Don't Say You Weren't Warned.

When Britain is finally out of the EU; when Scotland and Ireland have left and we are just England and Wales; when there is no NHS free at the point of delivery and it costs £75 for a consult and an aspirin and even a semi serious illness will bankrupt you or force you to watch someone you love die slowly and horribly; when all the schools are profit-making training centres for zero hours contract jobs for corporations that take all their profits abroad; when the disabled are all tagged and ghettoised as too expensive to care about; when the elderly are demonised and deleted from existence by their miserable, degrading lack of care; when higher education costs £50,000 plus interest 10% above base; when a significant proportion of the population has been criminalised and forced to work a 10 hour day for nothing making the products that those same corporations sell; when the beaches are again so filthy that you can't ever go to the beach; when the water is so polluted by fracking that you are forced to buy over priced bottled water for everything; when your energy is so expensive that you are forced to choose between heating and eating; when every penny you earn is used to repay your debts and get yourself to work and back with nothing left over; when your friends and neighbours have been deported or excluded from society and still there are not enough resources, housing or healthcare; when the Middle East is a smoking radioactive crater populated only by robots that can drill for oil; when the only thing left in Eastern Europe are NATO's depleted uranium leftovers; when the only politicians you can have are the ones that you are allowed…

Don't say you weren't warned.

Democracy's Last Stand

If Corbyn doesn't get re-elected as Labour leader that will effectively mark the end of representative democracy in this country.

It will still *look* like representative democracy but the fact is that John McDonnell was right - this isn't about opposition to Jeremy Corbyn, this is about the 1% telling the rest of us to know our place.

If they manage, through their campaign of lies, spin, misinformation, gerrymandering and disenfrachisement, to block Corbyn this time then after this we will only ever be able to vote for who we are allowed to vote for, not who we want to vote for.

The choices will be between this or that neoliberal, this or that Blairite, this or that political "royalty" elitist multimilionaire. The Kinnocks, the Bennites (oh how THAT term has changed meaning), the Eagles and the Smiths of Westminster will allow to vote for them, or one of their gang, or we can vote for more of the same in the Tory party or UKIP.

But vote for who WE want to vote for - nope.

@RichardBurgon Nails @DavisHD trying to dishonestly frame the debate

In this wonderful little clip Davis tries FOUR TIMES to frame the nature of reality around Corbyn as the opposite of reality. To try to claim as he does that Corbyn's hundreds of thousands of supporters are the ones who are out of step with just 172 MPs would be laughable if he, and the rest of the BBC, didn't get away with this day after day.

But Richard Burgon MP to the rescue! Just listen to the way he patiently but assertively corrects Evan Davis at every turn.

First of all Davis tries to validate an undemocratic coup attempt by bringing up Corbyn's own history of opposing the leadership. Burgon's answer to this: "There's a difference between principled opposition on .... policy to an outright attempt to capsize the whole ship".

In his next attempt Davis tries to characterise the Labour leadership as some sort of dictatorship. Burgon's response: "The truth is Jeremy Corbyn was elected with an overwhelming majority, the biggest mandate of any political leader in British history".

Following this Davis tries to describe Corbyn as "a radical", hoping some kind of negative scary description will finally stick. No chance. Burgon's answer "There's nothing radical about proposing a £10 per hour minimum wage ... nothing radical about proposing a massive program of building council houses, and I don't think there's anything radical ... in thinking Britain made a huge mistake in getting involved in the Iraq war."

Finally Davis tries one last, desperate, undignified dig: "You're implying that he can limp on", he says. Burgon, maintaining his equilibrium perfectly: "I'm not implying anything about 'limping'".

Meanwhile in other news, te Met Police report that "10,000 people gather in Parliament square to support Corbyn". This, in the hands of BBC's Laura Kuenssberg , becomes "Jeremy Corbyn's support begins to show signs of fraying".

I would normally say something like "you couldn't make it up" - but it's pretty clear that's exactly what they do.

Heseltine Rants - Real Enemy Is Still Cameron

Heseltinr must be utterly furious with David Cameron - nearly everything he's accusing Johnson of is squarely Cameron's fault, but he has to find a scapegoat. As furious as he is with the towering stupidity of the prime minister, he's desperate to deflect a backlash against the true culprit because by rights this awful mess should have brought down central government. Johnson's an unprincipled bastard but Cameron started this whole shitfest to outmanoeuvre UKIP, mollify his back benches and maintain his mendacious grasp on power.

By rights we should be marching on Westminster and putting Cameron's metaphorical head on a pike on Westminster Bridge along with Osborne, Johnson, Gove, Hunt and all the rest of them, bringing the government down lock, stock and barrel, and Heseltine knows it. That's why he's come on TV to speak to the great unwashed.

The tragedy is that there's no opposition to do this for us because Labour's PLP are so blind to everyone and everything but themselves that they are engaged in their own internal power grab like dogs fighting in a cage. If they looked out through the bars they'd see a once in a century opportunity to take power and do some good in the world for a change.

I guess the PLP are so stupid we wouldn't want them there anyway. They'd only vote for another war and overclaim their expenses. It's time ALL these stuffed shirt career politicians went the way of the dodo.

Power to the people!

Heseltine's ingenuous rant is here.

Today's Email From My Labour Party Branch

Steve Ballard, the secretary of my local Labour Party Branch sent out this email today: below it is my response.

1.
As a current officer in our branch, I feel moved to say that we all have differences of view, but that in amongst what is a clearly a time of tumult, we must create spaces where people can share their views, collaborate and debate. All with mutual respect and an awareness that we do share common goals around equality and social justice, power for the many not the few, tolerance and solidarity... (I hope we do!)

2.Jeremy is clearly a decent, principled politician but it's time for him to step aside. The Labour movement is not a protest group. We should be seeking to return to power and then getting on with improving the lives of the millions of people in this country who need our help.
Jeremy has raised some excellent points during his time as leader. In fact, I think we'll look back and recognise how his time in office helped rebalance the party between idealism and pragmatism.
But, ultimately, politics is about leadership. When you're a representative of the people you can't just be a conduit for a protest movement; you actually have to lead. Jeremy is simply not a leader. We need a leader who will listen to all sides and unite the party. To take the fight to the Tories and guide us to election victory.
Many people clearly still support Jeremy. But many do not. I fear for our party if this situation continues.
I won't accept being a member of a leaderless, ambition-free protest group for much longer. And I'm not alone. Not by a long way...

My response was as follows. It rambles a bit, isn't as organised as I'd like, and doesn't press every button, and I'm very sad that I had to write it.

"I'm sorry I can't come along in person tonight as I would welcome the opportunity to express my views.

I am shocked and saddened by your lack of commitment to creating a fairer and more just and peaceful world for us and our children.
For me to abandon those principles by joining David Cameron when he called for Jeremy Corbyn to step down, head of a government delivered on Monday of the most stinging rebuke in the history of the United Nations, and to join those in the PLP who have consistently enabled by their abstentions the egregious punishment of the poor, sick, disabled and disadvantaged to provide tax breaks for the rich; by voting to bomb Syria, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees now being victimised for their very existence, and increasing immeasurably the terrorist threat to this country and others; by enabling the genocide now taking place in Yemen at the hands of the Saudis; and most importantly to join those "grandees" who took us to illegal war in Iraq - responsible for the biggest decline of membership in Labour's history and who lost us 2 general elections, and are now briefing every paper, every pundit, every news outlet against Jeremy Corbyn using trumped-up nonsense, paid "hecklers" and fabricated "evidence" as on Monday in order to save their own worthless skins; who await the publication of the Chilcot Report with trepidation and are using every possible ruse to unseat the one politician who has vowed to take it seriously; if I were to abandon these principles of what use, then, would be any power I might gain? To what end?

 Politics is not about leadership at any cost. This is exactly why we are in this mess today. We stand on the brink of the most horrible future imaginable and your answer is to stand with the unprincipled thieves and liars that brought us here?

No thank you. I stand with the vast majority of the Labour Party 

membership, with the 17,000 who have joined the party in the last week to defend Jeremy Corbyn, with the thousands in Momentum and the millions in the country who want a fairer society free from racism, war, poverty and injustice.

 You stand where you think your own advantage lies; I won't be standing there with you."

Also, this:

 

The Corbyn Coup - THE FULL TIMELINE

A friend posted this in an email. it may of course all be nonsense.

"It now emerges that Hilary Benn and Angela Eagle have been secretly briefing against Jeremy Corbyn for the last 9 months. They have constantly fed information to Laura Kuenssberg and the Murdoch press corps about pending coups and dissatisfaction in the Parliamentary Party.They were planning to move against him on several occasions and chickened out'. The debate on the RAF bombing intervention on Syria on the 2.12.15 was to be the preliminary opportunity for Benn to strike by
speaking out against the Labour line ( which he did to much Tory
applause). This was to be followed up by a no confidence motion after
the loss of the Oldham by-election which was confidently predicted by
the Murdoch press.The plot fell apart when the Oldham by-election was won by Labour, with UKIP in second place and the Tories beaten into third.
Their next attempt was when Shadow Foreign Minister,Stephen Doughty,resigned on air during the BBC's Daily Politics programme on 7.1.16,just before Prime Ministers Questions. Kuenssberg had been briefed by the plotters beforehand and she had fed this information to David Cameron who announced it during PM's Questions to the surprise of the Labour benches.
This plot to usurp Jeremy also fell apart.
All of Kuenssberg's reports which began with 'a senior Labour spokesman
told me....etc.' came from the offices of Benn and Eagle.
Kuenssberg was also informed about the present debacle. The conspirators had received news that Corbyn would suggest the impeachment of Tony Blair if the soon to be published Chilcott report on the Iraq war showed any basis of 'war crimes'. The conspirators decided they had to pre-empt this attack on Blair. It was agreed that Benn would initiate the attack on Corbyn. He awoke Corbyn in the early hours of Sunday morning 26.6.16 with a phone call to inform him of his intention to attack him publicly with a statement of his lack of confidence in his leadership. Corbyn had
no option but to remove him from post.The plan was then to organise a series of resignations with one being announced roughly every 2 hours to give the impression of a growing revolt. This was designed to keep it in the public eye and they would hopefully then encourage others not involved in the plot to join the bandwagon if they thought the ship was sinking.Initially there were 10 Shadow cabinet members recruited. and Eagles was to be the last one to declare in order to separate any association between Benn and herself.She would make a tearful, on-line resignation speech underlining Jeremy's honesty and goodness but saying he had no leadership skills.
"OH ! WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE WHEN FIRST WE PRACTICE TO DECEIVE"

The link to the original Facebook post is HERE.

Demand That Your MP Represents Your Views

To anyone thinking of writing to their Labour MP in protest at their attack on the leadership, a friend asked what he might say and I came up with this, hope it helps, please nick bits if you, too, have an MP like Chuka Umunna who is *not* representing you.

You could try pointing out that speaking for yourself and the few hundred people whose political views you know about, fighting their own leadership instead of making a common enemy of the real threat to everyone in this country - the Tories - is rapidly eroding their support and making Corbyn's even stronger as your friends continue to join the Labour Party in the expectation that they will have to defend Corbyn's leadership against further attack.

You might remind them that the PLP are the elected representatives of both the general population and those self-same The Labour Party members, not the other way around - that if the EURef result was about anything, it was about people being determined to have their own voice and not one handed down to them by a patronising political elite, and that the Labour party is not its MPs, it is its membership.

If he or she wants to continue the hemorrhage of support started by Tony Blair's illegal war and continued by their support for David Cameron's then they might want to start considering the views of the people that actually vote for them for once.

Or something.