The mainstream media rarely draw attention to the ongoing collapse in the value of UK workers wages.
They rarely bother to explain that the real terms value of workers' wages are lower than they were 10 years ago, and that this decline is set to continue into the 2020s.
They rarely bother to explain that the percentage of people living in poverty despite being in working families has been soaring.
And they steadfastly ignore the fact that the only country in the developed world that has suffered a comparably severe collapse in the value of workers' wages is crisis-stricken Greece.
To hear Tories scaremongering that the UK could end up like Greece if the public don't re-elect the Tory party is utterly laughable. Wealthy Tory MPs and their cheerleaders in the right-wing press may be financially insulated from the dire consequences of their austerity wealth transfer con but ordinary working people certainly aren't.
Judged by the collapse in the value of our wages, the UK has already ended up like Greece in the experience of ordinary working people.
We all know that prices have been rising way faster than wages.
We've all seen people we know struggling on exploitative zero hours contracts, and fake self-employment scams in the gig economy.
We all know people who haven't had a proper pay raise in years.
We all know people who have had their in-work benefits slashed by this cruel Tory government.
We all know people who are struggling to get by on various low paid part-time jobs because there aren't enough real jobs to go around.
We're all well aware of the scandal of NHS nurses relying on food bank parcels in order to survive.
We all know that the Tory "economic recovery" was only ever a recovery for the rich, while the rest of us have seen our share of the wealth actually eroded away.
The UK is the only country in the developed world where the economy has actually been growing, but the share of the wealth going to workers' has been in decline.
"Where has all of this extra wealth gone?" you may ask. The answer is obvious. While the majority were suffering the worst collapse in the value of our wages on record, the tiny mega-rich minority literally doubled their wealth.
One of the most appalling things about this situation is that the Greek government oversaw the collapse in the value of their workers' wages because they were forced to do it by the iron fist of the Troika. The Tories chose to do it to British workers because they wanted to.
The Tories actually want to turn the UK into a low-skill, low-tech, low-pay, low-welfare economy to compete with China and India on their way up, as we meet them on our way down, and trashing the value of UK workers' wages is one of the ways they've been trying to achieve it.
Even worse than the fact that the Tories imposed this wage repression agenda just because they wanted to do it, not because they had to, is the fact that so many ordinary British workers absolutely refuse to fight back, and even allow themselves to be deluded into thinking that they actually have something to gain by voting for the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party.
Just imagine if this was France. Just imagine if the French government had overseen such a severe collapse in the value of workers' wages to match the wage collapse that British workers have endured. Just imagine the strikes, the mass protests, the riots in the streets, the relentless civil disobedience. Hell, they'd probably blockade Britain to make themselves heard!
Meanwhile in Britain the party that did this to our wages have been re-elected as the largest political party twice (despite being led into the most recent election by a robotic charisma vacuum of a woman who is seemingly hell bent on delivering a socially and economically ruinous "no deal" Brexit strop to make the global banking crisis look like a walk in the park).
Not only are British workers failing to fight back against this sustained Tory assault on the value of their wages, millions of them are still actually queuing up to vote for the party that did it to them!
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.
We all know that the right-wing "taking us back to the 1970s" propaganda trope was already written well before the Labour manifesto was leaked don't we?
Stuff like facts and evidence don't matter a jot to the people who mindlessly regurgitate this kind of right-wing propaganda as if it's some kind of wonderful political insight rather than something they've just absorbed from the right-wing gutter press.
It barely takes a puff of critical thinking skills to tear this "back to the 70s" trope to shreds, yet the mindless political rote learners just can't do it.
- They don't care that the rip-off private energy companies only formed after the privatisation of the National Grid in 1990 (long after the 1970s).
- They don't care that the railways were privatised in 1994 (long after the 1970s).
- They don't care that the Royal Mail was only privatised in 2013 (long after the 1970s).
- They don't care that, unlike almost every other developed nation in the world, the UK never actually had a national investment bank/fund (not even in the 1970s).
- They don't care that the proliferation of exploitative Zero Hours Contracts only happened over the last decade (long after the 1970s).
- They don't care that house prices have soared out of the reach of millions of ordinary working people as a result of the Tories overseeing the lowest levels of house building since the 1920s since 2010 (long after the 1970s).
Facts and evidence just don't matter to the kind of people who rote learn and regurgitate the propaganda they read in the extreme-right press.
They only care about the dopamine reward they get from successfully remembering that they've seen these simplistic extreme-right propaganda tropes before, and from faithfully repeating them like a small child who is ecstatic at having learned the first few letters of the alphabet or the two times table.
Worse even that the immunity to facts, and the aversion to critical thinking skills, is the downright hypocrisy of so many of these right-wing blowhards.
They're been trained by their masters in the extreme-right press to pour scorn on any policies designed to undo the damage that decades of hard-right economic madness has done to the UK economy, and accuse their proponents of living in the past, or wanting to drag the UK back to the 1970s ... yet, we know that a huge proportion of the hard-right propaganda reading Brexit fanatics are obsessed with bringing back stuff like blue passports, Imperial weights and measures and corporal punishment in schools.
We also know that they're now intent on voting for a party that wants to bring back the divisive segregation of children into a minority that go to well-funded grammar schools and the majority who get left to rot in the under-funded secondary moderns.
They accuse others of wanting to live in the past, yet they clearly hanker after the distant past themselves, when passports were blue and children got whipped and beaten with sticks for failing to learn how to divide stuff by 14 and 16 properly.
And they're off to vote for a political party that is plotting to allow their posh mates to begin ripping foxes apart with packs of dogs for fun.
The really sad thing is that they don't miss the actual good things about the past like the house prices that weren't way beyond the reach of ordinary working people, the decent wages, the train tickets that were cheaper than doing the trip by car, the affordable energy bills, the full employment, the decent workers' rights ...
No! The stuff that most Daily Mail and Express readers seem to miss about the past is the teachers beating the crap out of the children they didn't like, the ridiculously archaic and impractical weights and measures, the barbaric blood sports, the segregation in the education system, and the bloody blue passports.
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Whoever leaked the Labour Party draft manifesto obviously did it in order to try and damage the Labour Party as much as possible, but the plan has backfired because a lot of the policies it contains are exactly what the public want to see.
Renationalisation
Stuff like the renationalisation of the railways and Royal Mail are favoured by an overwhelming majority of the British public [source - YouGov]
Additionally only a minority of people who would argue against the plan to break up the profiteering energy companies in order to bring the natural monopolies of the transmission and distribution grids back into public ownership and establish at least one publicly owned energy company for each region. If this kind of energy strategy is good enough for Germany, why do we in the UK deserve less?
These policies obviously make sense because any profits the nationalised companies make would be reinvested in the nation, rather than siphoned off into private pockets.
Zero Hours Contracts
The idea of following New Zealand's lead and banning exploitative Zero Hours Contracts is also a good one that is universally popular across the political spectrum. 71% of Labour Party supporters would like to see them banned, but Tories are also more likely to support a ban than oppose it (by 46% - 35%) [source for stats - YouGov]
If New Zealand can ban unscrupulous employers from exploiting their workforce, then why can't the UK?
National Investment Bank
The Labour idea of a national investment bank is really good stuff, but for some reason the public remain unconvinced, which is odd because we accepted successive governments pouring more and more cash into the RBS black hole, but we're sceptical about a plan to create a bank that actually invests in public infrastructure and works like a sovereign wealth fund.
Instead of squandering their North Sea oil wealth on tax breaks for the rich and unemployment benefits for the millions of people they laid off like the Tories did, the Norwegians invested their North Sea oil bonanza in a sovereign wealth fund which is now the richest sovereign wealth fund on earth (not bad for a country with about the same population as Scotland!).
The UK missed a trick for sure when the Tories squandered the North Sea oil bonanza, but it's never too late for a good idea. If the idea of a national investment fund/bank is good enough for Norway (and almost every other developed country on earth) why can't the UK have one too?
Clampdown on outsourcing companies
Labour are planning to clamp down on profiteering corporate outsourcing companies, and it's about time too. They want to make sure that any company receiving taxpayers cash for doing government work must pay their fair share of taxes and not hide out in tax havens (how this isn't the case already is extraordinary).
Labour also want to make sure that companies carrying out government work are subject to the Freedom of Information Act. This is a good move for a couple of reasons. Firstly the public should have a right to know how their money is being spent (whether it's being spent by government or by a private company), and secondly it would remove the unfair advantage that private companies have in being able to gather information on the publicly run services they're planning to take over, whilst keeping their own operations secret.
Other stuff
- Putting a stop to creeping pension age rises
- Bringing the UK corporation tax rate more back into line with the average for the developed world and scrapping to sweetheart tax deals between HMRC and multinational corporations like Google, Starbucks and Vodafone.
- Review Tory cuts to the child welfare system and in-work benefits with a view to reversing them and immediately scrap the rape clause.
"Taking back control"
"Taking back control" was one of the most popular slogans of the Brexit movement, but if Theresa May and the Tories end up in an even more powerful position than they were in before, free to continue rigging society in favour of corporations and the super-rich, how have we taken back control?
Surely we'll have given even more control to the political establishment than they had before.
Jeremy Corbyn's plan is to "take back control" by taking back our public infrastructure from the corporate profiteers and running it for the national good, and to clamp down on other outrageous corporate practices like profiteering from natural monopolies, tax-dodging and worker exploitation.
So if we really want to "take back control" of our country from the out-of-touch Westminster establishment and the corporate interests they serve, then now is probably the only chance we'll get in generations to actually do it ...
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.
A London School of Economics study into how Jeremy Corbyn is represented in the media found that only a paltry 11% of all newspaper articles about him bothered to accurately state a single one of his actual policies. In the hard-right Daily Mail and Express that figure was 0%.
Given this lack of unbiased political coverage it's not difficult to understand why so many people are so unfamiliar with Jeremy Corbyn's actual policies, and tend to judge him as if politics is some kind of vapid personality contest.
So here are some of the Jeremy Corbyn policies that the mainstream media really don't want to tell you about, so you can judge for yourself whether you like them or not.
Labour Party policies
Ban companies based in tax havens bidding for government contracts
It's astounding that this isn't the case already. How on earth could anyone even attempt to justify taxpayers' cash being paid to companies based in tax havens for the purpose of dodging tax?
£10 minimum wage for all workers over the age of 18
The UK is the only country in the developed world where workers' wages are declining in real terms, while the economy is actually growing. A £10 minimum wage would help to reverse this scenario, and it would also significantly reduce the cost of in-work benefits like tax credits and housing benefit (most of which goes to working families these days).
All rented accommodation to be fit for human habitation
Again, astounding that this isn't the case already, but in January 2016 the Tories (over 1/3 of whom are landlords) deliberately voted down a Labour Party amendment to their housing bill to ensure that all rented accommodation is fit for human habitation.
Renationalise the railways
This is a very popular policy that is supported by an overwhelming majority of the public. Do you support rail renationalisation too, or are you one of the minority who think that the current profiteer-administered shambles is acceptable?
Renationalise the NHS
The Tory party have been carving up the English NHS and distributing the pieces to the private sector, Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to reverse this process. Are you one of the 84% of people who thinks the NHS should be run as a not for profit public service, or the 7% who agree with the ongoing Tory privatisation agenda?
Free school meals
The policy of providing free school meals to all school children between the ages of 4 and 11 is based on evidence based research showing that universal free school meals lead to significantly improved grades. It will be paid for by ending the generous tax breaks (public subsidies) for the 7% of kids who go to private fee-paying schools.
Create a National Education Service
Jeremy Corbyn believes that education is a right, not a commodity. He wants to create an integrated National Education Service to ensure that education is freely available to anyone who needs it.
Scrap tuition fees
Thanks to the Tories (and their Lib-Dem enablers) UK students now face the most expensive tuition fees in the developed world for study at public universities, meaning students typically leave university with £50,000 of debt, and two thirds of them will never pay off their student debts. Labour would end this lunacy by getting rid of student fees.
Restore NHS Bursaries
One of the first things Theresa My did when she came to power was to scrap NHS bursaries for nurses and other NHS workers. This removal of financial support for nurses has caused a huge 10,000 decline in the number of applicants to nursing courses. This collapse in nursing recruitment would be bad enough in its own right, but in combination with a record increase in the number of EU nurses quitting the NHS, and a mind-boggling 92% fall in nursing recruitment from EU countries, the UK is clearly facing a massive NHS recruitment crisis. Labour would reverse this calamitous state of affairs by restoring NHS Bursaries for trainee nurses.
Increase the carers allowance
Labour are proposing to increase the Carers Allowance for the 1 million unpaid carers in the UK. This would be paid for by scrapping the Tories' Inheritance Tax cut for millionaires. Unpaid carers save the UK economy an estimated £132 million a year, and they're doing ever more work as a result of the £4.6 billion in Tory cuts to the social care budget.
Create a National Investment Bank
This is actually one of Jeremy Corbyn's best policies, but few people actually understand it. It's absolutely clear that allowing private banks to determine where money is invested ends up in huge speculative bubbles in housing and financial derivatives, while the real economy is starved of cash. A National Investment Bank would work by investing in things like infrastructure, services, businesses and regional development projects, and would end up becoming a kind of sovereign wealth fund for the UK.
End the public sector pay freeze
Under Tory rule UK workers suffered the longest sustained decline in real wages since records began. The public sector pay freeze contributed massively to this. You'd have to be economically illiterate to imagine that repressing public sector wages with below inflation pay rises for year after year would not exert downwards pressure on private sector wages too. Ending the public sector pay freeze would actually boost the economy by putting more money in people's pockets, meaning an increase in aggregate demand.
End sweetheart tax deals between HMRC and massive corporations
David Cameron (the son of a tax-dodger) repeatedly lied through his teeth about how serious he was about confronting tax-dodging, whilst allowing HMRC to concoct sweetheart deals with corporations like Google, Vodafone and Starbucks. One of the main reasons the corporate press are so strongly opposed to Jeremy Corbyn is that they know that unlike David Cameron, he's serious when he talks about clamping down on tax-dodging.
Stop major corporations ripping off their suppliers
Major corporations are withholding an astounding £26 billion through late payment, which is responsible for an estimated 50,000 small businesses going bust every year. The scale of this problem is so massive that it should be a national scandal, and Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely right to align himself with small businesses to defend their interests.
Reverse the Tory corporation tax cuts
Since 2010 the Tories have cut the rate of corporation tax for major multinational corporations from 28% to just 17% (by 2020) meaning the UK has one of the lowest corporation tax rates in the developed world. The global average is 27% and the G7 average is 32.3%. Theresa May has already threatened to lower the corporation tax even further to turn post-Brexit Britain into a tax haven economy, Corbyn is proposing to do the opposite and increase corporation tax rates so they're more in line with the rest of the developed world.
Defend Human Rights
Theresa May has repeatedly expressed her intention to tear up Winston Churchill's finest legacy, the European Convention on Human Rights. Labour would oppose this Tory attack on our human rights.
Zero Hours Contracts ban
Almost a million UK workers are now on exploitative Zero Hours Contracts. Last year the New Zealand parliament voted to ban them, and Labour is proposing to do the same. Long-term employees and workers doing regular hours would be protected from Zero Hours Contract exploitation.
Holding the Tories to account over Brexit
Labour have said that they won't block Brexit, but they will seek to hold the Tories to account over it. A landslide Tory victory would be a disaster for the UK because it would allow the Tories to pursue the most right-wing pro-corporate anti-worker Brexit possible with almost no democratic scrutiny. The only way to make sure the Tories don't push a fanatically right-wing Brexit on the nation is to return a Labour government, or ensure that there are enough opposition MPs to hold them to account.
Housebuilding
Under the Tory government the level of UK housebuilding has slumped to the lowest levels since the 1920s, even though demand for housing is extremely high. Labour are guaranteeing to invest in a programme of house building, and committing to ensure that half of the new houses are social housing. This wouldn't just alleviate the housing crisis, it would also stimulate the economy by increasing aggregate demand.
Combat inequality
George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda resulted in the longest sustained decline in workers' wages since records began and condemned an additional 400,000 children to growing up in poverty, meanwhile the tiny super-rich majority literally doubled their wealth. Labour is pledging to reduce the inequality gap and introduce progressive policies to reduce the gap between the incomes of the highest and lowest paid. There is plenty of evidence to show that the least unequal societies are more economically successful places where the people are happier.
Conclusion
So out of these 20 Labour Party policies, how many do you actually strongly disagree with?
Footnote
This article attracted rather a lot more interest than I'd imagined (well over 1 million hits in 3 days!). One of the big questions people have been asking is how all of this would be paid for.
The answer is that quite a lot of the policies are actually investments that would pay for themselves in the long-term because they would stimulate more economic activity than the investment cost (see my articles on fiscal multiplication and the marginal propensity to consume to get a better idea of how). Other policies could easily be funded if we had a government that was actually serious about cracking down on tax-dodging, which costs the country vast amounts per year. Just ending sweetheart deals between HMRC and major multinationals would generate £billions, which would pay for stuff like restoring the NHS bursary many times over.
If anyone is genuinely worried about how stuff is going to be paid for, the first thing on their mind should of course be the impending threat of a "no deal" Tory strop away from the Brexit negotiating table that the Tories have made the centrepiece of their so-called "negotiating strategy". If that happens the IFS have estimated a 6.3% -9.5% collapse in GDP, which would be a much more significant economic meltdown than the one that was caused by the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis (that our economy and our wages have still nowhere near recovered from). What do you think would happen to the tax take and the budget deficit if the economy tanked even worse than it did in 2009 thanks to the Tories' alarmingly woeful threat-based Brexit negotiation strategy resulting in the chaos of an economically ruinous cliff edge Brexit?
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.
1. The National Insurance U-turn
The mainstream media desperately tried to turn the absurd Tory U-turn on their proposed National Insurance hike into an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, but the truth of it is that the "Corbyn missed an open goal" narrative is a sideshow designed to deflect attention away from the abject incompetence of the Tory party leadership.
It's absolutely clear that Philip Hammond was far too busy writing jokes to put in his budget speech to bother briefing his fellow Tory MPs or the pro-Tory press that he was going to casually break the Tory manifest commitment not to raise National Insurance. The week of absolutely ridiculous Tory excuses being made against a backdrop of almost unanimous condemnation was followed by a hastily executed U-turn. It was a total shambles, and anyone guilty of trying to make the story about Jeremy Corbyn's Prime Minister's Questions performance is clearly attempting to deflect attention away from the abject incompetence of the actual government.
2. A record fine
The Tory party were handed a record £70,000 fine for their dodgy election expenses during the 2015 General Election campaign. Not only did they misdeclare over £100,000 in expenses as national rather than local expenses, they also totally failed to declare another £100,000+ at all. The £70,000 fine was less than one third of the value of the expenses they scammed, but the maximum allowable by law.
3. Criminal investigations
12 police forces have handed files to the Crown Prosecution Service over the 2015 Tory General Election fraud and Tory MPs are being interviewed under caution about their roles in the scandal. There is plenty of evidence that the Tory party broke the law by misdeclaring local campaign spending as national spending.
It's becoming ever clearer that the Tories won the 2015 general Election with a coordinated breech of election spending rules designed to financially dope their way to victory in a load of marginal constituencies. The only way the CPS can avoid accusations of a politically motivated whitewash will be to find some people to prosecute for the blatant criminality, which means they will have to decide whether to charge the MPs themselves, or their election agents.
4. The NHS nursing crisis
Freedom of Information requests have revealed that the number of EU nurses quitting the NHS has risen to an all time high, while the number of new nurses arriving from the EU has slumped by 92%. Meanwhile there is a huge recruitment crisis going on as the number of British people applying to train as nurses has slumped by almost 10,000 as a result of Theresa May scrapping the NHS bursaries that helped trainee nurses qualify without assuming vast mountains of debt.
5. David Davis' admission
The Tory Brexit secretary David Davis made an absolutely extraordinary admission that very few people seem to have grasped the appalling significance of. As he was being grilled by the Brexit select committee Davis admitted that the Tory government have done absolutely no research into how bad a retaliatory hard Brexit would be for the UK economy and the British people. What makes this admission so extraordinary is that it shows that when Theresa May put on her tartan clown costume and made her do as we say or we'll blow up a 'hard Brexit' economic bomb threat to the EU, she hadn't even bothered to investigate how bad the economic damage will actually be if the EU call her bluff.
6. Scotland
If there's one thing that's most likely to drive Scotland towards independence it's an English Tory Prime Minister expressing her determination to totally ignore Scottish democracy. The Scottish parliament will vote to hold an independence referendum to give the Scottish people the chance to escape the appalling consequences of a hard Tory Brexit that they voted so strongly against, and if Theresa May refuses to allow it because of her determination to drag Scotland out of the EU, and out of the Single Market against their will, she'll drive countless people into the welcoming arms of the Scottish independence campaign.
David Cameron will always be remembered as the man who gambled the entire future of the UK in return for a little bit of short-term party political gain and lost. This week it's looking more and more likely that Theresa May is going to go down in history as the woman who's bossy authoritarianism ensured the break-up of the United Kingdom.
7. Child Poverty
The government's own figures revealed that 100,000 more children are living in poverty than last year. Of the 4 million children in the UK who are growing up in poverty, two thirds come from working families. As even more ideologically driven Tory cuts to in-work benefits really begin to bite over the next three years the child poverty rate looks set to continue increasing, and the proportion of kids in poverty from working families looks set to increase too.
Only the most savagely indifferent of Tory apologists could possibly try to argue that any kids, let alone kids from working families deserve to grow up in poverty.
8. Zero Hours Contracts
Office for National Statistics figures revealed that the number of UK workers on exploitative Zero Hours Contracts rose to an all time record high of 905,000, an increase of 13%.
Last year New Zealand banned Zero Hours Contracts, but in Tory Britain ever more people are finding themselves stuck in exploitative and unstable Zero Hours jobs.
9. The Housing crisis
The Office for National Statistics have revealed that UK houses are the least affordable they have ever been. Since 1997 house prices have risen 259% while wages have risen only 68% in the same period. This means that the the average house now costs 7.6x average annual earnings as compared to 3.6x in 1997.
In the 1980s the Tories used to bang on and on about the importance of home ownership, but nowadays the percentage of people who own their own home is in freefall, house prices have become the most unaffordable they've ever been, house building remains in the worst slump since the 1920s, a massive horde of virtually unregulated buy-to-let slumlords are cashing in on the crisis by renting appalling properties at sky-high rents, and last year the Tories voted down a bill to ensure that rented houses are fit for human habitation!.
39% of Tory MPs are landlords.
10. Ireland just shamed the UK
In January 2017 Theresa May scuttled off to the United States to lick Donald Trump's boots and beg him for a hastily cobbled-together trade deal for Brexit Britain. Her "begging bowl" speech was an absolute abomination.
In March 207 the Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny used his visit to America to lecture Donald Trump about the benefits of immigration as a swipe against Trump's immoral and brazenly unconstitutional anti-refugee policies.
Don't think that I like Enda Kenny's economic policies. I don't. But his backbone is admirable. Theresa May shamed Britain with her pathetic grovelling at the feet of a narcissistic bully with no respect whatever for basic human decency or the rule of law. Enda Kenny did the Irish proud by standing up for immigrants.
If the right-wing Prime Minister of our little neighbour Ireland can stand up to Trump, why on earth did Theresa May have to shame the United Kingdom by licking his boots so cravenly?
Conclusion
The Tory government is an absolute shambles. They're slow-marching us towards a catastrophic nuclear Brexit and the break-up of the United Kingdom; they just did possibly the biggest budget U-turn in living memory; they're trashing the NHS; they're overseeing huge spikes in child poverty and people in unstable work; they're under criminal investigation for cheating their way into power; they're overseeing an extraordinary house price inflation crisis; and Theresa May just got put to shame by the bloody Prime Minister of Ireland.
Of course the mainstream media will try to deflect attention elsewhere. Of course they'll attack the opposition instead of the actual party in government.
"Ooh Ooh Ooh look at that squirrel".
Now forget everything you just read.
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Owen Smith's bizarre below-the-belt dig at Jeremy Corbyn's leadership for being like Sports Direct just goes to show how utterly out-of-touch some of these coup plotter MPs are.
These people earn £75,000 a year, plus tens of thousands more in expenses, plus tens of thousands more if they hold positions in the shadow cabinet. Some of them who were parachuted into safe Labour constituencies essentially have jobs for life. Most of the others can look forward to retirement in the £300 per day (tax-free) unelected House of Lords, or cushy consultancies at PR firms or corporations hoping to cash in on their political connections.
In contrast 90% of Sports Direct employees are on insecure Zero Hours Contracts. The company was recently slammed for illegally paying workers less than the minimum wage and treating their staff like sub-humans. Staff were subjected to humiliating searches and left so afraid of losing their jobs that they avoided taking toilet breaks. One woman was so fearful about her job that she gave birth in a toilet cubicle. Other women were even promised permanent contracts in return for sexual favours.
The Labour coup plotters don't like their boss. They resent the fact that Labour Party members chose a man they don't want to work with. Several of them flatly refused to serve in his shadow cabinet from day one. Others damaged the party by constantly briefing against the party leadership in the press. Others engaged in a grubby sequence of pre-planned resignations designed to bully their boss into quitting just at a time when the country most needed the opposition to speak with a unified voice in condemnation of the Tories. Others have deliberately fabricated evidence of "abuse" in order to inflict as much damage as possible on the party they pretend to love.
Anyone who has worked for private companies in the past (Sports Direct or otherwise) knows damned well that inflicting this scale of damage on the company reputation would lead to immediate sacking, yet when it comes to the appalling behaviour of these MPs Jeremy Corbyn is still offering to forgive and forget.
Nobody is claiming that Jeremy Corbyn is perfect, he's only been in the leadership job for ten months. He's been learning on the job and made mistakes along the way. Of course he's not going to have become an ideal boss in such a short amount of time, but comparisons with Mike Ashley and the management of Sports Direct as quite frankly ridiculous.
By making such a hyperbolic and frankly insulting comparison Owen Smith has demonstrated that he's completely out of touch with the reality faced by millions of exploited low-income workers across the UK. It's no wonder that five million voters abandoned the Labour Party between 1997 and 2010 when the Party has bred such complacency that MPs are prepared to use the plight of exploited workers just to score cheap political points within the Westminster bubble.
What cheek they have to compare their own privileged position in society to the employees of one of the most ruthlessly exploitative companies in Britain.
Jeremy Corbyn is one of the only high profile political figures who seems genuine in his concerns for the working poor, yet his opponents within the Labour Party are determined to show how out of touch with reality that they are by comparing their own plight to the the workers of a company that has been described as a 21st Century workhouse.
They're so insulated within their own bubble of wealth and privilege that they're seriously comparing their own privileged situations to the plight of some of the most unfortunate workers in Britain. What makes this behaviour all the more insulting is that understanding the plight of, and defending exploited workers is the exact purpose the Labour Party was originally built for.
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.
Anyone who is familiar with my work knows that I'm left-wing. I'm left-wing because I think that some infrastructure and services are far too important to be left to private profiteers, and are much better if they are run as not-for-profit public services.
The EU referendum debate is very interesting because it's not a left-wing vs right-wing contest. You have hard-right people on both sides of the debate and also very left-wing people on both sides too.
The Leave campaign is supported by right-wing zealots like Michael Gove (the guy who privatised thousands of publicly owned schools into the hands of unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities and openly declared that people should ignore the experts and use their gut instincts when making important decisions), Priti Patel (a vile reactionary who detests workers' rights), Chris Grayling (the guy David Cameron put in charge of privatising the UK justice system), John Redwood (a guy who wants to see the UK turned into the World's biggest tax-haven), Arron Banks (a guy who bankrolls UKIP and wants to see the NHS privatised) and Iain Duncan Smith (a rabidly right-wing narcissist who actually compared his callous treatment of the unemployed and disabled with the slavery abolition movement). However Leave also has the support of some admirable old-school left-wingers like Dennis Skinner and Dave Nellist.
The Remain campaign is supported by the likes of David Cameron (an inveterate liar), George Osborne (surely the most under-qualified and incompetent Chancellor in living memory), Theresa May (a disgusting right-wing authoritarian who has introduced much of the absolute worst legislation during Cameron's stint as Prime Minister), Nick Clegg (a man who sold his so-called principles for a tiny taste of second hand Tory power) and Tony Blair (the right-wing neoliberal who usurped the Labour Party and switched it from being a social democrtic party to a Thatcherite one). However Remain also has the support of genuine left-wingers like John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, as well as the bulk of the trade union movement.
I'm definitely not pro-EU (I've probably written far more detailed criticism of the EU than 99% of Brexiters) but I decided that the case for quitting the EU is far too weak if there's not actually a specific plan of action for how to restructure the UK economy/legal system/constitution/trade relations etc after we leave. I've critiqued both the right-wing Vote Leave campaign and the left-wing "Lexit" campaign and found them both sorely lacking in an actual plan of action for how the post-EU economy would be restructured.
Given my left-wing sentiments I really did want the "Lexit" case to be better than the "Vote Leave" case, and in some regards it was. Criticism of the economically hard-right assault on our sovereignty that is the TTIP corporate power grab clearly carries more weight when coming from a left-winger than it does from the kind of right-winger who would normally be orgasmic at the thought of the complete corporate takeover of the United Kingdom.
The right-wing Vote Leave campaign desperately undermined their own case with their absolute refusal to stop repeating their "£350 million a week" lie, even after it's been clearly shown that including all expenditures and excluding all benefits is a shockingly misleading way of determining the cost of a thing.
I genuinely hoped that "Lexit" wouldn't stoop to such appalling lies to sell their campaign, but unfortunately some of them did. The most oft repeated "Lexit" lie is that "workers right are not protected by the EU". This lie isn't just endlessly repeated by "Lexiters" in comments threads, it actually appears in a Left Leave campaign document which states in no uncertain terms that "it is a myth that the EU defends workers".
The claim that the EU has done nothing to protect workers rights is an outright lie. In 1998 the EU introduced the European Working Time Directive in spite of fierce opposition from the UK Tory government during the negotiation phase. The European Working Time Directive prevents your boss from forcing you to work more than 48 hours a week (you still can if you want to, but your boss can't make you) and it also guarantees paid holiday leave (2 million British workers had no paid holiday leave at all before the Working Time Directive came into operation!).
Of course many of our workers' rights were won through the hard work and sacrifices of trade unionists long before the EU even came into existence, but to claim that the EU doesn't protect any workers' rights whatever is just as clear a lie as the right-wing "£350 million a week" claims.
Of course it's possible to argue that the EU hasn't done enough to protect workers rights, they were apparently powerless to intervene when Margaret Thatcher carried out her ideological assault on Britain's heavy industries and the trade unions and they have been seemingly powerless to stop the exponential growth of exploitative Zero Hours and Limited Hours contracts too. However this is a very odd argument for Lexiters to make, because the implication is clearly that the EU should have had more powers to protect our workers' rights, not that we would have been better off outside the European Union.
Perhaps this obvious logical problem with the "the EU hasn't done enough to protect workers' right" line of argument is the reason that some "Lexiters" have instead resorted to repeating the outright lie that the EU doesn't protect any workers' rights whatever?
Whatever the reason that this lie has been adopted by the "Lexit" campaign, it's severely disappointing. It's disappointing because even though I think "Lexiters" are playing with fire by calling for Britain to quit the EU when we have a radically right-wing government in power, I really wanted their case to be superior to the shockingly dishonest rubbish spouted by the right-wing Brexiters. However this oft repeated lie about the EU doing nothing for workers' rights proves that certain members of the Left Leave campaign are just as prepared to lie to get what they want as members of the right-wing Leave campaign are.
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