Newsnight: “You can see some really significant increases… the vast majority of MPs and CLP Chairmen did think that many were joining to vote specifically for Keir Starmer.” Policy editor Lewis Goodall reveals an influx of new members joining the Labour Party.
Laura Parker: Lewis Goodall, were none of the ppl you contacted running CLPs women?!
Lewis Goodall: Hello, there were, of course. Many apologies, I meant to say chairmen and women, however, live TV and all that, made a mistake. Should have saved myself the bother and said “chairs” instead.
Laura Parker: Thank you.
Yes, he's apologising for using the word 'chairmen'!
I’m sick of seeing Jeremy Corbyn brandishing sheaves of paper to ‘prove’ the nastiness of the Tories. A bundle from Russia-with-love to prove that Boris Johnson is about to sell off our NHS to “Trump”. The evidence appeared to consist of a wad of thick black lines, the content redacted, obliterated and unreadable. But no matter. When today is over we might not have to see it again.
A few days ago BBC News featured a Corbyn rally (in Bristol, perhaps?) Corbyn, again waving papers before an adoring mob. This time, the front page of the Mirror featuring four-year-old Jack being “treated for pneumonia on the floor because there were no beds in Boris Johnson’s hospital.” Behind the anointed one, a comedy bobble-hat rose up, very slowly from beneath the podium to reveal the wearer - a photographer. Had the prospect of a Corbyn led “gov’ment” been less catastrophic, this slow-motion ‘photo-bomb’ might have added a moment of slapstick hilarity. I wish the intruder was an absurdist performance artist, but I expect the chap just wanted a shot of the great man from an unusual angle; the back of the head.
The confusion about the four-year-old boy-on-the-floor drags on. Speculation abounds. Who took the photo? Why was it taken in the first place? The plea not to politicise it - from the boy’s mother and from Jeremy Corbyn, whose very insistence that he wasn’t politicising it was effectively politicising it, something of which he must have been perfectly aware.
The assertion that the boy was ‘being treated for pneumonia’ on the floor, yet the drip was plainly not in use; but was it a drip or an oxygen thingy? Whatever had happened, it was all due to callous Tory cuts.
“His mother, Sarah Williment, found herself in a moment of panic: her baby needed her. Moreover, her baby needed medical care from the amazing doctors and nurses at Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) but such was the demand from patients, he had to be made as comfortable as possible – on a pile of coats on the floor – until a bed and care became available.
Is a four-year-old technically a baby? Well, I s’pose, to a parent, one’s adult offspring are still babies, at a stretch.
Was he waiting for ‘a bed and care’ or had he already ‘had’ care? If he hadn’t been seen yet, who supplied the drip cum oxygen mask? P’raps they brought one with them from home? This is getting ridiculous now.
“With only good intentions, Williment contacted her local newspaper, the Yorkshire Evening Post. In times of trouble, people often turn to their local newspaper. In this instance, Sarah only wanted to others to see just how stretched the team at LGI was, and humanise the impacts of too few hands at the pump.
As you do when you think your child baby has pneumonia. I’m not going to go on and on, much as I could. I must try going to my local newspaper in my time of trouble - but will the Western Morning News care that a bunch of antisemites are running the country?
"The truth is that I can now barely bring myself to contemplate what this election says about my fellow Brits' willingness to tolerate Jew-hate. Whatever share of the vote Labour ends up with, it's safe to predict that over a third of voters have no problem with the concept of installing as prime minister a man who is repeatedly labelled an anti-Semite, not least by those like Dame Margaret Hodge who have worked alongside him. […] In 2017, it was possible to argue that they didn't know about all this. That's impossible now. The issue of Labour's anti-Semitism has been given a full and comprehensive airing both during and long before the campaign.
[...]The worst of them all are the so-called moderate Labour MPs. In the four years since Mr Corbyn was elected leader many of them have tweeted and spoken a lot about solidarity with the Jewish community. But when an election was called and they had to make a choice, they chose – actively, consciously and unambiguously – to ignore the pleas of the Jewish community, and to side with the Jew haters. Their campaigning was not to stop anti-Semitism, it was to put the leading anti-Semites into power.
Momentum-inspired aggressive behaviour of the baying mob is spookily 1930s-like.
On an odder note, have you noticed, Jeremy Corbyn himself has succumbed to the fashionable Labour glottal stop. He suddenly started using the famous Labour Party pronunciation, referring to the organisation as The Labour Par’y.
Might Angela Rayner impose the ‘silent T’ as part of Labour’s revolutionary educational policy: “Equality Rules for Dumbed-down Schools”?
People were amused and entertained by this young fellow. (Look at the comments below this tweet) I wonder if anyone at the Beeb reads below the line responses to its Q.T. Twitter thingy.
“am I the only one who spots the youthful Momentum plants in BBCQT audiences most weeks? I love how confident they are of the dear leader's popularity with the masses, in the face of all the evidence. Nothing that a little strategic entryism into live telly broadcasts won't surmount”
says a commenter on H.P. (link to website temporarily unavailable)
No, I don’t think you are (the only one)
"As soon as the Beeb announced that Hartley-Brewer, the journalist, broadcaster and fiery talkRADIO host, would be on QT tonight, the mob got into action. They said it was repulsive for the national broadcaster to ‘platform’ someone like Hartley-Brewer. They demanded that the BBC rethink – that is, it should throw this foul, Brexit-supporting woman off the panel."
Watching the Daily Politics (yesterday*) a couple of thoughts struck me.
One: Why did Conservative MP Anne-Marie Trevelyan come in fancy dress? (What as? I’d take a punt at Sandy from Grease.) (the musical)
Two: I have to question a system whereby Labour MPs like Emma Reynolds have collectively decided to place party loyalty above all else. To a certain extent party loyalty is understandable, I get that. However, when it means continually having to say “I don’t agree with Jeremy, but I respect his decision” it’s quite alarming. Astonishing even. For non-Momentum Labour MPs, (assuming there will still be some) the consensus has settled on an approach that seems to be, ‘well, anything is better than the Tories.’ But when Corbyniste ideas positively endanger the country then it’s time for what people might call ‘a reality check’.
How can the likes of Emma Reynolds (I may be wrong, but she doesn’t come across as an ardent Momentumiste) or, say, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall, John Mann or any sane member of eg., Labour Friends of Israel, justify toeing the party line, when the party line is halfway along the road to ruin?
Sunder Katwala of “British Future” looked as though he was about to burst into tears, which might account for the encouraging smiles from both the ladies on the other side of the desk. “Please don’t cry!You can do it”
Don't Cry!
You can do it!
Reporting the findings of a survey carried out by his group, he revealed that the public takes an extremely nuanced view of immigration. So we’re not such racists as we’re cracked up to be. I was surprised to see that “British Future” is a left wing, pro-immigration outfit which heavily promotes stories about “good” Muslims; no-one hinted at this when he was introduced.
I didn’t enjoy watching the news editor of Huck magazine (see Dawn Foster’s contribution here)
But as I’m not one of those bigot who are always clamouring for people I disagree with to be no-platformed. I respect his views and will reluctantly suck them up.
* I wrote much of the above yesterday but life intervened, so it was with a nuanced amount of glee that I read this piece in today’s Times:
“Moderate Labour MPs are threatening to quit and sit as independents in the Commons if they are deselected as the left tightens its grip on the party.
Three Momentum-backed candidates, including Jon Lansman, founder of the pro-Corbyn network, were elected to Labour’s influential governing body yesterday. The leftwingers won the national executive committee (NEC) seats by a landslide, beating moderate and independent candidates including the comedian Eddie Izzard, who came fourth. The result prompted fears among centrists that the left would push ahead with trying to deselect MPs in favour of candidates who were more aligned with Jeremy Corbyn. The NEC presides over Labour’s rule book, guarantees the propriety of its selection process and helps to oversee policy development.
Branches of Momentum have been vocal about wanting to make it harder for incumbent MPs to be confirmed as candidates for the next general election without facing an open contest. At present an MP needs to win a simple majority of nominations from local party branches and affiliated trade unions and socialist societies in a “trigger ballot”, the vote to confirm them as the candidate. Momentum has proposed raising the threshold to two thirds of nominations.
Other left-wing backers of the Labour leadership want to go further and introduce mandatory reselection before every general election, forcing incumbents to face challengers."
“Michelle Harris has been shortlisted to stand as the Labour candidate in Amber Rudd’s (very marginal) seat of Hastings and Rye. Her previous form with regard to antisemitism was revealed a few days ago by @GnasherJew, an account dedicated to exposing Labour antisemitism. One particularly egregious moment came in 2014 when she shared a David Icke post referring to ‘Rothschild Zionist Israel’. “
I wonder if Emma Reynolds will still be rejoicing at the fact that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t unelectable after all.
It seems odd to me that the BBC is promoting the story of bullying within the Tory party so heavily, but the story of the bullying within the Labour party - not so much. Could there be something about Lord Feldman, apart from his friendship with David Cameron, that they don’t particularly like?
A Feldman
It is very annoying when the BBC get their teeth into a story and obsess about it disproportionately and tediously as they did recently over Andrew Mitchell’s ‘Plebgate’ adventure.
All this ‘he said / she said’, or in this case ‘how long has he known?’ and ‘when did he get the dossier?’ business is not worth the amount of energy expended. Presented in the BBC’s own special way, the whole thing comes across as tittle-tattle rather than news.
Okay, so he might have been handed the dossier on a particular date. Maybe he tucked it behind the clock on the mantlepiece while attending to something more pressing. Haven’t we all done that? Personally I have quite a backlog of dossiers that I haven’t got round to dealing with.
Oh, I forgot, I’m not co-chair of a political party. Never mind.
I know I sound facetious, especially as the bullying seems to have been a factor in a young man’s suicide, and I do think it merits a more thorough investigation than a spot of symbolic head-rolling and sword-falling.
It’s just that some of us find the bullying of certain Labour MPs by the Momentum lot more scandalous, at least as worthy of investigation and a whole day’s-worth of outraged headlines as the Get-Feldy campaign has garnered, because as Dan Hodges says in his Telegraph piece, “Jeremy Corbyn does havean electoral strategy. It just doesn’t involve the Labour Party”.
“People still misunderstand Corbynism. The consensus view is he has no interest in constructing a successful electoral strategy, preferring instead to focus on taking control of the Labour Party’s levers of power. But in truth he is not seeking to take control of the Labour Party. He is seeking to dismantle the Labour Party and replace it with a new a loose affiliation of hard Left campaign groups, direct action foot-soldiers and social media warriors.
Jeremy Corbyn does havean electoral strategy. It just doesn’t involve the Labour Party.Take Labour’s membership. What has been described as a “membership surge” is in fact a membership transfusion. Tens of thousands of new activists have joined. Simultaneously, thousands of moderate activists have left. Labour’s membership base is not expanding. It is being cleansed.”
If you don’t find the bullying involved in putting that hideous Corbyn strategy into effect worthy of as many headlines as dossiergate, than you probably have a sinister agenda of your own. If you get my meaning.
Update:
Hodges is hugely erratic. He has just written a reactionary piece in the Telegraph about Trump. He wants to ban him from the UK. (Along with other “Islamophobes" Robert Spencer and Pamella Geller)
That would be interesting ... if Trump ever got to be POTUS. Could we actually ban the US president from these shores, should he ever wish to visit? Well, under Sharia we probably could, and who knows if that will be the case, the way things are going. We could hasten it with this ban if we were enthusiastic enough about it.
