One of the trickiest things to understand about self-declared "centrists" is how they're so insulated from reality that they're incapable of even understanding the damage they keep doing to their own cause.
The primary fixation of the "centrists" at present is demanding another EU referendum that they've patronisingly called a "people's vote" as if the 33.5 million who voted in the 2016 referendum were somehow un-people.
Giving your campaign an absurdly patronising name is bad enough, but anyone with a grain of sense should be able to spot the massive glaring risk with this "another referendum now" strategy, which is that if Remainers conspire to lose it (like they did the last one), then they'll have created a cast-iron irreversible double-mandate for Brexit.
With this risk of creating an irreversible double Brexit mandate in mind, you'd think that "centrists" and other Remainers would be focusing all their efforts on trying to create as much public appeal as possible for the idea of stopping Brexit ... But no! A lot of the bone-headed, shockingly out-of-touch, unbelievably divisive, and downright dishonest behaviour of "centrists" looks like it's actually designed to make the general public hate Remainers.
"Taking the piste"
Andrew Adonis' Tweet about a 2nd referendum on his mates winter skiing options may have some kind of niche appeal amongst the most militant of Remainers, who knows? But if the replies are anything to go by, he's spectacularly misjudged the mood of the nation.
Brexit happened in the first place because Tory austerity dogma and wage repression policies caused an unprecedented collapse in living standards.
"Centrists" compounded the problem through their failure to pin the blame for this collapse in living standards on Tory government policy for fear of implicating themselves too (the Lib-Dems actively enabled Tory austerity dogma, and Labour "centrists" somehow decided that imitating Tory austerity dogma rather than opposing it would win them the 2015 General Election!).
This "centrist" failure left the door wide open for ukippers, hard-right Tories, and assorted extreme-right hate groups to falsely pin the blame for the consequences of Tory austerity and wage repression on immigrants and the EU.
Since the Brexit vote things have got even worse. More people in dire poverty, more people in exploitative low-paid jobs, more people feeling the effects of Tory wage repression, more people struggling to get by, more people relying on food bank handouts just to survive ...
Yet here's one of the most high profile Remainers (an unelected lord) actively fulfilling the caricature of an out-of-touch Remainer elitist living the high life while the ignored millions continue to struggle to survive!
How could anyone ever think that these appalling optics could help the Remainer cause?
Manufacturing the news
Brexiteers won the 2016 referendum with an absolute mass of deceptions, distortions, and outright lies. Even the Vote Leave campaign chief openly admitted that they wouldn't have won without the '£350 million for the NHS' lie.
It seems that rather than oppose this kind of outrageous propaganda, "centrists" have decided to imitate the same tactics to manufacture outrage and distort public opinion to their will, with the Guardian leading the charge.
An outrageously deceptive headline misrepresenting Jeremy Corbyn's Brexit policy in order to trigger a tsunami of rage shares on the Friday, an then following it up with an article on the Sunday openly gloating about the bitter internal Labour conflicts triggered by the mass rage sharing of Friday's deceptive headline and even outright lying about Jeremy Corbyn's Brexit stance!
Anyone who has paid attention over the last three years can't have failed to notice the bitter "anti- Corbyn" agenda of "centrist" hacks at the Guardian. But the terrifying thing is that this anti-Corbyn groupthink mentality is so deeply embedded at Guardian towers that they're wilfully spreading deceptions and outright lies in order to manufacture divisions amongst opponents of Tory Brexit.
Any Guardian hack with a shred of journalistic integrity should be outraged that the organisation they work for is conducting such an obvious propaganda war to use deceptions and lies to attack Corbyn and drive a wedge between the Labour left and the Remain campaign, when any sensible strategy to minimise the Brexit damage should be aimed at unifying all opponents of Tory Brexit, rather than deliberately infuriating the Labour-left with anti-Corbyn propaganda and lies.
Preaching to the converted
I vehemently opposed Brexit in 2016, and I've continually opposed the Tories' shambolic and incompetent handling of Brexit ever since, but JK Rowling's astoundingly patronising, hate-fuelled, faux biblical Twitter rant is so obviously appalling and that ordinary people must be wondering how she ended up so consumed by such bitterness and hatred, despite living a life of wealth, luxury, and almost constant acclaim.
Another puzzle is how thousands of "centrist" types apparently enjoyed this utterly cringeworthy display of preaching to the converted so much that they actively liked it and shared it!
If you wanted to actually reinforce the views of Brexiters, showing them this horrific display of patronising and elitist "centrist" bile would surely work infinitely better than composing some new lie to plaster on the side of a bus.
Counter-productive behaviour
If "centrists" were even remotely capable of learning from their own mistakes they would have clocked that their barrages of smears and abuse aimed at discrediting Jeremy Corbyn during the 2015 Labour leadership election only ended up boosting his popularity.
If they had any sense whatever they'd have got to grips with the concept of counter-productive behaviour, and evolved their campaigning strategies accordingly.
Another lesson "centrists" should obviously have learned is that their lamentable campaign tactics during the 2016 referendum somehow managed to hand a bunch of hard-right pro-austerity Brextremist charlatans an astounding victory, despite the fact they demonstrably didn't even have a plan for what to do next if they did somehow end up winning!
That "centrists" so clearly haven't learned either of these lessons should leave anyone who opposes Tory Brexit sick with worry, because presuming these people get the second referendum they want so much, how is Tory Brextremism ever meant to be defeated with a bunch of out-of-touch, unbelievably divisive, bone-headed, elitist, downright dishonest, and unbelievably counter-productive people like this fronting the campaign against it?
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Last week the Sky News reporter Lewis Goodall turned up in Stoke to vox pop a load of people who were queuing to get into a Jeremy Corbyn speech. One of the people he spoke to accidentally said that Jeremy Corbyn had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (instead of the Sean McBride Peace Prize).
Goodall then included this short clip in a compilation deriding the "cult of Corbyn". The piece then went mega viral on Twitter with right-wingers and the usual 'centrist' bullies absolutely dog-piling the poor woman for her stupidity.
What nobody was ever told amongst this outpouring of hatred, contempt and derision was that the woman in question had quickly realised her mistake, then asked Lewis Goodall not to use the clip where she misspoke.
He ran it anyway.
Of course running a clip when a member of the public has asked you not to because they realised they'd misspoken betrays an extreme lack of journalistic ethics on Lewis Goodall's part, but this isn't really the main issue.
The main problem is the way the mainstream media and a bunch of vile Twitter bullies savagely attacked a random member of the public in a desperate proxy attack on Jeremy Corbyn.
We've all seen the shocking levels of anti-Corbyn bias in the mainstream media. The way they endlessly promote absolute rubbish like not bowing-deeply enough, fake photoshop pictures to make it look like he was dancing, the Czech spy nonsense, the Russian stooge nonsense, the wreath nonsense ... all in order to distract public attention away from the grotesque track record of the Tory government they're trying to protect.
Corbyn has shown that he's strong enough to withstand these attacks, and left-wing public figures like me have gradually learned to withstand the regular tides of insults, abuse, defamatory accusations, lies, and threats from right-wingers and so-called 'centrists' (Labour right-wingers being about on a par with Ukippers for abusive blind fury responses to information and opinions they don't like).
But it's a completely different story when the anti-Corbyn mob turn their hatred on a random member of the public in a desperate attempt to portray everyone who supports Jeremy Corbyn and his democratic socialist policies as members of some kind of stupid cult.
Despite asking that the clip not be broadcast, the poor woman has been reduced to ruins, anxiety, and depression. Ashamed that she's been made to look so stupid, and even more ashamed at the damage she feels her seven second peace prize comment has done to Jeremy Corbyn and the mass movement for democratic socialism.
If mainstream media hacks and Twitter bullies are prepared to do this to an ordinary member of the public as part of their vendetta against Jeremy Corbyn, who on earth would trust them to speak out on behalf of ordinary members of the public when they're suffering systematic persecution by the government, wage repression, draconian sanctions, the effects of Tory austerity dogma, or anything else?
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The Guardian columnist John Harris is the latest mainstream media journalist to launch an attack on independent media in a column in which he disparages non-mainstream media sources for supposedly committing the crime of confusing "advocacy" and "analysis" as if mainstream media journalists are righteous and broadly unbiased commentators trying to paint a fair picture using "analysis", while non-mainstream journalists are dangerous rabble-rousing usurpers peddling a dangerous form of radical "advocacy".
It's easy to see how mainstream media pundits like Harris are so terrified of independent media. People like him have deluded themselves into thinking that they're the righteous gatekeepers of public discourse, so it enrages them to see social media providing a platform to political outsiders to say things that fall way outside what they consider to be the spectrum of acceptable political opinion.
They preferred it back when people like me were pretty much voiceless because people from unremarkable working class backgrounds would never ever have been handed lucrative newspaper columns or invited on TV politics shows to air the kind of political views that were considered to be shockingly heretical by the political pundit class until the rise of Jeremy Corbyn.
They're furious because the rise of Jeremy Corbyn has proven there is actually a strong public appetite for once-heretical left-wing stuff like public ownership and a more humane welfare system that doesn't treat the most vulnerable people in society as vermin to be trampled all over to satisfy the blood lust of Daily Mail columnists.
Harris exists in such a bubble of delusion that he even quotes the Times hack and Twitter bore Hugo Rifkind to attack social media, as if a Rupert Murdoch employee and privately educated son of a government minister in the Thatcher regime is somehow a natural authority on unbiased journalism!
The fact is that all political commentators are biased. Mainstream media journalists all too often promote the biases of the newspaper they write for like a pack of amoral mercenaries, or push the groupthink of the Westminster political class that they've allowed themselves to get way too cosy with.
I've never been afraid to admit that I'm politically biased (against ruinous hard-right economic dogma, warmongering, profiteering, and corruption and in favour of social justice and democratic accountability), but I've also repeatedly warned my readers that the ones to really watch out for are the commentators who pretend that they're neutral and unbiased observers, because they're lying to you.
Even if they've managed to create a convoluted self-justification for having appointed themselves the gatekeepers of public opinion, they're deluding themselves if they pretend to that they're trying to be unbiased because the only true form of political neutrality is complete and total apathy.
If they can report on stuff like the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people, the appalling humanitarian consequences of Britain's catastrophic foreign policy interventions in Iraq and Libya, or the ideologically driven Tory assault on workers' wages, labour rights and working conditions, yet not advocate for change to prevent the suffering, death and impoverishment of their fellow human beings in future, then these people are callous and complicit monsters, not noble impartial journalists they see themselves as, which is exactly the point that Harris used his column to condemn the Labour veteran Dennis Skinner for making.
Harris' retort is based on the incoherent argument that somehow only dispassionate observers are capable of holding the powerful to account, and those who actually advocate for change when they witness corruption or injustice are somehow guilty of creating a world where the powerful are not held to account for their actions!
Another major flaw in Harris' self-aggrandising posturing as some kind of more-or-less neutral analyst is belied by his enthusiastic support for the Anyone But Corbyn coup last summer, followed by his lazy recycling of the pessimistic pre-election Guardian trope that Jeremy Corbyn would lead Labour to a historic hiding, rather than the the vibrant renewal of the party and the first increase in the Labour vote since 1997.
During the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup last summer Harris wrote an anti-Corbyn Guardian column in which he bitterly prophesied the end of the Labour Party, cluelessly decried social media as "probably the worst thing that ever happened to the political left", and hysterically accused left-wing independent media of "grinding the Labour Party to dust".
In his naval-gazing worldview this kind of extreme rhetoric in his own column wasn't a display of intensely biased advocacy against Jeremy Corbyn that it so clearly was. It wasn't an effort to manipulate the reader against the Labour left and left-wing independent media either. In his mind it was common sense analysis, because this kind of intensely biased fearmongering groupthink nonsense was absolutely rife in the Westminster bubble and the chattering classes with which Harris and his Guardian mates associate.
Just a year ago Harris was actually deriding social media as some kind of terrible curse that the left would never recover from, but the public didn't heed his fearmongering diatribes, and left-wing activists absolutely trouncing the Tories on social media turned out to be a decisive factor in the UK Labour Party's 10.5% increase in vote share against a backdrop of other democratic socialist parties capitulating all over Europe (Greece, Netherlands, France, Germany and soon Austria).
Harris considered his often intensely biased and delusional diatribe last year to be analysis rather than advocacy because it chimed with the groupthink of his peers, and he considers the output of non-mainstream media to be advocacy rather than analysis because it so often contradicts the myopic groupthink of his fellow mainstream media mates.
It was the same story again with the General Election. Harris and his groupthink riddled peers in the mainstream media predicted doom for the Labour Party, but the Corbyn surge resulted in the biggest surprise result in decades.
At first mainstream media pundits were flabergasted and unable to explain how the Corbyn surge had happened. But now they're increasingly furious because it's dawning on them that millions of people just ignored their lazy groupthink rhetoric in defence of the orthodox neoliberal consensus because social media has empowered a new generation of independent journalists to attempt to describe what people are actually feeling, rather than trying to manufacture people's political opinions for them to match whatever the mainstream media groupthink brigade have decided the public should be thinking.
Harris and his ilk see it as their job to guard the boundaries of public opinion, and they hate the increasing amount of influence over public discourse that social media is affording to outsiders like me. That's why he describes Facebook journalism as polemicists, without a hint of self-awareness about the fact that his column about the horrors of Jeremy Corbyn, the labour left and social media last year wasn't just polemical, it was downright delusional too.
To get an idea of how mainstream media groupthink leads to highly selective accusations of bias, take the power and influence of JK Rowling on social media, especially Twitter. How often have you heard mainstream media journalists pointing out that her political views are intensely biased (which they obviously are), or complaining that she repeatedly uses her huge social media power to promote vile misogynistic British Unionist troll accounts like Brian Spanner, and to bully people who disagree with her views?
You don't ever hear about Rowling's bias and bullying tactics in supposedly left-liberal mainstream media publications like the Guardian because Rowling's brand of bitter anti-Corbyn rhetoric and intense British nationalist bias chime perfectly with their own worldviews, so it's sites like The Canary and Evolve Politics who keep getting it in the neck for being biased and having too much influence, while Rowling's bias and levels of influence go totally unremarked upon by Harris and his ilk.
Aside from the hypocrisy, the self-aggrandisement and the very one-sided accusations of bias, another of the worst things about Harris' is that it's so unoriginal. There have been several concerted mainstream media attacks on independent media sources like the Skwawkbox and The Canary since the election, The BBC's Nick Robinson had a foot stamping tantrum about independent media last week, and now Harris is just lazily rehashing the mainstream media groupthink on the terrifying threat of independent media, just like last year he was lazily churnalising the intensely biased negative mainstream media groupthink on Jeremy Corbyn and the revival of the left.
Harris' latest attack on independent media is little more than a toddler tantrum. He knows that he's been proven spectacularly wrong about social media being some kind of deathly curse on the Labour Party. He knows that the fearmongering anti-Corbyn rhetoric that he and his fellow Guardian columnists concocted last summer is now about as appealing as a bucket of cold sick to anyone but Tories and the obnoxious trolls who populate the Guardian comments section after the exodus of people fleeing their anti-left bias, toxic comments Below-the-line atmosphere, and desperately deteriorating journalistic standards. And he knows that the mainstream media establishment club are badly losing control of the vice-like grip they've had on the boundaries of public debate for decades.
He's furious about all of this, but it's telling that all he can do about it is write an impotent and unoriginal foot stamping column that demonstrates his total unwillingness to accept the changing mediascape.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
