Posts Tagged ‘Jeremy Corbyn’
GE17: who wants to see Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘money shot’?
As Cuck Norris tweets: “When phrases enter the language and you use them, but you have no idea of their meaning or derivation: a short treatise.” @JeremyCorbyn4PM has treated Twitter users to Jeremy Corbyn’s “Money shot”.
Collins dictionary defines ‘money shot’: “a shot in a pornographic film in which a male performer is seen to ejaculate.”
Spotter: Cuck Norris
Posted: 7th, June 2017 | In: Politicians | Comment
GE17: Nuanced tabloids leave voters in a dither
It’s the eve of the 2017 General Election and the the papers remain undecided. It’s all very nuanced at the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Sun.
One tabloid does, however, make it position clear: Jeremy Corbyn’s cup is empty in the Daily Mirror.
Posted: 7th, June 2017 | In: Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
Jeremy Corbyn ‘looks forward to an asteroid wiping out humanity’
In 2004,Jeremy Corbyn was one of three signatories on an anti-human motion.
Early day motion 1255
Session: 2003-04
Date tabled: 21.05.2004
Primary sponsor: Banks, TonySponsors:
That this House is appalled, but barely surprised, at the revelations in M15 files regarding the bizarre and inhumane proposals to use pigeons as flying bombs; recognises the important and live-saving role of carrier pigeons in two world wars and wonders at the lack of gratitude towards these gentle creatures; and believes that humans represent the most obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and looks forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the earth and wipes them out thus giving nature the opportunity to start again.
Nice opinion to the electorate, Jeremy.
Tory Peter Bottomley amended that to the hope that “humans and other creatures may with luck have the chance to live together again”.
Posted: 5th, June 2017 | In: Politicians, Strange But True | Comment
How to survive Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Nuclear Meltdown’
Don’t panic! Jeremy Corbyn might trigger a “Nuclear Meltdown” should the leader of the hollowed out Labour Party make it into Number 10, but surviving the atomic holocaust is just a matter of picking the right level of sun cream. The Daily Mail is here to help its readers survive.
Factor 5million should just about do it.
Posted: 3rd, June 2017 | In: Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
Ken Loach for Jeremy Corbyn: vote Theresa May if you hate your kids
Ken Loach’s ad for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is… Well, it’s incredible. Theresa May stars in the Milk Snatcher II:
Brutal response 😂 (wait for it)
⏩ https://t.co/aBfHF3Y85D#GE2017 #BBCQT pic.twitter.com/468E3sMaqv— Momentum (@PeoplesMomentum) June 2, 2017
GE17 tabloid review: Corbyn’s cat, May’s death and go Amber!
GE17: a look at tabloid reporting on the big debate.
Daily Mirror (front page): “Tories are plotting to stab PM in the back”.
No sign of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on the Mirror’s cover, just news that should Theresa May not win a “hefty election majority” Tories will “ditch her”. May is shown looking tight-lipped.
You know it’s looking bad for Labour when the Labour-supporting newspaper finds solace in anything other than a Tory landslide.
There is no mention of Jeremy Corbyn until page 6.
Indeed, in this front-page story, May is name-checked 11 times; Corbyn just twice. Corbyn’s image only appears in a small photo on a left-hand page. And even then he’s not alone.
Page 6 -7: “May has to land a huge majority or she’ll be hung out to dry by the Tories,” states the paper. Stabbed and hanged. Brutal stuff. But more likely May will get a great pension and more time to sort out the bins.
On page 7 Jason Beattie says May has “no personality”. She has “sabotaged the Tory campaign”. She is “brittle and desperate”. Jason isn’t keen on her.
Page 6: “Labour will storm ahead with its blueprint for Britain if it becomes the largest party in a hung parliament.” It will storm ahead before getting caught in an eddy and going nowhere. “If we are the largest party, we go ahead – no deals,” says shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, safe in the knowledge that they won’t be.
Page 7: We get to look at Labour Party winner. “Tony Blair called Sedgefield County Durham his ‘spiritual and political home’,” says Paul Routledge. Yep. it’s Blair, who keeps his money in London. Routledge says it’s “unthinkable” Sedgefield, the seat Blair sat in for 24 years come war, more war and even more war, will turn Tory blue this June. So unthinkable is it that Routledge has written a column on the matter. The Labour candidate for Sedgefield is Phil Wilson, who tells locals: “What people want is someone born and brought up here. Whose kids went to school here.” Tony Blair was born in Edinburgh. He lives in London. Best of luck, Phil.
Daily Express (front page): “Corbyn Doesn’t Believe In Britain.”
Well, so says Theresa May.
Pages 4-5: “Corbyn? He’s a man who has no plan, says May”
The Daily Express produces a phone poll: “Does Corbyn have what it takes to run Britain?” it asks. Calls are 50p each. Keep an open mind before deciding which number to call for ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Keep your mind so open your brains fall out.
Page 5: “Greater Tory majority will ensure Brexit is easier, claims think tank”. The Express campaigned for UKIP and Brexit. Make the link.
Page 5: “Corbyn backed squatters crusade”. In 2013, Corbyn “helped organise a meeting for the Squatters Action for Secure Homes (Squash) at the House of Commons.”
Daily Mail (front page): “Corbyn’s Sly Death Trap”
The paper cites “new figures” which “suggest… Jeremy Corbyn will drag an extra 1.2 million family homes into the grip of inheritance tax if he wins the election.”
Vote Corbyn, then. We can all default on our mortgages and squat for free. The kids will love it. Sleep over! But wait. The “policy is not in the Labour manifesto, but appears in a separate costings document.”
Corbyn is mentioned three times on the Mail’s front page. Theresa May is not mentioned once. Indeed, in this front-page story, Corbyn is name-checked 12 times; May just twice. The Mirror and Mail agree on one thing: the other leader is a vote winner for the wrong side.
Page 6: “Tories go to war with BBC over Left-wing audience bias.” The paper updates readers on that BBC TV debate May did not take part in. Before you watch May and Corbyn on Question Time – yep, there is a televised leaderzzzzzz’ debate – the paper warns readers that the BBC might be biased to the Left.
Page 7: “For those of you a little hard of learning, the paper produces “How ‘impartial’ BBC has kept up a relentless attack on the Tories”.
Page 8-9: We get to learn what else Corbyn doesn’t believe in. “He doesn’t believe in Brexit.” So there.
Daily Star (front page): “TV Caroline Love Isle Lesbian Romps.” Vote now!
Page 4: “Seven Days To Save UK, May Warns Voters”. Corbyn is 7-2 to win the vote. Save your money for something worthwhile, like a Daily Express phone poll or a wishing well.
The Sun (front page): “Corbyn’s magic money tree will cost families extra £3.5k-a-year.”
Corbyn’s manifesto is full of “far-fetched election bribes” that would “blow a £300bn hole in Britain’s finances”. On page 2, the Sun reminds readers that the “hard hitting ‘money-tree’ phrase was coined by Home Secretary Amber Ruud.” Amber. Amber. Amber. The papers love her. May should frisk her for knives.
Page 8: “Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn even believes his cat supports the hard left.” Mr Cobyn says the cat – called ‘El Gato – has shown “socialist tendencies” in allowing a stray cat to share its food.
Jeremy Corbyn has a cat! Dog owners, you know what to do.
Posted: 2nd, June 2017 | In: Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
GE17 Cambridge debate: media bias, missing May and Corbyn’s balls
Last night’s election debate featured seven politicians, none of whom were Theresa May. How do the tabloids report on the show at Cambridge University?
The Sun front page: “PM: VOTE TORY FOR BEST BREXIT.”
Having trailed Theresa May’s big speech on Brexit (page 1), used an editorial to argue that she must do more than say “I’m not Jeremy Corbyn” (Page 8) and invited Tory MEP Daniel Hannan on to write below the headline “Dodgy dealer Jezza will Wrexit Britain” (Page 8), readers get to the debate on Pages 10 and 11.
Pages 10 -11: “WEAKEST LINK JEZ – Corbyn walloped by all six opponents in debate.”
The paper says Corbyn’s “surprise” 11th hour decision to take part in the TV debate “backfired”. The show was an “ugly shouting match”. Who won? “The most withering assault on Mr Corbyn came from Tory Home Secretary Amber Rudd.” Corbyn “came under fire for being weak from Leave and Remain supporters”. Corbyn “gaffed on the economy”.
Readers do hear from May, who says: “I think debates where the politicians are squabbling among themselves doesn’t do anything for the process of electioneering.”
Daily Mirror (front page): “Nadia: I’m going bald”.
Bigger than the debate is news that TV presenter Nadia is losing her hair. The debate appears on Pages 6 and 7.
Pages 6 – 7: “Leaderless and heartless – Rivals blast PM’s TV debate no-show. Rudd steps in despite father’s death.”
The paper begins by telling readers that Corbyn changed his mind about taking part in the debate. Why? We’re not told. But it looks like it was about upstaging May, who “left Amber Rudd to parrot the Tory line – despite the Home Secretary’s father dying 48 hours earlier.” In the paper’s mind that means May is “heartless”. But surely Rudd wanted to take part. And doesn’t carrying on in the face of personal pain suggest a strong and – lest it go unsaid – stable character?
As for why she was chosen to take part – or chose to: shadow home secretary Diane Abbott had been booked to argue Labour’s case. Home Secretary Rudd v Abbott would have been a valid debate. No?
The paper also notes that the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, for it is she, “sent her deputy Angus Robertson”. Nicola wasn’t there either. The Mirror says the Green’s Caroline Lucas, LibDem’s Tim Farron and Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood mocked May for her no show; Sturgeon escaped any attack.
The Mirror says Rudd “struggled” and “squirmed”. Corbyn was “stunning”. The audience”cheered” Corbyn.
Daily Mail (front page): “FURY AT BIAS ON BBC TV DEBATE – TV chiefs under fire over ‘the most Left win audience ever’.”
The paper says “even BBC presenter Mishal Husain was heckled when she pointed out he [Corbyn] had been unable to set out the cost of his flagship child care policy”. Corbyn was “repeatedly cheered despite a meandering performance”.
The paper’s quote about the audience being skewed towards Corbyn comes from George Eaton, “political editor of the Labour-supporting New Statesman magazine”, who opined:” This feels like the most left-wing audience in any TV debate.”
Page 6: “CORBYN’S L-LA-LAND ECONOMICS”
Page 7: “An audience as balanced as a gorilla on a unicycle,” says Quentin Letts – in a view about as balanced as a trout on LSD. Jeremy Corbyn, evasive on immigration, was rewarded with whoops and wolf whistles. Welcome to the BBC!” May did well to stay away from this “bent, babyish custard-pie fight”. It was a “demeaning brawl”. Corbyn and Robertson “found themselves sniping simultaneously at Miss Rudd. Two angry men shouting at a younger women. Great look, guys.” So much for equality (and gerraload of Amber’s legs!).
Daily Express (front page): “Corbyn’s Plot To Bring In Migrant Workers”
The debate features first on page 5.
Page 5: “Rudd blasts the ‘Jeremy money tree’.”
Rudd mocked Corbyn for his “fantasy economics” in a “heated live television clash”. May is praised for sticking to her decision not to take part whilst Corbyn U-turned. Rudd landed “body blows” on Corbyn. And, er, that’s it.
Daily Star (front page): “Corbyn does a U-turn”
Page 4: “Corbyn’s U-Turn”. The Labour leader “tried to wrongfoot Theresa May”.
Such are the facts.
Posted: 1st, June 2017 | In: Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
The Sunday Sport: ‘teenage Jeremy Corbyn squashed girl’s pet rabbit with his pogo stick’
The Sunday Sport has news on Jeremy Corbyn. It might not be the current Labour Party leader. It might be a “sex dwarf” look-alike. But someone thinks Jeremy Corbyn “squashed my sister’s bay rabbit with his pogo stick”:
Spotter: @Poshboy97
Posted: 17th, May 2017 | In: Politicians, Strange But True, Tabloids | Comment
The Hard Left’s last gasp for power: tracing Jeremy Corbyn’s revolutionary socialism since 9/11
News that Andrew Murray, a “longstanding communist party member who joined Labour in December”, is running the Labour Party’s General Election campaign raises eyebrows. The Hard Left have taken over Labour.
Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey, authors of Moscow Gold: The Soviet Union And The British Left, look at UK’s Leninists since 9/11, and ask “if life in the mainstream will make or break revolutionary socialism”:
1. What is to be done?
By the end of the 1990s, to most observers of the British left, the Leninist era seemed to have come to an end. The Socialist Workers Party, quasi-Trotskyist and owner of a competent offset press in east London, still had some life about it, but not a lot. The Scottish Socialist Party – essentially the renegade Glasgow office of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, which had been expelled by Labour in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with SWP and independent barnacles hanging on – had some support in urban western Scotland. And the hardline Communist Party of Britain, the main Stalinist splinter from the ‘official’ Communist Party of Great Britain (which had given up the ghost in 1991, 70 years after its launch with a giant subvention from Moscow), was still influential in a few trade unions. The CPB still had a daily paper, the Morning Star, though hardly anyone read it any more.
This is what Leninism had dwindled to, unless you also count the aloof cadre at New Left Review or the machinations of mayor of London Ken Livingstone’s office, in both of which veterans of another Trotskyist outfit, the International Marxist Group, latterly Socialist Action, had key roles. New Left Review a dry bi-monthly theoretical journal, had gone through several changes of tack since its 1960s and 1970s IMG-dominated heyday (if that’s the word), but the onetime followers of the Trotskyist guru Ernest Mandel – most notably Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, were still very much on board. Livingstone had a later generation of IMGers in key staff positions, among them John Ross as chief economic adviser and Simon Fletcher as chief of staff. Mood music for this embattled rump was provided by the occasional jeremiad in the comment pages of the Guardian and in the London Review of Books.
On the best estimate, the membership of all the Leninist groups at the turn of the millennium totalled no more than 6,000 – of whom perhaps one-third were active.
Most were in the SWP, the CPB or Militant’s successor groups, with a few hundred scattered among more esoteric fractions, some of them crazy but most of them deadly dull: Socialist Action, so deeply embedded in the Labour hard left that even members found it difficult to distinguish themselves from centrist trade-union bureaucrats; the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, previously Socialist Organiser, notable for picking ideological fights on foreign policy with everyone else and then claiming to be victimised; the group that had once been the Revolutionary Communist Party, a slightly unorthodox Trotskyist group, but after a series of baffling changes of political direction under a variety of names was in the process of launching Sp!ked, a website devoted to provocative libertarianism; the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), a weird sect that had emerged from a Stalinist fraction in the Turkish Communist Party and had spent most of the 1990s engaged in litigation over former assets of the real CPGB – fighting for flats above chip shops in Dagenham – but had also set up Weekly Worker, an entertaining newspaper, largely online, devoted to left sectarian quibbling.
Few would have predicted any kind of revival for the Leninist fragments. Yet that is what happened in the early years of the new century. The starting point was the creation of an electoral coalition to fight the 2001 general election against Tony Blair’s Labour government, the Socialist Alliance, by the SWP and the English successor-group to Militant, the Socialist Party of England and Wales (the unfortunately acronymed SPEW). Blair, said the comrades, had traded the promise of socialism for a destructive neoliberalism: it was time for a new left initiative. The SA attracted a few independents and started brightly, but got nowhere. All the same, the experience gave the SWP, with John Rees and Lindsey German at the helm, a taste for working with other organisations it not had for more than 20 years – even though they’d decided that SPEW wasn’t exactly an ideal partner.
Then came 9/11 – and everything changed.
2. War and peace
The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by Islamist terrorists on 11 September 2001 had a disorienting effect on the British left. A brief, shocked silence was rapidly followed by attempts to make sense of the outrage. On the Leninist left and among its sympathisers the narrative that it was payback for American imperialism in the Middle East was quick to emerge. The “root cause” of the attack was not Islamist fanaticism, they argued, but crusader power – US support for Israel, the punitive sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 war against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, arms sales to Saudi Arabia, exploitation of the region’s oil. The British government was on the side of the imperialists – and it was crucial that the imperialists were defeated. (This is Lenin’s doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism”, developed in World War I, according to which the left in any country engaged in an imperialist war should support the defeat of its “own” ruling class in order to bring on the revolution.)
The analysis was simplistic and met deserved scorn from many left and liberal critics, but after Blair’s decision to support US military intervention in Afghanistan, the knee-jerk anti-imperialism of the Leninists gained a wider hearing. The SWP went all-out for the most opportunist popular front ever. The minuscule party – with an unstable membership of less than 2,000 – ditched SPEW and the Socialist Alliance to set up the Stop the War Coalition, with the aim of attracting the mosques to the anti-imperialist cause. It soon became an alliance of Trotskyist and Stalinist Leninists and the Islamists of the Muslim Association of Britain, with a sprinkling of Labour leftists (among them Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell), Greens, anarchists, CND (by now controlled by the hard left), Scottish and Welsh nationalists and Liberal Democrats.
Opposing the Blair government’s political and military support for the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001-02 was not popular: overturning the Taliban and catching Osama bin Laden were objectives shared by an overwhelming majority of Britons. But opposing Blair’s subsequent backing for the US invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein was different. The 9/11 link to Saddam was, to say the least, not persuasive – and the official rationale for the invasion shifted suspiciously from Saddam’s support for terror to weapons of mass destruction. Taking out Saddam by force seemed a massive risk. US President George Bush appeared to be preparing for an intervention that was at best opportunist, half-thought-through and dangerous – and Blair seemed to be tagging along uncritically. It was more complex than that, but Stop the War, with the SWP firmly in command and the CPB playing a key supporting role, found itself in the position of being the only organisation in place with the means to mobilise popular opposition to war. Its high point was the 15 February 2003 demonstration in London against intervention in Iraq, which attracted perhaps 1 million people.
It would be ludicrous to claim that many of the 15 February demonstrators were signed-up Leninists. But the Stop the War organisers and spokespeople for the movement for the most part were: Rees and German from the SWP; the organisation’s chair, Andrew Murray, a leading figure in the Stalinist Straight Left fraction of the 1970s and 1980s (a bizarre secretive group that operated both in the CPGB and the Labour Party), who had become a member of the CPB central committee and an official for the train drivers’ union Aslef; the Labour MP George Galloway (expelled from the party in autumn 2003 for bringing Labour into disrepute after calling on British troops to refuse to obey orders); Kate Hudson, chair of CND and a member of the CPB. And they had media support too – most importantly from the comment editor of the Guardian, Seumas Milne, another veteran of Straight Left.
The Leninist-Islamist alliance (minus most of the Labour hard left and the CPB, at least formally, but backed by many conservative Muslims) was subsequently the basis for a new electoral party, Respect (Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environmentalism, Community, and Trade Unionism). German failed miserably as its candidate against Ken Livingstone in the 2004 London mayoral election; but Galloway won Bethnal Green and Bow on a Respect ticket in the 2005 general election. The Scottish Socialist Party, without Islamist support, also did well in the 2003 Scottish Parliament election, winning six seats.
The Leninist revival was, however, patchy and short-lived. It bore the seeds of its own destruction in the blurring of aspirations required by the anti-war popular front: deference both to Muslim moral conservatism and to Scottish nationalism north of the border.
Despite their organisational zeal and campaigning efforts, the micro-parties recruited fewer new members from Stop the War than they had expected, and the new recruits, though often as ardent and narrow-minded as any “class-against-class” communist of the early 1930s, chafed at the bit of party discipline.
While the high-ups in the SWP and CPB engaged in the Stop the War love-in with Islamists, pacifists, Greens, the Scottish National Party and the traditional Labour hard left, undermining their own arguments for a distinctive revolutionary party, the narcissism of small differences disorganised the movement on the ground – where it was amplified by articulate (if hardly independent-minded) novices radicalised by campus identity politics.
The Leninists’ embrace of Islamism was particularly problematic: if everyone could agree that Islamophobia was bad and it was easy enough for Galloway and leftist intellectuals to declare anti-imperialist solidarity with Islamists, the culture clash between Leninist and Islamist anti-imperialisms could not be avoided in campaigning activity, particularly where the rights of women and gay people were at stake. Meanwhile, in Scotland, the Leninist left could not find a narrative to rival that of the SNP.
In Scotland, the SSP’s Tommy Sheridan never got into bed with Galloway and Respect – in part because there was little in the way of Muslim radicalism in Scotland with which to ally – but the News of the World reported in 2006 that he had taken part in orgies at a dodgy sex club in Manchester. He sued the paper for libel and won damages, but his account of his actions was at odds with what he had told his SSP comrades, and he was soon charged with perjury for lying in court. Sheridan’s economy with the truth led to the SSP imploding: it lost all representation in Holyrood in 2007 as its followers transferred their support to the SNP, which became for the first time the largest party in the Scottish parliament. Sheridan was convicted of perjury and jailed in 2010.
In England and Wales, growing tensions between Galloway and the SWP – largely over the role of Islamists – led to a spectacular split in RESPECT. Rees and German were off-loaded by the SWP in 2009-10 and set up a website in lieu of a party, Counterfire, which adopted political positions barely distinguishable from those of the traditional Labour hard left except for its empathy for radical Islam, Iran and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Galloway, who made a fool of himself in the reality-TV Celebrity Big Brother in early 2006, abandoned Bethnal Green and Bow and then failed to become the MP for Poplar and Limehouse in 2010. SPEW, the CPB and the RMT railworkers’ union set up No2EU as a left-Eurosceptic electoral alliance for the 2009 European Parliament elections: it secured less than 1 per cent of the vote. SPEW’s next initiative, the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (supported by the SWP and RMT but not the CPB), stood in the 2010 general election but lost all its deposits with a similar, stubbornly insignificant, share of the vote.
Meanwhile, the Trotskyists in Ken Livingstone’s office received big pay-offs after he lost the London mayoral election in 2008. By then, only train-spotters could tell they remained Trotskyists, so deeply had they subsumed their identity in that of Labour’s hard left and Livingstone’s enthusiasm for attracting inward investment by giant global corporations.
Things got little better for the groupuscules after Labour’s general election defeat in 2010. Galloway made a spectacular comeback to win a by-election victory as a Respect candidate in Bradford West in 2012. But he did this without much Leninist support: his electoral base in Bradford was almost entirely Muslim, communal and largely conservative. The SWP went into meltdown when the leadership mishandled allegations of rape against one of their number, a nasty affair that lost the party nearly all of the members it had recruited during the Stop the War campaign.
The film-maker Ken Loach and others – many of them, like him, formerly of the Workers Revolutionary Party, once the biggest Trotskyist group in Britain but utterly discredited in the mid-1980s when its leader, Gerry Healy, was accused of serial sexual assaults – set up Left Unity, a supposedly new party which was not explicitly Leninist, though most of the members it attracted were old-left Leninist has-beens. Unsurprisingly, it failed to get off the ground.
TUSC staggered on, failing to win local council seats, and No2EU did even worse in the 2014 European elections than it had in 2009. Slightly more in tune with the times, Counterfire, the CPB and others opened a second popular front – the People’s Assembly Against Austerity – bringing together Labour, Green and trade union leftists, among them Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Despite its large meetings and occasional demonstrations, it had little public impact.
These false starts and falterings are not the whole story. The Leninist micro-parties may have got nowhere in 2010-15, but after the collapse of the SSP and RESPECT many individual Leninists, drawing on the hard-left networks in which they had embedded themselves, did much better in the trade union bureaucracies.
Assisted by the apathy of members and the complacency of their opponents – while building on the alliances forged in Stop the War and local campaigns – the hard left won several key positions, elected and appointed, on top of the handful it already held. The most important victory came in 2010. Unite, the giant general union born of a series of mergers with the TGWU, elected Len McCluskey as general secretary on a 15 per cent turnout. McCluskey, a self-declared former-supporter of Militant in Liverpool (although he was never a member and is much more a product of the 1970s CPGB union machine than of Trotskyism), won against a candidate supported by the SWP and other Leninists. He appointed Andrew Murray of the CPB and Stop the War as his chief of staff.
Over the next five years the hard left in the unions huffed and puffed, complaining that Ed Miliband, who they’d backed in 2010 for the Labour leadership, was a great disappointment. In 2013 there was a major falling-out between Miliband and McCluskey after complaints that Unite was trying to fix the Labour parliamentary selection in Falkirk. Miliband’s response to the unions throwing their weight around in internal Labour politics was a change to the party’s leadership election rules. In 2014, he eliminated the formal role of trade unions in the electoral college that had chosen Labour leaders since 1983: members of Labour-affiliated unions and registered supporters were given a vote in party leadership elections with the same weight as that of a standard full member.
Hardly anyone objected. The commentariat saw the move as Miliband taking on the union bosses in a new drive for “modernisation”. But Unite and others saw the change as an opportunity – and in 2015, after Labour lost the general election, the chickens came home to roost.
Unite and Leninist-influenced hard left networks in the unions played a significant role in the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Their intervention was mostly indirect. Unions in which the hard left was dominant splashed cash for propaganda and funded phone banks. Unite in particular invested heavily in the Corbyn campaign.
This support was contested and appears to have been grudging – McCluskey wanted to back Andy Burnham but was overturned by his executive. Corbyn’s leadership campaign director was Simon Fletcher, a longtime Socialist Action stalwart who had served as Ken Livingstone’s chief of staff before taking up a similar role with Corbyn. Activists from the People’s Assembly Against Austerity played an important part in organising public meetings for the Corbyn campaign, as did the Labour Representation Committee, a parallel initiative set up in 2004 that brought together the remnants of the Leninist left in the Labour Party and the unions that had survived two decades of expulsions of entryists.
Both the People’s Assembly Against Austerity and the LRC consider that Leninist parties should be allowed to operate freely inside Labour, and members of both – along with activists from TUSC and other far-left operations – have enthusiastically signed up to Momentum, the continuity Corbyn leadership campaign set up by his campaign manager Jon Lansman, a veteran of the early-1980s Bennite left who is a key player in the LRC.
As far as anyone knows, Corbyn himself never joined one of the Leninist groups, but throughout his political life he has drawn on their support and ideas. He basked in the political milieu they dominated, and was heavily involved in campaigns in which Stalinists and Trotskyists played major if not defining roles – the Chile Solidarity Campaign, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, Liberation, Labour CND, Stop the War, the Labour Representation Committee and many more.
More importantly, Leninist anti-imperialism continues to play a central role in shaping his thinking on foreign affairs: if there’s any guiding principle to Corbynism, it’s that the west – in other words, the US and the other “imperialist powers” – is always wrong. The west is by definition imperialist, whatever the aims or impact of its policies, from humanitarian intervention to regime change, from economic development to trade agreement, from the extension of democracy and human rights to formal alliances between states.
In this world, any opposition to the west that arises on the ground is understandable whatever form it takes, and is mostly viewed sympathetically. From the IRA to Hamas, from Cuba to Hezbollah, from North Korea to Venezuela, “anti-imperialists” are “friends” usually deserving solidarity – and a blind eye has to be turned to most of their flaws and their crimes.
As leader, Corbyn has appointed people from the Leninist periphery of hard-left Labour politics who share this worldview – let’s call them Leninoids, as they retain no formal relationship to organised groups – to key positions in the Labour Party, most importantly John McDonnell as shadow chancellor and Seumas Milne as chief spin-doctor. Back in the 1980s, McDonnell, along with Ken Livingstone, was part of the Labour Herald crew that was kept afloat by the Workers Revolutionary Party. Milne’s political sympathies have always been much more towards J V Stalin.
One of the strangest and most shocking characteristics of this boilerplate ‘anti-imperialism’ is a deeply ingrained deference to the Leninists’ old flame, Moscow. The hard left defended Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Georgia in 2008 and excused Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its subsequent bloody interference in Ukraine. This left raised only a finger in protest at Putin’s cynical support of Bashar al-Assad in Syria – and its leading protagonists have long been favoured talking heads on Moscow’s international propaganda TV channel, RT. That Russia might itself harbour imperialist ambitions remains unthinkable for the last Leninists standing. Their crude anti-imperialist reflex gives Moscow a pass, just as it did for Saddam, and just as it continues to do for Iran and China.
It would be wrong to describe the elevation of a few backward-looking fossils as a Leninist revival. It is certainly not a Leninist takeover of Labour. Corbyn’s mindset is indebted to Leninism, but the Labour Party members and supporters who voted for him were and are people who wanted a change of tack on austerity and foreign military intervention. What they’ve got isn’t what they wanted. Putting it crudely, a handful of Leninists past and present have been given key bureaucratic positions by a hard-left Leninist-fellow-travelling leadership. Or to frame it differently: in choosing his team, Corbyn took a leaf out of Livingstone’s book and co-opted Leninist organisational talent for reforming and social-democratic ends.
It’s not the wisest move an aspiring prime minister could make, nor has it united the party, so the future of Corbyn’s fragile and fractious project is unpredictable. One thing is clear, however. Corbyn’s leadership of Labour is unlikely to regenerate the CPB, the SWP or any of the other micro-parties. It is much more probable that the sharp left turn for Labour that his leadership represents will deny Leninists their most potent recruiting argument, that Labour is selling out socialism and the working class. The more successful he is, the more difficult it will be to differentiate their brand – and if he sinks, their close association with him makes it likely that they go down with him.
Sadly, another Leninist mini-revival cannot be ruled out. The organisations are still there, ageing, battered and bruised, and there are plausible scenarios that they could exploit to their advantage. But nearly a century of experience suggests that Britain’s Leninists are on their last legs and going nowhere.
The best hope for the left in electoral politics remains Labour – even if there is a mountain to climb by 2020 and Corbyn fails to enthuse the voters. The party is easy to join and it is a movement for change. Most of its members are sane democratic socialists with no illusions about the scale of the challenge facing them. If you want thrills and spills in the here-and-now and Labour doesn’t appeal, you’re better-off doing your politics yourself than joining one of the self-appointed vanguard parties. You might get nowhere, you might win meaningful victories, but you won’t find yourself dragged into cadre servitude by a central committee that treats new recruits as expendable extras in a misconceived historical movie.
Because that is what British Leninism is today: a tawdry political re-enactment society. They can grow Lenin beards and pretend to be hipsters, or dye their hair red like Rosa Luxemburg’s. But it’s not a politics for today. It isn’t going to find the way forward. The raison d’etre of Leninism is to mislead, to misrepresent and to divide the left. It’s time to let 1917 go.
Reproduced with permission of the very good Little Atoms.
Read the book: Moscow Gold: The Soviet Union and the British Left.
Posted: 15th, May 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
He’s right: Jeremy Corbyn’s high income does not make him wealthy
Is Jeremy Corbyn a wealthy man? We don’t know. We haven’t seen his tax returns. All we do know is that he earns well. The UK average salary is around £27,000 a year. Corbyn earns more than £137,000 year. According to the Mirror, the pay gap is a “grotesque chasm between a rich one per cent and the other 99% of the country”.
Is Corbyn grotesquely rich? An annual income of £100,000 is enough to put you comfortably within the top 2% of all earners.
The Mail spots Corbyn speaking with Julie Etchingham on ITV’s Tonight show:
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has REFUSED to say that he is a wealthy man – despite earning more than £137,000…
He said: ‘I consider myself adequately paid, very adequately paid for what I do…. What I do with it is a different matter. I consider myself well paid for what I do and I am wanting to say to everyone who’s well off, make your contribution to our society.’
Ms Etchingham, 47, reminded him that people at home will be ‘shouting at the TV saying “of course you’re a wealthy man on a £137,000″‘.
But he replied: ‘No, I’m not wealthy because of where I put the money, but I’m not going into that.’
He’s right. Wealth is having a great deal of money, resources, or assets. We don’t know if Jeremy Corbyn is wealthy. We do know that he is paid well and his income affords him choices. Wealth inequality is not the same as income inequality. The two can be linked. But they are not cause and effect.
Posted: 15th, May 2017 | In: Money, Politicians | Comment
Bias media: Daily Express rejects Crusader Jeremy Corbyn over NHS parking charges
On July 1 2014, the Daily Express launched a “Crusade” against parking charges at NHS hospitals. Readers were urged to sign a petition, which began: “I petition the Prime Minister to step in to end the scandalous cost forced on patients and families when parking at hospital…”
Sarah O’Grady had news:
THE Daily Express has launched a crusade to help the sick, the elderly and hard-pressed families across the country by calling for an end to the disgraceful and unfair practice of sky-high parking charges in hospital car parks.
The campaign thundered on. It was backed by a pretty impressive 97% of Daily Express readers.
Things improved for patients in August 2014 when Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt ordered a relaxation of rules on hospital car parking to ensure seriously ill patients are not penalised.
“Daily Express Crusade victory as ministers get tough on rip-off hospital parking,” cheered the paper, aligning its crusade with political policy. When politicians promise to end the charges they do so because they are on the same side as the Express. The paper reported:
Under new guidelines announced by ministers today, “priority groups” should be allowed to park without charge or at a greatly reduced cost.
They include visitors with relatives who are gravely ill or who have to stay in hospital for an extended period.
People with disabilities, those who make frequent outpatient visits and staff working shifts will also be able to take advantage of the concessions, the Department of Health said.
The announcement is a major victory for the Daily Express crusade to prevent thousands of people up and down the country being ripped off by extortionate charges of up to £4 an hour.
More than 10,000 people have pledged their support via postal coupons or on our website calling for the sky-high parking charges to be abolished or reduced. The Daily Express will continue to press for the guidelines to be adopted by hospital trusts.
But the charges kept on coming.
On December 22 2015, the paper picked up its simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play to slam the “Greedy” hospitals earning up to £3.7m a year each through parking charges. “Their current behaviour is completely at odds with the ethos of the NHS,” it added.
As the BBC notes:
Hospital car parking fees were abolished in Scotland and Wales in 2008, although a small number of hospitals still charge as they remain tied in to contracts with private companies that manage their parking facilities. Fees may be charged in Northern Ireland.
In England, whether to charge fees is a decision for individual trusts, with some making parking free for particular patients, such as cancer patients or those using dialysis, or for parents staying overnight with their children.
Who will end this greed? One man will. It’s Jeremy Corbyn, who will end this “tax on serious illness”. He says:
“Labour will end hospital parking charges, which place an unfair and unnecessary burden on families, patients and NHS staff. Hospital parking charges are a tax on serious illnesses.”
So how does the Express report on this breakthrough, the arrival of a champion to lead their Crusaders into Jerusalem’s free parking zones? It doesn’t. There’s not single a word on it in the paper. You can, however, read about it on the Express‘ website – but you’ll find no word on how Corbyn is part of the paper’s Crusade. In fact, there’s no mention of the Crusade at all. The 97% will be disappointed.
Spotter: Liz Gerard – follow her here and here. And read her on Sub-Scribe.
Posted: 9th, May 2017 | In: Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
Bloody Corbyn And Brexit: Voters’ deliver candid message to Labour
It turns out that having rubbished the electorate for being thick and voting the wrong way in the referendum, when you go asking for them to vote for you you get told to naff off.
The former leader of the Labour group on Leicestershire council, Robert Sharp, is upset. He tells the Leicester Mercury:
“I am personally disappointed but we saw it coming. I have said before that it has been tough on the doorstep. We have struggled to get local issues noticed.
“All we have had back at us is Brexit and ‘bloody Corbyn’. I don’t want to sound like a bitter candidate who has just lost his seat and is trying to blame someone else, but Jeremy Corbyn has had a negative impact on this campaign.”
Posted: 7th, May 2017 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment
Green Left Weekly: ‘British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has done remarkably well’
Australian publication Green Left Weekly aims to deliver “news and ideas the mainstream media won’t”. For instance, it’s the only paper we can find that says “British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has done remarkably well since Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May’s April 19 announcement of general elections on June 8.”
Green Left Weekly reported that on May 4. Two days on and the poisonous mainstream media has a different view on Corbyn’s performance.
Spotter: Tim Worstall
Posted: 6th, May 2017 | In: Broadsheets, Politicians, Reviews, Tabloids | Comment
Brexit thrives as voters bring about the demise of UKIP and Labour’s slow suicide
UKIP’s vote share in the Council election is down by 16%. They are demolished. The good news is that this also demolishes the argument that a vote for Brexit was a vote for racism and Nigel Farage’s monocular views.
Operation Black Vote launched this to encourage people from ethnic minorities to register and vote in the EU referendum
Brexit lives on and thrives as UKIP dies on the vine.
At 09:00 BST, across the 23 English and Welsh counties that had fully declared results, the Tories had control of 10 authorities and 561 seats, a net gain of 155.
Labour had control of five authorities and 404 seats, a net loss of 125. The Lib Dems had 143 seats, a net loss of 28. UKIP had failed to win any seats, a net loss of 41, while the Greens had picked up five.
Labour are being eroded. Jeremy Corbyn could reduce a Tory landslide by resigning immediately. The Tories only need slap his face on posters to secure voters in the General Election. He won’t, of course. Labour is so far to the Left that it’s now anti-Labour.
Posted: 5th, May 2017 | In: Politicians | Comment
Labour’s party political broadcast showing indoctrinized Corbyn Kids backfires
Labour’s latest electoral move is to take a teacher and show her instructing her students that education is safe in Labour’s hands. She’s shown indoctrinating her seven to eight year old students after they ask her some questions about politics. The internet rose to the challenge: what happens when they ask some difficult questions?
Our political broadcast airs tonight on @BBCOne. Share the teaser ↓ pic.twitter.com/9wxk4u34mg
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) April 21, 2017
Spotter: Robbie Travers
Posted: 22nd, April 2017 | In: Key Posts, Politicians | Comment
Theresa May is the people’s champion in her pro-Brexit General Election
There will be a General Election on June 8 2017. Theresa May wants Parliament to approve her call for a summer poll. She needs Labour to back her request – she needs two thirds of MPs to back an early-term General Election. They dare not deny her. What purpose is there in Opposition if you do not take your chance to unseat the incumbent Government? May’s message is clear: put up or shut up.
(We’ll have a Labour government on June 9th or my name’s not Pascal Thatcher-Livingstone III.)
Theresa May hopes to be a leader the demos voted for and not just the Conservative’s place holder.
She hopes the Tories will annihilate Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour at the polls, as they surely will.
She hopes UKIP voters will vote Tory, as they surely must.
She hopes there will be no new populist, left-wing pro-Brexit party to bloody the establishment’s noses.
The election will be a vote on Brexit. The Government’s majority is small. Division in Westminster, says May, is trying to undermine and scupper the will of the people. The news is stuffed with ex-PMs, unelected Lords, the very rich and connected chipping away at the people’s will. We voted for Brexit. We voted for change, more say, openness and being closer to the leaders and law makers who represent us. Everyday people saw a chance for something different and seized it.
May wants all parties to put forward their plans for Brexit and let the people decide which they prefer. A vote for the Conservatives is, she says, a vote for Brexit and a vote that will see the will of the people carried through.
A vote for May’s Tories is a vote in the national interest. Three other reasons to vote Tory are:
Jeremy Corbyn.
Jeremy Corbyn.
Jeremy Corbyn.
It’s going to be a Tory landslide.
Posted: 18th, April 2017 | In: Politicians | Comment
Jeremy Corbyn meltsdown in the Sun, Mail and Express but is smiling in the Mirror
When Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn appeared on Sky News, he was asked about his leadership. “I’m carrying on as leader,” said Corbyn, “because I’m determined that we will deliver social justice in this country.” So, er, will you stay on as leader. “I have given you a very, very clear answer, yes,” said Corbyn.
At one point he face contorted. As @ExcelPope quipped, “Have you ever been so angry that your monocle fell out?”
The Express calls Corbyn’s reaction a ‘meltdown’. He ‘dramatically flew off the handle’. On page 2 it features the same screen shot you see above, in which Corbyn seems to be auditioning for Steptoe and Son.
On the Sun’s page 2, it’s ‘JEZZAAARRRGGH!’ cornyn ‘snapped’ on TV. He ‘snarled’ as he ‘dodged three questions on whether he would be in the job to fight the 2020 election’. The paper quotes a Comres poll that 77% of Labour voters ‘think their party has the wrong leader’.
In the Daily Mail, ‘snarling Corbyn features on page 24. He ‘snapped angrily’ when asked about his future. It’s slightly better news for Jeremy, though, because in the Mail he only ‘twice ducked questions about whether he would keep his job until 2020’.
The story gets a different twist on the Mirror’s page 2. Thereon, Corbyn is issuing the rallying call : ‘We won’t give or retreat.’ No sign of a screw face here, it’s just Jezza with one thumb up as he addresses Labour’s Scottish conference – yes, they still have one, albeit in the room under the stairs. There is no word on his Sky ‘meltdown’. There is no word on the Comres poll.
Such are the facts.
Posted: 27th, February 2017 | In: Politicians, Tabloids | Comments (3)
Daniel Ratcliffe regrets the error: Seamus Milne is away and Jeremy Corbyn might not be magic
The big question is: does Harry Potter like Jerrmy Corbyn? The Guardian says he does:
Daniel Radcliffe has endorsed Jeremy Corbyn for leader of the Labour party, saying the veteran leftwinger’s sincerity won him over. The Harry Potter star told The Big Issue that Corbyn’s informal style had excited voters and was a welcome departure from scripted politics.
The Guardian was sticking to the right script, albeit wrongly. The paper later regretted the error:
NOTE: This article was published in error. It was based on social media circulation of an interview Daniel Radcliffe gave to the Big Issue in September 2015. It is not known whether he still holds these views. It originally ran with the headline ‘Daniel Radcliffe endorses Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader’ and was published at 4.55am on 4 September 2016. The original article read as follows:
Whoops! As the Guardian checks the date of Seamus Milne’s contract (the paper says, he’s “a Guardian columnist and associate editor”; he’s also Jeremy Corbyn’s spin doctor), we look at what Radcliffe told the Big Issue:
“I feel like this show of sincerity by a man who has been around long enough and stuck to his beliefs long enough that he knows them and doesn’t have to be scripted is what is making people sit up and get excited. It is great.”
A days is long time in politics. A year is a lifetime…
Posted: 4th, September 2016 | In: Broadsheets, Celebrities, Politicians, Reviews | Comment
(No) Antisemitism in Labour Party Watch: Ruth Smeeth, Kate Osamor And Corbyn’s ‘kinder’ politics
More evidence that there is no anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The Jewish News reports on Ruth Smeeth, Labour MP:
Counter-terrorism police have launched an investigation into a fanatic who has threatened to hang a Jewish female Labour MP from the gallows. Ruth Smeeth is reportedly receiving special protection from police after receiving the foul-mouthed death threat on Facebook, which included anti-Semitic and homophobic abuse.
The Stoke-on-Trent MP is branded a “yid”, “dyke” and a “CIA agent” in the highly offensive rant which is reported in The Sun.
The abuser finishes the post by saying: “Ruth Smeeth is British and from my perspective since treason is still a capital offence in Britain, the gallows would be a fine and fitting place for this Dyke piece of Yid s*** to swing from”
Adding:
The threat was issued in July, soon after the MP fled the launch of Labour’s report into anti-Semitism in tears after being accused by a Momentum activist of colluding with the right-wing press.
Ms Smeeth accused Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of a “catastrophic failure of leadership” for failing to intervene during the incident and said the Labour Party “cannot be a safe space” for British Jews.
Ms Smeeth is quoted in The Sun saying of that incident: “I very much hold Jeremy personally responsible”.
The Facebook rant is captured and reproduced:
The Sun says the ranter is a Corbyn supporter:
We hear from a Corbyn PR:
“Jeremy has consistently spoken out against all forms of anti-semitism and has contacted Ruth Smeeth to express his outrage at the abuse and threats directed against her. Jeremy condemns all abuse, and no one responsible for it is a genuine supporter of Jeremy’s. He has repeatedly called for a kinder, gentler politics.”
Smeeth is quoted by the Press Association:
Ms Smeeth told BBC2’s Victoria Derbyshire programme. “I know that Jeremy Corbyn would condemn this, but it’s not about condemning, it’s about what people are doing in his name. What I need is for the leader of my party, the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, to make it clear what can be done. He should be naming and shaming some of the worst perpetrators who are doing it in his name, and making it clear publicly that they do not speak for him, that this is unacceptable.
“There is a vile amount of racism and intolerance and abuse online, which then feeds on to our streets and leads to a culture of intolerance that he could actually personally do something about. That’s what I’m asking him to do.”
In other news:
Exclusive: Shadow minister’s aide suspended over Zionist posts.
An aide to shadow international development secretary Kate Osamor endorsed a controversial Palestinian activist’s social media posts
Elizabeth Dudley, who was a member of Kate Osamor’s parliamentary staff, ‘liked’ two Facebook posts from a West Bank activist, who Jewish News revealed yesterday is to speak at an event organised by Newcastle Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
One incendiary post from Iyad Burnat said: “To the American people do not bother to vote in the elections. The Zionists had identified the next president.”
Another post from him that was ‘liked’ by Dudley showed the bodies of dead children with the flag of Israel alongside the swastika. Wording above said: “Is the Zionists terrorists? What is the difference between Zionism and Nazism?”
Osamor told the Jewish News: “Having been made aware of these posts, the member of staff has been suspended with immediate effect.”
Conclusion: There is no anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.
Jeremy Corbyn, Press TV and a ‘mere £20,000’ filthy lucre
Jeremy Corbyn has appeared on Press TV five times. Press TV is the Iranian regime’s propaganda channel. It used to be broadcast in the UK but it was banned “for its role in filming the tortured forced-confession of Iranian liberal journalist Maziar Bahari.” Bahari has called Corbyn a “useful idiot”, adding:
People who present programmes for Press TV and get paid for it should be really ashamed of themselves — especially if they call themselves liberals and people who are interested in human rights.
You can watch Corbyn at work here.
The Mail adds:
One Labour MP criticised the party leader’s links to Press TV, and said he should donate all the money to a Jewish charity. In 2011 Mr Corbyn took part in a round-table discussion on the channel with journalist Yvonne Ridley, lamenting the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Mr Corbyn told PinkNews his £20,000 fee for four appearances between 2009 and 2012 ‘wasn’t an enormous amount, actually’.
Is it enough to buy a train ticket?
Posted: 3rd, September 2016 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment
#traingate: Jeremy Corbyn and The Canary sing for an Aisle Free airline
On The Canary website, monocular readers can study Jeremy Corby’s responses to #traingate. “Corbyn delivers a brutal message to Richard Branson after the Traingate smear falls apart [VIDEO],” thunders one headline. The apparent “smear” being that Corbyn was misrepresented when he sat on the floor between carriages and said to camera that there were no seats on a packed train when there were, using his suffering to campaign for a return to State-owned railways.
Another story upbraids Richard Branson’s Virgin for running “fuel-guzzling trains”.
As Jeremy Corbyn books handgliding lessons and a sedan chair for his next trip up north, we notice that alongside the Canary’s self-styled “Fresh, Fearless Independent Journalism” is this advert for an airline offering “Aisle Seats for Everyone”.
‘Book now and book often’, as they don’t say in Corbyn’s office.
Posted: 25th, August 2016 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment
Corbyn, Hitler and Press TV
Two stories about Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn stand out in today’s media.
ONE: Corbyn the Fearful
The Observer reports that the Labour Party leader is so weak he fears his deputy, Tom Watson.
A senior Labour source, close to the embattled leader, said they had blocked Watson from talking privately to Corbyn because they have a “duty of care”. “They [Watson’s aides] want Watson to be on his own with Corbyn so that he can jab his finger at him,” the source said. “We are not letting that happen. He’s a 70-year-old [sic] man. We have a duty of care … This is not a one-off. There is a culture of bullying.”
Vote Corbyn, then, a leader who will lead the country forward until he meets a man with pointy finger, like Labour peer Alan Sugar, the spirit of Lord Kitchener or Tom Watson.
TWO: Corbyn the Fearless
The Business Insider (BI) website says: “Jeremy Corbyn was paid by an Iranian state TV station that was complicit in the forced confession of a tortured journalist.”
Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn accepted up to £20,000 (about $27,000) for appearances on the Iranian state broadcast network Press TV — a channel that was banned in the UK for its part in filming the detention and torture of an Iranian journalist… Corbyn’s final Press TV appearance was six months after the network had its broadcasting license revoked by Ofcom for airing a forced confession by Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari.
A spokesperson for Corbyn told Business Insider, “We don’t comment on historical matters.”
What Corbyn is and what Corbyn is not is the hot debate. How much is the media to blame, if at all, for how Corbyn is perceived? The BI website features a video of Corbyn and a suggestive teaser. The picture is below:
No Nazi salute, of course. But it is Godwin’s Law at work.
Posted: 3rd, July 2016 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Jeremy Corbyn supporter wears ‘Eradicate Right Wing Vermin’ T-shirt
At the pro-Jeremy Corbyn rally in Westminster, a woman has shown her support for the Labour Party leader by wring a T-shirt declaring: “Eradricate the Right Wing Blairite Vermin.” It is the new “gentler, kinder politics” Corbyn wanted:
Posted: 27th, June 2016 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comments (2)
Jeremy Corbyn reshuffles his Cabinet and champions democracy
Jeremy Corbyn is in the mire. Can he survive the storm raging inside the Labour Party and remain as its leader? The grassroots Labour Party like Corbyn – they voted him in. The new Labour Party want him out. The mutineers who have resigned from Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet want him out, seizing on the EU Referendum result to get shot of Corbyn. Helpfully, Jeremy has issued a statement:
Our country faces a huge challenge following Thursday’s vote to leave the European Union. And the British people have a right to know how their elected leaders are going to respond.
David Cameron resigned. Well, it was his referendum.
We need to come together to heal the divisions exposed by the vote.
Which is why he, er, sacked Hilary Benn as his shadow foreign secretary.
We have to respect the decision that has been made, hold the government to democratic account over its response, and ensure that working people don’t pay the price of exit.
Many of those “Working people” voted for Brexit. What does he man by working people? Does he discount the students and the pensioners – they who will pay in to the big pot and they worked all their lives to live on a pension, respectively?
Neither wing of the Tory government has an exit plan.
They do. This morning Chancellor George Osborne’s made a statement on the impact of the vote leave EU referendum. He said:
It is inevitable, after Thursday’s vote, that Britain’s economy is going to have to adjust to the new situation we find ourselves in.
In the analysis that the Treasury and other independent organisations produced, three particular challenges were identified – and I want to say how we meet all three.
First, there is the volatility we have seen and are likely to continue to see in financial markets.
Those markets may not have been expecting the referendum result – but the Treasury, the Bank of England, and the Financial Conduct Authority have spent the last few months putting in place robust contingency plans for the immediate financial aftermath in the event of this result. We and the PRA have worked systematically with each major financial institution in recent weeks to make sure they were ready to deal with the consequences of a vote to leave.
Back to Corbyn:
One clear message from last Thursday’s vote is that millions of people feel shut out of a political and economic system that has let them down and scarred our country with grotesque levels of inequality.
Yep. They voted to reject The European Union.
I was elected by hundreds of thousands of Labour Party members and supporters with an overwhelming mandate for a different kind of politics. I regret there have been resignations today from my shadow cabinet. But I am not going to betray the trust of those who voted for me – or the millions of supporters across the country who need Labour to represent them.
Democracy will out.
Those who want to change Labour’s leadership will have to stand in a democratic election, in which I will be a candidate.
And he’ll win again. Our bet is he wins by an even larger majority.
Over the next 24 hours I will reshape my shadow cabinet and announce a new leadership team to take forward Labour’s campaign for a fairer Britain – and to get the best deal with Europe for our people.
Now hands up who wants to join Corbyn on the losers’ table?
Posted: 27th, June 2016 | In: Politicians | Comment
Jeremy Corbyn gets negative ‘boost’ in satisfaction ratings but Farage wins
Big news. The Indy says “Jeremy Corbyn overtakes David Cameron in leadership satisfaction ratings”.
The Ipsos MORI poll showed Mr Corbyn up ten points and David Cameron down ten points after last week’s Budget
Corbyn is popular?
Mr Corbyn is now on net -11 while Mr Cameron is on net -25 with the pollster.
Phew! No, he’s not. Unpack your bag, Jews of Britain. Things will be ok for a while yet.
There has been speculation that Mr Corbyn’s satisfaction rating with the pollster – his highest with any firm – may also be exaggerated by Conservatives saying they are satisfied with what they perceive as his poor performance.
Who was polled?
Other pollsters ask different question formulations – including whether a leader is “doing a good job” – which would likely shed light on whether the shift represents a real move in support.
Ha!
The boost for Mr Corbyn however comes amid a number of pollsters showing Labour drawing nearly level, level, or slightly above the Tories in voting intention.
A -11 rating for an Opposition leader after a divisive budget is a ‘boost’?
The Indy does not mention that George Osborne’s satisfaction ratings equal his worst ever following the budget. And the paper completely fails to mention that Nigel Farage is the real winner:
Posted: 26th, March 2016 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment
