Thursday 14 April 2016

Warts and All

This was expected, of course.

As is the withering media scorn towards the critics. They are being depicted as the Outer Left, as if that applied to Frank Field, Kate Hoey, Gisela Stuart, Roger Godsiff, Graham Stringer, Nigel Griffiths, Tom Harris, John Mills or Brendan Chilton.

Ronnie Campbell had it right on The World at One, that reforming the EU in a socialistic direction was "Cloud Cuckoo Land" and that "no one would even listen to [Corbyn)", while, when it came to workers' rights, "we could just do that ourselves".

Well, we should. It is a different question whether, inside the EU, we could. How were workers' rights in 1972? And how are they today?

Behind today's speech are the corporate-style mega-unions that have emerged over relatively recent years. Those need to be broken up as surely as do numerous other things, not least the EU.

The resurgent Left is not there to provide cover for them, any more than it is there to provide cover for the Liberal Establishment's media, or for the right-wing (if at all political) Labour machines in local government. 

The difference is that, while we should and do want Out of the EU, we should want In to the new Executive Board of the BBC, to the future ownership structure of the Channel Four Television Corporation, to the Governing Bodies of the academies, and to the Boards of Trustees of their wider networks.

Alongside the Tories? So be it. We sit on councils, don't we?

The Labour and Labourish Establishment is expecting us to do its hard work for it, in order to protect its power bases from which it has always excluded us, and from which it fully intends to carry on excluding us.

We need to go over that Establishment's head.

And we need to strike the first of many hammer blows against it, by securing the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union.

1 comment:

  1. One of the most half-hearted speeches I have heard in 50 years of listening to them, he was obviously reading out a script handed to him by someone else. As you say, "the corporate-style mega-unions that have emerged over relatively recent years."

    But do I read this correctly, you think the Left should just bypass the party machine and negotiate our own representation in the new broadcasting and educational arrangements? Mr. Lindsay, you are a genius.

    As Mr. Corbyn might be. The anti-Cameron Right has bet the farm on withdrawal from the EU, which is extremely unlikely to happen after today. As a populist force the ostensibly anti-Establishment Right will be finished. Who will that leave? We all know the answer to that.

    And the Tories would give us those broadcasting board and school governor seats, but they would never have given them to Ukip or their own right wing. I'll say it again, you are a genius.

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