I’m waiting for the ‘constructive’ in his criticism. His article asked 9 questions, many of them framed destructively with no sense of awareness of the situations in which they arose (see blog posts ad nauseam yesterday from people endeavouring to set this record straight — Sodium Haze and AnotherAngryVoice are good starting points).
He made no new observations, simply culled the talking points of the anti-Corbyn press from the last 9 months and drew them all together in the greatest concern troll of this entire, sad campaign. He acknowledged that there are hundreds of thousands of us who are not paid by the click or the word or the post, but who desperately want to do something to bring a progressive agenda to the table — but offered not one sentence of useful guidance as to what we might constructively do.
Add to this the timing: he might have said this at any point — he might usefully have said it (if he could be bothered to bend his brain to offering answers) after 24th September… because Jeremy Corbyn remains the left’s only hope. It’s a two horse race and I have yet to meet anyone who thinks Owen Smith is anything other than a glove puppet for the right: ‘these are my principles and if you don’t like them, I have others’.
Instead, Owen Jones offered his ‘insights’ now, as a gift to those who hate Corbyn — and hate him because he *is* the left’s only hope. This is being widely cited as the biggest shift in the campaign since it began. There was a report late last night from a CLP meeting that young Momentum members are standing up and talking against Corbyn and for Smith, pretty much directly quoting Jones’s piece.
So — Jones has been around a fair while. He knows how the media work. He’s seen what the anti-Corbyn faction will do given half a chance. Still, he launched his grenade. This is either staggeringly naive. Or it’s deliberate sabotage. There isn’t any other way to view it. Unless, I suppose, you want to think that there’s some kind of subconscious self-destruct going on — but still, you’d imagine there would be some kind of logical overlay that might just suggest the timing was seriously off?

TLDR: Paul Mason offered suggestions. Owen Jones offered woolly, ill thought rehash of old, and in many cases unsupported criticisms. It’s hard to see how this is useful.