The siege of Aleppo has resulted in an extraordinary amount of savagely partisan propaganda. The absence of reliable journalists and humanitarian organisations on the ground there means that distortions, exaggerations and lies from either side have spread like wildfire.
One incredible example of the spread of bizarrely distorted propaganda is the endlessly repeated claim that up to 100,000 civilians remained trapped in the 2km militia controlled area of Aleppo. If this claim is true then that besieged district of Aleppo was by far the most heavily populated area on the planet, with over seven times the population density of Hong Kong!
It's not clear where this ludicrous 100,000 claim originated, but it was soon being spread all over the mainstream media, being repeated unquestioningly by mainstream media stooges and supposedly anti-establishment commentators like Owen Jones alike.
The brazen misrepresentation of reality can also be seen in the mainstream media coverage of the ongoing evacuation of the last militant occupied area of Aleppo. In reality the evacuation has been carefully negotiated to allow the militant occupiers of Aleppo safe passage to the militant controlled area of Idlib in return for the safe passage of aid convoys into the besieged Assad-loyal villages of Al-Fu'ah and Kafriya.
The fact that the combatants who occupied Aleppo for four years have been allowed to leave on convoys of busses to fight another day (perhaps in Syria, perhaps elsewhere in the Middle East, or in Europe) is being portrayed very oddly in the British mainstream media.
Instead of admitting that militants and their families are being allowed to escape from the small besieged district of Aleppo they had been cornered in, so that the relentless fighting in Aleppo can finally come to an end, the British press are describing the evacuation of militant fighters purely as an evacuation of civilians.
The Daily Mirror described the evacuation of militant fighters and their families as "buses packed with terrified civilians leaves besieged city". The Guardian coverage barely even implied that militants were amongst the evacuees by quoting an International Red Cross source saying that the "majority" of evacuees were civilians (meaning some were combatants). The BBC at least openly admitted the fact that militants were being evacuated, but waited until the fourth paragraph to do so. Not only did the ITV coverage fail to mention that militant fighters were among the evacuees, but they also recycled the ludicrous 100,000 trapped civilians figure too.
It's a sign of the contempt that mainstream journalists hold towards the general public that they expect us to believe that all of the evacuees from Aleppo are all innocent civilians, and presumably that the militants who occupied the city for four years just somehow just disappeared into the ether, despite being totally surrounded in their final besieged enclave.
The question has to be why the UK media appears so reluctant to tell the British public the truth about Islamist militants being allowed to leave Aleppo amongst the civilian evacuees.
Another mainstream media agenda to consider is the glaring contrast between the hysterical mainstream media reaction to the siege of Aleppo and the near complete silence over the ongoing siege of Mosul in Iraq. The parallels between the two sieges are undeniable. Both cities are occupied by Islamist militants with thousands of civilians trapped in the crossfire. The big difference is that the siege of Aleppo was carried out by Syrian government forces, Iranian fighters and Russia, while the siege of Mosul is being carried out by Iraqi government forces, Kurdish fighters and the United States.
One battle has been routinely described in the western media with phrases like "complete meltdown of humanity" while the other has gone almost totally ignored since the early days of the siege.
The mainstream media's over-reliance on the grandiose sounding Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is another example of western media organisations reporting biased material at face value. Reports in the mainstream press never mention the fact that this official sounding organisation is actually run from Coventry by a single anti-Assad campaigner who hasn't visited Syria in ten years. It doesn't matter how often this is pointed out, the mainstream press continue to give the partisan SOHR the same kind of billing as the United Nations or legitimate aid organisations like the Red Crescent.
Of course Russian media outlets are biased in the other direction (some of them describing all of the evacuees as "militants and their families"), but that's absolutely no excuse for the western mainstream media spreading absurdly inflated figures, relying on information gleaned from partisan sources, or the absurd efforts by the UK press to portray the evacuation of militants from Aleppo as a purely civilian relief operation.
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The Former Guardian columnist Alex Andreou has posted a savagely misleading Acid Attack of an article entitled "The Truth About Jeremy Corbyn" which attacks Jeremy Corbyn and derides his supporters on his blog. At the end of the article Andreou announces that he's taking a Twitter-break with an insinuation that the reaction of people who are opposed to the Anyone But Corbyn coup would be a load of intolerable abuse.
The article is misleadingly entitled "The Truth About Jeremy Corbyn"
This article is a response to Andreou's Acid Attack article and it contains no abuse other than references to the numerous examples of the generalised abuse that Andreou hurled at Jeremy Corbyn and the hundreds of thousands of Labour members who support him, and exposures of the multiple abuses of logic, reason and evidence that Andreou peppered throughout his unpleasant, intellectually dishonest and fundamentally contradictory hatchet job.
Concern Trolling
Andreou opened his piece by claiming that he used to love Corbyn as much as he now despises him by saying "I have been as vociferous in my opposition to Corbyn as I was in supporting him a year ago".
This contrasts jarringly with his admission later on in the article that he only voted for Corbyn because he was the least-worst of the candidates. here's exactly what he said:
"I voted for him in the first place, because I thought all four candidates last time were unelectable. So I thought: 'Fuck it. If none of them can reach out to the wider electorate, I might as well vote for the one whose politics most closely align with mine'."
If he admits that he only voted for Corbyn because Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall were even worse candidates then he clearly and demonstrably wasn't as keen on Corbyn in 2015 as he is keep to trash him in 2016.
Pretending that you loved something before you set about explaining how much other people should hate it is a classic dishonest debating tactic that is commonly referred to as "concern trolling". People like Andreou try to get you onside by saying they understand how you feel in order to then relentlessly work you into switching to their side of the debate.
Corbyn vs Smith
In his initial bid to win Corbyn sympathisers over with kind words before working them with a relentless tirade of anti-Corbyn rhetoric Andreou admitted that "Corbyn has been hugely misrepresented by most media" that "the right wing press has been responsible for the worst kind of monstering" that "the lack of loyalty shown by a small cabal of colleagues, briefing against him from day one, is vile" and that "he was never properly supported or given a decent chance", but he dismisses all of that as being "the job he signed up for" as if that magically makes it all OK!
He then goes on to admit that Owen Smith is "a bit blah" and "ain't exactly Obama" which is just about the only reference to Smith in the entire 6,300 word hatchet job of an article.
Tellingly Andreou never admits that he supports Owen Smith, or gives any single reason why Smith would make a better leader than Jeremy Corbyn. But then the clear point of the article is to damage Corbyn as much as possible, not to explain why the only alternative option for Labour members to vote for would actually be any better.
Alleged abuse
Andreou constantly whines about the supposed abuse he's received for criticising Jeremy Corbyn, but forgets to cite any examples of it, never mind any proof that the abuse came from actual members of the Labour Party.
Of course nobody should have to put up with abuse, but as a relatively high-profile political commentator it's inevitable. Long-term readers of my work will remember examples of the abuse, insults and threats that have been hurled at me for expressing my political opinions. I don't like it, but I don't use the abusive comments of a small minority of people who comment on my page to generalise about larger cohorts of people like Andreou does.
In taking a stance that is highly likely to be seen as pro-establishment by his mainly left-wing readership, Andreou knew perfectly well that he was basically Above the Line Trolling, so crying because the people he has antagonised didn't like it is a pretty lame performance.
By weaponising the claimed abuse of unnamed individuals in order to attack one of the only mainstream politicians who actively avoids the kind of dirty personal politics that David Cameron, Lynton Crosby and the Tories have legitimised through their repeated use, Andreou is simply adding to the downwards pressure on the already dispiritingly low standard of political debate in the UK.
If Andreou really has suffered any serious abuse and intimidation he should report it to the authorities because stuff like threats of violence, bigoted abuse and cyber-stalking are all crimes that should be investigated. If it's just a case of inarticulate people telling him to "fuck off" because they disagree with him he should just ignore them.
Acid Attacks
Not only does Andreou cry victim over the alleged abuse he's been getting, but he's so hypocritical that he peppers his article with critical, dismissive and abusive comments about Jeremy Corbyn and anyone who dares support him. Andreou uses terms like "Armchair Che" and "achingly middle class Corbynistas" to denigrate Corbyn supporters and repeatedly accuses them of "fanaticism", "violent fervour","denialism", contributing to "clear patterns of wickedness" and being a "personality cult" and an "army" that will inevitably become "an instrument of violence".
This generalistic abuse is not the kind of language used by a guy who rejects bad faith tactics like abuse, smears, generalisations and condescension, they are the tactics of someone who revels in the kind of insulting muck-raking abuse that he bookends his article crying about.
Not only does Andreou use derogatory generalisations and accusations as weapons to belittle the hundreds of thousands of people from all ages, areas of the country and walks of life who support Jeremy Corbyn, he openly admits that he's "gone over the top" with his criticisms and then belligerent declares that "I stand by every acid word".
Owen Jones
Andreou actually tries to cite Owen Jones' 9 questions article as evidence against Jeremy Corbyn. The absolute gall of it is incredible.
Andreou's manipulative and highly contradictory Acid Attack article is in stark contrast to Owen Jones' article about Corbyn which actually did raise a number of legitimate questions.
Although Jones was critical of Corbyn the article was actually quite balanced and tried to engage with Corbyn supporters rather than attempting to con them with a bit of dishonest concern trolling then crudely smearing them for the rest of the article.
You can read my response to Owen Jones' 9 questions article here.
Blame Corbyn
The entire article is littered with examples of Andreou blaming Corbyn for things that are clearly the fault of the Anyone But Corbyn coup-plotters.
Andreou Blames Corbyn for the slump in Labour's poll numbers since the coup-plotters launched their inept effort to bully Corbyn into resignation.
He blames Corbyn for the fact that the coup-supporting Labour establishment tried to rig the leadership election against him by disenfranchising 130,000+ Labour Party voters and then selling votes to non-members at £25 a pop.
He even tries to blame Corbyn for the catastrophic implosion of the Labour Party in Scotland!
Scottish politics
Trying to blame Jeremy Corbyn for the annihilation of Labour in their traditional Scottish heartlands displays an extreme ignorance of Scottish politics.
Scottish Labour lost 40 of their 41 Westminster seats at the 2015 General Election. This happened months before most people even knew who Jeremy Corbyn was. The election strategist for that complete meltdown was a Blairite called John McTernan. And guess what ... the guy who is actually most blameworthy for the Scottish debacle is standing alongside Andreou cheerleading for the Anyone But Corbyn coup.
This ludicrous effort to blame Corbyn for the damage that out-of-touch Labour right-wingers like Tony Blair, John McTernan and Jim Murphy did in Scotland is not the only example of Andreou betraying a deep ignorance of Scottish politics and the lessons that should have been learned from Labour's political suicide there.
In another section Andreou bitterly criticises Jeremy Corbyn for deliberately distancing himself from David Cameron's toxic Project Fear style Remain campaign.
I'm not too convinced that Corbyn has much idea about what to do about the Scottish mess he's inherited, but at least, unlike Andreou he had the good sense to recognise that sharing a platform with Tory fearmongerers during the EU referendum debate would have discredited the Labour Party even further in the eyes of all progressives.
The Scottish electorate abandoned Labour because they were sick of being treated like an insignificant irrelevance. Andreou exemplifies this complacent Labour attitude towards Scottish voters in his absolute unwillingness to consider the actual causes of the furious mass revolt against the Labour Party by one of it's most reliable demographics.
The EU debate
Andreou's article is full of regurgitated mainstream media attack points against Jeremy Corbyn. Even though Corbyn returned 63% of the Labour vote for Remain while Cameron's fearmongering returned 58% of Tory voters for Leave, all of Andreou's opprobrium is reserved for Jeremy Corbyn.
Polls during the EU referendum debate showed that Jeremy Corbyn was rated as by far the most trusted Labour politician and his tactic of speaking to the public like we're adults rather than a massive bunch of sub-juvenile halfwits who can be goaded into supporting one position or the other with fearmongering, threats, misrepresentations and outright lies chimed with a lot of people.
He was one of the only politicians to speak truthfully about the fact that the EU isn't ideal, but how it's better to stay in and try to reform it rather than bail out with no plan of action for what to do next, yet Andreou characterises Corbyn's EU stance as being dishonest!
Tunnel vision
Another regurgitated mainstream media anti-Corbyn attack point that Andreou blurts out is the so-called honours controversy over Shami Chakrabarti. Andreou lambastes Corbyn for appointing someone he admits is "thoroughly deserving" because it apparently "muted" the criticism of all of David Cameron's dodgy appointments.
How many of these dodgy Tory appointments has Andreou criticised? None of course.Like Peter Mandelson before him, Andreou was far, far too busy concentrating on weaving criticism of Jeremy Corbyn's one House of Lords appointment into his anti-Corbyn hatchet job to find a single word of criticism for any of David Cameron's 13 unelected cronies, another Tory donor turning down his peerage because of the storm of negative publicity or another of Cameron's dodgy Tory donors getting disallowed by the appointments commission.
Channelling Tony Blair
One quote from the article stands out because of its remarkable similarity to a sentiment expressed by Tory Blair back when he thought that his anti-Corbyn rants would serve any purpose other than sounding like a ringing endorsement in the minds of the millions of people Blair and his cronies drove away from the Labour Party.
"Right now, the only thing more frightening to any rational person than Labour losing the next election, is Labour winning it with Corbyn in charge." - Alex Andreou, 2016
"Let me make my position clear: I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it." - Tony Blair, 2015
The sentiment that it would be much better for Labour to lose the next election than actually win with Jeremy Corbyn in charge is clearly identical.
Perhaps if Corbyn's critics don't like being criticised as Blairites, they should consider not using the exact same form of anti-Corbyn argument as Tony Blair?
Honesty
Andreou weaves the theme of honesty throughout his article (even entitling it as The Truth About Jeremy Corbyn) which is ironic given that he shares the same objectives as the deceitful Anyone But Corbyn coup-plotters and people like Angela Eagle and Margaret Hodge who have repeatedly exaggerated and outright lied about abuse in order to inflict as much damage on the party leadership as possible.
Andreou's constant posturing as a truth-teller also clashes glaringly with his intellectually dishonest debating tactics, his brazen misrepresentations and the fact that his favoured Anyone But Corbyn candidate is a former PR man whose white shirt + rolled-up sleeves "normal guy" posing is just as brazenly dishonest as Eton educated former-PR man David Cameron's woefully transparent white shirt + rolled-up sleeves "man of the people" act.
it takes some brass neck to utilise honesty as a central theme in a bad faith Acid Attack of an article designed to assist the removal of Jeremy Corbyn and his replacement with an ideologically flexible placeholder candidate like Owen Smith.
Misrepresentations
One of the most woeful of Andreou's misrepresentations is his assertion that Corbyn would personally "deselect all dissenters and take full control".
Top-down Kinnockesque witch hunts and expulsions of ideological dissenters are not going to happen under Corbyn's watch. If Corbyn does use his likely re-election to put re-selection of MPs onto the agenda, the people who would make the decision to remove corrupt/complacent/party wrecking/self-serving/right-wing MPs would be local Labour Party members.
If re-selection does materialise, it won't be Corbyn taking "full control" of the party for himself, it would be Corbyn handing an awful lot more control over the direction of the party to the people who make up the party membership.
It's a complete liberty for Andreou to make honesty and truth central themes of his article, but to dishonestly characterise Corbyn's democratisation of the party as a dictatorial power grab.
Not only is Andreou dishonestly misrepresenting the situation, he's also dishonestly misrepresenting his own commentary as being an honest appraisal. The dual nature of Andreou's dishonesty warrants the coining of the term "meta-dishonesty" to describe it.
An unwarranted attack on Podemos
Towards the end of the article Andreou really begins to lose the plot and allow his true anti-democratic agenda to shine through. At one point he tries to illustrate his claim that mass political participation is unworkable by citing an article in the Rupert Murdoch operated Times slagging off the Spanish left-wing anti-austerity party Podemos.
What Andreou fails to mention is that Podemos was only founded in March 2014, meaning that in just over two years they've gone from nothing to being the third largest political party in Spain with above 20% of the vote (just a whisker behind the second party) and winning the mayoral elections in both Madrid and Barcelona.
Imagine if a brand new political party took 20% of the vote in the UK and their candidates became the mayors of London and Edinburgh. Do you think anyone in their right mind elsewhere in Europe would be trying to write that off as a spectacular failure to score political points against a local politician they're waging a vendetta against?
Interestingly, as a self-proclaimed expert on Greek politics Andreou fails to make a much more telling comparison between Labour and the once powerful Greek socialist party PASOK.
PASOK made the mistake of embracing right-wing austerity economics and slumped from never receiving less than 38% of the vote between 1981 and 2011 to taking just 4.7% of the vote in 2015 and ending up as Greece's 7th party!
Instead of trying to paint the remarkable rise of Podemos in Spain as some kind of desperate failure, maybe it would have been more useful for Andreou to point out a real political catastrophe that actually happened, and explain how traditional left-wing parties peddling hard-right economics are playing on extremely dangerous political thin ice?
Participation vs Managerialism
It begins showing from around the middle of the article, but toward the end Andreou really starts losing the ability to hide his true agenda. The absurd attack on Podemos in order to try to discredit the concept of mass political participation is bad enough, but in his concluding remarks he demonstrates his true anti-democratic sentiments by describing the massive number of people inspired by Corbyn to become Labour Party members as an "army" that will inevitably become "an instrument of violence".
Andreou is clearly afraid of mass political participation. He's scared of the idea of allowing ordinary plebs to have any real influence over the political system. He's terrified of participatory democracy, so he's smearing the people who want to get involved as part of a violent mob.
Andreou obviously prefers the managerialist style of politics where an insulated political elite get to make the important political decisions and the lower orders are kept as far away from the political process as possible.
What seems to have passed him by is that the slick managerialist style of Tony Blair led us into the Iraq catastrophe that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, caused a huge refugee crisis and triggered a wave of sectarian violence that eventually culminated in the rise of ISIS. If the millions who protested against the Iraq invasion would have actually had some kind of democratic political mechanism to influence the managerialist political establishment, then perhaps all of that violence, and death, and suffering, and bloodshed, and misery could have been averted ...
But no ... In Andreou's version of reality the Westminster political establishment (you know, the ones who just wrote a blank cheque to renew Britain's stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction and are still allowing British corporations to sell arms to the disgusting Islamist Saudi Arabian regime) are the peacemakers, and the people who want to reform politics to make them more accountable to the British public are the loathsome violent threat that you should be afraid of.
Utter contempt for democracy
Andreou's article is riddled with confused logic, misrepresentations and outright hypocrisy but his contempt for democracy is the one thing that shines through the most strongly at the end.
He spends the article wildly generalising about how intolerant the so-called far-left are, insisting that Corbyn and his supporters are a far-left fringe who are "obsessed with purging it [the country] from anyone who thinks different" and then later in the article he says that "Corbyn must be ousted at all costs. Everything else can be fixed later".
The contrast really couldn't be starker. He's smearing Corbyn supporters for supposedly wanting to conduct an ideological purge, then insists that no matter what the outcome of the leadership election Corbyn and his supporters should be purged from the party at any cost!
Screw what the membership want. Screw the concept of participatory democracy. What Andreou wants is an ideological purge of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, and he openly admits that he doesn't care how much damage to the Labour Party it takes to achieve it.
And most delusional of all he genuinely seems to think that a return to the orthodox old-fashioned managerialist style of doing politics will enough to undo the damage inflicted by the "destroy Corbyn and drive away his supporters at any cost" brigade.
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The left-wing commentator Owen Jones has written a very long blog post entitled "Questions all Jeremy Corbyn supporters need to answer" which asks nine questions of Jeremy Corbyn supporters, but which could easily just as well be asked of Owen Smith supporters, or supporters of any political party that opposes the hard-right fanaticism of the Tories.
Mainly fair and justifiable questions not biased smearmongering
Before getting to his questions (which I will attempt to answer later) Owen Jones spends paragraph after paragraph trying to define his stance as being broadly sympathetic to Jeremy Corbyn and his team. He doesn't ever quite bring himself to admitting which side of the binary choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith he favours, but he makes it quite clear that he's not just behaving like the tedious Anyone But Corbyn bots who even blame Corbyn for everything, even the way Labour's poll numbers have plummeted since their disastrously ill-timed Anyone But Corbyn coup plot was launched.
Jones makes it clear that he is broadly sympathetic towards Jeremy Corbyn and friends with many of his top team, and he makes his feelings on the timing of the Anyone But Corbyn coup equally clear:
According to Jones the coup-plotter decision to "effectively shut down the functioning of the Opposition when all the scrutiny should be focused on the Tories" was a "disgrace at a time of national crisis". It's good to see that Owen Jones' opinion on the timing and the conduct of the highly, damaging and ineptly conducted pre-plotted Anyone But Corbyn coup is pretty much the same as my own.
Lots of people have gleefully jumped on Owen Jones blog post as if it's some kind of savage condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, but in reality it's actually nothing of the sort. The blog post raises a number of criticisms and demands answers to difficult questions, but it's absolutely nothing like the hopelessly biased guff that most of Westminster establishment club and their chums in the mainstream press have churned out since day one of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.
Overall Owen Jones blog post constitutes more-or-less fair commentary and reasonable questions, not the kind of savagely biased hatchet job a lot of people seem to be portraying it as.
My own stance
Just as Owen Jones felt the need to clarify his own stance before asking his questions, I'm going to clarify my own before answering them, but hopefully in fewer than 18 paragraphs.
I'm not and never have been a member of the Labour Party. I consider myself a traditional Labour voter who was chased away from the party during the Blair/Brown era. I dislike the hard-right Thatcherite ideology Blair agreed to adopt in order to win Rupert Murdoch's approval and as a consequence I have not voted Labour in a General Election since 1997 because every single Labour candidate in the various constituencies I lived in were from the right-wing Blairite mould. Labour lost 5 million voters between 1997 and 2010. If they want to win another election they have to figure out how to win some of them back.
The reason I consider myself a Jeremy Corbyn supporter is that he is returning the party to their traditional values. Before Corbyn came along I had more sympathy with the Green Party than with Ed Miliband's Blairite infested Labour shadow cabinet.
As far as I'm concerned if Jeremy Corbyn is ousted as Labour leader and replaced by a guy who is backed by every single Blairite in the party, then my suspicions that the Labour party is essentially unreformable and unelectable will be confirmed.
If Corbyn wins re-election then he's going to face an incredibly tough fight to fix the reputation of the party, but he'd certainly have a mandate to introduce re-selection of Labour MPs so that local people can remove self-serving gravy train riders and replace them with ordinary people who are more likely to actually serve the interests of their constituents rather than lining their own pockets.
I'm not going to be joining the Labour Party because of my position as an independent writer, but if Corbyn wins and somehow manages to tame the Blairite faction who would rather destroy the Labour Party completely rather than allow Jeremy Corbyn a chance of success, then I'd certainly consider voting for them.
Questions and answers
1. How can the disastrous polling be turned around?
The first question of the nine is one of the most disappointing because it makes no admission of the fact that Labour's polling has taken a huge hit since the Anyone But Corbyn coup was launched. Before the coup Labour weren't exactly doing very well (ranging between -5 and level pegging in the various polls running up to the EU referendum), but since the ridiculously ill-timed, incredibly divisive and unbelievably inept coup was launched, five of the first six polls had them double digits behind the Tories.
Of course the polling needs to be turned around, but the job is going to be an awful lot more difficult now as a result of the damage inflicted on the party's reputation by the Anyone But Corbyn coup.
There is no one magic bullet answer to the question of restoring the Labour Party's reputation with voters. If the poll results are to improve it will take a strategy based around answers to the other eight questions.
2. Where is the clear vision?
Corbyn has two clear visions that have convinced hundreds of thousands of people to part with cash to become Labour Party members.
The first is opposition to Tory austerity. Criticism of the Tory policy of selling the public a load of ridiculous economic fairy stories to justify a policy of transferring as much wealth as possible from the poor and needy to the already super-rich really shouldn't be such a hard sell in a country that lauds Robin Hood as a national hero for doing the opposite.
The problem is that the Labour critiques of Tory austerity needed to be as clear and easy to understand as the economic "let's cut our way to growth" economic fairy stories the Tories and the right-wing press have been drip-feeding to the public for years. Corbyn needs to simplify his message a lot more and learn to get to the point (I appreciate the irony of me giving this advice in a 3,000+ word blog post).
The other clear Corbyn vision is to try to restore faith in politics by sticking to his principles and not being a corrupt, lying opportunist who will say whatever he thinks it takes to serve his own political interests. If Corbyn could solidify this honourable way of doing politics with some actual policies (democratising the Labour Party with the ability to re-select corrupt/venal/self-serving Labour MPs, making all party manifesto pledges legally binding, introduction of proper punishments for politicians who are caught lying to parliament or the public, rules to ensure press apologies are made in the same size font and position in the newspaper as the original lie ...)
These are two potentially popular positions because there is an absolute mountain of evidence of the catastrophic social and economic results of Tory austerity, and because nobody likes to be lied to.
3. How are the policies significantly different from the last general election?
Corbyn's position is very different from the last Labour manifesto. Ed Miliband offered half-hearted tinkering with the energy markets and rail franchises instead of the renationalisation policies that the vast majority of the public want to see.
One of the clearest distinctions between Corbyn's leadership and the Miliband so-called opposition that preceded it is their actual opposition to malicious Tory legislation. One of the clearest examples of this distinction can be seen in the way that Ed Miliband whipped his MPs into abstaining on Iain Duncan Smith's retroactive workfare legislation that was designed to cover up the fact that he'd imposed a load of unlawful rules forcing unemployed people to work for profitable corporations for no wages.
Whether you like Corbyn or not, the idea that he would collude with the Tories in this kind of manner in order to help them cover up their unlawful treatment of unemployed people is impossible to imagine.
Owen Jones should be well aware of this difference because back in 2013 he wrote a blog post slamming Ed Miliband and his then shadow DWP minister Liam Byrne for helping iain Duncan Smith write himself this parliamentary get out of jail free card. Owen Jones is also well informed enough to know that the retroactive workfare legislation that Ed Miliband helped the Tories shovel through parliament in a single day was subsequently declared unlawful in the courts.
Whether you like Corbyn or not, it's impossible to imagine him whipping his MPs into supporting an unlawful piece of Tory legislation designed to retroactively cover up their unlawful treatment of unemployed people by treating them as a free source of labour for their corporate mates.
It's also impossible to imagine Corbyn appointing a complacent Blairite fool like Ed Balls as his right-hand man and then following his hopeless advice to push a catastrophically uninspiring and General Election losing austerity-lite electoral strategy.
Corbyn is different from Miliband because he is not ever going to collude with the Tories to strip people of their labour rights and force them to work for profitable corporations, and he's not ever going to weakly imitate Tory economic policies rather than actually opposing them.
4. What’s the media strategy?
In the paragraphs explaining this question Owen Jones makes some good points. The first is that "the media are always going to demonise a left-wing leader" and the second is that social media is an effective tool in reaching some demographics, but a very poor tool for reaching others.
The mainstream media vendetta against Jeremy Corbyn has been relentless and there's plenty of hard evidence to prove it. One study found that just 11% of articles about Corbyn actually mentioned his policies without manipulating or distorting them.
Another academic study found that the BBC's news coverage in the wake of the Anyone But Corbyn coup was extremely biased in favour of Jeremy Corbyn's critics.
In the final question Owen Jones asks how the huge Labour membership can be mobilised. Perhaps one of the ways could be a letter writing campaign demanding that newspapers start actually discussing Corbyn's policies, rather than presenting crude smears and insults as news coverage?
If newspapers got tens of thousands of letters complaining about their biased coverage and threatening to stop paying for their products or visiting their websites, perhaps they would consider actually discussing/critiquing some of Corbyn's policies rather than just smearing him (which would actually be a significant improvement on the current scenario).
Writing to the corporate press might not achieve very much, but complaining to the BBC could, because the BBC has a public service remit. It's hardly unrealistic to expect a publicly funded public service broadcaster to avoid displays of staggeringly biased coverage.
5. What’s the strategy to win over the over-44s?
This is an important question because the older people they are, the more likely they are to actually bother voting. At the 2015 General Election Labour actually marginally outperformed the Tories in the combined 18-49 demographics, but were absolutely trounced by the Tories with the over-60s.
Two of the most important issues for older people are pensions and the NHS. If Labour want to appeal to the older generations they have to make more of the fact that the British state pension is one of the worst in Europe and offer something better, and do more to criticise the deliberate Tory strategy of shaking the NHS to destruction.
6. What’s the strategy to win over Scotland?
This is another disappointing question because it doesn't even acknowledge that the loss of the Scottish Labour heartlands was the fault of Corbyn's Blairite predecessors. Blair and Brown were utterly complacent towards the Scottish electorate but the real damage was done by Ed Miliband who decided to have a year long public french kiss with the politically toxic Tories over Scottish independence, then compounded the issue by pushing Ed Balls' catastrophically ill-conceived austerity-lite agenda in Scotland where the electorate had an alternative party to vote for.
In 2015 Labour lost 40 of their 41 seats in Scotland and it's telling that the Labour campaign manager who oversaw the most catastrophic collapse in British electoral History (John McTernan) is backing Owen Smith to replace Jeremy Corbyn.
In my view the only way Labour can possibly win back some support in Scotland is to distance themselves from the Tories as much as possible from now on, find a replacement for the appallingly vacuous Kezia Dugdale to lead the Scottish Labour Party, and never ever listen to a word John McTernam ever says again.
Even if they do all of these things the Labour Party have a huge uphill battle to fight to regain even a fraction of what the Blairites used to take for granted and abused to the point of outright revolt.
7. What’s the strategy to win over Conservative voters?
This is another disappointing question because it relies on the misnomer that the only way to win a General Election is by poaching Tory voters. In 2015 just 24% of the public voted for David Cameron's Tories. At their lowest ebb ever 19% of the public voted for William Hague's Tories in 2001. This suggests that just 5% of the eligible electorate are soft-Tory voters who would ever vote for other parties.
In comparison to the 35% of the eligible electorate who didn't even vote in 2015, 5% of the electorate seems like a pretty tiny demographic to fixate upon. Maybe giving the seven people who thought that politics doesn't work for them something to believe in and vote for could be a better strategy than tailoring your policies to suit the one Tory voter who might change their mind (and risk chasing away even more traditional Labour voters in the process).
It's also worth noting that the Lib-Dems managed to lose two thirds of their voters between 2010 and 2015 after they enabled David Cameron's hard-right fanatics into power. Surely wooing the 9% of the electorate who are disillusioned Lib-Dems would be a more realistic policy than trying to trying to appeal to voters who supported the demonstrably hard-right Tories in 2015.
In my view chasing Tory voters should be a distant third priority behind trying to engage the huge numbers of politically disillusioned people and trying to woo former Lib-Dem voters, but it is worth considering that 52% of Tory voters support renationalisation of the railways and energy companies, so it's clearly not even necessary to imitate hard-right Tory economic policies in order to have some appeal to the majority of Tory voters.
8. How would we deal with people’s concerns about immigration?
This is a difficult question to answer for one main reason. A lot of people's concerns over stuff like immigration and the EU are blown out of all proportion to the actual scale of the problem. A piece of research before the EU referendum demonstrated that an awful lot of people are woefully under-informed about immigration. The research found that the average Brexit voter estimated that EU migrants make up a vast 20% of the UK population when the real figure is just 5%.
It's pretty difficult to try to argue against the savage anti-immigrant rhetoric of the right-wing corporate press, but if the choice is between the politically expedient course of playing along with the anti-immigrant lies (and legitimising them in the process), and the politically difficult course of trying to counter the propaganda with facts and evidence, it's a contrast between political expedience and morality.
One thing that definitely can be done is to criticise the woeful lack of planning to deal with migrant worker inflows. All local council services have been under severe pressure from years of savage Tory austerity cuts, and poorer areas that often have had large migrant inflows are even more under pressure. Labour could definitely do more to channel money into providing public services in areas that have had major population increases.
If the Labour Party is unwilling to court the extreme-right with anti-immigrant hatemongering like Theresa May is, then the immigration debate has to be reframed so that governments that turned blind eyes to the impact of mass migration into certain areas are blamed, rather than the migrants themselves.
Labour do have one very strong piece of ammunition against Theresa May; for all of her vile anti-migrant hatemongering as Home Secretary she oversaw the largest spike in net migration in British history. Labour could insist that the way to deal with immigration is through adequate strategic planning rather than through Theresa May's empty hate-filled rhetoric and inaction.
9. How can Labour’s mass membership be mobilised?
One of Jeremy Corbyn's undeniable achievements as leader of the Labour Party is stimulating an unprecedented surge in party membership. With a paid up membership of over 500,000 the Labour party now has more members than every single other political party in the UK combined!
If this membership can be mobilised effectively it could be a real game-changer in UK politics.
One of the key ways in which this membership could be used to challenge the tropes pushed by the right-wing corporate media is through engagement with ordinary people.
The mainstream media have waged a deliberate propaganda war against Corbyn supporters, using precisely the same kind of rhetoric used during the Miners' Strike. As far as the mainstream media are concerned the hundreds of thousands of people who support Jeremy Corbyn are a bunch of militant, brick-lobbing, misogynistic, anti-Semitic thugs.
The difference between Corbyn supporters and miners is that the miners were confined in close-knit mining communities, but Corbyn supporters can be found all over the UK and in all different ages and demographics too.
It was easy for the right-wing press to demonise the miners in the minds of people who had never even met a real miner. It was easy to paint them as the thuggish "enemy within" because there weren't miners spread across the entire UK and across all sectors of society to defend themselves.
It's very different with Corbyn supporters. If everyone who supports Corbyn challenged people they know in person to consider the fact that they are a Corbyn supporter and contrast it with the "brick lobbing bully" stereotype, it would be a great way of illustrating that the mainstream media are pushing a dishonest agenda.
It's undeniable that people are susceptible to mainstream media tropes. Just think of all the times you've heard someone mindlessly regurgitating unsupported evidence-free drivel like "Corbyn is unelectable" or "Theresa May is a 'safe pair of hands'" that they've blatantly just rote learned from the press.
However when it comes to contrasting what they've been programmed to believe about Corbyn supporters with what they actually know about someone like "our Kath", Granny or Steve next door, who are actually kind-hearted, honest and respectable people, you couldn't really ask for a stronger demonstration of the fact that the mainstream media are using dishonest demonisation tactics to smear huge numbers of decent people.
When someones' cousin, respected-work colleague, aunty, longstanding friend or neighbour asks them to consider some of the mainstream media smears against Jeremy Corbyn supporters and then asks them to contrast that with what they know about them in person, there couldn't really be a stronger tool for diffusing the lies and smears of the corporate press.
Of course there are other ways in which a voluntary army of 500,000+ people could be utilised (delivering leaflets, telephone calls, social media campaigns, explaining policies, inviting people to attend events ...), but this article is long enough as it is so I'll leave it to your imagination.
Conclusion
Anyone trying to portray Owen Jones' blog post as an attack on Jeremy Corbyn clearly hasn't even bothered to read it, or if they did they failed to understand pretty much anything it said.
Most of the questions are justifiable, but the article is disappointing for the way it excludes important bits of context. Of course Corbyn would need to find some way of reversing the appalling poll numbers and winning back some Scottish voters, but omitting to mention the fundamental role of Blairites in creating both of these problems makes the article appear to be much more of a hatchet job on Jeremy Corbyn than it could have been.
I've tried to provide considered answers to Owen Jones' 9 questions. In return I would like Owen Jones to answer one simple question.
Given that the future of the Labour Party is set to be determined by a binary choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith. which candidate does he support?
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