The 2017 General Election result caught the myopic political pundit class totally by surprise. They were hoping for Corbyn to be wiped out so that they could lecture the public about the foolishness of hoping for a better, fairer future.
They missed a few incredibly important things. They failed to factor in the huge number of Labour Party members, they failed to factor in the role of social media, and they failed to factor in that the British public are absolutely sick of Aussie-style much-raking politics from the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Lynton Crosby.
Some journalists have taken this humbling in the right way. For example Medhi Hasan (the chief political editor of Huffington Post) said this
"I would not let myself believe, as many others on the left did, that a Corbyn premiership was a very real and live possibility, rather than a mad fantasy, a progressive delusion. I was wrong. Completely, utterly, hopelessly wrong … but never have I been happier to be wrong." [source]In my view this shows an excellent balance of contrition and optimism. He's admitted that he's been proven wrong, and indicated that he's going to stop patronising us and take us seriously now.
Meanwhile several Guardian columnists are still pushing their desperate anti-Corbyn agendas this week, despite having had their noses well and truly rubbed in their own "unelectacble" excrement by the electorate.
These people exist in their own bubbles of privilege, and fail to understand that although not perfect (no politician, no person ever is) Corbyn represents the best chance we've got of overturning the neoliberal Westminster hegemony that has held a vice-like grip over the British political system, and the British economy ever since 1979.
The options are that: they don't want to overturn the neoliberal hegemony ("we're quite well off under the current system so screw you guys at the bottom, we want things to stay the same"), they're hoping for a more ideal candidate to come along (far more naive than the Corbyn supporters they relentlessly attack for supposedly being "unrealistic") or they simply don't understand the importance of replacing the neoliberal hegemony with a kind of politics that delivers for everyone, not just the privileged few (in which case they have no place at all commenting about politics in a supposedly left-liberal publication).
Just look at the concerted efforts these people went to in order to destroy the best hope that democratic socialism has had in years.
These dismal people were actually willing a massive Tory landslide in order to crow that democratic socialism is "unelectable" and call for some uninspiring red Tory from the right-wing of the Labour Party to take over.🎥 | The 'left liberal' Guardian's campaign against @JeremyCorbyn was as relentless as the right-wing Daily Mail & The Sun. Here's the proof: pic.twitter.com/HPOFNjjBgX— @ROBN1980 (@robn1980) June 11, 2017
They actually give that little care for people they perceive to be below them in the social pecking order that they'd gladly sacrifice disabled people, Internet freedom, our human rights, the NHS, pretty much anything rather than admit that they were wrong about Jeremy Corbyn, and wrong about what the public considers "electable".
Of course there are still some fantastic contributors at the Guardian, but the bitter anti-Corbyn agenda of this supposedly left-liberal newspaper, even after having been proved so wrong, is now so intensely annoying that I'm seriously considering putting them alongside absolute rubbish like The S*n, Daily Mail. Express, Telegraph & Spectator in the "never sharing a link to that site again" pile.
I guess they wouldn't care so much if I stopped using them as a source in my work, but to me the decision to bin them would be a great sadness. I grew up in a working class family, but we had the Guardian on the table. It's the first newspaper I ever read.
Relegating the Guardian to the "shit media" pile would be like having a faithful pet put down.
But to be fair they've been relentlessly crapping all over the carpet for years now (supporting Blair's warmongering, refusing to properly scrutinise Gordon Brown's PFI economic alchemy schemes, uncritical analysis of the financial sector crash, a clear Lib-Dem bias even after years of Coalition chaos, routinely reporting ruinous hard-right austerity dogma as fact rather than scrutinising it, savage and even outright abusive anti-Corbyn bias...).
The fantastic Mhairi Black once said that she didn't leave the Labour Party, the Labour Party left her, and I totally agreed with her. But now Jeremy Corbyn has taken it back and set it back on its original mission of defending the ordinary people from the greed of the establishment elitists.
I feel the same about the Guardian. If I bin them as a reliable site it won't be because I've left them, it'll because they left me years ago and they're refusing to come back even though they've got the perfect opportunity now that the electorate have proven that Jeremy Corbyn is electable.
If Labour is recoverable, then so too is the Guardian, but in order for that to happen an awful lot of their columnists would have to climb down out of their ivory towers and eat humble pie by admitting that the electorate was right when they were wrong, rather than carrying on the anti-Corbyn agenda they've been pushing for the last two years.
It's time for these people to either get on board with progressive politics, or to have a bit of honesty and admit that the neoliberal hegemony has been alright for them because they've got nice salaries and nice big houses out of it.
Pretending to be progressive whilst attacking the best progressive option we've actually got simply won't cut it any more.
I'll give it a few weeks, but if the bitter out-of-touch Corbyn-bashing at the Guardian continues, then they will have to be taken to the online vets.
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