Last year, I had an encounter on Twitter with Kevin Mousley who is a producer with BBC News, In that exchange, I’d accused the corporation of sourcing news stories from the Guido Fawkes site. He denied it, then he tried to bully and browbeat me. I had a similar tussle with Rob Burley, the editor of the Marr Show on BBC 1. I ended up blocking him.
It’s not just the BBC that sources some of its stories from Guido, other broadcasters do too. The BBC also invites Tom Harwood, Guido’s tea boy into its studios, thereby legitimating him and the fact-free sewage that pours forth from the site.
Today on Twitter, I was alerted to the following tweet, which claims, without any evidence, that Jeremy Corbyn has had a stroke and which uses a doctored image to reinforce the message.
I’ve taken a screenshot of the tweet in case Guido takes it down. I’ve also taken the liberty of reporting it, for all the good that it will do.
This feeble attempt at propaganda may have played well in the 1920s or the 1960s, but these days, people aren’t so easily fooled. They know what Photoshop is and what it does.
Of course, Guido and Harwood, who is mostly likely the culprit behind the tweet and the shitty Photoshop effort, may try and pass this off as ‘satire’, but that would be a lie – much like the crap that passes for ‘scoops’ on its site. But what kind of satirist thinks having a life-changing event like a stroke is funny and uses it to score a cheap political point? Only bullies and their mates. That’s who.
When I wrote this blog about bullying in 2012, I always knew that some day I would have to revisit the subject. So it was that yesterday, on the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, that Fleet Street’s bullies and their associated helpers, used the solemn occasion of Armistice Day to dig up the monstering of Michael Foot’s appearance at the Cenotaph in a smart-looking overcoat in November, 1981, which they dubbed a “donkey jacket”.
Here’s what Foot had to say about the bullying he endured.
Like many of this country’s political commentators, history for Andrew Pierce, began with the election of the Thatcher government in 1979. He tweeted this mush.
What is @jeremycorbyn wearing at the Cenotaph? It looks like an anorak. Is it a Michael Foot moment
He was joined by the ever-juvenile, Julia Hartley-Brewer, whose puerile comments amount to little more than trolling.
I know it’s petty but does @jeremycorbyn seriously think that a bright red tie and a scruffy hooded coat are appropriate wear for the Cenotaph? Or is he just trying to signal to his Leftie anti-war chums that he doesn’t really want to be there? Such poor judgement.
The idea that the weather may have played a part in Corbyn’s sartorial choice yesterday has clearly escaped her. What matters more to Hartley-Brewer is turning up to a service of remembrance looking as if you’ve just stepped out of the pages of a Savile Row catalogue. The idea that one’s choice clothing is an indication of one’s level of respect is not only risibly childish, this notion is based on a superficialities, because in the postmodern mind, appearance is much more important than substance. As for Hartley-Brewer, she’s nothing but a school bully who never grew up.
Kevin McKeever, who I’ve never heard of, thought it was a “stunt” , but it’s his added claim that, somehow, he and the rest of the media’s bullies are above concocting narratives of ‘disrespect’ and ‘them and us’ that stands out. McKeever’s mini-bio says he’s the “Founder of political consultancy, Lowick”. In other words, he’s a public relations hack. In fact, his biography on Lowick’s website states:
He has experience of working on political and reputation campaigns in the US, EU and Middle East.
Politically active, he stood for election to the UK Parliament at the 2015 and 2017 General Elections.
Such is the lack of self-awareness that McKeever projects his and his fellow hacks value-judgements onto Corbyn’s sensible choice of overclothes. Naturally, I put him straight.
Wrong. The entire narrative was created by you and your fellow travellers. It wasn't a "stunt" but then, being a bunch of postmodernists, you're prone to seeing things superficially. You're also bullies. https://t.co/HunIyQCFZG
Here, the editorial team decided to use colour filters to make Corbyn’s raincoat look a sort of light blue rather than black. The use of digital technology to create a narrative of ‘disrespect’ is one that the media has to own, rather than deny. We’re not as stupid as they think we are. This isn’t 1981, when they could get away with such tricks, the year is 2018.
Right-wing shock jock, Jon Gaunt, followed suit with this unoriginal take.
Unbelievable disrespect from @jeremycorbyn turning up in a scruffy anorak for #rememberancesunday One step up from Michael Foot’s donkey jacket! Can’t he afford Black overcoat? This man wants to lead our Country? No way! Do you agree?
Appearing at the Cenotaph to pay one’s respects to those who died in wars prosecuted by halfwitted short-sighted politicians – the kind of politicians whom the likes of Hartley-Brewer would no doubt rally behind – wasn’t enough for Gaunt. Apparently, you’re supposed to turn up in the latest designer gear from Bond Street, as Harry Paterson noted in this tweet.
Designer-clad worthies will tick all the right boxes today then return to selling WMDs to Saudi Arabia. Honouring the memory of hundreds of thousands of terrified conscripts who died in mud and shit screaming for their mothers by making damn sure there'll be plenty more of them.
Every November, it’s the same thing: pass comment on what the leader of the opposition is wearing or not wearing. He doesn’t bow low enough. He doesn’t wear the right clothes. His poppy isn’t big enough. Look, if Corbyn didn’t appear at the Armistice Day ceremony, then they’d have something to complain about. However, using his clothing to make judgements on his character is nothing short of bullying. These people should be ashamed of themselves, but that’s hoping for too much. These people have no shame.
The antics of Britain’s news media in the last few weeks have been, to say the least, discomfiting and laughable in equal measure. From the production of anti-Corbyn smears to their fulsome and unquestioning support for the government’s vague position on the Skripal poisoning case, the media has shown itself incapable of critical analysis and devoid of professional curiosity. It has, instead, resorted to smearing the leader of the opposition, who advised a more cautious, even statesman-like approach. For his trouble, he was smeared by the government, the media and even some members of his own party, most notably the MP for BAe Systems, John Woodcock.
The BBC has been especially poor and has recently taken to sourcing news stories from the disreputable flak machine that’s Guido Fawkes. I wrote about the site in this article from 2012.
Last October, as I watching The Daily Politics, I’d noticed that the editorial team had sourced an item about Labour MP, Jared O’Mara, from Guido. I took to Twitter to express my disgust and disbelief.
On Monday, anticipating a smear story that was about to break, I took to Twitter again after it emerged that the BBC and other news organizations, had sourced a story from Guido.
The #BBC sources news stories from Guido. Let that sink in for a moment.
This one claims to be a BBC producer, folks. Apparently, he thinks I'm an "idiot" for pointing out that the BBC sources stories from Guido. The evidence speaks for itself. https://t.co/tbCjppSCNg
Mousley has yet to respond. But if this is how one BBC employee replies to viewers and listeners, then it’s a fair bet that this high-handed, smug attitude is consistent throughout the Corporation. If Mousley deletes the tweet, then I have a screen shot.
We expect better from our news providers, but when they produce blatant propaganda pieces and repeat smear stories sourced from sites like Guido, then they no longer deserve the trust and support of the public.
First, a confession, I adapted the title of this blog article from an album by post-punk band, the Pop Group. But it’s a serious question and it’s one that only a few people seem to ask, while even fewer seem to want to do anything about it beyond putting an ‘x’ against a candidate’s name in a distant general election. Yet, the problem that confronts us is one that must be dealt with now before it’s too late. This cruel and corrupt Tory government, which seems to delight in each death caused by homelessness or its callous cuts to benefits, continues in power as if immune from criticism. Worse, perhaps, is the way government ministers like Mark Garnier, who was recently accused of making his assistant buy sex toys for him and whom he also called ‘sugar tits’, are allowed to continue in their posts as if nothing has happened. If this had been a Labour or SNP MP, the media campaign to force him to resign would have been relentless. Instead, there was nary a peep from the Tory press and practically silence from the BBC.
Yesterday, Labour activist and blogger @Rachael_Swindon, was doorstepped by a ‘reporter’ from The Daily Mail, who apparently wanted to confirm her gender. Apparently, the Tories and their media pals couldn’t believe that a woman was capable of blogging and tweeting for herself. But that says more about the Tory mindset than they would care to admit. And there’s something else: it would appear that the Mail’s campaign of bullying and intimidation has moved from print to IRL (in real life) harassment. This is a new and worrying development. In what other country would you find a national newspaper intimidating people on their doorsteps?
The claim that Rachael was a man has been doing the rounds among simple-minded Tory hacks for a couple of months or so. One of leaders in this endeavour is Jane Merrick, a “freelance reporter” for the Telegraph et al. Make sure you look at the thread too.
Does everyone know, by the way, that “Rachael Swindon” is a man who uses his wife’s username? He blocked me when I tweeted this point previously. Just to put this misogyny/trolling into context.
We are often told by the defenders of Britain’s newspaper industry that there is something called a ‘free press’. But is a free press supposed to act as an auxiliary attack-dog for the government? It does here in Britain.
At today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Labour’s Dr Rosena Allin-Khan asked the following question about the rise in homelessness:
In 2009, the Prime Minister said it was
“a tragedy that the number of children falling into the poverty cycle”was “continuing to rise.” Every child deserves to have a roof over their head and food on the table, yet on her watch, in Wandsworth alone, the number of families forced to survive on food banks is continuing to rise, and 2,500 children—yes, children—will wake up homeless on Christmas day. So my question is simple: when will this austerity-driven Government say enough is enough and put an end to this tragedy?
Theresa May offered, the by now, characteristic but ultimately mendacious response:
The hon. Lady should note that, in fact, this Government have lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of absolute poverty. But it is important for all those who have heard her question to be aware of this: she talks of 2,500 children in Wandsworth waking up homeless on Christmas day; anybody hearing that will assume that what that means is that 2,500 children will be sleeping on our streets. It does not. [Interruption.] It does not mean that. [Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. Hon. and right hon. Members are accustomed to these exchanges taking somewhat longer. So be it. The questions will be heard, and the answers from the Prime Minister will be heard. I am in no hurry at all.
Prime Minister
It is important that we are clear about this for all those who hear these questions because, as we all know, families with children who are accepted as homeless will be provided with accommodation. I would also point out to Opposition Members that statutory homelessness is lower now than it was for most of the period of the last Labour Government
You’ll notice how May resorted to her default line of attacking the last Labour government instead of accepting responsibility. This happens at PMQs week in and week out. We hear claims like “absolute poverty has fallen” as if poverty itself had been eradicated, and yet, this is nothing more than a corrupt method of measuring poverty, which then allows the government off the hook for failing to deal with a growing social problem. In this alone, its tendency to social Darwinism is once again laid bare.
We are being ill-served by a government that puts its own party interests above those of the country. This is a government, so shot through with venality, that will do anything to cling to power and that includes smearing political opponents. This deviousness and bullying are like twin threads that have been running through the Conservative Party since 1924 when it used the forged Zinoviev Letter to bring down Ramsay MacDonald’s weak minority government.
Chris Grayling appeared on Newsnight on Tuesday evening and took the opportunity to gaslight viewers with his warped take on online abuse. Diane Abbott has received 45% of the abuse dished out on social media and yet, here’s Grayling claiming that the abuse is coming from the Left – particularly Momentum.
“A significant part of the blame lies with parts of the labour movement… it is bringing a nastiness into our politics” – Transport Secretary Chris Grayling on threats towards MPs pic.twitter.com/xoIseTprEx
Bullying is second nature to the Tories and, as we saw in the case of RoadTrip2015, it resulted in the suicide of a young party activist. Others were blackmailed. Some were sexually assaulted. The internal party inquiry was roundly dismissed as a whitewash (as it was in the case of Aidan Burley and the Nazi uniform controversy).
The Conservatives have become so corrupted by their own lust for power that they have ceased to function as a party of government. Its constant refrain is “if you don’t vote for us, you’ll let Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street”. This is not only a form of blackmail, but it also shows a deeply-rooted disdain for democracy. Tellingly, the media also adopts the same spiel when it engages in character assassinations against Corbyn and left-wing Labour MPs like Laura Pidcock. It has smeared Emma Dent Coad for daring to ask questions about the government’s attitude to social housing tenants – especially the victims of the Grenfell Fire. What kind of people do that? Tories.
But we also have a corrupt national press that feels it has the right to hack a dead girl’s phone, intimidate political activists, smear the government’s opponents and undermine both the democratic process and the judiciary. Tell me, where else does this happen?
So, I ask again: for how much longer do we tolerate bullying and corruption?
For the best part of 20 years, soundbites have become the lingua franca of careerist and dishonest politicians. We can see this whenever the subject of the National Health Service or public services is raised in an interview with a Tory minister: they’ll trot out the familiar soundbite of “in order to have a properly funded NHS, we need to have a strong economy”. What this actually means when it’s translated is “we’ll keep running down the NHS, until we get it into such a position that we’ll have to sell it off”. When it’s unpacked, the ‘strong economy’ soundbite is actually an admission that the economy is actually weak and not as “strong” as the Tories suggest. The Tories will then contradict themselves by telling us that the economy is “strong”, even though many of us know this is not the case. Why? Because we can see the evidence of a weak national economy with our own eyes.
If the economy is so “strong”, then why are working people forced to go to foodbanks? If the economy is so strong, then why are public sector workers having their pay effectively cut year on year? If the economy is so “strong”, then why are people put into a position where the only jobs available to them are casual and short term jobs?
So, if the Tories are to be believed and we have a weak economy, does that mean we can’t have an NHS? Nonsense. After the Second World War, Britain was broke and its economy was weak, yet we still managed to have an NHS.
The mass media – especially the BBC – is failing the public by refusing to challenge Tory politicians on their claims and their meaningless soundbites. They are helping to undermine, not just the democratic process (the election), but our flimsy democracy too.
We deserve better from our politicians and our mass media.
Helen Lewis is the deputy editor of the notionally left-wing journal The New Statesman. Her views on Jeremy Corbyn are well known and she’s a regular on the BBC’s Sunday Politics. Today, while Harriet Harman, Labour’s former interim leader appeared on the Andrew Marr Show, she issued this Tweet to her followers.
If you want a politician who really stood up against "the establishment", look at Harriet Harman.
In the last few weeks, the media has paraded a series of Orwellian neologisms like “post truth politics” before us. Can we therefore regard Lewis’s Tweet as “post-reality”? Let’s remember that Lewis herself comes from a privileged background and is, for all intents and purposes, like Harman, a member of the establishment. So it’s unlikely that she possesses the ability to identify anti-establishmentarianism and is more likely to characterize it as something else.
Later on, and perhaps spurred on by the appearance of Harman, Lewis went a little further and began banging the drum for Corbyn to quit.
Harriet Harman, former acting leader and Lab's longest serving female MP, calls for Corbyn to stand down pic.twitter.com/s0NYt5nl2D
So what was the reason for this? Corbyn has ordered a three-line whip on the vote for Article 50, which triggers the Brexit process. What hacks like Lewis and her colleagues in the anti-Corbyn media fail to understand (frankly odd for a political journalist) is that Article 50 is merely a Parliamentary mechanism. The actual debate on the precise nature of Brexit takes place later. Instead, the mass media has been misleading the public with the notion that Article 50 is the final stage in the process, thus they rely on the general public’s ignorance of Parliamentary procedures. This is the same ignorance that was exploited during the referendum campaign itself. It’s yet the latest stage in an ongoing attempt to remove Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, and the likes of Lewis won’t rest until they see someone picked by them in the role. That, friends, is not only contempt for the democratic process that elected Corbyn, but it is also contempt for ordinary party members.
Fake news? You’ll get loads of it from Lewis and her fellow hacks.
The Cat has always been bemused by the claim that so-and-so “has killed his own people”. This line of argument is usually deployed in advance of an invasion, air campaign or the implementation of a ‘no fly zone’. When one unpacks this argument, it is always found wanting and reveals the hypocrisy at the heart of the establishment’s rationale for military adventurism. Sometimes the phrase “he’s another Hitler” will be added for dramatic effect.
In the run up to Gulf War I, we were told Saddam Hussein had “killed his own people”. When Gulf War II rolled around, he also become “another Hitler”. By his “own people”, the warmongers and the news media were referring specifically to the Kurds. But Saddam Hussein didn’t see the Kurds as “his own people” and he wasn’t alone in this: it is a view that had been consistent in Baghdad throughout the history of Iraq, since it became nominally independent from Britain in 1932.
The Kurds (led by the powerful and corrupt Barzani clan) had constantly been in conflict with Baghdad since independence and had been waging a guerilla war in Northern Iraq for decades. A full blown war between the Iraqi Kurds and the Iraqi government took place in 1961. But this isn’t to say that Kurds didn’t participate in Iraqi politics or in government. They did. General Bakr Sidqi, for example, was the head of Iraq’s army. He led the forces that participated in the Simele Massacre of 1933, which saw thousands of Assyrians slaughtered as they fled towards the Syrian border. Sidqi, King Ghazi and the Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, didn’t see the Assyrians as “their people” either. Al-Gaylani would return as Prime Minister in a coup in 1941 and enter into a short-lived pact with Nazi Germany until he was overthrown by the British in the same year.
Western news media – especially British and American news media – have repeated ad infinitum the claim that Bashar al-Assad has “killed his own people” to rally public support for official military intervention and the eventual toppling of the Syrian president. That Assad has killed his own people isn’t in doubt, but his forces have also killed people that the West ironically sees as its allies. Fighters from the al-Nusra Front, for example.
Britain and the United States have historically offered much support to national leaders that have “killed their own people”. Many of these leaders were military strongmen that were entertained by British and American governments because of their impeccable anti-communist credentials. Below is a partial list.
Nursultan Nazarbayev (current president of Kazakhstan)
Islam Karimov (Uzbekistan, 1989 – 2016). His successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, is just as if not more violently repressive.
Suharto (Indonesia, 1967 – 1998)
Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire, 1965 – 1997)
General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (Chile, 1973 – 1989)
Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde (Spain, 1936 – 1975)
The Greek Colonels (1967 – 1974)
Air Chief Marshal Hosni Mubarak (Egypt, 1981 – 2011)
Colonel Anwar Sadat (Egypt, 1970 – 1981)
General Zia al-Haq (Pakistan, 1978 – 1988)
Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic, 1942-1952)
The dominance of propaganda over news in coverage of the war in Syria has many negative consequences. It is a genuine civil war and the exclusive focus of on the atrocities committed by the Syrian armed forces on an unarmed civilian population gives a skewed picture of what is happening. These atrocities are often true and the UN says that 82 civilians may have been summarily executed in east Aleppo last month. But, bad though this is, it is a gross exaggeration to compare what has happened in Aleppo to genocide in Rwanda in 1994 or the massacre in Srebrenica the following year.
But it’s time to tell the other truth: that many of the “rebels” whom we in the West have been supporting – and which our preposterous Prime Minister Theresa May indirectly blessed when she grovelled to the Gulf head-choppers last week – are among the cruellest and most ruthless of fighters in the Middle East. And while we have been tut-tutting at the frightfulness of Isis during the siege of Mosul (an event all too similar to Aleppo, although you wouldn’t think so from reading our narrative of the story), we have been willfully ignoring the behaviour of the rebels of Aleppo.
Our leaders, though they may claim otherwise, have also “killed their own people” and we don’t need to cast our minds back that far. The brutal regime of cuts to social security by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition (2010-15) drove people to commit suicide, and although these people died by their own hand, it was the government’s policies that were ultimately responsible for their deaths. Why? Because this is a feature of what Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant called “symbolic violence”, which gets the victim to carry out acts of violence against themselves, thus obviating the need for actual physical violence from the state. It’s a pretty clever trick. No?
Governments are more than happy to kill their own people, even in so-called ‘democracies’. It isn’t confined solely to certain Middle Eastern countries.
Ever since Jeremy Corbyn announced he was standing as a candidate in last year’s leadership election, the smear stories have been relentless and increasingly shrill in their tone. This week has seen the absurd ‘List’, which was leaked to The Times and the ratcheting up of a dodgy story about Ian Lavery pocketing loads of union money. All of this happened, coincidentally, on the back of a good showing in the polls for the Labour Party.
Yet, some of these anti-Corbyn stories are downright hilarious, and others are just plain sloppy. A few days ago, I came across this article in The Independent in which someone called Caitlin Doherty, who says she’s a student, claims to have left the Labour Party because of “Jeremy Corbyn”. Well, that’s what the headline says and who am I to argue? Sod it, I’m going to argue. I’m going to argue that this article is little more than clickbait. Howzat?
I’m a student Labour supporter – but I just quit the party over Jeremy Corbyn
Last summer Young Labour blanketed itself in a sense of euphoria. Yes, our party may have lost the election; our optimism, encouraged by pollsters and the unexpected popularity of the Milifandom, may have been initially destroyed. But it wasn’t the end; it was just the start of a new beginning.
There was a new guy on the Labour scene: a guy who looked oddly like your granddad, wore tweed suits and rode a pushbike through Islington. Jeremy Corbyn was set to change the face of the tired and irrelevant Labour Party, and that hot bed of lefties – the student population of Britain – was understandably excited.
So far, so clichéd.
That euphoria, however, is slowly bringing about the end of the Labour party. According to figures released this week, the tidal wave of support that pushed Corbyn to the opposition front bench is coming to an end. For the first time since the general election of May 2015, more people are leaving the Labour Party than joining. And I am among them.
Caitlin links to this misleading article by Andrew Grice in the same paper (sic) that was published the day before, which makes the bold claim that party membership is “falling”. Predictably, Grice offers no sources for his claim.
The majority of these Labour “deserters” are thought, like me, to be the students that drove him to success: the idealists who were swept up in the hashtags and headlines became quickly bored and have moved on elsewhere, it is said. This sweeping assumption does Labour students a great disservice.
“The majority”? Some numbers would be nice or maybe a link? No chance. “Hashtags and headlines”… don’t you just love alliterations? They’re almost as good as tropes and there’s loads of them in this article.
Students aren’t leaving Labour because it isn’t trendy anymore. Students are leaving Labour because they are fed up. Fed up with the ecstatic reception Corbyn still receives – particularly in UK universities where Labour Societies have become increasingly elite and exclusive to ardent Corbynites, with no room for questioning Our Great Leader – despite very little demonstration of any opposition to the increasingly strident Conservative Government.
Was being a member of the Labour Party ever “trendy”? Notice how she slips in the word “Corbynites” and “Our Great Leader”, the latter of which I often see being used on comments threads beneath pro and anti-Corbyn articles.
Caitlin’s previous effort for The Indy was this article on how to survive ‘A’ Levels.
Caitlin is a second year English Literature student at the University of East Anglia, the Global Editor of UEA’s ‘Concrete and a writer for several other local and national publications. A passionate writer, committed politics follower, and occasional book reader she can often be found getting very angry about something.
She’s written three articles for them.
However, with a little digging, I discovered that Caitlin also writes for the University of East Anglia’s student rag. Last September, she wrote this article in which she says:
In a so-called “unity statement” on his campaign website he argues that: “There is no place for personal animosity, negative campaigning, and saying or doing anything now that will damage our ability to work together as one party”. and he urges supporters to add their signatures to this statement of intent. Campaign proclamations aside, whoever finds themselves elected leader in a few weeks’ time will likely have Jeremy Corbyn to thank for an increasingly disunited and fractured Labour Party.
I don’t think she joined Labour because of Corbyn.
I reckon our Caitlin would make a great Progress intern or a Murdoch hack. How about you?
The British Right (the Tories and Kippers) will tell anyone who will listen that they’re democrats. One form of democracy which they don’t approve of is the protest. Since the general election, there have been a number of anti-austerity protests up and down the country. The Tories seem to believe that because they won 24.3% of the vote, that should be the end of the matter. People should just put up with austerity. The Tories have never been known to brook opposition. If anything, they despise it. That’s why Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council and the metropolitan county councils.
Yesterday’s anti-austerity protest on the day of the State Opening of Parliament is a case in point. UKIP’s sole MP, Douglas Carswell was caught up in the protests and like all good right-wingers, he lapsed into melodrama. He told The Guardian,
“It got extremely, extremely nasty. Their intentions were pretty murderous and I needed a lot of police officers to prevent them from attacking me,”
He had a bottle of water thrown over him. Wow. It’s not as though someone threw a bottle of warm piss over him. This has the feel of “Mummy, those beastly protesters gave me dirty looks! Make them stop!”. Carswell continues,
“I was stunned. I think MPs should be able to go about their business. It was incredibly intimidating. It was like a lynch mob on the streets of London. I thought this was a country where we had democracy and discussed the issues. “It just got incredibly ugly. It was an attempted lynching. I am in a state of shock. I do not want to have to worry about going about my business.”
The phrase “lynch mob” (which was also picked up by the Daily Mail) is typically hyperbolic, but that’s what Tories, Kippers and their supporters are like. I mean, why use reasoned arguments, when you can use melodrama and mendacity instead? Carswell told The [Notionally] Independent,
“If this is the way the extreme left behave now, I do not think it bodes well for the future.”
Carswell’s characterization of the protesters as “extreme left” chimes with the recent paranoid warnings of government ministers, because in the eyes of Tories and Kippers, anyone who protests against cuts is on the “extreme left”. If you look at the comments thread below The Guardian article, you will see a large number of right-wing keyboard warriors all spouting the same nonsense. “Why aren’t they working” and “soap-dodgers” being the most clichéd refrains, thus showing us the Right’s glaring lack of originality when it comes to hurling insults at their enemies.
The political right never protests because it doesn’t have to, and even when it’s not in power, it’s still pulling the strings from behind the scenes. Even during the Nu Labour years, Britain’s political right stayed indoors and let their lackeys in the ‘free press’ get on with the job of printing lies. Not one of them protested (unless you count The Countryside Alliance protest in 2002 in which a few hundred thousand braying toffs and their hangers-on demonstrated against the Hunting Act). This tells us something about Britain’s political right and those who support them: they are deferential, spineless whingers and they’ll touch their forelocks to anyone in authority. Their idea of resistance is to make the occasional joke about students and those horrible “loony lefties”. It’s so terribly English. Yah?
Finally, The Cat would like to remind readers that Carswell is a fan of Ayn Rand, who once characterized the poor and dispossessed as “moochers”. Protesters were also regarded in a similarly disparaging light. That’s the kind of world Dougie inhabits and it’s a frightening one.
The Tories and their allies in the press seem to believe that the party with the most seats in the event of a hung parliament should have the automatic right to form a government. They also claim that should Labour get fewer seats than the Tories and if they form a minority government with the support of smaller parties, then this government would be illegitimate. This has been comprehensively debunked time and time again. Yet the Tories and Nick Clegg continue to lie about this, relying on widespread ignorance of how parliament and governments function.
There is a historical precedent that has never once been mentioned during this election campaign by those commentators whose job it is to ‘explain’ the political system to the voters. The General Election of 6 December 1923, which Stanley Baldwin had called over tariff reform (which meant very little to many working class voters), produced a situation similar to the one commentators claim will happen this Friday. Baldwin hoped that he could cement his authority after succeeding Andrew Bonar Law as party leader and Prime Minister, and he was eager to make his mark.
But Baldwin’s plan to increase his party’s already large majority backfired. Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party came second with 191 seats. Herbert Asquith’s Liberals came third with 158 seats (the Liberals were split). Baldwin’s Tories came first with 251 seats . When added together, the combined anti-Tory seats outweighed the Conservatives’ numbers. However, things were not straightforward: Baldwin claimed legitimacy and appeared before the Commons, but was defeated on 21 January by a no confidence motion tabled by former Labour leader, J.R. Clynes. George V had no choice but to appoint MacDonald as Prime Minister. Labour then formed a minority government with the support of the Liberals on 22 January, 1924. There was no question of Labour’s legitimacy to form a government on that occasion, because everyone knew how the game was played. Today, the Tories and their media chums continue claim that should Labour come second, they will lack legitimacy. The front page of today’s edition of the Murdoch-owned Times has printed a variation on the lie.
However, the role of the Liberals in 1924 should not be read as the facilitation of a Labour government but as part of a plan to secure more power for themselves, should the government fall. Indeed, the Daily Mail begged Asquith to form a coalition with the Tories to keep Labour out. Asquith hoped that the voters would see Labour as incompetent. What the voters actually saw were squabbling, power hungry politicians knifing each other in the back. Even so, MacDonald’s government was weak and unstable and suffered its first defeat in March. By October, it would be voted out of office thanks to the Zioniev Letter.
The Liberals paid for their treachery and they were reduced to 40 seats. Asquith lost his seat, was kicked upstairs and died four years later. Even though Baldwin secured a massive majority, he would again lose out to Labour in the so-called ‘Flapper Election’ of 1929, which resulted in another hung parliament. MacDonald relied on the support of Lloyd George’s 58 Liberal MPs. But this government wouldn’t last long and in 1931 another election was called. Again, this produced a hung parliament and the notorious National Government was eventually formed with Baldwin pulling the strings.
In February 1974, Edward Heath’s Tories came second and Labour came first. Heath remained in Downing Street as the caretaker Prime Minister and attempted to form a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberals. But Thorpe rejected the Tories’ coalition proposals on the basis that Proportional Representation wasn’t offered as part of the deal. Harold Wilson was invited to form a minority government with the support of the smaller parties. Again, there was no question of legitimacy. This government lasted until October, when Wilson called another election and won a wafer-thin majority. By 1976, Wilson was gone and replaced by’ Sunny’ Jim Callaghan, whose majority began to evaporate due to by-election losses and defections. Callaghan was forced to enter into a pact with the Liberals (the Lib-Lab pact) in 1977. This lasted until the end of 1978 and the rest, as they say, is history.
What these elections reveal to us are the flaws inherent in the First Past The Post voting system. Whichever party forms the government after tomorrow’s election, we must take to the streets to demand electoral and constitutional reform. There must be no let up.
Guy Debord's Cat 