In an attempt to defend the indefensible the former Labour Party Home Secretary Alan Johnson wrote a woeful article in the Guardian trying to defend the double standard of allowing the unelected Labour peer David Sainsbury to get away with donating over £2 million to the Lib-Dems whilst the party simultaneously purges huge numbers of ordinary members for the "crime" of posting social media comments in support of other political parties before they even became Labour Party members.
Johnson deviously decided to completely evaded the central issues of Labour Party vote-rigging and the brazen double-standards between party elites and ordinary members. Instead he made the crux of his argument that Sainsbury deserves to be let off the hook for funding a rival political party that "At least he really tried to stop Brexit", which is clearly reiteration of the tired "Blame Corbyn for Brexit" trope.
There's no excuse for holding ordinary party members to a much higher standard of behaviour than party elites (which is what everyone talking about the Sainsbury donation to the Lib-Dems is complaining about), and there's no excuse for casting blame onto others and ignoring your own culpability.
If the Labour Party is busy purging ordinary members for the "crime" of supporting other parties before they even became Labour members, there is no excuse for not purging Labour members who actively supported another political party while they actually were Labour members.
To look at it from the other direction, if they're letting someone off for financially supporting another political party while they were an actual Labour Party member, they can't possibly justify purging people for having posted social media comments supporting other political parties a long time before they even joined Labour.
Only someone who has completely abandoned reason could attempt to argue for a double-standard where the party elites are subject to a completely different set of rules to the party membership, and make the crux of their argument the passing off of blame for their own failures onto someone else.
If Alan Johnson was capable of even the remotest level of introspection, he would be deeply ashamed of his behaviour, his double standards, his deliberately evasive argument and his embarrassing blame-passing conclusion, but he clearly isn't. He's so consumed by terror that Jeremy Corbyn is going to democratise the Labour Party and make the situation untenable for party elitists who don't want to be made accountable to the ordinary party membership that he's having an adult tantrum.
Anyone who has dealt with children's tantrums knows how they lose all sense of self-awareness and their rational thinking skills completely dissipate until the point at which they calm down and stop screaming. Toddlers having tantrums shout all kinds of incoherent nonsense, they put on incredible displays of stubbornness, their patterns of behaviour become illogical and self-defeating and during the tantrum they remain completely unaware of what their spate of uncontrolled behaviour looks like to other people.
The lack of self-awareness, the self-defeating actions, the stubbornness and the completely illogical nonsense and insult laden diatribes spouted by Anyone But Corbyn people like Alan Johnson, Tom Blenkinsop, Michael Foster, Alex Andreou, Ian Austin, Tristram Hunt, Angela Eagle, the Labour MPs making anonymous threats in the press, JK Rowling and the like appear to be the symptoms of adult tantrums.
The polling on the Labour leadership shows that despite the concerted efforts by the party elite to purge as many Corbyn supporters as possible (often on the most tenuous or hypocritical grounds) Corbyn is still looking set for a huge landslide victory.
Alan Johnson and various other members of the Anyone But Corbyn camp are blind furious that they're not getting their own way, and like toddlers they're reacting by lying on the ground, kicking their feet and trying to scream the house down.
The problem with this tantrum analogy is that most toddlers eventually calm down and get over their screaming fits, but many of the Anyone But Corbyn coup supporters are so belligerent that they're clearly going to continue trying to scream the house down indefinitely because they're not willing to accept that they're not going to get their own way.
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.
