How dare Owen Jones do what we told him to!

Why are Starmtroopers so furious that Owen Jones did what Keir Starmer said, and left Labour because he can't support austerity, privatisation, and genocide complicity?

Owen Jones is not the main character, but he is a significant voice on the left, so it’s certainly notable that he’s given up his lifelong support of the Labour Party to back alternatives like the Green Party and independent candidates.

Starmer and the right-wing ghouls he’s surrounded himself with have made no secret of their desire to drive traditional Labour supporters away, and make up the financial shortfall by attracting millionaire capitalist donors.

In fact Keir Starmer outright told opponents of his Thatcherisation of the Labour Party to "leave if you don’t like it".

Since then he’s gone all-in on economically illiterate austerity, NHS privatisation, and genocide complicity.

It’s no surprise that hundreds of thousands of Labour members have already quit in disgust, and that Owen Jones has finally had enough.

I’ve got empathy for people who want to stay and fight, because it must be awful to see the institution you’ve given so much time, money, and effort to usurped by an egregious liar and turned into a Tory tribute act that praises Margaret Thatcher, pushes bankrupt austerity economics, refuses to oppose even the most depraved Tory legislation, brags about its intentions to further privatise the NHS, and makes itself complicit with Israeli genocide.

It must be heart-wrenching to realise that you’ve lost the battle, and that the Labour Party you contributed so much to is irredeemable.

So Owen Jones has quit Labour and set up a new campaign organisation to support left-wing alternatives called We Deserve Better.

It’s undeniable that we do deserve better than an abject non-choice between two virtually indistinguishable pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-genocide parties.

The most interesting thing is all of the outraged 'how dare you!', 'who do you think you are?' responses from the Starmtrooper brigade interspersed amongst all of their abuse and crowing.

How are the aggro-centrists so angry that Owen Jones has done exactly what Keir Starmer told everyone on the left to do?

Starmer told people to "leave if they don’t like it" and then set about pursuing policies that huge numbers of traditional Labour voters find abhorrent, and now his acolytes are hammering furious screeds into their touchscreens in response because Owen Jones simply followed their glorious leader’s instructions!

One minute they’re saying 'we don’t want the left, we’ve got nothing to offer the left, we don’t need the left, the left can just go away if they don’t like it' and the next they’re crying bitter tears of outrage that the left has had enough!

Perhaps they’re so angry because Owen Jones is onto the right kind of idea?

We should support the Greens where they have any chance of winning; we should support fantastic independent candidates like Jamie Driscoll in the North East; and we should get behind efforts to unseat the worst offenders like Andrew Feinstein’s campaign against Starmer in Holborn St. Pancras and Leanne Mohammed’s challenge to Wes Streeting in Ilford North.

It’s also still worth supporting the small minority of decent Labour MPs who have resisted Labour’s mad dash to the hard-right and Starmer’s sickening genocide complicity (Clive Lewis, Zarah Sultana, Aspana Begum …).

There’s no way that Greens, independents, and the SNP will win enough seats to take political power, but we desperately need good people in parliament to resist Starmer’s sinister authoritarian tendencies, call out his lies, and demonstrate that there is an alternative to his hard-right, pro-austerity, pro-privatisation agenda.

It’s obviously up to voters to decide whether they vote in favour of "the lesser of two evils" and their dispiriting "more of the same" agenda, or throw their support behind something better than austerity, privatisation, and genocide complicity.

But like the great trade union leader Bob Crow once said: "If you fight, you won’t always win, but if you don’t fight, you will always lose".

Check out the We Deserve Better campaign here.

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