Been asking this on facebook and am still wondering:
Is the Guardian actively anti-Corbyn, or is it just trying to wind people up/thrill advertisers with anti-Corbyn clickbait? This whole scene is starting to interest me. Been reading another Corbyn Is Political Death article – this one perpetrated by someone called Kezia Dugdale. I am interested to know if anybody at the Guardian genuinely thinks that Kezia’s opinion counts. Kezia appears to be associated with Scottish Labour and even seems to want to lead it. Both of these things mean that oblivion will soon be hers and both those things make me think that her contribution to public discussion ought to rate even behind mine. To be fair, members of Scottish Labour can probably speak about roads to nowhere with some authority… but wanting the leadership? I feel inclined to take the long view of party members who actively covet the wheel of their own hearse. I can’t be the only one.
Anyway. I’ll tell you why the thought of a Corbyn win intrigues me. Mainly, it’s because the prospect of that Corbyn win is so obviously doing establishment heads in. That part is a major victory in itself and certainly reason to continue reading panicky establishment articles. I do have something more constructive, though. I like to think that for however long Corbyn lasts before the Tories or his own party rub him out, he’ll front up to PMQs with difficult questions for Cameron about the realities of social security cuts. I also like to think that he’ll rattle his own hopeless party with difficult questions about the realities of social security cuts. And…that’s about it. The truth is that the solutions to austerity won’t come from inside parliament, no matter who leads Labour. A few people could make things a little less easy for austerity’s perpetrators, though. It’s not much, but it’s better than the five-eighths of fuck-all we’ve had from Labour to date.
It seems like the Guardian and the useful Labour idiots have learned the dark arts of the Nudge Unit. Even the so-called news articles throw in random slurs like Trotskyite every other paragraph, regular as clockwork.
The silliest contributions are from Neil Kinnock, dismissing Corbyn’s policies which will be very similar to the ones he led on. The difference now is that the Thatcher-Blair pyramid scheme of an economy is collapsing, and there’s enough of us left out in the cold to win the next election if a party wants us.
Podemos and Syriza show that millions can and will back an anti-austerity platform but also that establishment institutions will pull out all the stops to destroy them. Jeremy will have one hell of a fight every day he is in the spotlight, but finally we could have a politician in England willing to stand alongside us.
“Someone called Kezia Dugdale” is the leader and, I think, sole member of the Scottish Parliamentary Labour Party. That you didn’t know this would probably tell us something deep about politics, especially Labour politics, between England and Scotland if we thought about it.
Ian Murray is Scotland’s sole Labour MP. Kezia Dugdale was Jim Murphy’s Holyrood lieutenant, and is useless.
Ah, yes! Jim Murphy! I remember that name and the Blairits legacy he contributed to. Employment support allowance: how will life be after incapacity benefit?
It does not surprise me that Dugdale supporter Ian Murray backs Yvette Cooper. She, like IDS and Lord Freud, has blood on her hands, it could be argued. It was YC who authorised the moving of Work Capability Assessment goal posts to reduce claimants’ chances of getting ESA. Sheffield Forum for Everything Sheffield reported in April 2010, Even harsher new ESA Medical approved”(warning very bad news inc) . Yes, the Con-Dems piloted that harsher test, but who authorised it?
What have the Labour alternatives to Jeremy Corbyn got to say about access to justice in this day and age? See what Rev’d Paul Nicolson has to say about access to British justice. How much would they be part of the solution under Corbyn?
I think I might start following Kezia’s “career” more closely…
I’m a Green Party member myself and the Green Party is against ‘negative campaigning’ even when the targets of the ‘negativity’ are outside the Green Party. And KUWG is non-party-political.
I ‘snipe at the sidelines’ of the Labour leadership contest as a KUWG member with my vast store of recollections of Labour in government, without consulting Labour Party comrades and Corbynit ‘insurgents’.
Meanwhile, re The Guardian, I point out that when it was sent copy of the Green Party response to Labour’s 2008 Welfare Reform Green Paper, The Guardian was one of several publications that did not do anything to draw attention to the fact that the Green Party of England & Wales is more than a political wing of Friends of the Earth. Corbynites would probably have much common ground with Writing off Workfare and form the necessary alliances.
Sniping is good. We need more of it.
I hope the Stop Corbyn campaign fails completely. Labour needs a leader like him, who is not afraid to ask awkward questions when necessary.
One who does not practice the ‘Three Wise Monkeys Method ‘ so favoured by the Labour front-bench, on issues of welfare and disability.
See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil.
‘You can always judge a man by the qualities of his enemies’. Oscar Wilde
There was a detailed piece on the Sodium Haze web site – ‘The Guardian has Morphed into the Daily Mail’ – on the Corbyn question and related matter, which is well worth a look.
The Guardian is at it again today (Aug 7) with Martin Kettle’s hastily cobbled piece reiterating the ‘Corbyn is unelectable’ mantra. Before the rise of Corbyn, they used to promote a Guardian Offer T-shirt that said, Labour: I Prefer Their Early Work. No sign of it recently, reflecting the change in editorial no doubt.
Kezia Dugdale now elected as Scottish Labour Party Leader.