Remember Luciana Berger? She is, or was, the Blairite MP for Liverpool who joined the chorus of Jewish MPs screaming that Jeremy Corbyn was an evil anti-Semite and a threat to British Jewry because he criticised Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Oh yes, and he wanted to ditch Thatcherism. She was one of the lynch mob of angry White women who turned up at the kangaroo trial of Marc Wadsworth demanding that he should be expelled for the dreadful crime of embarrassing Ruth Smeeth. For which Wadsworth, a long-term anti-racist activist who had worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in passing legislation to deal with real anti-Semitic attacks by the BNP, was labelled an anti-Semite. Berger seems to have turned up amongst the intake of new MPs in the 2010 parliament, and so Private Eye ran a feature on her in their ‘The New Boys and Girls’ column in their issue for the 18-31 March 2011. She comes across as fiercely ambitious, opportunistic and with scant interest or understanding of the ordinary Liverpudlians she supposedly represented. The article runs
“She may recently have been voted the most fanciable member of parliament, and since being elected as Labour MP for Liverpool Watertree last year she has developed a drooling fan club of sad, middle-aged men in the Commons – but looks deceive.
Twenty-eight year old Luciana Berger is what the comrades used to describe as a “right operator”. Within a few months of her arrival, Ed Miliband had already promoted her to the frontbench as a shadow minister for energy and climate change.
Her swift climb up the greasy pole began soon after she left the Haberdasher Aske’s School for Girls and went to Birmingham University, where she became an executive member of the National Union of Students, convening national anti-racism campaigns. She resigned in 2005, accusing the NUS of taking a lax attitude to anti-Semitism on campus.
She later took up a “public affairs” post at Accenture and went on to advise the NHS Confederation, but not before the rumour mill had come alive with talk of a relationship with Euan Blair after the pair were pictured at a party. Denials came thick and fast, not only from Blair but also from the Labour party, which took it upon itself to issue an official statement saing that young Luciana “was not, and had never been” romantically linked with Euan Blair.
One of her predecessors in the Liverpool Wavertree seat, the late Terry Fields, might have doffed his fireman’s helmet to her for the way she managed to get selected in the first place, for it came straight out of the old Militant Tendency’s instruction manual. While Labour was choosing its candidate, Berger lived for a month at the home of Jane Kennedy, then the sitting MP, whose partner was the Labour official who ran the selection process, Peter Dowling. The completed ballot papers were then returned to Kennedy’s home address for counting.
A furious Frank Hont, secretary of the regional branch of the Unison trade union, lodged protests with party bosses, to no avail. Although veteran Liverpool Walton MP Peter Kilfoyle branded her a “student politician” who lacked the experience to do the job, Berger went on to beat Liverpool councillors Wendy Simon and Joyce Still by a margin of around 2-1 to win the candidacy on an “all-wimmin” shortlist. By this time, Berger was in a relationship with the MP and journalist Sion Simon, who was shortly to stand down from parliament to devote his energies to becoming mayor of Birmingham. The pair were talked of as a new “power couple”.
Berger didn’t improve her stock with incandescent Scousers by committing a series of gaffes that would have sunk a less shameless candidate. In January 2010, the Liverpool Echo tested Berger with a four-question quiz on Liverpool life and history. She scored two out of four, not knowing who performed “Ferry Cross the Mersey”, and not recognising the name of former Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly.
In her defence, Berger said that “you can’t ask a girl a football question” and added: “I’m not new to the city. I’ve been coming here for the past decade through all different jobs.” It is difficult to know what caused more offence, Berger’s failure to have heard of Shankly or her reference to coming to the city “through all different jobs” – jobs, after all, being a commodity in short supply on Merseyside.
For a while it looked as though she would be given a run for her money at the election by Scouse actor and former union activist Ricky Tomlinson, who announced that he would stand for the Socialist Labour Party under the election slogan “Berger – my arse!” – but then wimped out because of “personal and contractual commitments”.,
Once in parliament, Berger’s ability to upset local sensitivities continued. Last October she infuriated Liverpudlians by appearing on a Radio Five Live show with Kelvin McKenzie, who was the editor of the Sun at the time of the Hillsborough disaster and whose coverage of the story led to a boycott of the paper on Merseyside that last to this day. Berger’s lame defence was that she “didn’t know who the other guests were”.
With yet another little local difficulty somehow shrugged off, Luciana has also shrugged off Sion Simon and is now romantically involved with an equally ambitious Labour MP, Chuka Umunna, who has been dubbed “the British Obama”. With the pair already being talked of as a new “power couple”, let’s hope the Labour party doesn’t go and spoil things against by issuing a denial.”
From this, it seems that she won her selection as Labour MP through knowing the right people, and is less interested in representing Liverpool than using it as a base to get her rear end in parliament. Which describes any number of Blairite MPs, male and female. As for saying that it was unfair to expect a girl to know about football, this sounds less persuasive ten years later when there’s a campaign to get more women and girls playing sport and women’s footie has been a regular fixture on the box with the men’s. As for Berger’s commitment to anti-racism, while I’m sure it was genuine enough at the time it was clearly outweighed in the Wadsworth’s case by her determination to defend Israel and purge the party of Corbyn and his supporters anyway she could. I also wonder about her complaint that Birmingham University wasn’t doing enough to tackle anti-Semitism. It’s possible it was all as she said it was, and there was real anti-Semitism on campus. But the Blairites deliberately conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Was the anti-Semitism she was so upset about simply other student activists, equally determined in their opposition to racism, condemning Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians?
And it is, in my view, too bad that Tomlinson didn’t stand against her and win. If he had done so, it was have done much to demonstrate to the Blairites, and particularly Starmer, that the Old Labour they despise has the power to defeat them by being able to create its own, independent party outside their control.
More evidence that the Tories are actually going down in the polls, not up. A day or so ago the papers were all running stories claiming that Labour were revising their election strategy following polls predicting that they faced being beaten by the Tories at the coming election. Yesterday’s Metro followed the rest of them in this with the article ‘Labour ‘hits reset button’ after grim poll warning’ by Dominic Yeatman. But a closer reading of the article showed that things were quite so rosy for the party of lies, racism, bigotry, poverty, starvation and death. It stated that the poll by YouGov showed that the Tories were leading in 43 of the 76 Labour constituencies they were targeting. But in most of these the lead was by less than 5 per cent.
It also predicted that the Lib Dem’s share of the vote would fall from 20 to 13, and that Anna Soubry, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and Angela Smith would lose their seats.
First the Tory lead was 20 points, then it was ten, then seven, and now in most of the Labour seats they hope to take it’s below 5. Despite the prediction that they would win a majority of 68 seats, the trend for them is quite definitely down, not up.
Which is why, as Dr. Moderate demonstrated in his tweets about their election strategy, they’ve changed their tactics from attack to defence, trying to hold on to their seats instead of attacking Labour’s. And why they’re practically braking electoral law by sending begging letters full of lies urging people to vote for them along with the postal votes in marginals.
Also on the subject of hypocrisy and racism, Buddy Hell has written an excellent little piece about it in the Lib Dems under Jo Swinson. He notes that she said nothing about the Tories Hostile Environment policy and how it disproportionately affected Blacks and Asians, and said little about the Windrush scandal. She also hasn’t raised any objections to the Tories’ persecution of Gypsies and Travellers, has said nothing about islamophobia and has also said little about the rise in hate crimes against people of colour. He observes how she was silent in the House of Commons when Sir Paul Beresford called Travellers ‘a disease’. She has also welcomed into her party former Tory Philip Lee, who has also expressed racist views on immigration, hidden behind coded language. She also welcome the former Labour MP Angela Smith, formerly of the Change group, who infamously referred to people of colour as having a ‘funny tinge’.
The shadow equalities minister, Labour’s Dawn Butler, was also angered by her failure to act properly over the claim of one of Swinson’s activists that Butler had made up her own experience of racism. The activist involved was Steve Wilson, Angela Smith’s husband, Wilson wrote to Butler to apologise, and Swinson said that she believed Butler had been racially discriminated against. But Butler was not satisfied as Swinson had not revealed whether Wilson had been suspended or punished. She also wanted Wilson and Smith to undergo diversity training.
He also notes that before Sam Gyimah and Chuka Umunna arrived, the Lib Dems had no people of colour among their MPs. But Gyimah has shown his character by accusing Labour’s candidate for Kensington, Emma Dent Coad, of being one of those responsible for making the decision to use flammable cladding on Grenfell Tower. Coad hotly denies this, and is suing. Dr Geoffrey Seef, the Lib Dem candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, has also been making coded islamophobic comments against Labour’s Faiza Shaheen, who has complained to Swinson with the support of Dawn Butler. Coded racism isn’t anything new to the Lib Dems either. In 1991 one Langbaugh produced leaflets urging constituents to vote for a ‘local candidate’. Presumably he thought he and his constituents lived in the League of Gentlemen’s Royston Vesey. In 2009 the Lib Dems in Islington were accused of camouflaged racist campaigning against Travellers, and used the same tactics in Tower Hamlets to try and get votes from BNP supporters.
He also describes how Swinson has lied time and again over a number of other matters. Despite claiming that the Lib Dems must own the failures of the coalition with the Tories, she’s done absolutely nothing to change their policies. She was caught lying about her misleading graphs claiming that the Lib Dems were the leading opposition party in certain constituencies by Sophie Ridge on Sky, but continued repeating the lie. She also has fantasies about becoming prime minister, something that is beginning to irritate her followers. He notes that she has done precious little herself about racism and anti-Semitism, while falsely accusing Jeremy Corbyn of it all day long.
Absolutely. She’s a massive liar and hypocrite. She certainly is no progressive, despite her claims. After all, what true progressive would support the Tories’ attacks on the poor and vulnerable through their welfare cuts and the bedroom tax, for example. I also strongly believe that she isn’t a serious remainer, and that it’s just a voting tactic to provide her with an excuse not to go into coalition with Corbyn. If she’s given the opportunity, she will show her true Tory nature and go back into coalition with the Conservatives again. Just like Nick Clegg.
Don’t be fooled by her egregious lies. Don’t vote for her, or the Tories, but Corbyn.
Okay, after years of rebuffing their advances Chuka Umunna has finally given in and joined the Lib Dems. The MP for Streatham is going to stand as their candidate in a safe Labour seat. So much for the man, who said that he would never put on the yellow rosette. I can understand why the Lib Dem leadership want him – he’s young, Black and ambitious. He was angling for leadership of the Labour party until he was defeated by Jeremy Corbyn. And as a good New Labour Thatcherite, he’s spent the past few years intriguing and campaigning against the Labour leader.
And now, six months after splitting from the Labour party to form Change UK with the other splitters and quitters, he’s now decided that they aren’t a grand enough vehicle for their ambitions. So he’s departed from them and joined the Lib Dems. It’s not wholly unexpected – Change UK and a similar, minuscule ‘centrist’ party, Renew – were talking about some kind of alliance with the Lib Dems. But forging a party alliance is different from betraying it altogether and joining a different and competing party.
Mike has argued in his article on this sordid incident that Umunna was probably moved to do this by the Lib Dem success at the Euro elections. He believes they’re on a winning streak, but ignores the fact that this success was based on them positioning themselves as the party of Remain in an election that had zero to do with the actual Brexit negotiations. I’ve no doubt that the Lib Dem leadership will be highly delighted, but you can bet there’s a lot of rancour and discontent in the local party about it.
Umunna is, after, all toxic and deeply untrustworthy. He’s shown himself to be cynical, opportunistic and disloyal. His support and membership of political parties seems to be determined solely by how he can use them to boost his own ambitions. He was blocked from the leadership in the Labour party, so he tried to remove its leader, and undermine his support and that for the party generally in order to discredit not just Corbyn, but also the move to traditional Labour values and policies. When this failed, he loudly and publicly split, clearly expecting far more than the eight former MPs who joined him to follow suit. And when Change UK proved to be a dud, he showed his complete absence of sticking power and party loyalty by abandoning them as well. It’s a career that should tell the Lib Dem leadership that they can’t trust him even remotely. His loyalty to them is always going to depend on whether or not he thinks he can be better served elsewhere. It really wouldn’t surprise me if he grows tired of them eventually, and throws in his lost with the Tories if they appeal to him as a centrist Remainer.
As for the local party, you can bet than many of them are going to be furious, as long-term members and activists will no doubt now be sidelined after their years of loyal service in his favour.
Hopefully at the next election, whenever it comes, Umunna will lose massively and spectacularly to the Labour candidate, as he should. And then it’ll be interesting to see whether he sticks with the Lib Dems, or throws another strop and tries appealing to someone else to give him the power he craves.
On Wednesday Mike put up another piece reporting and commenting on Corbyn’s departure on a meeting Tweezer had called between the party leaders. He walked out when Anna Soubry and Chuka Umunna of The Independent Group walked in. The lamestream media were spinning this as a fit of pique on Corbyn’s part. In fact, as Mike and the peeps he quotes on Twitter pointed out, Corbyn was quite right: TINGe shouldn’t have been there. They’re not a party, and their inclusion in the talks was a calculated insult. Labour stated that Corbyn walked out as the talks were supposed to be bilateral, and Tweezer had changed the format from what had been previously agreed. And Mike and the Tweeters also weren’t impressed with Tweezer’s decision to hold a press conference later that evening at which she said zero that was new or even interesting. Many of them made the point that she’s now an utterly spent force, with no authority whatsoever. It’s about time she left and there was a general election.
There are other reasons why Corbyn was quite right to walk out on them. Firstly, they’re a danger to democracy. As has been said, they ain’t a party but a private corporation. This means that they don’t have to display their accounts as proper parties are supposed to, and so we don’t know who’s funding them. Donald Trump is under investigation in America of being a stooge for Putin. By the same logic, it’s entirely proper to ask if TINGe are also in the pay of a foreign government. And it is not remotely anti-Semitic to ask if that government is Israel, considering that their official have conspired to undermine the British cabinet, Zionist groups within the Labour party that are hostile to Corbyn, such as Labour Friends of Israel, have received funding from them and the Israeli government has an entire ministry, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs under cabinet minister Gilad Elon devoted to spreading propaganda, including most particularly accusations of anti-Semitism, against perceived opponents of Israel.
The question of funding also concerns potentially corrupt relationships between ministers and government officials and industry in this country. New Labour, and John Major’s government before it, became notorious for ‘sleaze’, in which private industry received favours from the government in return for sponsoring them. George Monbiot described the situation under Blair’s Labour party, and the holding of government posts by various leading industrialists in his book, Captive State. By keeping their accounts secret, it appears that TINGe are determined to go on in this manner. In America, the corporatist corruption of Congress has proceeded to such an extent that Americans have lost faith in their politicians’ willingness to represent them, and a study published by Harvard University stated that as a result America was no longer a fully functioning democracy.
Furthermore, TINGe also aren’t a genuine political party in that they have no mass membership nor any mechanism for allowing one to decide party policy. Just as they don’t really have policies. Except, of course, that Chris Leslie and the voting records of the others have made it very clear that they stand for all the neoliberal, anti-welfare policies of the Tories, including tuition fees and not raising taxes on the rich. They’ve also said that they would go into a supply and confidence relationship with Tweezer if the DUP pulled out of theirs.
It’s also been suggested by commenters on alternative media that they intend to try to discipline the Labour party and pull it in a rightward direction from outside, at the very moment that the country’s political mood as a whole is going left. TINGe have promised that they will open up their books sometime in the future, but this is just promises. As it stands, by incorporating themselves as a business, not a party, they have made themselves literally unaccountable as a political movement.
TINGe thus represent nothing so much as a Blairite splinter group, determined to shore up the Tories from outside. Just like Blairites in the local parties tried to get Conservatives and Lib Dems to join in order to oust Corbyn in the Labour leadership elections. Corbyn was right to see the political trap and walk. As for the meeting itself, I doubt Tweezer was going to say anything of value whatsoever. She didn’t when she called an earlier meeting of the leaders of the other political parties before. She didn’t listen to them, just harangued them about how they should vote for her deal. I doubt anything changed this time.
Tweezer and TINGe are an affront to democracy. We need a general election to get rid of both of them.
This fortnight’s Private Eye for 8th -21st March 2019 has an article on the connections between Chuka Umunna’s Independent Group, the Blairite think tank Progress Centre and Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. It suggests that Paul Myners, who sits on the think tank’s advisory board, could be funding it. The article on page 7 runs
MYNERS STRIKE
AS WELL as launching “The Independent Group” (TIG) of MPs, Chuka Umunna also chairs a think-tank called Progressive Centre UK. Last August this “next generation ideas lab” gave him a £65,000-a-year (for 12 hours a month) chairing its advisory board.
As TIG launched, the Progressive Centre paid for polling that “shows real appetite for new party” – which was handy for TIG, as its PR people admitted it did not yet have the cash to fund its own polling. The Progressive Centre also published work by academic Steven Fielding arguing that “despite what many believe, the future of the Independent Group might be very bright indeed”.
The most heavyweight member of the Progressive Centre’s advisory board is Lord (Paul) Myners, Gordon Brown’s City minister from 2008 to 2010, and deeply involved in the bank bailouts during the financial crisis. Indeed, the Commons treasury committee criticised Myners over his “City background and naivety” for allowing the disgraced Fred Goodwin to escape from the bailed-out RBS with an £8m pension top-up.
Myners, who also chairs PR firm Edelman and is vice-chair of Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel, gave Umunna £9,000 for office costs in 2016-17. This was when Umunna was believed to be raising funds for a leadership bid, which was called off when Jeremy Corbyn failed to crash adn burn in the 2017 election.
Could Myers be funding the Progressive Centre itself? The think-tank doesn’t say who funds it – but if he is backing it, it could at least get his name right. On its “People” page its website lists him as “Peter Myners”.
The Progress Centre sounds like a standard Blairite political faction. Myners is a banker and the head of a PR firm, and New Labour was notorious for its insistence on a light regulatory touch for the financial sector, as well as its connections to industry and banking. It was also notorious for PR and spin, instead of real policies. And like the Blairite faction in the Labour party, it’s trying to sound progressive and forward-thinking while in fact it’s just more of the same, shop-worn Thatcherism.
And the Progress Centre and the Independent Group also have another feature in common: they’re heading their financial backers.
As for the Independent Group’s prospects for the future, I think Fielding and his pollsters are being wildly optimistic. The mood of the public is moving left. Labour’s policies are massively popular with the public, unlike those of the Tories and Blairites, who aren’t offering anything except more privatisation and austerity.
As they are now, both the Progress Centre and the Independent Group are also a positive threat to democracy. They won’t reveal who their backers are, but following standard Blairite practice, it’s more than likely that they represent those backers’ interests, rather than that of the British public. They represent more Blairite and Conservative corporatism. And as six out of the eight Labour founders were members of Labour Friends of Israel, including Joan Ryan and her connections with Masot and the Israeli embassy, it’s likely that they’re also receiving money from them. And so they’ll also represent Israeli interests, rather than those of the constituents, who elected them.
I found this short video by Mark Braithwaite on his channel over on YouTube. It’s just under two minutes long, and is of Ann Soubry being told by her constituents exactly what they think of her for leaving the Tories and not holding a bye-election. They ask her why, if she believes in democracy so much, she doesn’t hold a bye-election. One tells her that he thinks she only left because she wasn’t in the cabinet. Another tells her that while she thinks she’s a rebel, she isn’t. She is also told that she is showing disrespect to her constituents for not holding a bye-election, because they didn’t vote for her as an Independent, they voted for her as a Tory. And she’s also disrespecting the 17.5 million people, who voted to Leave by demanding a second referendum on Brexit.
It’s all rather amusing. And I can quite believe that her motivation for leaving the Tories is frustrated ambition. A Labour MP yesterday said he believed that Chuka Umunna hadn’t left Labour for any better or nobler reason than that. He departed because he knew he would never be the party’s leader.
But Soubry doesn’t seem to have left the Tories at all. Not in her heart. According to a recent post by the Angry Yorkshireman over at Another Angry Voice, she’s said that she still intends to campaign for the Tories. And she and Umunna also believe she should be allowed to go back to the Tory party when she wishes, and that it’s terrible that the Tories won’t have her. Which shows how utterly inept Umunna would have been as a Labour leader, if he believes it’s acceptable for a member of his political grouping to campaign for a rival party. See https://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com/2019/02/chuka-umunna-thinks-ex-tory-members-of.html
The Independents are quickly showing themselves to be an absolute farce. And I don’t doubt that they’ll be gone at the next election. And good riddance!
Yesterday’s I also carried another interesting piece on page 9 by Adam Forrest, which reported claims that Chuka Umunna split off from Labour for no better reason than frustrated personal ambition. The piece ran
The shadow International Trade Secretary, Barry Gardiner, has claimed that Chuka Umunna only helped to form The Independent Group because “he knew he could never be the leader of the Labour Party”.
Mr Gardiner accused Mr Umunna of being motivated by frustrated personal ambitions. “It was fairly clear to me that the reason he wanted to leave the Labour Party was he knew hye could never by the leader of the Labour Party,” he told Sky News.
Mr Gardiner also cast doubt on anti-Semitic abuse as a primary motivation for leaving the party. Several of the nine Labour MPs who quit last week cited the party’s failure to tackle the abuse as a reason for leaving.
Mr Gardiner said he was “deeply saddened” that one of the MPs, Luciana Berger, felt she had to leave over the harassment she suffered in her Liverpool Wavertree constituency.
“I have no time for the others at all, because actually their reasons are varied by different,” he said. “What I’m clear about is that I don’t believe that [anti-Semitism] is the sole focus of why they’ve left the Labour party.”
No, I don’t believe that they left solely because of anti-Semitism either. It’s more likely because, like Umunna, all of them are Blairite mediocrities. Umunna was asked by Sky News to name a Labour policy he disagreed with. He couldn’t. Or, as has been remarked, he daren’t because they’re all popular. As for Leslie, as I’ve said, in his interview with New Scientist he was against a 50 per cent tax rate, renationalisation of the utilities, and ending tuition fees. Angela Smith’s also for keeping the water industry private. And all of them don’t want to hold an inquiry into the Iraq invasion. And they were all, or nearly all, the subject of ‘no confidence’ votes or threatened with deselection. They were jumping before they were pushed. Six of the original eight were also members of Labour Friends of Israel. And by anti-Semitism, they almost certainly anti-Zionism, or simply criticism of Israel. They’re thus standard Blairite neoliberals and warmongers.
And I don’t doubt, that as Blairites, they’re getting money from Israel. Joan Ryan was caught by the undercover journo for al-Jazeera’s documentary, The Lobby, saying that she met Shai Masot, the disgraced official at the Israeli embassy, most days for discussions. And Blair himself was financed by the Israelis and the Israel lobby through Lord Levy, whom he met at a gathering at the Israeli embassy.
These are almost certainly the real reasons they left: an attempt to preserve Thatcherite capitalism, western, corporate driven imperialism, and the preservation of Israel from justifiable criticism. Everything else is simply lies and propaganda.
In this 20 minute long video from Novara Media, presenter Aaron Bastani utterly demolishes the new ‘Independent’ grouping of MPs. He shows that rather than being any kind of new politics, they are simply the old, Blairite and Tory politics neoliberal politics. They are radically out of tune with what people really want, especially millennials, who have left much worse off than the preceding generation by the same politics the Blairites and Tories were pushing. And they’re being promoted by the media because they represent the old style of politics the media like: austerity with a smiley face.
Labour MPs All Going Before They’re Pushed
Bastani begins the video by describing how the departure of the seven Labour MPs – Gavin Shuker, Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Ann Coffee, Luciana Berger, Mike Gapes, Angela Smith, who left to form the Independents – wasn’t actually a surprise. They were all loud critics of Corbyn, and almost all of them had been subject to motions of ‘no confidence’ or were facing deselection. They were then joined the next day by Joan Ryan, another critic of Corbyn, who had also lost a ‘no confidence’ motion. They were then joined the day after that by Anna Soubry, Heidi Allen and Sarah Wollaston from the Tories, who complained about the old, ‘broken’ politics of Labour versus Tories.
Independents Not Democratic, and Not a Political Party
The Independents, however, aren’t a political party as such. Which means that they don’t get the Short Money given to opposition parties. This could add up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. They also don’t have to conform to the same standards as proper political parties, although they claim that they will try to do so as best they can. They also don’t have a membership. You can give them your name and contact details, and make a donation, but there is no mechanism for creating a mass organisation where the membership can determine policy. It’s a private organisation more than a political party. But what concerns Bastani the most is that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, because this would ‘crush democracy’. It’s doublespeak, and the truth is that they don’t want bye-elections because they’d lose.
Angela Smith’s Racism
He then goes on to describe how the seven founding ex-Labour members claim that they were driven out of the party by its racism, only for Angela Smith to say within hours the most racist thing he’s ever heard a politician say on television. To show how badly their launch went, Bastani produces some viewing figures. On the Monday the video of their launch had 75,000 views on Twitter. The video of Angela Smith’s apology got 700,000 views. But the video of Smith making her racist comments got even more – 1.5 million views. And while the Mirror and the Guardian wanted to splash on a video by Tom Watson, which got 500 shares on Facebook, Novara’s video of their own Ash Sarkar showing the corruption at the heart of the group – she challenged smith on her chairmanship of a parliamentary group supporting water privatisation, funded largely by the water companies – got 200,000 views. Chris Leslie then appeared later on the Beeb to sort this out. Where once again he talked about their love of democracy. A love so strong, that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, thus disenfranchising the hundreds of thousands of people, who voted for these 11 MPs. They claimed to be anti-racist, but set a new record by being racist ‘pretty much by lunchtime’.
People More Politically Engaged, Not Less
But their fundamental principle is that people don’t want Labour or Tory, but what Labour used to be 15 years ago. But at the 2017 election, 82 per cent of the population voted for either of the two main parties – Tories or Labour. That was the highest percentage the parties had since 1979. In 2010 only 65 per cent of the public voted Labour or Tory. The idea that people are turning away from the two main parties when there is a clear choice, socialism or neoliberalism, isn’t true. And the claim that people are disengaged from politics doesn’t stand up either. Voter turn-out was higher in the 2017 election, just as it was higher during the Scottish reference in 2014, and the Brexit referendum in 2016. Which was the biggest democratic exercise in British history. More people voted in that than in any previous general election or referendum. And Labour now has more than 500,000 members – more than it has had in a generation. The same is true for the SNP. More people are members of political parties now than at any point in Bastani’s lifetime. And if people genuinely do want centrist politics, how is it that the Lib Dems, who got only 8 per cent of the vote in 2015, got even less in 2017? This was despite the ‘media Einsteins’ telling us all that they would do well against the two main parties in a Brexit election. It’s almost as if, says Bastani, that the media don’t know what they’re talking about when they claim to know what the public wants.
Labour Policies Massively Popular
And then there are the policy issues. Labour’s policies are very popular. They’re right at the top of the list of why people voted Labour. But they don’t want to imitate these popular policies. Chris Leslie in an interview with New Scientist said he didn’t want a top tax rate of 50 per cent. That’s not a Corbynite policy, it’s one of Gordon Brown’s. He was also against stopping tuition fees and rejects the renationalisation of the railways, both extremely popular policies. These aren’t just popular with Labour voters, but also with Tories and Lib Dems. And polls conducted by IPPR And Sky News did polls at the end of last year which showed clear majorities of the British public wanting the Bank of England to keep house prices down and a minimal presence, at least, of workers on company boards. People don’t want centrist policies. They’re moving left, as shown on poll after poll.
Millennials Left-Wing because of Neoliberalism
And there’s a clear generational difference. At the last Labour split in 1981 when the SDP was formed, there was a clear movement to the right and post-war socialist policies had become unpopular. And yet when this split happened, the Economist carried an article decrying the popularity of socialism amongst millennials both in America and Britain. This meant ‘Generation Z’ young people, who want the government to address climate change as a fundamental part of 21st century politics. And these millennials despised the Tories, as shown by footage of an anti-Tory march. These are going to be the voters of the 2020s. And they’re not going to be bought off. They’re not left-wing because of something the read in a book, or because they want to be countercultural. They’re left-wing because their living standards and expectations are lower than their parents, they have a less expansive welfare state, they’re going to have higher levels of debt and earn less, and they will have to deal with systemic crises like demographic aging and climate change. They rightly feel that they’re screwed over. And the idea that these same people are going to agree with Chris Leslie’s idea of politics is probably the stupidest thing you’ll hear this year. And this is only February.
The Failure of Centrist Parties in France, America, Italy, Spain and Canada
But since 2015 centrist politicians have been hammered in election like Hillary Clinton in 2016. Emmanuel Macron in France was hailed as the saviour of French centrism, despite only taking 24 per cent of the vote in the first round. Now he’s the most unpopular president in French history after months of protests by the gilets jaunes, which have been met with tear gas attacks by the gendarmes, which have left people losing their eyes and their lives. Then there’s Matteo Renzi of the Partito Democratico, the Democratic Party, the Italian sister party to Britain’s Labour. In 2014 they took 42 per cent of the vote. But he was out within two years, having lost a referendum by 20 points. And in the last election the party lost half of their senators, leaving Italy governed by the Five Star Movement and the far-right Liga. Then there’s the example of the PSOE’s Pedro Sanchez. The PSOE is the Spanish equivalent of the Labour party. He’s also suffered mass protests and this week Spain called new general elections, which his party are certain to lose. Centrism is not popular in Europe or America, so the Independents have to turn to Canada’s Justin Trudeau. But Trudeau is now less popular in his country than Donald Trump in the US. Not that the media pushing ‘centrism’ will tell you this.
The Centrist Real Policy: More Austerity
The unpopularity of centrist politics is due to the fact that they still haven’t solved the problems of global capitalism created by the 2008 crash. They believed that financialisation would create the economic growth that would support public services. But financialisation hasn’t created growth since 2008. And as they can’t create prosperity and tackle income inequality, all they’ve have to give us is austerity ‘with a nice smiley face’.
Labour Splitters against Iraq Inquiry, For Welfare Cuts
And not only do the eight former Labour MPs have Brexit in common, they also voted against an independent inquiry into Iraq. A million people have been affected by the war, along with those, who suffered under ISIS, and Iranian influence has expanded across the Middle East. The idea that Iraq is irrelevant is not only absurd, it is a disgrace. People have died, and it has made an already volatile region even more so. And Britain is directly responsible. The former Labour MPs also abstained on the vote of welfare reform before Corbyn came to power. They do not stand for a moral foreign policy, or for a more just social system at home.
Their politics are a mixture of careerism and opportunism, and their opposition to Brexit actually makes a new deal more likely. They are driven by fundamental democratic principles, but won’t stand for a bye-election. No members, no policies, no party democracy, no vision. Bastani states that this isn’t the future of politics, it’s the past, and the worst aspects at that. He looks forward to sensible people joining them, because they’re going to be found out sooner or later. And if we want to establish the primacy of socialist ideas, he says, then bring it on.
There’s been much shouting this week by the Labour defectors – Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Gavin Shuker, Joan Ryan, Lucian Berger, Angela Smith, Ruth Smeeth and the Blairites inside the Labour party – Tom Watson and John Mann, about how anti-Semitic the Labour party is. But the Independents themselves share at least two features with Mussolini’s Fascists.
Firstly, they both started out claiming not to have any set policies. Mussolini started off as a radical Socialist, and the 1919 Fascist manifesto was as radical as that of the Italian socialists. Later, Mussolini opportunistically moved to the right, taking money from big business and attacking organised labour – the free trade unions, and socialists and anarchists. He began his tenure of power by proclaiming that his policies would be pure Manchester school. In other words, absolute free trade. In fact, within a few years of his seizure of power, Mussolini had set up the classic features of the Italian Fascist state: his personal dictatorship, autarky and a rigidly controlled economy, and the replacement of the Italian parliament with a Chamber of Fasci and Corporations. The corporations were industrial organisations containing representatives of management and the unions, as well as members of the Fascist party to represent the people. Mussolini then sat down to write his own account of the principles and policies of Fascism, The Doctrine of Fascism. Which he then had recalled and pulped the next year, because, he declared, Fascism had no doctrine. And in fact many Italian intellectuals had voted for the Fascists because they believed that. The Fascists stated that action preceded theory and philosophy, and so they would simply whatever was necessary to solve Italy’s problems without worrying about a fixed political programme or underlying ideology.
And now we have the so-called Independents, who also claim not to have a fixed programme or ideology. They also claim to be flexible, and that they will be doing things in a new way. The party is a corporation, so they don’t have to reveal their donors, as required by electoral law. At the same time, while they claim to be receiving many inquiries for membership from the public, they don’t actually seem to have a mass membership. Rather like Mussolini later declared that the Fascists didn’t want to be a mass party, and limited the number of party members to the sansepolcristi, those who were present at the party’s foundation. But whereas Mussolini tried to limit party membership, the Independents have gone one better, and don’t seem to have any members at all.
And they also stand for corporatism, albeit of the Thatcherite/Reaganite kind. This is when private corporations determine policy through donating to political parties, which then act in their interests and frequently give staff from those same corporations posts in government. As the Blair government did, and which is extensively documented in George Monbiot’s Captive State. So far, Umunna, Leslie and the others haven’t yet adopted the cult of the infallible leader, as that remains firmly around Margaret Thatcher. Nor are they greeting each other yet with the Fascist salute. But nevertheless, despite their fine verbiage about free institutions, parliamentary democracy and a free media, they are very antidemocratic.
Like Mussolini’s Fascists, they are a party for the rich against the poor and working people. They should be recognised and discarded as the danger to the British people they are.
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