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#Labourpurge In the olden days, anyone got a letter from the Labour Party telling them their support was rejected and their vote wouldn’t count because “we have reason to believe you do not support the aims and values” would moan about it to a few friends and that would be that.
But it is not the olden days any more, so get your popcorn out!
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Oh how wonderful 😀
Translation: “We don’t need no stinkin’ democracy”
There can be hardly be a complaint when a party that hankers after the suppression of people does something that, er, suppresses people.
In yesterday’s Times, Matthew Parris said he had successfully registered his pet llamas as Labour supporters. He balked at letting them vote, though:
It brings a tear to my eye: https://twitter.com/AntoniaJennings/status/634328143428501504
This is nice: https://twitter.com/RebeccaaDay/status/634317162849665025
“It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.”
Another irony meter busted. A political party who propose to be engaged and committed to the process of free, open and fair voting for a democratic government, suddenly decides it’s a closed shop. Restricted membership political parties are not conducive to a representative democracy, they are just plain old carpetbaggers that bring corruption and cronyism to the British political system, they are the rot, time to disband them all.
@ Natalie Solent, who wrote:
“In yesterday’s Times, Matthew Parris said he had successfully registered his pet llamas as Labour supporters. He balked at letting them vote, though:
They know too little of politics and their views are naive (though one has to remark that if opinion polls are to be believed many of those who have successfully registered show crazier judgment than most llamas).”
By some great and amazing coincidence, I just made plans with my vet to euthanize one of our llamas this afternoon. In the proud tradition and history of socialist democracy, I intend to register her as a Labour supporter this evening.
Llamas are not naïve – quite the opposite. The way our polity is going, I’m thinking I’d rather be governed by the first 500 llamas in the ILA registry instead of the hopeless, hapless clown college we have today. Llamas understand incentives and consequences, they practice only the positive aspects of community living, and the worst they will do to you if you cross them is spit on you. Not a bad system to aspire to.
llater,
llamas
To the deeper point – of course Labour seeks to identify and cast out those who do not completely support their current directions and prevent them from influencing their future.
It’s Socialism. It’s a system of religious belief. It depends on conformity and unquestioning adherence to the revealed creed. And the priestly caste absolutely cannot tolerate any level of apostasy. Unbelievers must be Cast Out – and, like the Catholic Church or the old Soviet system, (or that other attractive group, the Living Dead) the real sweet part of the deal is that they get the whole congregation to seek out the sinners for them.
Rejecting dissent and silencing dissenters – but of course! They’re Socialists. It’s what they do. You might as well be surprised when a scorpion stings you.
llater,
llamas
And the joke is that this bunch of clowns, having made such a balls up of running their own party, will spend the next five years telling how much better they can run our lives for us if only we’d let them, (or whether we let them or not).
And then in 2020 they’ll come prancing onto the stage demanding that we let them run the country as they’re demonstrably so well qualified for the job.
Sorry to hear about your actual llama, Llamas – putting down a pet is always a sad duty. However regarding your criticism of Labour “silencing dissenters”, I am thinking of writing a brief post defending the right of Labour to seek out and expel those who do not truly share its values, such as Tory infiltrators and Matthew Parris’s llamas. Possibly this experience will be a lesson to those socialists who have sought to curtail the right to free association of, for instance, religious organisations which do not approve of homosexuality to exclude homosexuals. What goes around comes around, guys.
I agree with you, btw, Natalie. It doesn’t stop me laughing at the terrible mess they’ve got themselves into, though.
Ahh, if only the American GOP would have a Purge… or the LP for that matter. Then we would finally know what they stand for.
@ Natalie Solent. Thank you. They all die eventually.
Just to be clear, I absolutely agree with you, Labour should be absolutely free to make any rules they like concerning membership and voting in their club. Wasn’t suggesting for a moment that they shouldn’t. And, after all, when your adversary is busy making a monumental c*ck-up, it’s a bad idea to discourage him.
At the same time, we (you) should take every opportunity to point out the staggering hypocrisy of what they are doing, enforcing their political orthodoxy upon people who just want to join what appears to be an organization that’s open to the public and soliciting members. Comparisons with the owners of B&B’s and cake bakeries would lie very accurately, I suspect. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
This Corbyn joker appears to be a tool of the very finest National Socialist mettle. Let’s hope he becomes Labour leader, he’ll make Kinnock and Foot look like positive genii by comparison. Could set the party back a generation. What a shame.
llater,
llamas
The Labour Party has a proud history of descending into chaos during economic depressions. It did so in the 1930s, the 1980s and it would appear to be about to do it right now.
Hard reality is no place for a socialist.
Mr “Ed” Miliband’s creation of the “registered supporter” system was demented.
Demented – unless he deliberately wanted the far left (the Marxist left) to take over the Labour Party.
After all the father of Ed Miliband was Ralph Miliband.
Ralph Miliband was not a member of the Labour party – but he would be working for Jeremy C. now.
According to his Wiki page, Mr Miliband was a member from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, even though he was an obvious and open Marxist, although the old Labour Party was keen to have a system to keep out entryists (well, Trotskyists) which did lead to some ‘purges’, it was only about concerns over a lack of loyalty (latent or blatant) to Moscow.
I bet they are all itching to denounce each other as being (or not being) Zinoviev-Kamenev Deviationists.
On an earlier thread I Said:
“Most lefty ideas are like this. They end up shipwrecked on the rocks of reality, producing a different outcome to the one intended and, whatever the problem was, usually making the situation worse that it otherwise would have been. Often though, the actual outcome was perfectly predictable if it had been properly thought through.”
When Labour announced that they were going to open their leadership vote to anyone who was prepared to pay a small membership fee, it was obvious that such a system would be open to abuse by political opponents buying membership in order to vote for the worst candidate. The actual outcome was perfectly predictable if it had been properly thought through.
It is a shame that none of the Labour Comrades are invoking the sacred memory of Comrade Yezhov, perhaps the new Leader of the Labour Party will formally rehabilitate him.
Counter-revolutionary Wreckers ahoy!