Monday 5 February 2018

It's time for the Labour Party right-wingers to pick a side


In recent years the right-wing faction of the Labour Party have had an extraordinary track record of incompetence, but their misdirected criticisms, their furious berserker attacks on their own party, and their unfathomable willingness to mindlessly regurgitate hard-right propaganda tropes are in danger of ushering in something far worse than Theresa May's directionless and shambolic incarnation of the Tory party.

The track record of incompetence

We're all familiar with the way Labour's chance to walk the 2015 General Election was totally squandered when the Labour right insisted on meekly imitating ruinous Tory austerity dogma instead of actively confronting it and relentlessly criticising Tory austerity dogma as the economic vandalism that it undoubtedly is.

We saw them lose 40 of the 41 Scottish seats in 2015 and then we saw them conclude that the answer to this unprecedented electoral wipe-out was to replace their hopeless right-wing leader Jim Murphy with yet another Labour Party right-winger, the hapless Kezia Dugdale!

Then we saw the right-wing Labour leadership candidates get completely trounced by a 200-1 outsider candidate with a core principle that Labour should actually oppose the Tories instead of meekly imitating them.

Then we saw the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup, which only ended up in Corbyn strengthening his mandate to lead the party, and creating a second huge surge of enthusiastic pro-Corbyn people joining the Labour Party.

The damage they've done to the Labour Party is only rivalled by the way they've marginalised themselves within the party and completely trashed their own reputations.

The right-wing Progress "party within a party" was once the most powerful and formidable Labour faction by far, with Progress-backed MPs ruling the roost for over two decades, but now they're an absolute joke of an outfit who are clearly far more intent on their internal wrecking campaigns than actually presenting an alternative view of what Labour should be doing other than the centre-left democratic socialism that Jeremy Corbyn and the overwhelming majority of the membership want.


Haringey

The mainstream media have been desperately trying to create the fiction that the leader of Haringey Council Claire Kober has resigned because of bullying by the left-wing of the party, and the Labour right are loving it, retweeting her lurid accusations and highly damaging berserker attacks on the Labour Party. It's as if they imagine that helping her wreck the Labour Party in Haringey is some kind of master-strategy, rather than the next bout of self-defeating flailing by people who are incoherent with rage that they're still not getting their own way.

What the mainstream media have almost ubiquitously failed to explain is that Claire Kober had made her position as Haringey Council leader totally untenable by relentlessly pushing a hugely unpopular £2 billion privatisation/social cleansing scheme called the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), and that she was accused of using "wrecking ball tactics" and running Haringey council "like her own personal fifedom" by a resigning Labour councillor just weeks ago.

Aside from the Labour NEC and both of the local MPs urging Kober to stop the HDV privatisation scheme, she was also caught creating a secret dossier on six Labour council candidates in an attempt to have them purged as council candidates for the party.

So there's strong grounds for arguing that the woman who is loudly and relentlessly crying victim is actually the bully who won't listen to reason, and the ones being smeared as bullies are generally just local people and ordinary Labour Party members who didn't like her autocratic rule, and didn't want her £2 billion privatisation/social cleansing scheme to go ahead.

Northamptonshire

The mainstream media and the Labour Party right have made so much noise about Haringey you could be forgiven for having missed the fact that the Tory run Northamptonshire Council has completely run out of money and is effectively bankrupt.

The Tories there have banned all new spending and they're actually looking to sell off the £53 million council offices they just built, just to cover their own running costs!

This local government meltdown should be a national scandal, but instead of a concerted effort to draw attention to this Tory financial catastrophe, the Labour right are intent on keeping Haringey and Claire Kober's berserker attack on her own party in the headlines as much as possible!


Political intimidation

Last week an extreme-right terrorist admitted in court that he'd plotted to assassinate the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. A couple of days after admitting this assassination plot he was found guilty of carrying out the Finsbury Park extreme-right terrorist attack.

Hardly anyone on the Labour right took the time to condemn this outrageous plot to murder Corbyn and Khan, or to point out the link between the hateful rhetoric of the right-wing press and hate-mongering Tory MPs like Nadine Dorries, and the rise in extremist political intimidation.

They could easily have pointed to the massive waves of abuse and death threats the Brextremist blue-kip mob hurl at any Tory MP who dares question Theresa May's fanatically right-wing and staggeringly anti-democratic interpretation of Brexit. to create a very strong warning about the violent extremism of the far-right.
  
But no, they decided to bite their tongues and reserve their furious condemnation for a few days later when half a dozen or so anarchists protested noisily at a Jacob Rees-Mogg speech (even though the instigator of the violence at the event was clearly the white-shirted Rees-Mogg supporter who smacked a woman in the face).

It's beyond belief that Labour right-wingers who remained silent over a plot to actually kill the Labour Party leader all suddenly began pushing the Guido Fawkes outrage narrative that noisy but non-violent protest is now completely unacceptable, and that the left in general are somehow to blame for the violence instigated by the Rees-Mogg supporting thug who saw fit to smack a young woman in the face.

The danger

There's no doubt that there are many on the Labour right who would rather wreck the Labour Party and leave the Tories in power perpetually than see Jeremy Corbyn lead the party to victory.

Don't just take my word for it that they feel this way - take Tony Blair at his word. He's the one who wanted to be "absolutely clear" that he'd rather see the Tories win than a Labour Party led by a genuine democratic socialist.

The problem with this internal wrecking strategy is obvious: Theresa May is already dancing to the tune of the hard-right Brextremists, and it's only a matter of time before these fanatics pull the plug on her and attempt to install their leader Jacob Rees-Mogg as Prime Minister.

Rees-Mogg is supported by the lunatic right-wing fringe of the Tory party (who use taxpayers' cash to subsidise their secretive Brextremist ERG faction), the death threat hurling blue-kip mob, former Ukippers like Arron Banks and Nigel Farage (who now see an extreme-right Rees-Mogg takeover of the Tory party as a much easier prospect than breathing life back into the corpse of UKIP), the alt-right (who see Rees-Mogg as the British version of Trump), and even the Britain First hate mob who inspired the terrorist who plotted to kill Corbyn and the terrorist who succeeded in killing Jo Cox, and now see themselves as Rees-Mogg's Sturmabteilung thugs.

If the Labour right continue their utterly misguided thrashing around, then they're likely to hand power directly to Rees-Mogg and the extreme-right fanatics who adore him.

Instead of championing Clair Kober and her berserker attack on her own party because she's not going to get her own way on her massive privatisation scheme, they should be focusing attention on the catastrophic Tory economic meltdown in Northamptonshire.

And instead of mindlessly repeating hard-right Guido Fawkes tropes about how non-violently protesting against Jacob Rees-Mogg is supposedly shockingly unacceptable, they should be focusing their criticism on the extreme-right Brextremists who repeatedly send waves of death threats at the behest of Paul Dacre and the hard-right Daily Mail propaganda rag, glorify extreme-right terrorism, plot to raise a slush fund to incite more extreme-right terrorist attacks, plot to kill Labour politicians, and support Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Their motivation

It's difficult to know whether these Labour right-wingers mindlessly regurgitate Guido Fawkes propaganda tropes, continually attack their own party, and routinely ignore the catastrophic failings of the Tories because they're terminally stupid, or whether this behaviour is motivated by such a deep ideological hatred of democratic socialism that they'd rather help Jacob Rees-Mogg and his hard-right Brextremists into power than allow the Labour Party that they once controlled with an iron fist revert back to centre-left democratic socialism.

Their choice

It's becoming increasingly obvious that the only choice the Labour right are left with is between Jeremy Corbyn and a genuine democratic socialist pushback against four decades of neoliberal dogma, or the wanton destruction of Jacob Rees-Mogg and his coalition of the most fanatical hard-right Brextremists.

Astoundingly, their continued internal wrecking suggests that a significant section of the Labour right are intent on backing Rees-Mogg and the dangerous fanaticism of the extreme-right!



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