenda criticised as harmful to the UK economy by a clear majority of trained economists.

Despite all of this economic ammunition the likes of Jack Straw had to fire at George Osborne before the General Election they remained resolutely silent, yet as soon as someone dares propose an alternative to George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda, they clamour to spit as much furious bile as possible at him, even though he's a member of the same political party they are!

The venomous rhetoric Jack Straw has reserved for Jeremy Corbyn makes it absolutely clear where his ideological allegiances lie. Not only is the man a disgrace for selling political influence, he's also an ideological blood brother to the Tory party, and an opponent of the massive grass roots movement within the Labour Party to return it to it's social democratic principles.

Yvette Cooper

Yvette Cooper slammed Jeremy Corbyn's economic policies as "not credible" during a speech in Manchester in which she spent far more time attacking her leadership rival than actually detailing her own policies.

If we look a little closer at the arguments she used to criticise Jeremy Corbyn's plan to use money creation in order to fund large public infrastructure projects (Direct Quantitative Easing) it's quite easy to see who is lacking economic credibility, or even any kind of political nous.

Here's the pseudo-economic babble she came out with to attack the idea that newly created money should be invested in infrastructure and services rather than propping up failed banks and enriching the tiny super-rich minority as the original £375 billion in QE was:

"Quantitative Easing to pay for infrastructure now the economy is growing is really bad economics ... QE was a special measure when the economy collapsed, liquidity dried up, interest rates fell as low as they could go. But printing money year after year to pay for things you can't afford doesn't work ... History shows it hits your currency, hits investment, pushes up inflation and makes it harder not easier to get ... sustainable growth."

There are so many things wrong with this garbled pseudo-economic spiel I'm going to have to resort to bullet points to get through it all:

• To hear a potential Labour Party leader repeating the Tory propaganda about how brilliantly the UK economy is recovering is bizarre. Instead of reinforcing the Tory narrative that everything is going great in order to attack a member of her own party, perhaps she might be better off pointing out that the UK is still enduring the slowest post-crisis recovery in history, and that GDP per capita (the amount of economic activity per person in the UK) is still significantly below the pre-crisis level.

• The idea that the original £375 billion in QE was a good and necessary thing is laughable, especially since the Bank of England's own research concluded that 40% of the benefit went to the 5% of wealthiest households. To hear a potential future Labour Party leader slamming a money creation scheme to improve infrastructure and services and defending a money creation scheme that handed £150 billion directly to Britain's wealthiest families is sickening stuff.

• Cooper also claimed that QE was a good thing before because "interest rates were at a historic low", which is odd, because interest rates still remain at the all time record low of 0.5% today. If we just skip past the fact that she's blatantly put the cart before the horse in claiming that low interest rates were a reason for QE rather than an effect of QE, we're left with a rather obvious question: If such a low interest rate (0.5%) was such a good reason for QE back in 2009, why is exactly the same rate now (0.5%) not a good reason for more QE (just this time supplied direct to the economy rather than pumped into insolvent banks)?

• The idea that Quantitative Easing is "printing money" has been debunked so many times it's beyond belief that Cooper is repeating that story again. Only 3% of the money in the UK economy takes the form of notes and coins. Perhaps Cooper is unaware that the vast majority of money in circulation is created out of nothing by private banks and rented out in interest bearing loans, over 60% of which end up funding property speculation and being gambled on the unregulated global derivatives casino. It's astonishing that any politician could attack a public money creation scheme designed to improve infrastructure and services, yet implicitly endorse a private money creation system that is mainly used to inflate vast unsustainable property bubbles and reckless gambling in the shadow banking sector.

• Cooper is also wrong to claim that Corbyn plans to use QE to pay for things we "can't afford". The idea that the UK can't afford modern infrastructure, decent services, high quality education and investment in high-tech industries is completely backwards. What Britain can't afford is to continue our long track record of catastrophic underinvestment in these things. It hardly takes a genius to realise that investment will be far more likely to flow into countries with modern infrastructure, good services and highly skilled workforces, than those which have deliberately curtailed investment in such things as part of an economically illiterate austerity agenda. 

• Another bizarre claim from Cooper is that she has historical evidence to support her assertion that using direct QE to invest in infrastructure and services "hits your currency", "hits investment" and "pushes up inflation". I'm not really sure what historical data she is even alluding to. Perhaps she's just fearmongering by trying to claim that direct QE would turn the UK into the equivalent of Weimar Germeny or Mugabe's Zimbabwe, even though neither of those historical examples of hyperinflation are remotely similar to Corbyn's proposal for direct QE? She certainly can't be alluding to previous examples of orthodox QE, because it's absolutely clear that Japan has not suffered hyperinflation even though it has been doing QE since the 1990s. The UK, US and Eurozone haven't suffered hyperinflation either since they started using QE to prop up their insolvent banks. It seems that Cooper has no actual idea what effect direct QE would have, and is just lashing out in the hope that the public can be fearmongered into believing that it's better off to just leave money creation to the private banks, rather than trying to direct newly created money towards anything economically beneficial.

All in all, Cooper's criticism of direct QE reads like the rambling of someone who is far too wedded to the crony capitalist orthodoxy to even understand the alternative that is being proposed, let alone assemble a coherent critique of it. If anyone's economic policies are "not credible" it's Yvette Cooper's, because she's incapable of seeing the problem that the private banks will never have any interest in using their money creation powers to do what's best for the UK economy as a whole. All they'll ever do is use their money creation powers to chase quick profits with property speculation schemes and gamble on the global derivatives casino, safe in the knowledge that the taxpayer will bail them out again the next time they render themselves insolvent. 

Not only is she incapable of seeing the problem, she's also incapable of offering anything even remotely resembling a coherent critique of Jeremy Corbyn's proposed alternative.

Conclusion

As I've pointed out before the hysterical ranting of the Blairite old guard about the rise of Jeremy Corbyn is spectacularly counter-productive from their perspective, since condemnation from the likes of Tony Blair (warmonger), Jack Straw (discraced "cash for access" scammer), John McTernan (hilariosly incompetent election strategist) and Chuka Umunna (the living embodiment of the self-serving Westminster careerist) sound like ringing endorsements in the ears of millions of people, meaning the more they attack him, the stronger he gets.

The sheer stupidity of sticking with such a counter-productive strategy is bad enough, but the damage that all of these attacks is doing to the credibility of the Labour Party is even worse. It seems as if the Blairites would rather ruin the Labour Party completely than relinquish control of it to a genuine grass roots social democratic movement.

 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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