Posting will be quiet over the next week while I’ll finish some things.
Will still be around on twitter @hangbitch and enjoying watching the Labour establishment lose its grip as it tries to make sense of/ditch Corbyn. I’m not a Labour party member, or even an interested onlooker generally, but this leadership contest really has evolved into a summer page-turner. Am particularly intrigued by the panic on the Guardian’s front bench and now find myself refreshing their homepage at five-minute intervals to check for new and even more desperate installments (this is probably one reason why it is taking me a while to finish some things – see first line of post). It would seem that a lot of people have a great deal invested in making sure that things stay as they are.
Anyway – there really is nothing I like better than watching the political and media establishments reel in genuine horror. Whatever happens to Corbyn in the end – and I’m sure it won’t be good – I will always look back on these few months fondly. I might even fork out £3 and vote for Corbyn as a kind of Cheers For Roughing Them Up card. I guess it is more likely that I’ll put the £3 towards at least one of the beers that I’ll need to sustain me while I’m on the long job that is following the Graun’s commentariat meltdown, but I hope Jez knows that the thought is there.
Be good.
Leaving aside what The Guardian is doing and saying, I noticed this morning on BBC TV newspaper coverage that The Times print edition front page said something about ‘hard Labour’. That to me is such a cliché going back to ‘reds under the bed’ panic stations that it indicates to me that Murdoch & Co are in meltdown. And of course, Corbyn is presumed dangerous rather than ‘moderate’.
I am reminded of Eleanor MacLean’s classic 1980’s work, ‘Between the Lines: How to detect bias and distortion in the news and every day life’ where she highlights the abuses of the word ‘moderate’.
But on the Andrew Marr Show interview with Jeremy ‘Jez We Can’ Corbyn, JC talked about ‘austerity-lite’ Labour as having its origins from after the banks’ collapse in 2008. What about the fact that David Freud the investment banker who is now Tory Welfare Reform Minister and life peer was installed with investment banker background as Labour’s ‘welfare reform guru’ by Blair before the 2008 financial collapse?
And I remember myself being interviewed by BBC2 tv’s ‘Working Lunch’ programme in September 2000 as a disabled jobseeker. The cue for my being interviewed was that Labour’s then Immigration Minister had broadcast to Labour Party Autumn Conference that they were introducing special ‘Green Card Immigration Status’ for people with special skills from abroad to plug a skills cap. And I was one of a great many Working Lunch viewers who contacted the programme about the inadequacies of jobcentre-funded IT-related courses and Labour Government’s contempt for potential ‘home grown talent’.
That was after I had passed the entry test for a Web Development course and turned down the offer of a place on the course after interviewing the training provider. Micro-Tech was an ‘Investors in People’ award winner and ‘Positive About Disabled People’, and the admin person I spoke to told me, “I agree with you that the six weeks basic training is totally inadequate for the amount of course content, but the [Blair] Government has told us to halve the length of the training period so as to double the throughput from the dole queue.”
A few months later, Labour’s then Work & Pensions Secretary talked about summonsing Incapacity Benefit claimants to jobcentres for ‘all work interviews’; and in 2007 Labour twisted around data that emphasised winter deaths of Incapacity Benefit claimants denies winter fuel payments because they were aged under-60. Work & Pensions Secretary John Hutton told BBC News that driving IB claimants into enforced jobsearch was because after two years on IB, you were more likely to retire or die than get another job.
And it was also John Hutton who oversaw the introduction of ‘Voice Risk Analysis’ technology for detecting ‘fraudulent’ Housing Benefit claims in 2007. Yet as then Head of Money Advice for Hertfordshire County Council Gary Vaux told Community Care magazine readers, VRA was very unreliable, made claiming more stressful and its introduction was without any kind of disability impact assessment.
Going back to the term, ‘hard Labour’, maybe that should really apply to workfarist Labour and Yvette Cooper’s 2010 determination to bring in ‘tougher’ Work Capability Assessment test that was not piloted until there was a Tory-Lib Dem coalition in 2011?
That’s the interesting thing. Corbyn is pretty moderate really. Unfortunately, we’ve reached a point in history where anyone who believes in anything other than the complete destruction of society is considered a ranting commie. Hard Labour indeed.
I actually don’t care what happens to the Labour party much, but I do like to see its various worthies and their endless hangers-on having a few very bad moments on their way to oblivion.
It may be that this outlook doesn’t show me in my most generous light.
I’m just back from a Green Party hustings event toward selecting London Green Party’s candidate for 2016 London Mayoral ‘race’; and the matter of Labour Party prospective change of direction with a different leader came up.
The consensus from those who know Jeremy Corbyn personally and who have dealings with him personally is that he is a very decent person, even while he calls for economic growht — as on Andrew Marr interview. (The Green Party says that ‘economic growth’ is too much linked to global warming, while what is required is more a case of economic re-engineering and redistribution — eg, Green New Deal stuff.)
Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group is non-party-politically inclined, while individual members include staunch Labour Party members, and supporters of TUSC and Left Unity as well as my own being a Green Party member since October 2005. But Corbyn’s decency as an MP aside, what would he be leader of?
It is indeed interesting to see the establishment panic. One thing that strikes me is the argument that he can’t win over the public. Now is that a well informed public or one that has been endlessly battered by endless media bias and manipulation?
It’s an interesting topic, this. I am not one of those who think that people who voted Tory are tossers, or that people who are onside for social security cuts are twats…that’s because I talk to a lot of people who I don’t feel are regularly exposed to the reality of social security cuts and I personally think that lack of exposure has got a lot to do with it. If you don’t have much to do with social security systems, you’re not necessarily exposed constantly to evidence that those systems are being trashed. From time to time when I talk to people outside activist circles, they seem quite surprised when I talk about closures like the ILF…I just don’t think that people realise that really shitty things like that are happening. The understanding is that people who really require support are getting it and will continue to get it. In fact, that isn’t happening.
I also meet people who are very aware that those things are happening and are directly affected by them and voted Tory all the same. The explanation here: “It doesn’t make any difference.” That’s relevant too. I’m not sure that a lot of people believe that solutions to their own issues lie in a very distant political system in Westminster http://www.katebelgrave.com/2015/07/social-security-and-voting-tory/
Today’s big splash story — heading BBC Breakfast News and emanating from a Sun exclusive — revolves around Lord Sewell. I wonder how long that Sun exclusive was hanging around at News International before publication? Perhaps the timing of the release was designed to knock alternatives to austerity off the front pages?
I recall that the Sunday after the million people march through London against war in Iraq the big story, from Murdoch’s publication of Edwina Currie’s autobiography, was of Edwina bonking John Major under the Iron Maiden’s nose.
I’m amused by Labour back-bencher John Mann’s statement about ‘entryism’. “John Mann, the MP for Bassetlaw, claimed that the party is seeing an influx of new members and registered supporters, all of whom will be eligible to vote in the contest that ends in September.” Source: The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/scottish-independence/does-anyone-agree-with-the-labour-mp-that-demanded-the-leadership-contest-be-halted-due-to-influx-of-new-leftwing-members-10417646.html“>
Jeremy Corbyn dismisses claims Labour being ‘infiltrated’ by left-wing activists
Has he ever objected, I wonder, about any of Labour’s corporate sponsors, especially, say, in the days when non-doms [as reported in Private Eye] donated heftily to Labour when it was in Government?