Letter Defending Corbyn in Private Eye

This fortnight’s Private Eye for 10th – 23rd January 2020 has a number of letters from annoyed readers defending the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn after slights from the Eye itself and letters from Tories in last fortnight’s issue gloating at Labour’s defeat. One of the letters is from Tim Mickleburgh of Grimsby, who writes

Sir,

Comments in your “Election Special” need to (Eye 1512) need to be challenged. First, 68 percent of the electorate didn’t reject Labour’s policies, rather they wanted to “get Brexit done”, being unhappy that Labour had reneged on their 2017 promise to accept the 2016 referendum. And Corbyn was right to claim Labour “won the argument” if not the election, for the Tories had moved away from the austerity policies of Cameron/Osborne, promising more for the NHS, 20,000 new policemen and to consider re-opening closed railway lines.

Just the opposite from 1997, when Tony Blair’s New Labour won a landslide majority but promised to continue with Tory spending plans and generally accept the Thatcherite agenda.

This is correct. The areas of the north and midlands that turned Tory were those that voted for Brexit, and Labour’s manifesto policies were actually supported, according to polls, by 69 per cent of the public. The Tories also had to compete with Labour in promising more for the NHS and other parts of the economy. That hasn’t and won’t stop them breaking those promises, but it does show that these are issues that will help Labour to win if the party tackles them properly.

It’s important to stress this now that Corbyn is resigning and the Blairites are struggling to come back, repeating the old lies that only by accepting Thatcherism and becoming the Conservative Party version 2.0 will Labour become electable.

Charlie Brooker Latest Celeb To Push Anti-Semitism Smears on Have I Got News For You

Well, the election’s over and Boris in power with a massive majority. John McDonnell has resigned and Jeremy Corbyn is hanging on to oversee things until the party elects a new leader. But the Beeb still knows where its priorities lie: pushing the anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn and his party as hard as they can. And once again the vehicle for it was former satirical news quiz, Have I Got News For You.

This time the mugs making the smears were the guest host, Charlie Brooker, and comedian Phil Wang. Reading off an autocue, Brooker made a joke about Labour denying the Holocaust. He quoted someone saying the party was ‘in denial’ before quipping, ‘Well, at least it wasn’t about the Holocaust!’ Laugh? I thought I’d never start. Later on Wang made a joke about Jeremy Corbyn defending Nazis. Which isn’t funny either. The Beeb can’t claim the jokes are satirical, because they don’t parody reality. Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite and has never defended Nazis. Quite the opposite. Nazis don’t get themselves arrested protesting against apartheid in South Africa. They supported White rule there. They also don’t protest against the lack of content for Jews on television, or the redevelopment of Jewish cemeteries. Nor do they attend meetings addressed by Holocaust survivors. This last point was lost when the Conservative press and Jewish establishment collectively lost their minds at Corbyn nodding in agreement when a Holocaust survivor said that the Israelis were treating the Palestinians like the Nazis had treated him. How dare he! Anti-Semite! But Nazis don’t give any attention to Holocaust survivors, because they try to pretend it either didn’t happen or was far smaller than claimed.

Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani tweeted footage of Brooker’s joke, commenting

As minorities face rising abuse and violence every day the BBC producing this stuff is deeply disturbing. Perhaps the licence fee isn’t worth it after all.

Very true. Boris’ victory has emboldened racists, and the media seems to be joining in with ITV misrepresenting Stormzy’s remark about racism in Britain.

Simon Maginn commented

Imagine being Charlie Brooker.
Successful, feted, admired as a fierce and uncompromising critic of lies and bullshit.
Then he goes on some crappy BBC ‘comedy’ show and delivers a Labour Holocaust-denial ‘gag’ and BOOM! he’s just another dumbo cog in the dumbo BBC smear machine.

Brooker is popular and has received massive critical acclaim. This is for his harsh, scathing attack on poor television in books like Dawn of the Dumb, and for Screenwipe. This last was his TV series in which he made vicious comments about various programmes while screaming at the screen and miming masturbation. He then moved to creating thought-provoking Science Fiction television with his series, Black Mirror. This was a series of tales showing the chilling possibilities in computer technology and our media saturated culture. It was greeted with critical acclaim. But Brooker seems to have thrown that away by making a stupid joke about Corbyn and anti-Semitism. But as Mike says, perhaps that’s a contractual obligation of people fronting the show by the Beeb.

Tom London also criticised it, making the point that he was Jewish and that these jokes are damaging Britain’s Jews

I am Jewish
There is NO proper evidence that Corbyn is an antisemite because he is not one
The people who pushed the incessant, relentless propaganda that he is have
Undermined democracy
Done huge damage to relations between minorities
Harmed Jewish community.

Ah, but that doesn’t matter to the Beeb. They’re the establishment, and all they care about is protecting the existing neoliberal order from attack from people like Corbyn’s Labour party. Left-wing Jews like Tom don’t count. Because they’re the wrong kind of Jews.

Mike also makes the point that while some may like the right-wing propaganda HIGNFY is spewing forth, others don’t, and it may not be long before the programme’s axed. Artdecolady tweeted

HIGNFY is really unfunny now, and I think it might be because I always thought they were on my side, but it’s now clear they’re not. Charlie Brooker made a really pathetic joke about the Holocaust and the Labour Party. To think I used to like him.

Sometimes it’s funny, but I’ve also gone off it. It used to be hilarious when it started back in the 1990s. Perhaps it’s simply because the novelty’s worn off. But there’s something more to it. I gave up watching it completely a few years ago because of the constant propaganda. The attacks on Corbyn are just part of this, but it was also pushing the lie that the Maidan Revolution that ushered in pro-Western government in Ukraine was a popular uprising, rather than a coup backed by America and the country’s own domestic Nazis. It was organised by Victoria Nuland of the US state department and the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the independent organisation to which the American state has outsourced this kind of operations after the CIA caused too many scandals with their activities. But ordinary peeps in the West can’t know this, and you’re an evil conspiracy theorist if you do.

The Scots comedian Frankie Boyle was very critical of Have I Got News For You. He saw it very much as part of the political establishment akin to similar shows in some of corrupt Balkan states. In an interview with Richard Osman at the Edinburgh television festival the other year, Boyle recalled how he had been in Romania watching a show like HIGNFY on TV. Politics there, at least at the time, was very corrupt and the media and television programmes rigged to present a pro-government line. The supposedly satirical show was no different. A government minister was in the front row as the comedian went along, and there was a piece of banter between the two. Everything was very chummy, and showed that the show wasn’t in the least opposed to the government. Rather the opposite, in fact. When Boyle remarked on this, he guide and translator said, ‘But it’s like programmes in your country!’

‘No, it isn’t!’ replied Boyle. Which was answered by

‘Yes, it is! Have I Got News For You!’

The show’s been running for nearly 30 years. Perhaps it’s had its day and should be cancelled before it outstays its welcome.

But Mike concludes that if it is, then this will only provide Boris with a pretext to privatise and abolish the Beeb.

Worst of all is the probability that Boris Johnson will use this as part of his excuse to axe the BBC’s status as the UK’s public service broadcaster and remove the requirement to pay the licence fee.

Still, the BBC did its best to ensure the Tories won the general election, knowing that this would be on the cards.

The Corporation’s bosses really are like turkeys voting for Christmas.

Charlie Brooker becomes next celeb to end his career with a ‘joke’ about Labour and anti-Semitism

They did, but my guess is that they won’t care, because the top managers and the people in the news department responsible for this are no doubt counting on getting new jobs with the private broadcasters that will replace it. 

ITV Misrepresents Stormzy Racism Comment

Yesterday Mike put up a piece reporting that the Grime artist, Stormzy, had been misrepresent by ITV as claiming that Britain was totally racist. One of the broadcaster’s hacks had asked him if he thought Britain was racist. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘100 per cent’. Now it should be obvious even to the meanest intelligence that what he meant was that he believed 100 per cent that Britain was racist, not that Britain is 100 per cent racist. But we live in a ‘post-truth’ age, where the media is feeding us all kinds of lies, half-truths and distortions. Stormzy was pro-Labour and pro-Corbyn, and after the Beeb and its lead smear merchant, Laura Kuenssberg, had spent the election belittling Labour and promoting the Tories, it seems that ITV had decided it was their turn. There was an immediate backlash which resulted in the broadcaster releasing a statement retracting their claims about Stormzy, but which significantly did not include an apology.

The peeps on Twitter were not impressed. Mike has put up a number of tweets attacking ITV for this from people like Another Angry Voice, Laura Murray, the comedian and I journo Shappi Khorsandi, and Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar. Murray and Sarkar both noted that Stormzy was being smeared after Britain had elected Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. A racist, who talked about ‘picanninies with watermelon smiles’. Sarkar noted that Johnson also says he runs away from Black boys, Nigerians are obsessed with money and uses the N- and C- word for Blacks. Oh yes, and Britain is a country that illegal deported Black British citizens. But Britain isn’t racist, and it’s extraordinarily offensive to say that it does.

And after the Tory election victory that put Johnson into No. 10, I really wouldn’t have blamed Stormzy if he did believe that Britain was totally racist. Because as Murray and Sarkar note, 14 million people elected one. And it also looks like the broadcaster was using the same trick on Stormzy that the Sun in 1987 used to try to put the public off voting for Diane Abbott. They put a picture of her up in a feature on Labour MPs with left-wing or otherwise dangerous or offensive opinions, at least according to the Scum, claiming that she had said, ‘All White people are racist’. And now they misrepresented Stormzy to make it look like he had said something similar. The right-wing media in 1987 as part of their campaign against the Labour party deliberately misrepresented Black discontent not as resistance to racism, but as Black racism. And this looks very much the same tactic. Stormzy’s political views could be discounted, because he was yet another Black anti-White racist. That was the impression given.

Stormzy himself issued a very forthright attack on the smear. He declared, in language that in Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home is described as ‘colourful metaphors’, that all the publications and media outlets distorting his words could perform oral sex for him, and should not bother asking for anything from him in the future.

Mike comments on this affair

The mainstream – Tory – media will take every opportunity to mislead the public about the opinions, actions and philosophy of those of us who want a better deal for everybody, rather than a bigger slice of pie for the few who are already grossly obese while everybody else is starving.

They’ll do it in the knowledge that most of the people they are misrepresenting do not have the means to challenge them.

And when they are exposed, they’ll simply change their headlines, happy in the knowledge that the damage is done.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/12/22/fake-news-row-as-itv-misrepresents-stormzy-comment/

And now today Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin is chuckling over a hashtag campaign calling Stormzy a ‘bellend’. Sargon is, of course, the man, who killed UKIP along with Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meechan and Paul Joseph Watson. A man so right-wing, racist and sexist that the UKIP branch in Swindon asked him to be deselected as one of their candidates for the south-west in this year’s Euro election. Gloucestershire UKIP disbanded when they heard he’d been selected, and he was greeted with anti-racism demonstrations when he turned up in Bristol as part of his election tour, and had milkshakes and fish thrown at him Truro and other places. Sargon’s support of this hashtag campaign tells you all you need to know about the racists supporting ITV’s smear. It comes after a similar hashtag campaign against Owen Jones yesterday by supporters of Rachel Riley and the Alt Right. Which reveals exactly who some of her supporters are.

And with this latest attack on Stormzy, it shows how Johnson’s victory has emboldened the real racists in this country.

Book on Austerity as State Violence

The Violence of Austerity, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte, eds. (London: Pluto Press 2017).

Okay, I realise that this isn’t the kind of book most of us would choose to read at Christmas. We’d rather have something a bit more full of seasonal good cheer. I also realise that as it published nearly three years ago in 2017, it’s somewhat dated. But it, and books like it, are needed and still extremely topical now than 14 million people have been duped into electing Old Etonian Tory Boris Johnson.

I found the book in one of the many excellent secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham. I was particularly drawn to it because of its title, and the titles of the chapters it contains. It’s a collection of papers describing the Tories’ attack on the poor, the disabled, the marginalised, the unemployed, homeless and BAME communities, and particularly women of colour, as forms of violence. This isn’t mere hyperbole. The book discusses real instances of violence by the state and its officials, as well as landlords and private corporations and individuals. Mike in his articles on the Tories’ wretched benefits sanctions has argued time and again that this is a form of state violence against the disabled, and that it constitutes genocide through the sheer scale of the deaths it has caused: 130,000 at a conservative estimate. It’s therefore extremely interesting that others attacking and campaigning against austerity share the same view. The blurb for the book runs

Austerity, the government’s response to the aftermath of the financial crisis, continues to devastate contemporary Britain. Thius books brings together campaigners and writers including Danny Dorling, Mary O’Hara and Rizwaan Sabir to show that austerity is a form of systematic violence.

Covering notorious cases of institutional violence, including workfare, fracking and mental health scandals, the book argues that police attacks on the homeless, violent evictions in the rented sector, community violence and cuts to the regulation of the social protection are all being driven by reductions in public sector funding. The result is a shocking exposes of the ways in which austerity policies harm people in Britain.

One of the editors, Vickie Cooper, is a lecturer in Social Policy and Criminology at the Open University, while the other, David Whyte, is professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is also the editor of How Corrupt Is Britain, another scathing look at the UK under the Tories.

The book’s introduction by the editors is on the violence of austerity. After that it is divided into four sections, each on different aspects of austerity and its maltreatment of the poor.

Part 1, ‘Deadly Welfare’, contains the following chapters

1. Mental Health and Suicide, by Mary O’Hara
2. Austerity and Mortality, by Danny Dorling
3. Welfare Reforms and the Attack on Disabled People, by John Pring
4. The Violence of Workfare by Jon Burnett and David Whyte
5. The Multiple Forms of Violence in the Asylum System by Victoria Canning
6. The Degradation and Humiliation of Young People, by Emma Bond and Simon Hallsworth.

Part II, ‘Poverty Amplification’, has these

7. Child Maltreatment and Child Mortality, by Joanna Mack
8. Hunger and Food Poverty, by Rebecca O’Connell and Laura Hamilton
9. The Deadly Impact of Fuel Poverty, by Ruth London
10. The Violence of the Debtfare State, by David Ellis
11. Women of Colour’s Anti-Austerity Activism, by Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel
12. Dismantling the Irish Peace Process, by Daniel Holder

Part III, ‘State Regulation’, includes

13. Undoing State Protection, by Steve Tombs
14. Health and Safety at the Frontline of Austerity, by Hilda Palmer and David Whyte
15. Environmental Degradation, by Charlotte Burns and Paul Tobin
16. Fracking and State Violence, by Will Jackson, Helen Monk and Joanna Gilmore
17. Domicide, Eviction and Repossession, by Kirsteen Paton and Vickie Cooper
18. Austerity’s Impact on Rough Sleeping and Violence, by Daniel McCulloch.

Part IV, ‘State Control’, has these chapters

19. Legalising the Violence of Austerity, by Robert Knox
20. The Failure to Protect Women in the Criminal Justice System, by Maureen Mansfield and Vickie Cooper
21. Austerity, Violence and Prisons, by Joe Sim
22. Evicting Manchester’s Street Homeless, by Steven Speed
23. Policing Anti-Austerity through the ‘War on Terror’ by Rizwaan Sabir
24. Austerity and the Production of Hate, by Jon Burnett.

These are all subjects that left-wing blogs like Vox Political, Another Angry Voice, Pride’s Purge have all covered and discussed. The last chapter, ‘Austerity and the Production of Hate’, is on a subject that Mike’s discussed several times in Vox Political: the way the Tory press and media justifies the savage attacks on the poor and disabled through stirring up hatred against them. Mike has published several articles on the way Tory propaganda has resulted in vicious attacks on the poor, particularly the homeless.

This violence and campaign of hatred isn’t going to stop after Boris’ victory, and his appeal for healing after the election is just rhetoric. He doesn’t want healing, he wants compliance and complacency. He doesn’t deserve them, and should not be given any, because from now on he and his party will only step up the attacks.

Don’t be taken in by establishment lies. Keep working to get him out!

Private Eye on Telegraph Hack’s ‘Insensitive’ Handling of Labour Anti-Semitism Scare

Or perhaps simple, crass hypocrisy would be a better term! Private Eye’s Christmas edition has come out at last, it carries a very telling piece in their article giving ‘campaign medals’ about the general election for a Xmas 2019 poll. Daily Telegraph journo Alison Steadman gets one for her ‘Most sensitive handling of anti-Semitism’. This snippet reads

When the results were in, the Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson confessed to having been, in a biblical phrase, “sore afraid… The thought of Jews with their bags packed, ready to flee. It was awful, awful. As the Chief Rabbi warned, ‘The very soul of the nation is at risk.'”

Having filed this column for the Telegraph, Pearson headed straight to Twitter to demand: “So now all the Jews are staying who do we nominate to leave?”

Pearson will be familiar to readers of Tim Fenton’s excellent blog, Zelo Street, which has published numerous articles about her. She’s notorious for telling and repeating right-wing lies and smears for the Tories. The above is no exception. Although Private Eye doesn’t mention it, because they’re as keen to keep the anti-Semitism smears going as the rest of the wretched British media establishment, Pearson’s comment on Twitter just shows how seriously the media really take the anti-Semitism allegations: they don’t. They were never more than just a way to bring down Corbyn. Simon Kelner, one of the I’s hacks, showed as much in his piece when he said that absolutely nothing would happen to British Jews if Corbyn gained power, and wished that the Chief Rabbi had never opened his wretched gob to say it would. It was all manufactured. And the Tories and the media that screamed so bitterly that Corbyn, Momentum and Labour were an existential threat to Jewish Brits really couldn’t have cared less about the Jews for the most  part.

Pearson and the rest of the press lied, and smeared and libelled decent women and men in order to bring the Labour leader and his supporters down. But what is really galling is that, although the Eye knows this, they too are keeping up the smears and lies.

UKIP’s Working Class Voters and the Tory Victories in Labour Heartlands

Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin in their book Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support For The Radical Right in Britain (Abingdon: Routledge 2014) argue that UKIP’s brief appearance as a new political force was due to it developing strong working class support. It articulated the frustration with contemporary politics of the people left behind. These were generally older, less educated workers, marginalised through de-industrialisation and social change, particularly immigration and European integration. They write

UKIP’s revolt is a working-class phenomenon. Its support is heavily concentrated among older, blue-collar workers, with little education and few skills; groups who have been ‘left-behind’ by the economic and social transformation of Britain in recent decades and pushed to the margins as the main parties have converged to the centre ground. UKIP are not a second home for disgruntled Tories in the shires; they are a first home for angry and disaffected working-class Britons of all political backgrounds, who have lost faith in a political system that ceased to represent them long ago.

Support for UKIP does not line up in a straightforward way with traditional notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’, but reflects a divide between a political mainstream dominated by a more financially secure and highly educated middle class, and a more insecure and precarious working class, which feels its concerns have been written out of political debate. In a sense, UKIP’s rise represents the re-emergence of class conflicts that Tony Blair’s New Labour and David Cameron’s compassionate Conservatism submerged but never resolved – conflicts that reflect basic differences in the position and prospects of citizens in different walks of life. Before the arrival of UKIP, the marginalisation of these conflicts had already produced historic changes in political behaviour. Blue-collar voters turned their backs on politics en masse, causing a collapse in electoral turn-out to record lows, and fuelling a surge in support for the extreme right BNP, making it briefly the most successful extreme right party in the history of British elections. Since 2004, Farage and his foot soldiers have channelled the same social divisions into a far more impressive electoral rebellion….

(T)he potential for a political insurgency of this kind has existed for a long time. Its seeds lay among groups of voters who struggled with the destabilising and threatening changes brought in by de-industrialisation, globalisation and, later, European integration and mass immigration. These groups always occupied a precarious position on Britain’s economic ladder, and now, as their incomes stagnated and their prospects for social mobility receded, they found themselves being left behind.

Many within this left-behind army also grew up before Britain experienced the recent waves of immigration and before the country joined the EU, and their political and social values reflect this. This is a group of voters who are more inclined to believe in an ethnic conception of British national identity, defined by birth and ancestry, and who have vivid memories of a country that once stood independent and proudly apart from Europe. They also came of age in an era where political parties offered competing and sharply contrasting visions of British society, and had strong incentives to listen to, and respect, their traditional supporters. Shaped by these experiences, today these voters look out at a fundamentally different Britain: ethnically and culturally diverse; cosmopolitan; integrated into a transnational, European political network; and dominated by a university-educated and more prosperous middle class that hold a radically different set of values, all of which is embraced and celebrated by those who rule over them. This is not a country that the rebels recognise, nor one they like. (pp. 270-1).

Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters believe that the defeat in the recent general election was primarily due to Brexit and Boris Johnson’s presentation of the Tories as the party that would ‘get Brexit done’. Craig Gent, in his article for Novara Media, ‘Learning the Lessons of Labour’s Northern Nightmare Will Take Longer Than A Weekend’ argues that the northern communities, who turned to the Tories were those which voted for Brexit. He writes

The bare facts are these: Labour’s election campaign did not look the same across northern towns as it did on left Twitter. Swathes of towns that said they wanted Brexit in 2016 still want Brexit. Those towns by and large felt patronised by the offer of a second referendum, a policy whose public support has always been inflated by the gaseous outpourings of its most ardent supporters. And two years on from 2017, the novelty of Corbynmania had thoroughly worn off, with his increasingly stage-managed media appearances beginning to rub people up the wrong way.

See: https://novaramedia.com/2019/12/17/learning-the-lessons-of-labours-northern-nightmare-will-take-longer-than-a-weekend/

It’s also been argued that working class voters turned to the Tories in the north and midlands because the Leave vote was primarily a rejection of the political establishment, and in those areas, Labour was the political establishment.

Some of the features of UKIP’s working class supporters obviously don’t fit those, who voted Tory last Thursday. The people voting for Johnson weren’t just the over-55s, for example, and so wouldn’t have had the glowing memories of Britain before we entered the EU, or EEC as it then was. And it should be remembered that UKIP was never as large or as powerful as its supporters and cheerleaders in the lamestream media presented it. But clearly there are a large chunk of the British electorate, who did feel ignored by Labour’s Blairite leadership and shared their elders’ impressions of a Britain that was powerful and prosperous outside the EU, and which had been actively harmed by its entry.

But Boris won’t do anything for them, except possibly make a few token gestures towards improving conditions for those communities. It will mean hard work, but Labour can win those communities back.

But it means not taking them for granted, as Gent’s article states, and building a solid working class base once again through community activism and campaigning.

And not leaving them behind to concentrate on marginals and Tory swing voters, as New Labour did.

 

 

The Election: It’s Due to Brexit and Smears, Not Rejection of Labour Policy

As I’m sure everyone following this blog knows, the Tories won Thursday’s election. I had a horrible feeling they would, because despite Labour’s excellent manifesto and the polls showing that support for the Labour party had risen so that they were close behind them, the Tories are masters of deception. They’ve had the mass media, almost without exception, lying to the electorate for the last ten years. And I was afraid people would believe Johnson’s lies when he said he was going to build 40 new hospitals, recruit more coppers and nurses. All demonstrable lies, but people believe them. Just as they believed the lies put out by Thatcher and Major when their reforms were causing mass unemployment, poverty and misery, and ruining the Health Service. But I was unprepared for the extent of the Tory victory. They now have a majority of 78 seats.

Like very many people, I felt extremely bitter and angry, and spent yesterday trying not to think about politics, though it was inevitable. And now I’m ready to start analysing and making sense of this mess.

Martin Odoni has already written a very good piece about it, which is well worth reading. He argues that the result had zip to do with the public rejecting Labour’s manifesto, and everything to do with Brexit. He writes

It is absolutely self-evident, and was even so as the results were unfolding, that the biggest factor in the outcome by a country mile was Brexit. At almost every turn where Labour’s support had slumped, a similar number of votes had been claimed by the Brexit Party, by the Tories, or by a combination of the two – the two parties that are most rigorously pursuing British departure from the European Union. Most of Labour’s lost support was in traditional working class territory in the north of England, the north of Wales, and the Midlands, and most particularly in areas where there was a high Leave vote in the 2016 Referendum.

Now, I have no doubt Corbyn was a factor in some voters’ rejection of Labour – no politician will be everybody’s cup of tea. And given how brutally and relentlessly he has been smeared by the media, including many supposedly ‘left-leaning’ periodicals, there can be no doubt that the wider public’s view of Corbyn has been unfairly coloured. But the general results do not offer any specific evidence of a rejection of Labour’s policy platform as a whole. The shift was very definitely Leavers, with their maddening tunnel-visioned obsession with Brexit, moving to parties boasting their determination to ‘Get Brexit done’.

Either way, a personal objection to Corbyn does not constitute an objection to his policies. When discussing the Labour Manifesto, people were usually very enthused – Labour’s polling numbers did improve substantially rather than deteriorate after it was launched – just as they had been in 2017. On that occasion, Labour scored forty per cent of the vote, and it seems unlikely that huge numbers have suddenly reversed that position.

Absolutely. When Labour were mooting their new policies – of renationalising the NHS, and taking water, electricity and the railways back into public ownership – the polls showed that the public largely supported them. Which is why the Tories and the mass media had to fall back to smearing Corbyn personally with the false accusations of anti-Semitism and that he was some kind of Communist, IRA-supporting threat. Also, analysis of the grassroots membership of UKIP also showed that they’re largely in favour of nationalising the public utilities. What they don’t like is the EU, immigration and the new morality – the acceptance of the LGBTQ community. UKIP always was much smaller than the impression given by the media, and collapsed when it spectacularly failed to win any seats at the last election. The reasonable, or at least, less bonkers section of its membership went over to Fuhrage’s Brexit party, which has now also collapsed.

I conclude from this that it’s not Labour’s manifesto that’s the problem, despite Piers Morgan and the rest of the media and Tory establishment, including the Labour right, all claiming that it’s ‘far left’. It isn’t, and never was. It’s properly centrist in the true Labour tradition of a mixed economy.

I also think it would be difficult for the Labour to win under the circumstances. The anti-Semitism smears began when the Jewish Ed Miliband was elected leader. He was far more moderate than Corbyn, but dared to utter a mild criticism of Israel and so was subjected to a storm of smears. And Maureen Lipman flounced out of the party for the first time. Corbyn was then subjected to further smears and abuse for his support of the Palestinians – which does not equal anti-Semitism nor even a hatred of Israel, except in the minds of the ultra-Zionist fanatics. This was pushed by the media and the Conservative Jewish establishment, as well as the Labour right. They also misrepresented his work helping to negotiate peace in Northern Ireland as support for terrorism and the IRA. Oh yes, and he’s also supposed to be a supporter of Islamist terrorism. There’s also a nasty touch of racism in some of the other reasons I’ve heard for people not giving him their support. I’ve been told that Labour are in favour of open borders, and would flood the country with immigrants. Diane Abbott is also bitterly hated, and among the sneers I’ve heard thrown at the Labour leader is the accusation that he had an affair with her. Well, he might have, but that’s his own business and doesn’t affect his policies or how he intends to govern. Abbott is perceived by many as anti-White. I remember the quotation the Scum attributed to her in the 1987 general election ‘All White people are racist’. I don’t know if she really said it, but I doubt she believes it now. She’s friends with Michael Portillo, so I don’t think she regards him as racist. But her continuing anti-racism means that she is perceived by some as anti-White. And this also extends to Corbyn through their close professional relationship. And then there are the antics of the Labour right and their determination to bring Corbyn down through splits, rumours of splits,  right-wing female Labour MPs trying to claim that he’s a misogynist and the endless lying and partisanship of the media.

It reminded me very much of the elections in the 1980s and the abuse and smears hurled at the Labour leaders Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. Labour lost those elections, and Lobster has published a number of articles explaining how, under the circumstances, it would have been difficult for Labour to win.

But I don’t believe that we should give up hope just yet.

Labour’s manifesto was popular. People do want a return to the old social democratic consensus of a welfare state, mixed economy, and nationalised NHS. Prviatisation hasn’t worked, services are still crumbling and Boris will soon show how empty his promises about building hospitals and putting more money into the Health Service are. It’s just that, for the people who voted Tory in the north and midlands, Brexit took precedence.

And I feel that Corbyn has also given people hope. Before Corbyn’s election, I was extremely pessimistic about the survival of the NHS because all of the parties were participating in its privatisation. But Corbyn showed that its privatisation was not inevitable, at least at the hands of Labour. Which is no doubt partly the reason why the Labour Thatcherites are now queuing up to blame him for the election defeat. I do feel very strongly that Corbyn has set a very firm basis for a future Labour party to build on and grow from here, provided it finds a suitable successor.

I do not want another Blair.

Also, my guess is that this defeat will also make the true Labour supporters more determined. Always remember: an animal is most dangerous when it is cornered. I’ve heard tweets from people calling for new, more aggressive forms of resistance like the occupation of Jobcentres. And these will come. People will think up new ways of getting Labour’s message across.

And Boris hasn’t and won’t solve this country’s problems. Sooner or later some people, at least, will have to realise what I sham and a fraud the Tories are.

Let’s make it sooner.

Poll Showed Labour in Slight Lead over Tories

Well, an election has been set for December 12th, and the papers have been full of stories claiming that Labour is 15 points behind the Tories in the polls. This is quite a reversal from last Friday, 25th October 2019, when that day’s I carried an article by Jane Merrick, ‘New opinion poll shows narrow lead for labour’. This ran

A surprise poll put Labour narrowly ahead of the Conservatives last night, suggesting the possible Christmas election could be as close as 2017.

The ComRes survey has Labour on 27 per cent, on epoint ahead of the Tories on 26 per cent. The Brexit party is on 20 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 18 per cent. 

Recent polls have given Boris Johnson’s party a comfortable lead of as much as 15 points ahead of Labour.

However, the new ComRes poll was not based on a straight question of voting intention but was dependent on whether “the deadline for the UK to leave the EU has been extended beyond 31 October 2019”.

The survey was taken on 16 and 17 October, just as the Prime Minister had reached his Brexit deal with Brussels but before the publication of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill.

The poll suggests Mr Johnson’s latest plan, to call an election and extend Brexit beyond 31 October to allow the Bill to pass through Parliament on 6 November could benefit Labour.

Well, it’s now the 31st, and the Brexit deadline has definitely been extended.

Polls, of course, are notoriously untrustworthy. The polls for the last few elections all claimed to show that Labour would be wiped out. But as many of the polling companies are run by Tories, it isn’t remotely surprising they show Labour behind them. In reality, the party actually made some gains. Much also depends on the implementation of the laws on media impartiality. These come into force at election time for broadcasters, so that the Beeb is prevented from lying quite so flagrantly about Labour and Corbyn. As a result, Labour actually rises in the polls to the point where it overtakes the Tories. My guess is that the same process will begin to kick in the closer we get to an election. 

And as for the standing in the polls of the two party leaders, the last time I looked BoJob had a massive -44, by far the worse polling of any party leader.

BoJob States He Is Prepared to Break Law For Brexit

Yesterday Mike put up the ominous news that BoJob has confirmed in parliament that he would break the Benn Act in order to bring about a no-deal Brexit. Mike comments that this seems to confirm that he is indeed in the pocket of financial speculators, who stand to make billions from the economic and social chaos and misery that would result. Jeremy Corbyn and the SNP have also made it clear that they will not support Johnson’s new attempt at a deal with the EU. It appears that they only course left open is a vote of No Confidence, followed by a caretaker government led by Corbyn. If that fails, Mike speculates that John Bercow may seek to delay Brexit again in preparation for a general election. Mike goes on to wonder if Johnson actually wants that, as well as the Lib Dems, who seem to be ready to support the Tories back into power once again. He concludes

Perhaps he thinks the Brexit-supporting public will put him back into Number 10 with a majority.

But after a series of failed attempts at Brexit, is anybody really stupid enough to think he has anything to offer us?

WATCH: Johnson confirms he’s ready to break the law to leave the EU without a deal

By stating plainly that he is prepared to break the law to get the Brexit he and his backers want, Johnson has made it blatantly clear that he is not fit to be prime minister. While I’ve no doubt his toadies and lackeys in the right-wing press would try to claim that this would be the action of a strong prime minister against a weak, divided and traitorous parliament – and where would we have heard that kind of rhetoric before? Oh yes, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy – it’s the actions of an autocrat. We have such laws binding the powers of prime ministers and the head of state because we have constitutional government. It’s evolved over centuries through turmoil and revolution to protect British people, their liberty and property, from arbitrary, tyrannical government. That’s it’s point. Johnson and his supporters are willing to break that. It puts the lie to the old Tory claim that they represent democracy and the British constitution. In reality, as this shows abundantly, they are increasingly keen on autocratic one-man rule, with BoJob as the new Duce or Fuhrer.

If BoJob does violate the Benn Act, then I believe that he should be arrested and impeached as a clear and present threat to democracy. Perhaps we could put him and his supporters in the internment camp the right-wing forces plotting a coup in the 1970s wanted to put Harold Wilson, trade unionists and left-wing activists and journalists.

Private Eye: Government Plan to Draft Army as Local Government Officials in Event Brexit Crisis

There’s a very worrying story right at the beginning of this fortnight’s Private Eye. It’s page 7, where the actual text of the magazine starts right after the first few pages of advertising. Titled ‘Privates on Parade’, it reveals that Project Yellowhammer, the secret government plan for dealing with mass shortages caused by Brexit, also includes provisions for drafting the army in as local government officials. The reason they’ll be needed there is because there aren’t enough civil servants in the national administration to deal with the crisis, and if it happens, they’re going to have to draft in local government officials. The article runs

The government has spent the past fortnight trying to play down the leaked Operation Yellowhammer document about preparations for a “no deal” Brexit. Ministers initially pretended it was an old plan; when it emerged that the document was dated August 2019, they claimed preparations had alread moved on since then.

But the ramifications of the plans are extraordinary. To fill the thousands of extra civil service posts required the government has arranged for a rather unorthodox shuffle: if/when a “no deal” Brexit happens, thousands of local government officials are to be reallocated to Whitehall departments to fortify Sir Humphrey.

Who will run town and county halls in their absence? This is where matters become surreal. The army – including territorial volunteers – are being issued with instructions to take over local government posts, in a civilian capacity, in the event of “no deal”.

One officer, who admitted he was uncomfortable at the optics of all this, observed to the Eye that this involved putting soldiers in charge even when they lacked basic literacy and numeracy. Quite how they would get on in calculating council tax, or providing adult social care and children’s services, remains to be seen…

There are several remarks to be made about all this. The first is that it shows how stupid and destructive successive Conservative administrations have been in their determination to slim down the civil service. This has now reached the point where there are too few of them to run the country effectively in the event of a national crisis, like a ‘no deal’ Brexit.

The second is the massive implications this has for democracy in this country. I would imagine that one reason the unnamed officer felt uncomfortable about the ‘optics’ of the army moving into local government is that it looks very much like the beginnings of a military coup. And events don’t have to go much further before it really would amount to a military take-over of civilian government. I think that Operation Yellowhammer also provides for emergency legislation to deal with possible civil unrest in the event of shortages of food, medicines and other essential services. After a wave of rioting up and down the country the government could declare a state of emergency, draft in the army and put in force martial law.

Given Boris’ personal authoritarianism, as shown in his prorogation of parliament, I can imagine that he may even wish to dispense with parliamentary supervision in such an emergency. With the very loud support of the Tory press, he dissolves parliament again, which will only be recalled in after the restoration of order. And it probably isn’t so far-fetched to see some of the Tory right and British press demanding the arrest of left-wing subversives. If the unions call a strike, I imagine they’d be delighted. They could go back to Maggie’s tactic of posing as the nation’s champion against the bullying of the union barons. Further legislation would be passed or invoked to break up the strikes, ban trade unions and arrest trade unionists. At the same time, allegations of Communist connections and sympathies would be used to justify the arrest and detention of left-wing activists and trade unionists as threats to national security. This might be going too far, but I could also imagine the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the right-wing Zionists of organisations like Herut handing over lists of names of ‘the wrong sort of Jews’ in order to make sure Jewish critics of Israel and Conservatism were also arrested and detained. Because after all, they’re a threat to Israel, one of the West’s major outposts in the Middle East.

I’m not saying this will happen, only that it could. Back in 1975 the Conservative party and parts of the press, including the Times and the Mirror, were also pressing for a coup to overthrow Harold Wilson’s Labour government. Because industrial unrest had got out of hand, and he was supposed to be a KGB spy. See Francis Wheen’s book on paranoia in the ’70s, Strange Days Indeed. It’s also described in Ken Livingstone’s 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, in which the-then mayor of London discusses how there were plans to round up left-wing activists, MPs and journalists, and have them sent to concentration camps on one of the Scottish islands.

The plan to draft soldiers in to local government also reminds me of the very strong position of the armed forces in the economies in many developing countries. In Pakistan, for example, the army also runs businesses, like cement factories. I’ve heard that the same is true of Egypt. The military is deeply entwined with large sectors of industry. Now Johnson and co.’s plan only involves drafting the military in to deal with a shortage of civil servants. But Zelo Street posted a piece recently showing that the government was also considering buying up the surplus food produced by our farmers if they could not export to the continent, and asked whether they would also provide financial support to the British car industry, another part of the economy that’s under threat. If the government decides that they, too, will have to be given over to army management or staffing, then Johnson and the Tories will really have turned this country into a third world nation. He’ll have a created a real military dictatorship, like those that have afflicted Pakistan and other nations. And they will be cheered on in this destruction by the right-wing press, like the Times, the Mail and the Scum. Lurking behind this threat of a coup, is the danger of a return of real Nazism from Social Darwinists like Toby Young and Dominic Cummings, who fear that giving education and welfare support to the poor and disabled is a threat to our racial stock and the proper running of our society by the upper classes. You can see them demanding legislation once again to sterilise the disabled and those on benefits.

The Tories and the right-wing media, including the Beeb, are now a real threat to democracy, whatever Boris and the Polecat now say about holding elections. We have to get them out, even if that means that Corbyn and the rest of the opposition have to bide their time for the moment. The future of our country and its people really is at stake.