Jeremy Corbyn v The Establishment
The Establishment hate Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Why, because they know their days are numbered, that their gravy train is about to hit the buffers.
When opponents attack Jeremy Corbyn, and say it is about being in power, what they actually mean is that it is about a self-serving elite seizing power with party members and the electorate being used as ballot fodder.
Labour lost the last election because they offered Tory Lite, they supported the attacks on the poor, austerity and everything that comes with the neo-liberal agenda and Shock Doctrine. In Scotland, Labour were wiped out because SNP offered a radical alternative.
When Jeremy Corbyn threw his hat in the ring last year, he was to most people a breath of fresh air, here was for the first time in a generation the opportunity for genuine political change.
In less than a year, he has managed to form a mass social movement, which goes way beyond what can simply be measured as the numbers who have joined the labour Party.
And that is what worries the elite, the broad social movement which is eager for real change, and who having had a taste for it, are not going to give up lightly.
We are seeing the same in Spain and Greece, where the old corrupt socialist parties are dying and being replaced by vibrant dynamic radical parties like Podemos and Syriza.
When Thomas Paine proposed representative democracy at a time of Absolute Monarchs, he proposed radical change, so radical that he had to flee the country for fear of losing his head. What we are seeing now with Jeremy Corbyn, Podemos and Syriza is a change as radical. We are living in a post-2008, post-Capitalism world. In this New World Order, we have participatory democracy, not representative democracy, last seen in Athens in Ancient Greece.
Once Jeremy Corbyn threw his hat in the ring, the Party Establishment did everything they could to stop his election, then once elected everything they could to destroy his leadership.
The mainstream media talks of splits, the only split is between the Party Establishment who think they own the Party and have a God-given right to rule and the party membership.
This is our Arab Spring, the leadership election a counter coup by The Establishment.
Owen Smith was the scraping of the bottom of the barrel, the best they could come up with. A Blairite in his own words, who bragged he was more Blairite than war criminal Tony Blair, who called Blair a socialist. A former lobbyist for a major US drugs company, a PR drone, who wished to see privatisation of the NHS, who supported austerity, who abstained on massive Tory welfare cuts, but who now proclaims himself to be Corbyn Lite, as convincing as when Labour passed itself of as Tory Lite.
When Owen Smith was asked would he talk to Isis, his Pavlovian response was yes, presumably because he thought that would be what Jeremy Corbyn would say and he had to appear more Corbyn than Corbyn to win over any of the Corbyn supporters.
It badly backfired, it showed he had no understanding of Isis, how Isis has arisen, of Syria, Iraq or the Middle East.
Isis talks to no one. Canon Andrew White has tried. His intermediary had his head chopped off.
Isis is not the IRA, though it seems Owen Smith cannot see the difference.
Note: We are not allowed to call anyone ‘Blairite’, at least if not a Labour Party Member, as that disqualifies you from voting in the leadership election.
It is ok for the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn to be called Nazis, thugs, Trots, cultists and a whole load of other insults, ok to disenfranchise 130,000 party members and use party funds, ie money belonging to the members, to do so, but call anyone a Blairite and immediately face a sanction.
Blairites though have been remarkably quiet. In the last leadership election they were popping up in the media every day, all the has-been politicians we thought we had seen the back of were granted a soapbox. Could it be they realise, if they are seen supporting Unelectable Owen, they will let the cat out of the bag?
Imagine for one moment, the impossible, that Oily Owen (as he is known in Wales) wins the leadership election, wins the next election, does anyone seriously think anything would change? It would be businesses as usual, one elite replaces another elite. It would be as the end of Animal Farm when the animals look in the farmhouse window, look from pig to man, man to pig, and cannot tell the difference.
But will Tony Blair be able to keep quiet?
It is not only the Blairites who are quiet, so is the rabid right wing press, controlled by Murdoch and Lord Rothermere. Not a dickybird.
Paul Mason (The sound of Blairite silence):
Normally, if a Labour figure stood up and, from thin air, plucked a £200bn spending pledge based on a wealth tax, the Sun, the Mail and the Telegraph would have reporters going through his bin-bags.
It’s the same over Smith’s call for a second referendum. The pro-Brexit tabloids would normally be eviscerating any Labour figure who called, effectively, for people to be made to “vote until they vote the right way”. But they’re silent over this.
The Blairite front groups, Progress, Saving Labour and now Labour Tomorrow, are also quiet. The latter two, who owns and controls them, who are their members, where is their money coming from, no one knows.
What we do know is, when Owen Smith was lobbyist for Pfizer, he arranged over £80,000 to be paid to Progress.
More appropriate names for the Blair fan clubs or cults would be Regression, Destroying Labour and Labour Yesterday.
Owen Smith shows his contempt for the British public by calling for a second EU Referendum, for Labour Party members by not opposing the decision to go to the Appeal Court to reverse the High Court ruling that struck down the act by Labour NEC to disenfranchises 130,000 members.
Time that should be spent drawing up a Post-Brexit future, has been squandered by the coup plotters on a completely unnecessary leadership election
We live in a world of newspeak constructed by George Orwell, where War is Peace, Peace is War, where Owen Smith tries to claim he is more radical than Jeremy Corbyn, where he claims Jeremy Corbyn fails to inspire people, has only sound bytes and no policies.
If the low point for Owen Smith was handing out free ice creams and burgers, he has yet to hit a high point.
Maybe he fails to notice the large numbers who attend a Jeremy Corbyn rally, when he can barely attract a couple of dozen, not even when he has an ice cream van or offers free burgers, that last year at Beyond Austerity, John McDonnell with Yanis Varoufakis sketched out a viable economic policy.
Jeremy Corbyn when asked a dumb question, did not recognise who Ant and Dec were, for most people this enhanced his reputation, for who is interested in banal C-list celebrities?
When people attend a Jeremy Corbyn rally, they see here is a guy they can relate to. They see him travelling on the tube, travelling on the East Coast Mainline (now run by Virgin) sat on the floor. They see him without the distorting prism of the mainstream media.
At one of the leadership debates between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith, broadcast live by the BBC, the audience was carefully selected by the BBC and seated according to who they supported, with undecided in the middle. At the end of the debate, the undecided were asked, to move to one side or the other based upon what they had heard. They got up en masse and crossed the floor to join the Corbyn supporters.
From the coup plotters and those pulling the strings of Owen Smith, we have had smears and rigged elections. Their role, appears to be, if Jeremy Corbyn remains leader, which we can take as a given, destroy the Labour Party.
Where to now?
The coup plotter have made it clear, the war of attrition will continue. We must turn mass social movement into more than just words. We have to be active at all levels. We have to create open coops, collaborative commons, ordinary citizens seize control of local Town Halls (as seen in Frome in Somerset, Barcelona and other towns and cities across Spain), then network across Europe. The coup plotters must be de-selected, votes of no confidence at local party meetings, the Labour NEC diktat on no meetings until after the leadership election ignored, the Right of Recall must be brought in, not only for Parliament but also local councils.
