Saturday 19 November 2016

Changed Times

A reader writes:

I love the fact that signing up with you, George [Galloway] and Neil [Clark] and getting it published in the Morning Star is now the way for very young men to advance their careers in the Labour Party.

Like appearing on RT, the only channel that gives any kind of hearing to the Left in general and Corbyn supporters in particular.

And George's Talk Radio programme that, as you triumphantly tweeted last night, had the Durham Teaching Assistants on it this week.

Your hand in that, as when you arranged their meeting with Jeremy at the Gala?

Assume Rod [Liddle] agreed with every word of the Trump letter but still wouldn't sign it. Rod is Rod.

We wouldn't have him any other way.

Note that that letter also included support for the Durham TAs.

Again, that, and certainly not support for the "Labour" Group on Durham County Council, is clearly now assumed to be the way to get on.

RT is also the only channel that gives any kind of hearing to, among other people, British Muslims, and the traditional Right.

That latter includes one of the young signatories to the Trump letter.

Orthodox Catholics, as such, need to work on it. Or, rather, to work with it.

If it is absolutely toxic links that you want, then try the Clintons, or Tony Blair, or The Times.

The Guardian and even the BBC also need to watch themselves in these very changed times.

10 comments:

  1. As for RT, read Owen Jones on what the Left thinks of Putin's Russia.

    https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/26/vladimir-putin-russia-oligarch-british-left-speak-out

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    1. Oh, no one reads Owen very much these days. It is sad, but he has brought it on himself.

      18 months ago, he was the main speaker everywhere that he spoke. But now, he is the warm up act. He cannot get used to that.

      His "history will vindicate me" line is starting to sound like Tony Blair's. Most people who matter in Corbyn circles have pretty much stopped speaking to him.

      The Left is on RT all the time. It is never really allowed on anything else, excerpt perhaps in order to be shouted down. But it is heard respectfully there, and that on a daily basis.

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    2. Owen Jones went as near as he dared to endorsing Owen Smith, so his career as a voice of the left is as dead as Nick Cohen's now. I remember him being faintly starstruck when he met you at the Gala two or three years ago, long before the Corbyn phenomenon. You've been a lot bigger than you realise for a lot longer than you realise.

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  2. Rod pretends to be anti-Corbyn although he admitted he would have voted for Jeremy against Owen Smith if they had let him. Maybe they did. You, George and probably Neil are practically courtiers as far as I can tell, with George one of Jeremy's most important media backers via his RT and Talk Radio programmes. Any of the three of you can pretty much be put through to the Leader any time you want, like several other people who don't trouble themselves to join the Labour Party or even refrain from standing against its candidates. Must be nice.

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    1. Jeremy's next Chief of Staff could be the veteran Morning Star writer and lifelong Communist Party member who presided over the great anti-war demo of 2003. Chief of Staff as Leader of the Opposition, not of the party, so will he even join the party?

      If the next Leader is who we all think it is, we all know who'd be his Chief of Staff, don't we, David?

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  3. There is no line that has ever been used against you, or George Galloway, or Neil Clark that has not now been tested to destruction twice in as many years against Jeremy Corbyn. He is now the undisputed Leader of the Labour Party and the undisputed Leader of the British Left (you're right, Owen Jones is bitter about that) and the three of you are not very far off. Galloway's radio and television programmes are the Left's main vehicles in those two media. Clark is a columnist on the Left's only daily newspaper sold in newsagents and given Lobby access. 2017 is going to be David Lindsay's biggest year yet, as everyone in the know already knows.

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  4. In the real world, away from the borderline nut job stuff on the comments abive, The fight back against the Left begins today.

    The Telegraph reports: ""Sixty Tory MPs including seven ex-cabinet ministers have demanded Theresa May pulls Britain out of the single market and customs union amid fears her Brexit stance could be watered down by Labour and the Lib Dems.

    Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, John Whittingdale and Theresa Villiers are among the leading Eurosceptics to put their names to the negotiation demand.

    The politicians have gone public through The Telegraph amid concerns that pro-EU figures in the Cabinet are fighting to soften the Government’s Brexit position.

    The Eurosceptics said only the cleanest Brexit can fulfil the country’s referendum call to “untie ourselves from EU shackles and freely embrace the rest of the world”.

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    1. Who asked them? And they are only playing catchup with John McDonnell, anyway.

      Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, John Whittingdale and Theresa Villiers are not "leading" anything. That suggestion is preposterous.

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  5. To quote you elsewhere, Mr. L., it is hilarious to hear people who voted twice for George W. Bush, voted for John McCain and voted for Mitt Romney now claiming that Donald Trump represents everything they've always believed in.

    Of course if he'd relied on McCain and Romney voters he'd have lost. He won by winning the votes of people who'd voted twice for Obama in states Obama carried twice but Clinton couldn't win. Trump did that by rejecting international capitalism and Russia-hating, Saudi-loving warmongering as completely as Jeremy Corbyn does.

    The places that would have voted Republican anyway voted for him, the way the Tory-Ukip areas voted for Brexit as even the BBC had expected them to. But if they alone had done it, Trump and Brexit would have lost.

    Brexit was won from the Corbynite working-class left in areas that would never elect a right-wing MP unless he was pretending to be Labour, and Trump won from the working-class left that elected and re-elected Obama and would have voted for Bernie Sanders if he'd been on the ballot.

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