Jeremy Corbyn's time is up

[J Ed]

Owen Jones has really taken to his role of trying to sell the coup to the left

 

[butchersapron]

I've been trying to work this out as well, the only thing I can imagine is that they have spectacularly under thought the issue?

Over-educated thickos.

 

[BeverlyCrusher]

Owen Jones has really taken to his role of trying to sell the coup to the left

The dirty little lickspittle.

 

[BeverlyCrusher]

Owen Jones has really taken to his role of trying to sell the coup to the left

There's something of the Rod Liddle about his approaching middle age.

 

[killer b]

Jones has totally shat the bed hasn't he? Writes a best selling book about the iniquities of the establishment, then goes running to them to sort things out as soon as shit gets vaguely real.

 

[butchersapron]

Yes.

 

[inva]

Jones has totally shat the bed hasn't he? Writes a best selling book about the iniquities of the establishment, then goes running to them to sort things out as soon as shit gets vaguely real.

he's got an afterword at the end of Lisa McKenzie's book I read the other day. he's shit.

e2a instead of an afterword at the beginning that is

 

[butchersapron]

He's done what we said he'd do. He's tied himself into labour. That's principled. It's also why we can now show he's a two faced dick with nothing other than oxbridge air beneath him.

 

[SpookyFrank]

I keep getting a tickle in my brain that says "Smith is a stooge a la Eagle", but who for? Smith is certainly egotistic enough to believe he's a big cheese, but in reality he's a self-important nobody, who'd be the desperation shag at any office party. Is he being set up to show Chooks or Andy "Scott Tracey" Burnham in a better light?

I can't see the value in using two dummy candidates in a row tbh. If someone else stands against Smith at this point (although tbf a pine cone would probably get more votes than him) it'd make the anti Corbyn faction look even more incompetent and out of touch than they've already demonstrated themselves to be.

e2a: Not to say this definitely isn't the plan. Only that if it is, it's a fucking stupid plan.

 

[J Ed]

The dirty little lickspittle.

He has so obviously been tasked, or has tasked himself, with winning over the people who are familiar with the language and rituals of the Labour left and the left of Labour to Owen Smith. He's doing interviews with people who could conceivably be just convincing enough, he's posting texts of anti-Corbyn analyses disguises themselves as Marxist because they use academic jargon and he is repeating the smears about bigotry and violence.

Interesting that at the end of his interview he says that he hopes to do an interview with Corbyn or pro-Corbyn people, he sounds unsure that they would be willing to do that and I can see why.



Why should the Corbyn team reward Jones with an interview so he can continue to boost his brand and sell the coup?

 

[SpookyFrank]

Why should the Corbyn team reward Jones with an interview so he can continue to boost his brand and sell the coup?

And he writes for a paper which has been regularly printing hatchet jobs against Corbyn for a year now.

 

[J Ed]

The thing I find surreal is how he has spent the past few months swanning around in Spain to promote Podemos/his personal ethical brand (tm) and yet here he is attacking Podemos' ally who is leader of the Labour Party. I suppose it's lucky that Podemos did so badly in the elections, if it looked like they could have formed a government Jones might have lunged at Iglesias with an icepick.

 

[BeverlyCrusher]

He's a cold lover too I hear. Invites men in to fuck him but doesn't let them in his front room, just keeps them in his hall, drops his kegs, gets them to fuck him and then boots them out......or so I've heard from a reliable source.

 

[Wilf]

All coming out in the wash now regarding the Brighton pub incident - Cllrs showing their true colours too.

Revealed: The anti-Corbyn “moderate” in Brighton and Hove who stands accused of the hate-crime…

I'm sure that's all true about the event itself and it was nasty, though not too much beyond what passes for normal bad behaviour in political parties. Though all that forensic detail about twitter feeds and electoral registers is a bit of a turn off. Fair enough, expose the lies and bullying - I suspect there's fair bit of that going on on both sides - but the best way to beat the Blairites is to show them up as neo-liberal, anti working class scumbags. This sort of stuff seems like a bit of a side show.

 

[J Ed]

I'm sure that's all true about the event itself and it was nasty, though not too much beyond what passes for normal bad behaviour in political parties. Though all that forensic detail about twitter feeds and electoral registers is a bit of a turn off. Fair enough, expose the lies and bullying - I suspect there's fair bit of that going on on both sides - but the best way to beat the Blairites is to show them up as neo-liberal, anti working class scumbags. This sort of stuff seems like a bit of a side show.

Call out culture and grievance collection through social media has a real life of its own, it is a side show but the way that political campaigns have started to make it the issue to discuss means you can't really just ignore it, can you? I agree with you that just responding in kind doesn't seem like a very good way of countering it, especially when your response isn't going to be featured in the media, but I don't know what response would be better.

Is it even effective for either side to use it in the first place anyway? Clearly a lot of people must think it is, otherwise they wouldn't be using it, but is there any evidence it works?

 

[killer b]

He's a cold lover too I hear. Invites men in to fuck him but doesn't let them in his front room, just keeps them in his hall, drops his kegs, gets them to fuck him and then boots them out......or so I've heard from a reliable source.

Fuck off.

 

[butchersapron]

The thing I find surreal is how he has spent the past few months swanning around in Spain to promote Podemos/his personal ethical brand (tm) and yet here he is attacking Podemos' ally who is leader of the Labour Party. I suppose it's lucky that Podemos did so badly in the elections, if it looked like they could have formed a government Jones might have lunged at Iglesias with an icepick.

They're always better. Them. Long running trope of the british middle class left. A reflection and projection of their disgust of the real w/c in this country.

 

[killer b]

I'm sure that's all true about the event itself and it was nasty, though not too much beyond what passes for normal bad behaviour in political parties. Though all that forensic detail about twitter feeds and electoral registers is a bit of a turn off. Fair enough, expose the lies and bullying - I suspect there's fair bit of that going on on both sides - but the best way to beat the Blairites is to show them up as neo-liberal, anti working class scumbags. This sort of stuff seems like a bit of a side show.

It's bollocks, and the breathless language they write it with is laughable.

Someone in a political faction that's just been heavily defeated getting a bit shouty in his cups that evening? Hold the front page. Pricks.

 

[Wilf]

Call out culture and grievance collection through social media has a real life of its own, it is a side show but the way that political campaigns have started to make it the issue to discuss means you can't really just ignore it, can you? I agree with you that just responding in kind doesn't seem like a very good way of countering it, especially when your response isn't going to be featured in the media, but I don't know what response would be better.

Is it even effective for either side to use it in the first place anyway? Clearly a lot of people must think it is, otherwise they wouldn't be using it, but is there any evidence it works?

Yeah, I agree, if somebody accused me of something, I'd probably get just as forensic. Catch 22 really, if you are trying to achieve something positive, which I suppose the Corbynites are doing, certainly as opposed to the entirely negative Blairite schtick. It just seem soul destroying to be expending energy on this kind of stuff.

 

[binka]

Stan James has already come in from 2/5 (to make a 40% return on investment) to 3/10 (30% ROI). Best odds now available are 4/11 with William Hill and Coral - that represents a 36% ROI.

The best odds you can now is 1/5 with Betfred (20% ROI) his odds have halved in 24 hours - must have been some serious money put on him. Really wish I'd backed him at 2/5 now with some of my savings!

 

[butchersapron]

Yeah, I agree, if somebody accused me of something, I'd probably get just as forensic. Catch 22 really, if you are trying to achieve something positive, which I suppose the Corbynites are doing, certainly as opposed to the entirely negative Blairite schtick. It just seem soul destroying to be expending energy on this kind of stuff.

Prepare for twenty years of boredom.

 

[quimcunx]

Jones has totally shat the bed hasn't he? Writes a best selling book about the iniquities of the establishment, then goes running to them to sort things out as soon as shit gets vaguely real.

Pre-Corbyn I saw him on telly a couple of times and would find myself nodding along at what he said then facepalming when his solution to whatever problem he laid out was always 'So support Labour'!

 

[J Ed]

It's bollocks, and the breathless language they write it with is laughable.

Someone in a political faction that's just been heavily defeated getting a bit shouty in his cups that evening? Hold the front page. Pricks.

It's worse than that though, it's more like 'a male Corbynite disagreed with a woman, why is the Labour Party such a hostile environment for women?' and then of course in response someone on the 'other team' will respond in kind when they see a chance to do so.

The thing I find so depressing about the whole thing is that it's a game which virtually everyone now plays but no one believes in. It's so cynical and depressing and predictable.

 

[killer b]

Yeah, absolutely - it validates the bollocks 'attacks' the other side have been breathlessly denouncing

 

[mather]

It's worse than that though, it's more like 'a male Corbynite disagreed with a woman, why is the Labour Party such a hostile environment for women?' and then of course in response someone on the 'other team' will respond in kind when they see a chance to do so.

The thing I find so depressing about the whole thing is that it's a game which virtually everyone now plays but no one believes in. It's so cynical and depressing and predictable.

This is the result of the left allowing sloppy liberal thinking and identity politics to infect it. Now it is being used against them, in many cases by people who are not even part of the left but from the right too. Anyone can now play the 'you are not being nice to me or the minorities card', the politics of victimhood and point scoring by people who use this to hide the fact that either they have no politics or that their politics stink. What makes this worse is, as you have said, that it is all so cynical.

 

[gawkrodger]

word.

 

[J Ed]

This is the result of the left allowing sloppy liberal thinking and identity politics to infect it. Now it is being used against them, in many cases by people who are not even part of the left but from the right too. Anyone can now play the 'you are not being nice to me or the minorities card', the politics of victimhood and point scoring by people who use this to hide the fact that either they have no politics or that their politics stink. What makes this worse is, as you have said, that it is all so cynical.

Bit of a tangent but I read this last night, the whole piece is worth reading but the bits I've pasted address the consequences of this sort of thinking.

Passing for Politics

Debates over trigger warnings tend to represent them as the primary threat to university pedagogy. But when it comes to incursions on the quality of education, trigger warnings are vastly overshadowed by financialization and budget cuts. Public university privatization is part of a general social trend of austerity, and the stakes are high — for faculty and teaching assistants overwhelmed by ballooning class sizes, adjuncts commuting between teaching gigs at three or four different colleges, and students working full time after class to pay rent.

When the University of California Board of Regents announced a 27% tuition hike in November 2014, the Santa Cruz campus erupted. I hadn’t expected much; I was sitting in my office grading, planning to make a quick appearance at the rally on the way home. Then I heard the crowd outside: the building next door had been occupied, the administration ejected. Change of plans.

The occupation lasted about a week, punctuated with visits by Cornel West, Chris Hedges, and the Teamsters. After an initial burst of inchoate energy, conversations finally started — analysis was hashed out, slogans printed onto fliers. It’s remarkable how at all of these actions the race question already dominated everything. It seemed to be most effective, in terms of rallying troops, to say that rising tuition “hits students of color the hardest.”

I tried in vain to find some basis, any basis, for this in the data, but upon further scrutiny it doesn’t bear out. There may have been reasons for claiming that students of color who grew up in economically segregated neighborhoods and went to similarly segregated public schools were most severely affected by the overall trends of privatization which tuition hikes represent, despite the fact that the poorest among them don’t pay tuition. But the insistence that the tuition hikes themselves must be somehow racially biased obscured the complicated mathematics underlying the UC’s policy vacillations, and forced the movement into a rhetorical corner — as though racially equitable university privatization would be somehow acceptable.

Alongside this fundamental lack of clarity sat the flabbergasting opposition to the very words “occupy” or “occupation,” which could have recalled self-managed factories in Argentina and Uruguay, but instead were accused of celebrating the genocide of indigenous people. In a stunning reversal of earlier academic fads, the signifier “occupy” was restricted to a single meaning traced back to Christopher Columbus, any suggestion of polysemy rejected as if it were a personal insult. A debate that should probably have happened in a semiotics seminar took up hours at meetings where we could have planned teach-ins and rallies and workshops, or allocated clean-up tasks. Instead, we had to pore over the activist thesaurus in search of synonyms like “takeover” or “seizure.”

But things got worse. It started with a debate over authoritarian practices at a disorganized general assembly. The crowd, the biggest yet, was full of excited newcomers who were ready to join in. But they were totally silenced, reduced to receiving instructions that had not been democratically discussed. Many people spoke up to criticize this practice, including me. But each of the facilitators was a “POC” — that’s “Person-of-Color” — and after the assembly completely unraveled, an almost hilariously unsubstantiated rumor began to spread that the facilitators had been attacked by racists. This rumor became nearly impossible to dispel; even some of the usual supporters heard that the occupation wasn’t a “safe space,” and stopped showing up.

Some people began to organize separatist POC meetings, united by their complexion against a fictional collection of white anarchists. My skin got me in the door. After listening to a bewildering array of political positions — one student read aloud an email from an administrator conspiratorially accusing student protesters of attempting to undermine campus diversity initiatives — I felt the need to intervene. I stood and tried to summon up some rhetorical demons the best I could; I thought about Malcolm X, and how he always spoke in the second person (“You don’t know what a revolution is!”). I dropped names like Frantz Fanon, and tried to convince a totally heterogeneous group to drop the POC act and help build a better movement. Some observers snapped their fingers with appreciation at the occasional oratorical flourish, and ignored what I said.

...

The now firmly entrenched reduction of politics to identity has left social movements defenseless against subordination to the multicultural elite. Many of the core organizers of the Santa Cruz occupation, themselves people of color, quickly recognized that the ideology at work in the split threatened to tie the activist culture to puppetry from above. They wrote a letter responding to the spreading accusation that the occupation, and by extension all organizing on campus, was a “white space.” Such rhetoric, the letter pointed out, not only rendered the activists of color who organized the occupation completely invisible, it objectively benefitted the administration, which is fond of giving itself exorbitant raises at the same time that it threatens to increase tuition. If this way of thinking spread, the movement would disintegrate into “collaboration with token POC administrators, who will smile to our faces and stab us in the back.” In furious all caps the letter declared: “WE CAN NO LONGER AFFORD TO LET THIS TOXIC CULTURE CHIP AWAY AT THE AUTONOMOUS MOVEMENTS AGAINST THE TUITION HIKES.”

...

In Santa Cruz, the ideology of identity took us further and further away from a genuinely emancipatory project. Its consequences were not only the demobilization of the movement, but also a degrading political parcelization. In the absence of a credible identitarian claim, anti-neoliberal struggles, like the movement against tuition hikes, were artificially separated from “race” issues. “POC” activists would focus on police brutality, ethnic studies, and postcolonial theory; the increasing cost of living, privatization of education, and job insecurity became “white” issues.
.

Another thing I get stuck on about stuff like this is - if you were to design a political or social movement that you intended to be successful would you have this sort of culture 'built in'? I don't think you would, you'd build it in if you wanted it to fail. The right are more than happy to join in with these ritual denunciations, Cameron talked about how criticisms of Laura Kuenssberg were sexist but they never apply it to their own ranks.

 

[mojo pixy]

I don't understand Owen Smith instead of Angela Eagle. She's a woman, a gay woman. That all by itself would have drawn some intersectionalist support from Corbyn. But he's up against just some bloke, and a less famous one at that, who once worked for Pfizer ffs. I don't know what they think they're doing, they're fucked. Or being really canny in some way I can't see.

 

[mojo pixy]

I don't think this has been posted yet. It's a link from the shameless Guardian piece upthread, to a study of the UK print media that confirms what everyone knows. I just like it because it has data.

''Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press:
From Watchdog to Attackdog''

http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/pdf/JeremyCorbyn/Cobyn-Report-FINAL.pdf

 

[SpookyFrank]

I don't know what they think they're doing

You have that in common with the PLP I fear.