This ludicrous newspaper article in the Guardian provides a perfect example of how the mainstream media use false narratives and misleading language to frame the political debate. The headline clearly implies that the Labour leader Corbyn is some kind of extremist and that by taking these minor backbench positions the "moderates" have dealt Corbyn some kind of crucial strategic blow.
These people are not moderates, they are the unpopular right-wing fringe of the Labour Party
If you actually read the article you find that several of these so-called "moderates" are from the most right-wing fringe of the Labour Party. There's Caroline Flint (pictured) who is economically right-wing and has extremist right-wing authoritarian views on drug use. There's Tristram Hunt who did bollocks all as shadow education secretary to oppose the Tories as they privatised thousands of state schools into the hands of unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities (several of them operated by major Tory party donors), and only days previously was openly fantasising about how he'd love to see the "top 1%" taking control of the Labour Party away from the uppity plebs who elected Corbyn. And there's Chris Leslie, the Osbornite former caretaker shadow chancellor who expends far more effort attacking the current Labour leadership than he ever did criticising the Tories and their ideological austerity con.
The author (Patrick Wintour) even goes on to describe Chuka Umunna and Rachel Reeves as "moderates". Umunna is the absolute embodiment of the unmistakably right-wing self-serving Blairite careerist politician that pushes people away from the Labour Party in droves, and Rachel Reeves once promised to be even tougher on the most vulnerable people in society than Iain Duncan Smith's regime of terror!
It turns out that of the 17 Labour MPs to walk unopposed into these backbench roles, 10 of them openly supported Liz Kendall, who was the most right-wing of the four Labour Leadership candidates and ended up securing just 4.5% of the vote (compared to Jeremy Corbyn's 59.5%). That's pretty clear evidence that these people are not "moderates", but actually representatives of a tiny and deeply unpopular right-wing fringe of the Labour Party.
Jeremy Corbyn is a moderate
Jeremy Corbyn is an economic moderate. He's the kind of mild-mannered social democrat who would be considered quite normal in any of the Scandinavian social democratic countries. The problem is that the political spectrum in the UK has been skewed so far to the right over the last four decades that these days anyone who doesn't subscribe to George Osborne's fanatically right-wing economic agenda is derided as some kind of raving communist by the bulk of the mainstream press.
The idea that it's wrong to load the burden of austerity onto the poor and ordinary in order to pay for the excesses of the tiny super-rich minority isn't extremist. If more people understood that this is precisely what is happening right now, they'd see that Corbyn is actually talking a lot of sense.
The idea that the vital infrastructure and services should be run as not-for-profit public services isn't extremist, in fact the majority of the British public agree with Corbyn on that one.
The idea that the NHS shouldn't be deliberately starved of funding, carved up and given away to the private sector isn't extremist, once again the majority of people agree with Corbyn on that one too.
Jeremy Corbyn isn't an extremist and neither are the majority of the public who agree with many of his core economic policies. The problem is that right-wingers in the mainstream media have skewed the debate so far to the right that ideologically driven fanatics like George Osborne and David Cameron are described as the norm, while mild-mannered social democrats like Jeremy Corbyn are derided as dangerous extremists.
This was no kind of victory
As for their so-called flexing of muscles, most of these right-wingers obtained their backbench committee positions completely unopposed. Corbyn undeniably has the support of the Labour membership, but the Blairites who preceded him spent the last two decades parachuting in economically right-wing candidates into Labour safe seats, meaning there just aren't enough non-Blairite politicians left in the party to fill every minor position. It's hardly a victory for right-wingers like Flint, Hunt and Leslie that there's nobody left to oppose them taking up their minor backbench roles, it's a demonstration of how far the Parliamentary Labour Party has drifted from its founding principles.
It's absolutely clear that the vast majority of Labour Party supporters don't want these right-wingers running the party, but after two decades of New Labour purging the party of dissenting voices there just aren't enough non-Blairite MPs left to fill every minor backbench role, so some of these positions have ended up going to embarrassments like Caroline Flint, Tristram Hunt and Chris Leslie.
The agenda
The mainstream media agenda to demonise Jeremy Corbyn as an extremist and talk up the most right-wing elements of the Labour Party as "moderates" couldn't be clearer.
The idea that by positioning themselves ever so slightly to the left of the most right-wing Tory government in living memory these people are somehow "moderates" is utterly ridiculous. As is the idea that a Labour Party led by these people would be remotely electable. These people couldn't even get 5% of Labour Party supporters to back their right-wing candidate during the Labour leadership election, so how on earth could they ever get some 25% of the entire electorate to buy into their disgusting brand of pink Thatcherism?
I think the conclusion here is pretty obvious. I'm pretty sure that most politically aware people know by now to take the Murdoch Press and the Daily Mail with a huge pinch of salt, but the obvious false narrative and biased language in this Guardian piece should serve as a warning that it's important to always use your critical judgement whatever the source.
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In 2008 the UK economy collapsed into a crisis from which it has yet to recover. Despite the endlessly repeated Tory rhetoric that this crisis was caused by the Labour party, the real cause of the crisis was a global spree of reckless financial sector gambling, often on extremely complex financial products that the buyer clearly didn't even understand.
The Labour party were somewhat to blame for not only refusing to undo the financial sector deregulations of the Thatcher era, but actually even further deregulating the financial markets themselves. But the only Tory complaints at the time that Labour were further deregulating the financial sector were that Gordon Brown's deregulations hadn't gone far enough, and that the UK should strive to be more like Ireland!
Reckless financial sector speculation caused the global financial sector insolvency crisis and necessitated the biggest state subsidies in economic history to prevent the UK banks collapsing into their own black holes of debt. The problem is that it doesn't matter how much evidence there is that deregulated capitalism caused the financial sector insolvency crisis, the Tories and the right-wing dominated press are absolutely determined to create the simplistic narrative that the Labour party, and welfare spending are to blame for the fallout from the financial sector crisis.
The Tory narrative is that the Labour party "bankrupted" the economy with their excessive welfare spending, and the actual facts of the matter are irrelevant.
Instead of attempting to offer an alternative narrative built on the actual facts, such as the fact that the bankers' bailouts cost more than the entire national debt that the Tories endlessly fearmonger about, the Labour leader Ed Miliband has decided to capitulate.
Instead of attempting to counter the "blame Labour" right-wing rhetoric with the truth, Miliband and the shadow Work and Pensions secretary Rachael Reeves have decided instead to try and out-Tory the Tories.
Their latest plan is to revoke social security for 18-21 year olds, and replace it with a pitiful benefit only payable if the youngsters do workfare or training schemes. No doubt the same alphabet soup of extremely dodgy corporate outsourcing parasites (A4e, G4S, Serco, Sudexo, Capita, Atos ...) will be lining themselves up to administer the Labour party workfare schemes, and provide the Labour party "training" schemes, just as they have cashed in for the last four years administering the Tory parties workfare schemes and the Tory parties "training" schemes (in which people are "trained" at the taxpayers' expense how to wipe their bottoms by these companies).
In my view a much more sensible strategy for the Labour party would have been to attack the Tories for the fact that long-term youth unemployment has risen 57% since the Tories came to power in 2010, and that this huge rise has come despite the ever increasing use of workfare schemes designed to artificially exclude hundreds of thousands of (mainly young) people from the unemployment figures, even though they still receive unemployment benefits throughout their term of compulsory unpaid labour.
This astonishing rise in the rate of long-term youth unemployment is by no means the first example of the gross incompetence of Iain Duncan Smith providing Ed Miliband with a huge stick to whack the Tories with, but Ed preferring to set about beating himself over the head with it instead.
Back in February 2013 the Cort of Appeals declared Iain Duncan Smith's Workfare schemes for the unemployed unlawful, but instead of using this humiliating court judgement to attack Iain Duncan Smith, Ed Miliband and the Labour leadership actually decided to collude with the Tories in order to help Iain Duncan Smith get a vile piece of retroactive legislation rushed through parliament in a single day. Not only did Miliband refuse to attack Iain Duncan Smith for his incompetence, he actually helped IDS to stick two fingers up at the courts by quickly rewriting his own hopelessly botched legislation and applying the changes retroactively so that his workfare rules would have been lawful had they been written that way in the past.
Now Miliband is refusing to attack the Tories for the huge rise in long-term youth unemployment since 2010, and instead seems to want to further reinforce the Tory narratives that welfare spending and "scroungers" are to blame for the crisis through his new plan of attacking the pitiful amounts paid out to workless 18-21 year olds, instead of actively doing anything to actually help them.
Given that the economic crisis was undeniably caused by the bankers, a much better Labour party strategy might have been to highlight the huge rise in long-term youth unemployment since the bankers trashed the economy and to propose a new tax on bankers bonuses designed to fund paid apprenticeships for young people in real businesses (rather than ludicrous taxpayer funded "how to wipe your bottom" courses with A4e).
Instead of developing a strategy which highlights the reckless bankers and the incompetent Tories as the culprits, Ed Miliband's Labour party seem intent on painting the victims of the bankers' crisis as the guilty parties who are deserving of punishment for their "idleness".
Ed Miliband and Rachael Reeves seem intent on punishing a generation of youngsters who were still in primary school when the bankers were trashing the economy with their reckless gambling spree, because the economy still hasn't recovered sufficiently to offer these kids the prospects of real paid employment. This may seem like a sensible strategy from within the bubble of the Labour party leadership, but to countless thousands of traditional Labour voters it's bound to kill the last vestiges of hope that New Labour offer anything other than vindictive Tory-lite policies designed to appeal to readers of the Daily Mail and the S*n.
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Anyone who remembers the details of the 2010 General Election campaign would attest that David Cameron is a barefaced liar, who will say literally anything if he thinks it may work to his political advantage. For those with short memories, and those that don't really pay attention to politics but stumbled across this page accidentally, here are two of Cameron's most oft cited pre-election porkies.
"We'll cut the deficit, not the NHS"
Which was swiftly followed by a £20 billion NHS budget cut once the Tories got into power. The next quote also realtes to the NHS:
"No more top-down reorganisations of the NHS"
This one was particularly egregious considering that even as he was repeating this soundbyte, plans to introduce the largest organisational restructuring in the entire history of the NHS (aimed at privatising vast swathes of the NHS into the hands of private sector companies) were being drawn up by the Shadow Secretary of State Andrew Lansley. Had the public known about these secret Tory plans to sell off vast chunks of the NHS, the Tories would have lost hundreds of thousands of votes and almost certainly failed to even scrape together enough votes to form a coalition government.
As it was, the vast majority of the UK population were well aware of the Tory track record and refused to vote for them. Only 23.5% of eligible voters bothered to vote Tory, meaning that 76.5% didn't. As it happened this lack of public support didn't matter because the Tories managed to obtain power by forming a coalition with the Lib-Dems, who, in return for a taste of Tory power, promised to vote through all kinds of extremist Tory legislation, even stuff that wasn't even in the Tory manifesto like Lansley's enormous top-down reorganisation of the NHS which was passed into law in 2011.
Tory apologists may attempt to deflect attention from these transparent lies by claiming that all modern politicians lie in their pre-election campaigns, and to a certain extent they are right: In 1997 Tony Blair and the Neo-Labour lot lied about bringing in new rules to prevent political corruption ("sleaze" as it was called in those days), but they didn't and ended up taking plenty of dodgy donations themselves from people like Bernie Ecclestone. David Cameron's deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg also proved himself a pre-election liar by voting through plans to triple university tuition fees for English students aftrer "pledging" to vote against any plans to raise fees just a few months before, a pledge that won his party 100,000s of votes from students, former students and academics.
The problem with this defence is that Cameron and the Tories have continued brazenly lying to the public throughout their administration. Anyone with an interest in military affairs will already know about one of Cameron's big early 2013 lies. He promised that there would be no British "boots on the ground" in the Mali conflict in mid-January, only to decide to send British troops into the conflict zone just a couple of weeks later in late January.
January 2013 also witnessed what I consider to be one of his most egregious lies yet. In a scripted Party Political broadcast, Cameron claimed that "we are paying down Britain's debts". In fact the combination of the catastrophic failure of George Osborne's ideological austerity experiment and rampant industrial scale tax-dodging is creating a situation where the economy is flatlining, Osborne is missing all of his economic predictions and the national debt is still growing at an alarming rate. Given the appalling economic figures in recent months it is debatable whether the Tories are even cutting the deficit, let alone the debt.
The Labour MP Rachel Reeves was quick to pick up on this brazen lie and reported him to the UK Statistics Authority. The response from Andrew Dilnot, the Chairman of UKSA, was damning. He confirmed that there was absolutely no basis for Cameron's claim and then pointed out that the national debt has risen from £811.3bn, or 55.3 per cent of GDP in 2010, to £1,111.4bn, or 70.7 per cent of GDP. It is difficult to obtain any reliable estimates of how bad the debt will be by the General Election in 2015 (The OBR, the ONS and the IMF have all repeatedly produced over-optimistic economic predictions which then need to be downgraded time and again) however a decent ballpark estimate could be £1.4 - £1.5 trillion, or 80% - 90% of GDP.
Dilnot also took the time to explain to Cameron the difference between the debt and the deficit, something that many Tories have struggled with. The way I like to explain it is that a debt and a deficit in economics are analogous to speed and acceleration in physics. The debt is the actual value of the thing and the deficit is the rate of change in the value of the thing.
The big problem for Cameron is that most of the other Tory MPs that have jumbled up the concepts of the debt and the deficit, (or even claimed that they are the same thing!) have tended to do so in the heat of the moment, in live interviews or during unscripted speeches. Cameron has no such excuse. He lied about the national debt in a carefully scripted statement in a party political broadcast, for which there is absolutely no justification because there are only two possible conclusions to draw:
A. Cameron is too stupid to even realise that the script that he was reading contains outright lies about the economy.
B .Or, he knew perfectly well that it was a lie, is comfortable with telling lies to the public and holds the public in such low regard that he thinks that they are so stupid and ill informed that they won't even realise that he's lying to them.
In my view, either one of these explanations make him entirely unfit to be Prime Minister.
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