One more week of supercilious giggling by handsomely remunerated political journalists, that they have never had a conversation with a man who has been a Member of Parliament since before many of them were born, and that they had barely heard of him until a couple of months ago.
They are immensely proud of this sorry record, which in reality exposes that they are professionally incompetent. They are understandably terrified of becoming unemployable overnight when it becomes necessary to have contacts on the Labour Left and in the trade unions.
They killed off the Leadership ambitions of David Davis for very similar reasons. Or their predecessors did. Many of the present ones were still in school 10 years ago, and hardly any had graduated from university.
Speaking of universities, one of the most important features of the Corbyn campaign has been the re-emergence of Economics, rather than of nothing more than "what rich people think", as an integral part of the British political debate for the first time in 30 years.
One way or another, more than 70 economists have endorsed Jeremy Corbyn. None has endorsed any other candidate, just as one searches in vain for any who regards George Osborne with the slightest seriousness.
Yvette Cooper waves her third of an admittedly First Class degree 25 years ago, and her MSc from the London School of Economics not very much later (she also attended Harvard, but she holds no qualification from it), while Allister Heath made the journey in the opposite direction, advancing all the way to MPhil at Oxford.
But in my experience, if the people running the thing like you personally, then you need only hang around long enough on a Masters degree programme and you will eventually be given the piece of paper purely in order to get you off the books.
Whereas Corbyn is backed by Oxford and LSE Professors, among others, as well as by not one, but two, Nobel laureates. From their Ivy League Chairs, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz answer the jibe that, "If you were any good, then you'd be rich." They are paid an awful lot more than even the Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Krugman's column on the New York Times probably pays more than that, too, and it certainly reaches more readers. He is not only, by that measure, a more successful economist, but also, by any measure, a more successful journalist.
People joke about making Krugman and Stiglitz Spads to Prime Minister Corbyn, but it is not a bad idea. Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is one of the very few positions in the world that could match their current salaries.
And what luck. They are Americans. From the other side, there can be no answer to that. Liam Fox had an American Spad who was nothing more than an obvious intelligence operative, and who was refused security clearance by the Ministry of Defence. This would be a step a very, very, very long way up from that. So much for Corbyn as a security risk.
Bringing us to a second happy effect of the Corbyn Summer. It has manifested the complete indifference of the public at large to the foreign and security policy obsessions of this State's One Party since the death of John Smith.
Craven agreement with Saudi Arabia and its satellites, with increasingly Islamist Turkey, with the Israeli Far Right, and with the American neoconservative movement, and with the pet causes of that last from Eastern Europe to East Asia, does not constitute anything remotely approaching mainstream opinion in this country at large.
Most people opposed the Iraq War, and, knowing what they know now, most people probably wish that they had opposed the first Gulf War, if they ever still think about it. Most people have forgotten about Kosovo, and would be hard pushed to see what was so good about that intervention in view of what the place has become in the meantime, or in view of the precedent that it set (and yes, that was my view at the time).
It is difficult to believe that very much of the population can see what the war in Afghanistan was ultimately supposed to have been for or about. Or regards the intervention in Libya as having been anything other than a catastrophe. Or regrets the decision not to invade Syria. Or applauds the bombing of Iraq with parliamentary approval, and the bombing of Syria against the express will of the House of Commons, in the interests of the world's last theocratic absolute monarchies. Certainly, there would be the strongest possible opposition to the deployment of ground troops.
Such troops are already on the ground in Ukraine, a fact of which hardly anyone is aware, even though it is no kind of secret. If our supposedly free media made our electorate so aware, then that electorate would be incensed. Hence, the matter is never mentioned. We have come to see Russia as a tourist destination. We feel no animosity towards it, or towards China.
We would not want to live in either country, or in Iran, but that is not at all the same thing. "What is the point of NATO after all these years?" is a question that, if posed, resonates. Our Government shamed us by not sending anyone to the seventieth anniversary of Victory Day in Moscow, and its has shamed us again by staying away from Beijing. The neoconservative lie cannot withstand recognition of the true history of the Second World War.
Hardly anyone in Great Britain is still interested in anything to do with the IRA bombing campaign of the 1980s, which is now the stuff of an entirely vanished world, as surely as are references to the Soviet Union or to the wonders of completely unregulated financial markets. Even fewer here have ever held the extreme Unionist position of no Conservative Government ever, nor even of either Unionist party, since both have always been in favour of devolution to Northern Ireland.
The Falklands War was before the adult lifetime of anyone who is now younger than 51. Just as public opinion broadly accepts, and then only if pushed, the choice of the majority in Northern Ireland to remain British, but on the strict condition that there is no return to violence on the Mainland, so public opinion broadly accepts, and then only if pushed, the choice of the Falkland Islanders to remain British, but on the strict condition that there is no prospect of a second war for the sake of it. Neither issue, however, excites the public mind in the slightest.
Moreover, on both issues, Corbyn's enemies are wildly at variance with the Americans and, if the conduct of Menachem Begin, the revered founder of Israel's ruling party, was anything to go by, with the Israelis, too. But that is their problem.
It might be a bit much to seek a role at the heart of Government for the former Editor of The Times and of the London Evening Standard who five years ago called for the entire Armed Forces to be abolished, with each of the British Overseas Territories declared independent and given a permanent annual grant of a billion pounds, on the grounds that that would be cheaper.
But alongside challenging David Cameron as to which Professors of Economics and which recipients of the Nobel Prize he was going to bring into Downing Street, and then following through in office, Corbyn ought to do the same with suitably experienced figures of the anti-war Right, whether British (Mark Almond, John Laughland, Peter Oborne) or American (Philip Giraldi, Michael Scheuer, Larry Wilkerson), as well as with one non-Islamist dissident from each of the Gulf monarchies.
Without wishing to put him on the spot, Dr Christopher Davidson of Durham could doubtless supply some names. And one of the things about having a Leader from what, in the bygone age alluded to above, was called "the Hard Left", will be that he will have all kinds of connections of the kind that drive purists left over from that era's Labour Right to furious rage on the grounds that they do not come with various seals of approval.
In that category also falls the left-wing opposition to the EU, which Corbyn has put back on the British agenda for the first time since the media decided that the likes of the recently deceased Teresa Gorman made more entertaining television than the three times as numerous Labour MPs, including Corbyn, who were voting against the Maastricht Treaty at the same time.
Straight bananas, and being forced to drive on the other side of the road, have not come to pass. But everything that the Labour opponents predicted is happening before our very eyes. Right when one of them is about to become Leader of the Labour Party. Again, then, what luck.
Corbyn knows perfectly well that the vision of the EU that he outlines is the exact opposite of that which Cameron is going to renegotiate. That renegotiation, and withdrawal, are going to be the only options on the ballot paper. There is going to be no Third Way, and Corbyn knows it.
His denunciation of the EU at the final hustings in Gateshead on Thursday evening was lapped up by the audience in the hall. More than 80 per cent of the television audience gave victory to a politician who goes all the way back to voting against Thatcher's Single European Act, and even to campaigning for a No vote in the 1975 referendum.
Proper Economics, by proper economists. Opposition to the war agenda, by a man whose record on that issue is unimpeachable. Likewise, the left-wing case against the EU, which is the one that does not involve fancy dress or farmyard noises, but which has been fully vindicated by events, including by events that are very much ongoing.
And a real political debate, for the first time in a generation, to the horror and to the terror of glorified gossip columnists who can remember no generation before their own.
What luck.
But in my experience, if the people running the thing like you personally, then you need only hang around long enough on a Masters degree programme and you will eventually be given the piece of paper purely in order to get you off the books.
Whereas Corbyn is backed by Oxford and LSE Professors, among others, as well as by not one, but two, Nobel laureates. From their Ivy League Chairs, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz answer the jibe that, "If you were any good, then you'd be rich." They are paid an awful lot more than even the Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Krugman's column on the New York Times probably pays more than that, too, and it certainly reaches more readers. He is not only, by that measure, a more successful economist, but also, by any measure, a more successful journalist.
People joke about making Krugman and Stiglitz Spads to Prime Minister Corbyn, but it is not a bad idea. Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is one of the very few positions in the world that could match their current salaries.
And what luck. They are Americans. From the other side, there can be no answer to that. Liam Fox had an American Spad who was nothing more than an obvious intelligence operative, and who was refused security clearance by the Ministry of Defence. This would be a step a very, very, very long way up from that. So much for Corbyn as a security risk.
Bringing us to a second happy effect of the Corbyn Summer. It has manifested the complete indifference of the public at large to the foreign and security policy obsessions of this State's One Party since the death of John Smith.
Craven agreement with Saudi Arabia and its satellites, with increasingly Islamist Turkey, with the Israeli Far Right, and with the American neoconservative movement, and with the pet causes of that last from Eastern Europe to East Asia, does not constitute anything remotely approaching mainstream opinion in this country at large.
Most people opposed the Iraq War, and, knowing what they know now, most people probably wish that they had opposed the first Gulf War, if they ever still think about it. Most people have forgotten about Kosovo, and would be hard pushed to see what was so good about that intervention in view of what the place has become in the meantime, or in view of the precedent that it set (and yes, that was my view at the time).
It is difficult to believe that very much of the population can see what the war in Afghanistan was ultimately supposed to have been for or about. Or regards the intervention in Libya as having been anything other than a catastrophe. Or regrets the decision not to invade Syria. Or applauds the bombing of Iraq with parliamentary approval, and the bombing of Syria against the express will of the House of Commons, in the interests of the world's last theocratic absolute monarchies. Certainly, there would be the strongest possible opposition to the deployment of ground troops.
Such troops are already on the ground in Ukraine, a fact of which hardly anyone is aware, even though it is no kind of secret. If our supposedly free media made our electorate so aware, then that electorate would be incensed. Hence, the matter is never mentioned. We have come to see Russia as a tourist destination. We feel no animosity towards it, or towards China.
We would not want to live in either country, or in Iran, but that is not at all the same thing. "What is the point of NATO after all these years?" is a question that, if posed, resonates. Our Government shamed us by not sending anyone to the seventieth anniversary of Victory Day in Moscow, and its has shamed us again by staying away from Beijing. The neoconservative lie cannot withstand recognition of the true history of the Second World War.
Hardly anyone in Great Britain is still interested in anything to do with the IRA bombing campaign of the 1980s, which is now the stuff of an entirely vanished world, as surely as are references to the Soviet Union or to the wonders of completely unregulated financial markets. Even fewer here have ever held the extreme Unionist position of no Conservative Government ever, nor even of either Unionist party, since both have always been in favour of devolution to Northern Ireland.
The Falklands War was before the adult lifetime of anyone who is now younger than 51. Just as public opinion broadly accepts, and then only if pushed, the choice of the majority in Northern Ireland to remain British, but on the strict condition that there is no return to violence on the Mainland, so public opinion broadly accepts, and then only if pushed, the choice of the Falkland Islanders to remain British, but on the strict condition that there is no prospect of a second war for the sake of it. Neither issue, however, excites the public mind in the slightest.
Moreover, on both issues, Corbyn's enemies are wildly at variance with the Americans and, if the conduct of Menachem Begin, the revered founder of Israel's ruling party, was anything to go by, with the Israelis, too. But that is their problem.
It might be a bit much to seek a role at the heart of Government for the former Editor of The Times and of the London Evening Standard who five years ago called for the entire Armed Forces to be abolished, with each of the British Overseas Territories declared independent and given a permanent annual grant of a billion pounds, on the grounds that that would be cheaper.
But alongside challenging David Cameron as to which Professors of Economics and which recipients of the Nobel Prize he was going to bring into Downing Street, and then following through in office, Corbyn ought to do the same with suitably experienced figures of the anti-war Right, whether British (Mark Almond, John Laughland, Peter Oborne) or American (Philip Giraldi, Michael Scheuer, Larry Wilkerson), as well as with one non-Islamist dissident from each of the Gulf monarchies.
Without wishing to put him on the spot, Dr Christopher Davidson of Durham could doubtless supply some names. And one of the things about having a Leader from what, in the bygone age alluded to above, was called "the Hard Left", will be that he will have all kinds of connections of the kind that drive purists left over from that era's Labour Right to furious rage on the grounds that they do not come with various seals of approval.
In that category also falls the left-wing opposition to the EU, which Corbyn has put back on the British agenda for the first time since the media decided that the likes of the recently deceased Teresa Gorman made more entertaining television than the three times as numerous Labour MPs, including Corbyn, who were voting against the Maastricht Treaty at the same time.
Straight bananas, and being forced to drive on the other side of the road, have not come to pass. But everything that the Labour opponents predicted is happening before our very eyes. Right when one of them is about to become Leader of the Labour Party. Again, then, what luck.
Corbyn knows perfectly well that the vision of the EU that he outlines is the exact opposite of that which Cameron is going to renegotiate. That renegotiation, and withdrawal, are going to be the only options on the ballot paper. There is going to be no Third Way, and Corbyn knows it.
His denunciation of the EU at the final hustings in Gateshead on Thursday evening was lapped up by the audience in the hall. More than 80 per cent of the television audience gave victory to a politician who goes all the way back to voting against Thatcher's Single European Act, and even to campaigning for a No vote in the 1975 referendum.
Proper Economics, by proper economists. Opposition to the war agenda, by a man whose record on that issue is unimpeachable. Likewise, the left-wing case against the EU, which is the one that does not involve fancy dress or farmyard noises, but which has been fully vindicated by events, including by events that are very much ongoing.
And a real political debate, for the first time in a generation, to the horror and to the terror of glorified gossip columnists who can remember no generation before their own.
What luck.
Did you see the 55 hangers on in the FT? Waving their 20-year-old Masters degrees indeed. A bunch of research assistants and think tank pseuds. All very Yvette Cooper.
ReplyDeleteFar fewer than have backed Corbyn in your letter to the Times, that letter to the Guardian, that letter to the Observer, and various articles. Much less distinguished, too. No Nobel Prizes there.
Half-educated worshippers of the uneducated Thatcher go on about that famous letter against the Howe Budget, but that were proved right in the long term and horribly right in the very long term.