Tuesday 11 August 2015

Insults, threats and Intimidation no way to run a leadership contest

I am not involved in the Labour Party leadership election except as an interested  observer. However I think this Facebook posting by Javier Farje, which the Labour Party Forum decided not to publish,  deserves a wider audience. (Javier has explained that he meant no offence in his reference to troskyists and apologises to anyone who took offence.)

What was supposed to be a debate among candidates and different positions within the Labour Party has become a war against Jeremy Corbyn. The insults, the threats, the intimidation.

I joined the LP because, for the first time since I moved to the UK 27 years ago and became a British citizen in 1996, I felt that I could become a member of a party that, despite the different approaches to the issues that most concern our society: unemployment, poverty, the neglect of the manufacturing sector, among other things, at least agrees in the need to discuss the best way to make Britain a fairer place. 

I am neither a socially inadequate trotskyist entryist nor am I a disguised tory determined to wreck the LP. Like thousands of new members, young and old, native and, like me, adopted British citizens, I am a person who feels invigorated by the speech of a politician who, after many years of hearing other LP politicians, speaks his mind, without gimmicks or focus groups. 

As a journalist with almost 40 years of experience, 14 of them working for a major British and international broadcasting organisation, I know when I see a bad economic programme or an illegal war. So when Jeremy Corbyn challenges the current post-Cold War 'consensus' or the levels of poverty that can be easily be avoided if we increased taxes by a mere 0.5% to the richest people in the country, then I have to agree.

What is the response of the other candidates and their informal spokespeople? The Alan Johnsons, the Alistair Campbells, the Tony Blairs, the Peter Mandelsons of this world? A better programme, a valid alternative? No. The threat. The insult. 

To suggest that the election of a new party leader should be postponed because some people do not like one candidate is dishonest and undemocratic. The threat of an internal coup if Jeremy Corbyn wins reminds me Latin America, the continent where I was born, with its dirty tricks and its sometimes sleazy political system. It is shameful. I didn't join the LP for this. 

Burnham, Cooper, Kendal, convince me that what you have to offer is better than what Jeremy Corbyn offers. Don't patronise me with the idea that we would be going back to the 80s. And do not insult my intelligence suggesting that people like me do not know what we are doing. If any of you convinces me, I am happy to change my mind and vote for one of you. You have not done that so far. 

And that is not Jeremy Corbyn's fault.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am not a member or supporter of any political party, but I know good sense when I read it - and Javier Farje's statement makes excellent sense.

Philip Grant.

Anonymous said...

Javier, Labour does not like immigrants. Did you not get the bright red mug?

Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group said...

Perhaps something good and decent people have in common with the most vulnerable these days is that in relation to the establishment, good and decent people and the most vulnerable are deviants. Kilburn Unemployed blog piece: Spied upon political activists and the mainstream?

Much of the war against the most vulnerable was ratcheted up under Labour, and so the Labour MPs that voted against the latest Tory Welfare Reform and Work Bill were real deviants and a threat to what has become the Establishment.

The cops that spied on Jeremy Corbyn and who responded to the briefing that Green Party Peer Jenny Jones is a 'domestic extremist' must be in meltdown with so many insurgents to the Labour Party. What ever happened to controlling the masses by setting examples of those who step out of line?

Martin Francis said...

Anonymous comment sent by email:

"Jeremy Corbyn, despite his widely uncommented on fascinating style tips, obvious ideological polarity to the Troika and devil-may-care-thinking-man's-chin-topiary has as much to do with the inevitable collapse of KKKapitalism as your last bowel movement. Assuming you can remember or acknowledge when you last had a toilet break.

" Some people have obviously sold themselves into a magical three-bean mire where their ridiculous opinions seem to be equally welcome in New York, the Barclaybrosville Islands or The State of New Priory, Murdocia.

"http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/10/anyone-but-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leader-alastair-campbell?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2"

I think I preferred Al when he was merely abusively drunk to this pathetic power-crazed scrabbling haigographic gibberish. (And "Yes" I do know the Blairite alcoholism of the two glasses of wine per night... But it didn't make me a war criminal, Pal)"

Anonymous said...

Good to see Mary Berry joining the great leadership debate!

Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group said...

As I said to a reporter from the Mail on Sunday in February 2003, Alastair Campbell is an unreliable witness. The following is how I came to know that from personal experience.

After I was mugged at about 7:45pm on Hampstead Heath on the very wet and dark evening of 29 January 2001, Alastiar Campbell turned up as I was walking to a Gospel Oak Methodist where I was already late for taking the Church Council minutes.

He in his marathon training gear told me he had seen what happened from a distance as I was using a vocal exercise to alert whoever might have been over the next hilltop and deter my muggers. He volunteered to escort me to Royal Free Hospital A&E a few blocks away and I explained to him that with a slightly puffed lip from being kicked in the head by a youth's trainer, I was more concerned about notifying the Church Council of my situation as they would already be waiting for me.

So I told him that the best way he could be of assistance would have been for him to leave me his contact details so I could direct the police to him as a potential eye witness. He agreed and told me as he was writing out his contact details, "You've probably heard of me; I'm the Prime Minister's Press Secretary."

"Yes, I have heard of you," I replied and I must confess I have very little liking for Labour Party policy toward unemployed and disabled people that applies coercion and bullying tactics rather than support. (That was after the then Work & Pensions Secretary Alistair Darling had talked about summonsing Incapacity Benefit claimants to jobcentres for 'all work interviews' when I as a decades long disabled jobseeker was sick of inadequate training provision and the Blair Government's insistence that training providers MicroTec halve the length of their Web Development course training period so as to double the throughput from the dole queue.
He quizzed me about my political background and I outlined that I had been a member of the Labour Party (1980-84), Ecology Party (1984-86) and Lib Dems (1996-98).

After I gave the police my one eye witness's contact details, they told me the following day that they had been unable to contact him. And the Channel 4 News for the day after my mugging gave clues as to why: AC was heavily embroiled in handling fallout from some Peter Mandelson mortgage fiasco.

AC proved useless in helping track down my attackers but a conduit to my telling my mum two years later that I had been mugged but survived the experience. The cue for that disclosure was that AC had deputised for Boris Johnson as Spectator diarist and started off the diary piece by saying that someone had shouted, "Murderer!" at him across the street from his home, for his desire to send troops into Iraq and Afghanistan. He then went on to say that that reminded him of how he had rescued someone from a vicious mugging on Hampstead Heath, and escorted said victim to a local church hall where said victim turned on him saying, "'So you're Alaistair Campbell? I f***ing hate you.' It so happened that he was a Liberal Democrat activist -- never the most appreciative of people," the man of spin concluded while giving the obvious impression from his tale of courage and compassion involved in the rescue when he did not realise that he could have called 999 on his mobile, that he was a combination of Superman and Good Samaritan combined.

Yet he had told sufficient truth in his story for a sleuthing reporter from my mum's Sunday read to track me down via church notice board gateway, and for Mum to later declare that in my revelation of what had actually happened, that she was glad I had given him the print equivalent of 'a bloody nose' -- i.e., the real facts of the story.

Anonymous said...

He probably made up the swearing bit because he hadn't achieved his expletive target for that day, but damn you, KUWG, you've shattered my faith in the man. I'm even beginning to doubt his WMD story now.
On the other hand, at least it was Campbell's actual job as Bullshitter Without Portfolio to lie, lie and lie again for the man he loved and This Great Movement of Ours. People like Jack Straw, the appalling Geoff Hoon and John 'Dr' (the evidence) Reid had no such excuse.

Mike Hine

Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group said...

On the matter of being 'foul mouthed' I told Mail on Sunday reporter that I was horrified at the accusation that I had sworn at another human being. The Scotsman, in its very peremptory precis of the story, said that I was "a church-going man who claims that he never swears."

Yet those who know me know that I have sworn, but not at people. AC, on the other hand, apparently has quite a reputation for swearing himself.

Dude Swheatie of the KUWG