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BBC - Owen Jones

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ED TO GIDEON: ‘Owen Jones is asking people to vote Labour to stop the cuts’
 
I just cycled to get some free lunch off the Hari Krishnas and on my return nearly had a cycle collision with.....Owen Jones.
 
Are you suggesting that we check your eBay record see who bought them and then spend hours searching through their buying record then taking the piss out of it on here?

It was a few years ago so probably isn't still accessible, but I did that myself and it was a bit mental.

Sold quite a few "Fighting Talk" to some guy called Odin45356 or something who was obviously fash from the rest of the things he was buying. I did have a chuckle at him sitting in the armchair of an evening reading about his comrades having the shit kicked out of them by AFA.

And some "Cable Street Beat" mags to Dave Hann.

Maybe Owen Jones is scouring ebay RIGHT NOW for these things...
 
Article.

'I'm with the people'

having spent the last two years zig-zagging across Britain, I know there’s no shortage of anger and fear out there. Anger, from the kids at a Sheffield sixth-form who simply could not understand why their futures were down-payments for a crisis they had nothing to do with. Fear, from the young woman with a little daughter in Hackney driven from her home by benefit cuts, forced to bring her up in sheltered accommodation. But there’s one thing missing – and this isn’t a throwaway platitude – and that’s hope.

'The People's Assembly means the real (Labour) left is entering the ring:

It will come up against the sneers and venom of smug middle-aged pub bores (otherwise known as the “liberal commentariat”); Tories and Blairites, dismissive of anything not drenched in free-market dogma; and even left-wing sects, unable to explain why they have failed to grow five years into the biggest crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression. It will have to prove them all wrong.

Letting councils build houses and controlling rents, rather than subsidising landlords; a living wage, instead of state-subsidised low wages; an industrial strategy to create hundreds of thousands of renewable jobs, instead of the misery of unemployment; an all-out war against tax avoidance worth £25bn a year; public control of the banks we bailed out: here are demands that have long been ignored. They won’t be ignored any more.

The Labour leadership will face a new reality, too. They’ve taken it as read that they are the sole national spokespeople for the left; the only standard-bearers of an alternative to Tory calamity. Because their main competitors have been on the right, the terms of debate have been kept on the terms of the wealthy and powerful. No longer. The fragmented strands of progressive Britain are coming together; the anti-austerity movement is making its belated appearance. Finally, the left is entering the ring.
 
It will come up against the sneers and venom of smug middle-aged pub bores (otherwise known as the “liberal commentariat”); Tories and Blairites, dismissive of anything not drenched in free-market dogma; and even left-wing sects, unable to explain why they have failed to grow five years into the biggest crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression. It will have to prove them all wrong.

so the student protests, March 26th, the claimant and disability movement, Occupy, UK Uncut - this all meant nothing, but now owen jones has helped call a meeting to save us by telling us to vote labour

fucking arrogant prick, i like him less and less everyday
 
The loathsome Staines has a piece on his site about John Spellar's comments at the recent 'Progress' conference referring to Owen Jones.
“It’s perfectly true that the organised evil, the militant socialist workers and the communist party are nothing like as strong as they once were but the sort of mindset is still there. There’s some teenager who seems to have a column in The Independent who says ‘Labour finally has some real competition on the left.’ Well whoopee.”


I don't post this as a defence of Jones, but it is interesting to see the 'mainstream' Labour view 'the left'.

And these are the people we're expected to vote for?
 
And he's wrong, Oran juice jones doesn't say "‘Labour finally has some real competition on the left" - he says that the labour party left can offer some competition to the labour party leadership from within labour. It's as much internal to labour as is his progress shite.
 
And he's wrong, Oran juice jones doesn't say "‘Labour finally has some real competition on the left" - he says that the labour party left can offer some competition to the labour party leadership from within labour. It's as much internal to labour as is his progress shite.

Yes, but it looks like Spellar was reacting to this Indy piece in which Jones appears to be suggesting otherwise. Disingenuously he characterises the 'People's assemblies' as a device to effect a leftward shift in the LP, but seems willing to accept that such a strategy is useless...without explicitly declaring his position, on the basis that such a distiction doesn't matter.

Some will want a movement that puts pressure on Labour to do the job it was founded to do, fighting for working people; others think that’s about as productive as mating with a toaster. That doesn’t matter: it’s a broad movement, not a party, and there is a shared determination to give a platform to those hit by the Government’s austerity offensive, and to push an alternative that gives people hope. “We can’t afford to cock this up this time round,” as a young man put it to me in Nottingham.

This obfuscation allows him to conclude...

The Labour leadership will face a new reality, too. They’ve taken it as read that they are the sole national spokespeople for the left; the only standard-bearers of an alternative to Tory calamity. Because their main competitors have been on the right, the terms of debate have been kept on the terms of the wealthy and powerful. No longer. The fragmented strands of progressive Britain are coming together; the anti-austerity movement is making its belated appearance. Finally, the left is entering the ring.

:facepalm:
 
Yeah it was a direct reaction to that piece, but his misreading allows Jones to get off the hook - but, he can only do that by making it clear that he and spellar are really on the same side. Otherwise spellar the fool has just given jones exactly the sort of cover he needs to funnel the left outside of labour and anti-austerity stuff into labour support. Ineptness all round.
 
If he was he must have been a staunch socialist to send his kid to independent school then oxbridge.

I think he - Spellar - does have some kind of Labour connection he was a national fulltimer official for EEPTU as soon as he left Oxford from 1969 until he became an MP!
 
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