Labour Leadership Contest

[Hooch]

The tooth world of Denis Mad.

[Carvalho Diablo]

You can't handle the Tooth.

 

[Rotpeter]

The Yanks wont be happy,but thats a good thing in this case.

All those bombing campaigns in recent times have worked an absolute treat havent they?

This looks like the beginning of Phase II of Get Corbyn to me. Now opponents will start injecting his principles and values into real life situations like here his "pacifism" into the ISIS situation. The Murdoch press will go to town on this, "there's a red under by bed" becomes "there's a mad mullah under my bed". Enamoured but skeptical people will be listening very closely to his answers and they better be good and not sound anything like echoes of greenham common.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

I had my vetting call this morning.  Someone phoned up to ask whether I was a member or supporter of another party.  (I truthfully said I wasn't.)  She then asked whether I supported the principles of the Labour Party.  (I avoided the temptation to rant about how few Labour front-benchers in recent years seem to support those principles.)  She then asked who I voted for in the last election (I told her I voted privately; y'know, like people do in a democracy.  I stressed that I refuse to answer that question on principle.)  There were then questions about why I'd joined (to vote) and why I'd joined as a "supporter" and not as a full "member" (actually, I thought I had joined as a member - I told her I thought £3 was a bargain.)

 

Now I just have to wait and see whether they purge me.

 

I'll tell you what, though, it's a foolproof system.  I mean, if anyone wanted to join just to fuck up the vote, there's no way they could get past a rigorous examination like that.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Cameron signals he would drop Syria airstrikes vote if Corbyn is Labour leader

Prime minister says ‘general consensus’ in UK on extension of military action would be necessary for him to put plan before parliament

 

David Cameron has indicated he will abandon plans to extend military airstrikes against Islamic State (Isis) targets from Iraq to Syria if Jeremy Corbyn is elected leader of the Labour party.

 

In a sign of how the leftwinger could have an impact on Britain’s foreign policy, even as opposition leader, the prime minister said that he would only hold a parliamentary vote on the strikes if there is “genuine consensus”.

 

 

There's an important point here.

 

The other three have been banging on about whether or not Corbyn could be PM.  Like Ed Milliband before them (with the exception of the war vote) they don't seem to appreciate that Leader of the Opposition is an important role and is vital to a functioning democracy.  Milliband's strategy seemed to be to keep his head down and sit on his hands for five years and hope that everyone became so sick of the Tories that he'd win by default.  I can see Burnham or Cooper making the same mistake.  (I can't see Kendall doing anything. Ever.)

[Anubis]

Only telephone call I've fielded is from Tom Watson's phone bank.

[Rotpeter]

There's an important point here.

 

The other three have been banging on about whether or not Corbyn could be PM.  Like Ed Milliband before them (with the exception of the war vote) they don't seem to appreciate that Leader of the Opposition is an important role and is vital to a functioning democracy.  Milliband's strategy seemed to be to keep his head down and sit on his hands for five years and hope that everyone became so sick of the Tories that he'd win by default.  I can see Burnham or Cooper making the same mistake.  (I can't see Kendall doing anything. Ever.)

The other side of that self-same coin is that if Miliband had went full ED earlier he may not have made it to the general election.

[VladimirIlyich]

The other side of that self-same coin is that if Miliband had went full ED earlier he may not have made it to the general election.

The way he performed it probably wouldnt have mattered too much.

[Anubis]

So Corbyn supporters are now being compared to ISIS by Labour MPs. It really is becoming surreal.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/05/corbyn-supporters-mps-party-members-labour-election

 

 

As Big Ben strikes six on Monday evening, mainstream Labour MPs will congregate in the House of Commons’ wood-pannelled Committee Room 14 to launch an early fightback against what many fear is an inevitable victory for Jeremy Corbyn.

 

 

The Observer has learned that the chairman of the parliamentary party, John Cryer, has agreed to hold a debate among Labour MPs about the return of shadow cabinet elections, a move seen by many as a pivotal part of a plan to disrupt a swift “Corbynista” takeover of the party machine. A vote to bring the elections back can’t be held that evening because of various complicating rules, but it is likely be staged the following Monday – just 48 hours after the new leader’s election. Worries that party conference would subsequently need to endorse the MPs’ decision have been assuaged by officials.

 

 

After an extraordinary summer during which conspiring has had to be done remotely, the end of recess tomorrow will mark the start of feverish activity at the Palace of Westminster. One frontbencher said of tomorrow’s meeting: “There will be foment, torment and some will be in clover.”

 

 

The election of shadow cabinet ministers was ended by Ed Miliband in 2011 and, in recent weeks, Corbyn has spoken of appointing his own team. But despite some holding the view it might be best to let the Corbyn phenomenon come to its natural conclusion, (“a car crash”, is the consensus), Monday’s debate will be about an insistence that the parliamentary party, where Corbyn support is wafer-light, will not be going away.

 

 

Barry Sheerman, the MP for Huddersfield who approached Cryer over holding the debate, said: “I have been re-reading the manifesto which I solemnly put before the electorate. We may have lost the election, but there are lots of interesting things in there, and it was the basis on which people elected us. I don’t know if a new leader can tear up that agreement with their constituents.”

 

 

Graham Stringer, the MP for Blackley and Broughton, added: “As Jeremy has in the past, I have always thought the shadow cabinet should be elected.” Simon Danczuk, the MP for Rochdale, is understood to have already looked with colleagues at how a slate of moderate MPs could be compiled to fill key posts.

 

 

The logic behind MPs laying the foundations of their resistance to Corbyn now and in this form is buried in the arcane governance of the Labour party. If the MP for Islington North held total power of patronage over the shadow cabinet, some fear he would pack it with leftwing allies and then use his right to appoint three of those shadow cabinet ministers on to Labour’s governing body, the National Executive Committee.

 

 

With control over the 33-strong NEC, which is finely balanced between the wings of the party, the theory goes that Corbyn would be able to rush through a series of radical changes at the annual party conference held two weeks after his election, with the effect of undermining the influence of MPs who do not share the new leader’s leftwing aspirations. While still holding hope of an Yvette Cooper victory, John Spellar MP, warned: “They won’t be able to help themselves.”

 

 

Documents produced by the Bennite Campaign for Labour Party Democracy – whose spokesman, Jon Lansman, is a key figure in the Corbyn campaign team – possibly offer an insight into the moves that would be made, including making it easier for local constituency parties to deselect their MPs and taking power from moderate MPs, giving it to Corbyn-enthused members.

 

 

An explainer on one motion ready-prepared for conference notes: “The procedure would reform the policy-making process to (i) provide for a rolling programme based on amendments from party units, giving grassroots party individuals and affiliated members direct input into policy making; (ii) enable party conference to make the final decisions on policy.”

 

 

Or, as one Corbyn supporter and Unite member, Nick Long, wrote in a rather more blunt letter to his local paper in Lewisham: “If Corbyn wins the leadership race and other progressive MPs join him, a battle royal will ensue to wrest control of the Labour party out of the hands of the Blairite and Progress elite and the adoption of an anti-austerity agenda. A long struggle will be needed to oust these rightwingers and careerists.”

 

 

The Corbyn team deny aspirations for such blood-letting but they are certainly looking at how to convert those who have paid £3 to vote in the Labour leadership election into full members, with voting rights. It is believed that the vast majority of those 120,000 supporters, who have swelled the Labour electorate to more than 550,000, share Corbyn’s policy aspirations. In a sign of his determination to hard-wire the new supporters into the party machine, last week Corbyn told one of his rallies: “This level of participation is unprecedented and I am delighted by that. It will change the Labour party.

 

 

“I think it will make it a much more democratic organisation; it will make it much more participatory. My determination – it’s not about me, it’s about us, there’s a whole lot of us – is that we have a much stronger grassroots democracy, so that ideas come up, rather than decisions are made at the top and are handed down like papal encyclicals.”

 

 

All very reasonable, it might seem. “But there is an ulterior motive,” said Luke Akehurst, a Labour councillor and former NEC member. “The analogy an MP gave me was that these people are moving through the party like Isis in their jeeps in Iraq. They need to push on, take over, before they lose the momentum.” Perhaps not the most tasteful of analogies, but these are traumatic times for Labour MPs who have spent a lifetime opposing the hard left. One shadow minister said he had written his resignation letter and said he planned to “act like a Lib Dem for the next five years”.

 

 

“I will stay in my constituency, make myself useful, pick up dog shit and stay away from Westminster. What is the point of going there?” he said.

 

 

However others, with no less frustration have been examining the reasons behind the leftwing candidate’s rise and how they should respond.

 

 

Among those reading the runes are members of Miliband’s former office who are furious that the new leadership election rules – a one-person one-vote system that allowed new people a vote for £3 – were largely ignored as a potential factor in the contest by candidates other than Corbyn. One former Miliband aide said that of the candidates’ websites at the start of the contest only Corbyn’s contained a link to the site that would allow people to become “supporters”.

 

 

But the conservatism of some in the party had become apparent, the former aide claimed, even before the general election defeat. Two of Miliband’s inner circle – his director of strategy Tom Baldwin, and speechwriter Marc Stears – had suggested that the party seek out £3 supporters before 7 May in an attempt to engage people with the Labour party.

 

 

The membership had already changed hugely by 2015 compared with 2010, possibly in favour of the left. Only 35% of the 185,000-strong membership in 2010 was retained, and by 2015 new blood had lifted it back to around 200,000.

 

 

“Lots of Blairites left in a sulk because David Miliband wasn’t leader and it is generally the case that those that then joined are sympathetic to the leader,” said the source. But for all the party’s talk of radicalism, the idea of a membership push by MPs and officials to ignite interest and build a broader church was dismissed as “hippy nonsense” by more conservative voices around the leader.

 

 

Indeed, the Observer has learned that such was the lack of appetite for exploiting the rule changes that it was decided to ignore them when it came to the Scottish leadership election in December 2014. “No one noticed,” the source said. “But that election should have been done on the one-man one-vote basis with £3 supporters allowed to be involved. It was decided that it would be an embarrassment, with only about 10,000 members voting. And so the old system was used.There was considerable institutional conservatism, and the unions didn’t want to engage with it. And, other than Corbyn, the candidates in this contest have also been terrified of new people.”

 

 

Responding to the complaints about the rules by some senior figures, such as Michael Dugher MP, who is managing Andy Burnham’s campaign, the source added: “My strong advice is that if in an election you don’t have enough votes, you should go and find some more.”

 

 

It is advice that some are now belatedly ready to take. One frontbench spokesman said that with shadow cabinet positions came the chance to make speeches at conference and catch the public’s eye, and that an opportunity to build excitement around a candidate of the centre-left will not be lost next time. “There is a good chance that if Corbyn has a bad conference speech and three or four bad prime minister’s questions, the support around him will drop away,” the shadow minister said. “I am talking about the unions really, who will have strength in numbers on the NEC and finance the whole thing.

 

 

“Dave Prentis at Unison and Paul Kenny at GMB might put on leftwing clothing when it suits, but will they want to stick with a leader who is a laughing stock and can’t attain the rights for their members by winning an election? It might be over in six to 18 months. I don’t think the left have someone with Jeremy’s personal warmth who could stand.

 

 

“So it then needs someone in the mainstream to shine at conference and start enthusing people. Some have said Dan Jarvis could be the one. But he needs to be able to make a barnstorming speech. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown could do it. Can he?”

 

 

The MPs gathering on Monday night are looking to provide a platform for Corbyn’s successor – but who can perform on it?

 

 

Decision day: How the party’s new leader will be revealed

 

 

■ The special leadership conference at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in Westminster starts at 10am on Saturday, when the four candidates arrive to be ushered into the “candidates’ holding room”. At 10.30 they and their campaign managers will learn the results but be sworn to secrecy. At 11am, Iain McNicol, the party’s general secretary, will open the conference and the candidates will be invited to take their seats at the front of the audience.

 

 

■ Before the leadership result is announced, the matter of the deputy leadership needs to be dealt with. The chairman of the national executive committee, Jim Kennedy, will draw the audience’s attention to a big screen where the results of the alternative vote poll will be shown, round-by-round, so that members can see who received the most and least first preferences, and how the second preferences of voters accumulated to provide a winner of the contest. The winner will be announced and he or she will make a short speech.

 

 

■ At around 11.30am Kennedy will return to the lectern to do it all over again for the leadership contest. After the winner is announced, at 11.45, Ed Miliband’s replacement as Labour leader will make his or her first speech as leader of the opposition or, as some have described it, the worst job in politics. It will be the end of a tortuous morning, the start of a gruelling few days and the launchpad for a daunting five years. A blizzard of media interviews will then begin, before a 3pm meeting with senior management of the party.

 

 

■ Sunday morning will bring an interview with Andrew Marr on his BBC TV programme. Activities on the Monday will range from “cake and fizz” with party staff at lunchtime to a private meeting with the general secretary and a first meeting of the parliamentary Labour party and the shadow cabinet. Should Jeremy Corbyn be chosen, he will also attend an uncomfortable meeting with Alan Johnson, who is leading Labour’s pro-EU campaign. Corbyn is the least Europhile of the candidates.

 

 

■ The new Labour leader has also been pencilled in on the Tuesday to attend a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. If Corbyn wins, does he wear his vest and Breton cap?

[Rotpeter]

So Corbyn supporters are now being compared to ISIS by Labour MPs. It really is becoming surreal.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/05/corbyn-supporters-mps-party-members-labour-election

It was surreal from the beginning. When Corbyn first looked like he was going to be relevant there was a front page article on guardian.com by some labour MP trying to smear Corbyn with pedophile stuff (because it happened in Islington or some such).

[AngryOfTuebrook]

The other side of that self-same coin is that if Miliband had went full ED earlier he may not have made it to the general election.

I don't know what this means, so I can't comment on it.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

So Corbyn supporters are now being compared to ISIS by Labour MPs. It really is becoming surreal.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/05/corbyn-supporters-mps-party-members-labour-election

 

 

Wow!  What a fucking hatchet job.  The Mail or the Express would be proud of that.

 

The people who are already plotting to undermine and then overthrow the democratically elected leader; the people who want to make sure that MPs appointed to safe seats don't have to be accountable to their constituents; the Labour MPs who are getting ready to expose and exploit any perceived failings of the Labour leader; the people who are so fearful of popular democracy, that they see murderous mobs where there are enthusiastic crowds - these people are repeatedly described as "mainstream" and even "moderate".

 

And it even ends on a pre-emptive dig at Corbyn's dress-sense, with a deliberate effort to drag up the utterly false, but effective, slander about Michael Foot's coat.

 

Revolting.

[Red Phoenix]

Ive been away a short while been held by the plice answering difficult questions having been found shagging danielle westbrooks nostril flaps but like I told them she was scagged out heavily menstruating with a bout of the squits stanking out her back passagery and i noted she must have had a sore throat too as their were lozenges next to the bed and Im not a complete monster to rattle that voicebox so callously so the only gentlemanly thang tobe doin is to use wet snot to grease and facilitate a semi on and work the tip in but not so far as to give her any lasting brain damage whilst flushing out any remaining lemo residue from her last binge with a teaspoon of semen at climax. Any decent person would do the same i was gonna put a poll up and ask if you would fancy a bash at westbrooks filtrum clit but itd be a pointless landslide that would show a graph that eerily depicted the moment her nose fell off which would bring it all back and crush her spirit, for you gayers theres micheal jacksons nosehole when the tip falls off. You could put the tip in your bum if you are a wide receiver type or use your dextrity at fitting into the smaller crevice micheals corpse is rumoured to bare but i figure it should not be a poll that excludes anyone but then i thought theyd have be gay necrofilliacs who are partial to interracial as itd be interacial as hes both black and white like that song dirty diana. Anyway i decided the poll is 78 per cent in favour so theres little point pursuing it now it was a bit lower than i thought to be honest but the point stands you cant get fooled again.

 

 

That post is a bloody disgrace. I had no idea you were so warped, Dennis! To think that you've influenced me for so long!

 

An extra hour meditating today just for reading that. Someone get Dennis some valium! (errm, wait... I'll have the valium. Message me if you have some please, Dennis is fine, really. Anyway forget this part if you have no vallies, and remember this : Dennis is a bloody disgrace!)

[razor]

I've loved catching up with the debates online.

 

These are exciting times for the Labour movement.

 

The final crushing blow was the Miners' Strike.  It took years of recovery and a move to centre ground to win elections, but what's the point of winning in the name of the left when you aren't left?

 

Now Jeremy Corbyn is saying stuff that is radical and genuinely different.  It could be a return to polemic politics.  Or it could be the final nail in the coffin.

 

Politics is about to become interesting again. 

 

The centre-ground anodyne poli-droid is dead - long live the Left!

[lifetime fan]

So Corbyn supporters are now being compared to ISIS by Labour MPs. It really is becoming surreal.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/05/corbyn-supporters-mps-party-members-labour-election

It was exactly because of cunts like them I was so determined to never give the Labour Party another penny until they actually represented me.

 

If those MP's don't back Corbyn I hope every single one of them loses their seat next time round. I don't care if its to the Tories as labour will shit all over you too.

[Carvalho Diablo]

It's precisely because of these calculating and devious careerist Blairites that a generation of potential Labour voters has drifted towards apathy and stayed at home on election day, or gravitated instead toward a different political calling altogether.

 

I'm pleased this dirty laundry is been exposed by the papers, these arseholes need to be shaken awake and have it explained to them (very slowly) that their politics were annihilated at the last GE and rejected by every fucker.

 

Your blandist, Blairist, cushy fucking careerist shennanigans are long gone. Over, out, dead as fuck.

[Jairzinho]

As much as I have great respect for Corbyn's humility, calmness, etc in facing all of this shit, I'd happily pay some money into a crowd fund to have every single Blairite MP fired at a comet. 

[Carvalho Diablo]

As much as I have great respect for Corbyn's humility, calmness, etc in facing all of this shit, I'd happily pay some money into a crowd fund to have every single Blairite MP fired at a comet. 

 

I'm in for a tenner mate.

 

Just shows up everything that's rotten about this Labour Party; these fuckers aren't remotely bothered about the rank and file, or about democracy, they're not arsed about the people who they're paid to represent. I'd have far more (ie. a shred of) respect for them if they simply jumped ship to the Tories or to UKIP or whoever.

 

Just stop fucking pretending to represent Labour. They've forgotten what it means. Blair dragged the party far to the right, ably supported by his cronies and arse lickers, careerists who are in it for wholly the wrong reasons. Let's hope Jeremy Corbyn manages to wrestle the party back, giving us a credible alternative for the first time in a long, long time.

 

I'd love to see a re-energised Labour and a refocused Labour, able to attract new people with fresh ideas. The country has been crying out for it.

[Anubis]

Yvette handing out Photoshop opportunity presents.

 

 

[christianbenteke]

I'm in for a tenner mate.

 

Just shows up everything that's rotten about this Labour Party; these fuckers aren't remotely bothered about the rank and file, or about democracy, they're not arsed about the people who they're paid to represent. I'd have far more (ie. a shred of) respect for them if they simply jumped ship to the Tories or to UKIP or whoever.

 

Just stop fucking pretending to represent Labour. They've forgotten what it means. Blair dragged the party far to the right, ably supported by his cronies and arse lickers, careerists who are in it for wholly the wrong reasons. Let's hope Jeremy Corbyn manages to wrestle the party back, giving us a credible alternative for the first time in a long, long time.

 

I'd love to see a re-energised Labour and a refocused Labour, able to attract new people with fresh ideas. The country has been crying out for it.

 

I fully expect corbyn to win the leadership contest. But let's revisit this in say 3 to 5 years to see exactly where the party is standing.

[cloggypop]

Great stuff by Stewart Lee

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/06/stewart-lee-jeremy-corbyn-new-christs-bin-laden?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Great stuff by Stewart Lee

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/06/stewart-lee-jeremy-corbyn-new-christs-bin-laden?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Some beautifully-crafted phrases in there.

 

Apparently, the Labour party leadership contest frontrunner, Jeremy Corbyn, wants to dredge the decomposing corpse of Osama bin Laden from the seabed and then marry it.

And he wants to live with the dead body of Bin Laden in Islington, as if it were his gay-zombie husband, in a sick leftwing pantomime of the heterosexual Christian wedding ceremony. And this arrangement is also a perversion of Islam, which is of course a peaceful religion.

It was Monday morning. I logged off from the Daily Mail website. I only went on the damn thing to check whether migrants were currently a swarm of vermin, or decent loving parents like you or I, or if leggy Israeli model Bar Refaeli would take the plunge in a tiny wraparound oriental miniskirt, and then I got bogged down in all this Corbyn necrophilia stuff. It’s all so confusing.

Later, after I’d dropped the kids at school, I saw the cover of the Daily Express in a newsagent and read that Corbyn had also said it was a tragedy that he and Bin Laden had not met during the latter’s unfairly curtailed life, as Corbyn was sure that after they had become lovers, they would have sponsored a sloth at London zoo.

I raised my eyebrow at the newsagent, a bearded Islamic man in long flowing robes with an inscrutable expression of fundamentalist certainty. But he said that whatever people did behind closed doors was up to them, as long as the sloth had given its consent and was not harmed.

Later, I attended a local radical artists’ and writers’ meeting in the last squatted tower block in Tower Hamlets. We were trying to decide how best to respond creatively to the political implications of austerity, and whether there was a place in our empty gesture for puppetry and dance.

Turning to sip my tea, I looked out of the window to see Tim Farron of the Liberal Democrats fly by in a hang glider, with a picture of Jeremy Corbyn kissing Bin Laden printed on its outstretched wings.

Farron’s pained democratic face suggested either constipation, sexualised religious ecstasy, the vain hope that someone would remember that he existed, or some fair and just proportional representation of all three positions.

But a cat by the Museum of Childhood merely looked briefly up from burying its excrement on the lawn, as the desperate Cumbrian wafted himself westward toward Wapping.

The artists and I screwed up our agenda and discussed what we had seen. Of course, these days, rather than being reliant on squinting at the speeding news through the shit-smeared windscreen of newspapers, as it flashes by in full Doppler effect, we all agreed that we can use newfangled internet technology to seek out and then freeze-frame the source of the supposed story.

“Had Corbyn really said the death of Bin Laden was a ‘tragedy?’” asked a painter. “Not really,” offered a young woman tapping at an iPhone. It appeared the veteran leftwinger had used those words, but as part of a forward moving collection of sentences, which contextualised them in the way that sentences in a supporting argument do, in order to lament the lack of due process in Bin Laden’s killing, which Corbyn believed, rightly or wrongly, had ongoing global implications.

Anyone familiar with human language, such as a baby, a dolphin, or a cleverer than average dog, would have experienced such a syntactical procedure before, perhaps involving nouns and verbs and various qualifying phrases.

Only by decontextualising these words entirely were the Mail, the Express, theTelegraph and the actual genuine leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, able to misrepresent Corbyn so absurdly.

The digitally enhanced, bionic GM news flies past us with such high velocity that within 24 hours the surface of the Corbyn teacup was again millpond still. Only occasionally did the becalmed Fairtrade brew in the chipped Corbyn mug begin to ripple once more, as Tony Blair’s impotent ape footsteps pounded counter-productively on the tea tray around it.

Incoherently outraged, and yet in possession of a megaphone, the wounded and once powerful monkey god lashed out this way and that in a doomed quest for meaning. Or bananas. It’s so difficult to tell since the creature no longer has Alastair Campbell to interpret for him. “We don’t do bananas.”

Like Jeremy Corbyn, I too have experienced the agony of decontextualisation. A DVD of a 2009 standup routine, in which I used depictions of violence against TV motoring journalists as a way of questioning their own right to operate outside accepted taste boundaries, ended with a direct, down the lens, plea to Mail journalists not to decontextualise the images within the 50-minute bit in order to misrepresent me.

But, brilliantly, this did not stop the Daily Mail’s Jan Moir doing exactly that. Moir’s article was swiftly withdrawn from the paper’s website presumably when it became clear that my patented Jan Moir trap, baited with the stinking cheese of assumed outrage, had worked like a dream.

But apart from me, and Jeremy Corbyn, there was another man, wasn’t there, long long ago, whose wise words were often shorn of context by stupid fools, and used against him. And perhaps that man had a beard, and maybe he wore sandals too. And perhaps he too came to lead his lost followers away from false idols towards the promised land.

And this lowly man, would he have gone among the people in fine Raja Daswani shirts like Tony Blair? No, he would have dressed like me, in an XXL T-shirt he got free from an indie band; or like Jeremy Corbyn, in a pair of itchy alpaca wool underpants knitted for him by his mother, as a gesture of solidarity with the Sandinistas. And with all the oppressed peoples of the Earth.

I’m not saying, by the way, that Corbyn and I are the new Christs. But I don’t have any say in what headlines the subeditors and page layout people choose to put on these pieces. I hope that “new Christs” bit isn’t the attention-grabbing phrase that theObserver elects to pull out of this column.

Nobody on Twitter or Comment Is Free reads to the end of the pieces they are complaining about. And a headline like “Jeremy Corbyn And I Are The New Christs” will only serve to convince the Conservative content-provider Tim Montgomerie thatGuardian newspapers have finally lost the plot, and send Baron Daniel Finkelstein, OBE, into a tail-chasing tailspin of baronic confusion. What’s the point?

But in such moments of despair I think to myself, WWJCD? What would Jeremy Corbyn do? And the sadness just fades away.

[cloggypop]

Works better on the link I thought. With the headline.

[sir roger]

I don't think the main thing is political context or ideology behind the Labour party machinations against Corbyn, it is simply the panic of people who have assumed they had jobs & various cushy numbers for life & suddenly seeing they could all be tossed out on their pseudo-Tory arses.

[Section_31]

I don't think the main thing is political context or ideology behind the Labour party machinations against Corbyn, it is simply the panic of people who have assumed they had jobs & various cushy numbers for life & suddenly seeing they could all be tossed out on their pseudo-Tory arses.

 

I've said this before, but the country is currently in the grip of a particular class of people. It's not really a middle class/working class/upper class issue, but they do tend to be moneyed and well-connected. 

 

They permeate every industry in this country but there are two prerequisites (a) there has to be money/status to be made and (b  it can't require too much natural effort and brains. 

 

So, for example, they're not particularly arsed about getting into law or medicine, but they're all over the media because it's reasonably doabale. They're all over the arts, television, property, fashion - anything where there's money, kudos, and where knowing the right person can get you in the door. 

 

Now at some point around Blair's rise to power, politics was added to these industries. George Osborne couldn't get a job in a newspaper so he went to work in the Tory press office instead and his rise to power started there. Despite having the best education money can buy, his only other jobs were data entry and working in Selfridges. 

 

Underneath him there will be lots, and lots, and lots of trainee George Osbornes. Advisors, press officers, researchers. If they toe the line long enough they'll get  safe Tory seat. 

 

This is exactly the same on the Labour benches too, exactly the same. 

 

The people 'holding them to account' in the media, have mostly got their jobs via the same means. They've got a foot in the door with the right word with the right man, and they'll climbed the slippery ranks that way. 

 

Because of their wealthy background they expect that kind of success, it doesn't come as a suprise to them, but it also gives them a particular view of life. 

 

To them, Immigration is about going for a curry with a Japanese mate, crime is about not living in the wrong part of London, making money is about having a property portfolio and being canny with your taxes. You don't value the state because you've never needed it, and will never need it, if you're ever out of work there'll be a family member or friend to come along and wipe your arse. 

 

Poverty is about lacking 'get up and go', money is about 'hard work', breakfast is about drinking coffee made from beans which have been shat out by a silverback Gorilla. They share the same views, they reinforce the same views, and they're instinctively terrified of a situation ever arising where they lose their cushy number.