It’s confusing when people say ‘centre’ when they mean ‘right’
John Weeks — author of Economics of the 1%: How Mainstream Economics Serves the Rich, Obscures Reality and Distorts Policy — makes a good point in a Real News Network interview on Jeremy Corbyn’s latest leadership victory about the media’s use of the term ‘centrist’ to describe the Labour right.
Politics in this country is so moribund that the centre is good. When a policy is to be defended it is described as one befitting the central ground. And that may have been so many years ago. But with the Overton Window moved so far to the right, what is now described as centrist is media speak for adhering to the neoliberal norm. In other words, things that what would have been considered the realm of the crazy right wing prior to Thatcher.
Polly Toynbee has also responded to Corbyn’s convincing win by writing one of her more condescending Guardian articles educating us plebs on how — despite that win — we can make things better. To put things back to the Blair way of doing things, in other words. Toynbee perhaps considers herself a centrist now.
Her piece is all about Corbyn offering olive branches; nothing about the rebels offering contrition. She calls him short-sighted for not making concessions — already? — to his opponents. She brings up the issue of deselection again. Quite why MPs who are refusing to follow the wishes of their constituency members should not be deselected she doesn’t explain.
I suppose the most demoralising thing for me through the whole short era of the return to a social democratic Labour Party under Corbyn has been the showing up of the Guardian as one more neoliberal enterprise; one more wing of the corporate media.
There is a telling piece from Media Lens in July this year which includes a quote from new Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner. She proclaims the Guardian’s remit to create a business model with the search for truth at the heart of everything it does. The Media Lens guys are quite restrained in their mockery of this. Viner’s statement is either self-delusion or another example of the Guardian presenting one slightly progressive face to their erstwhile liberal audience while keeping their real face to show only to the money men.
I stopped buying and reading the Guardian in the wake of Corbyn’s first victory. The right wing bile spouted from the usual media suspects was one thing but to read it in the Guardian and to read it from people like Polly Toynbee was more than I could face. In her most recent article, Polly-knows-best has become that most prized possession of the elites; the sort of liberal commentator who believes that by becoming an occasionally critical mouthpiece of the elite she is serving a progressive purpose.
Labour will have to move forward and plan for an election victory in the knowledge that mainstream media will be ranged against them. There will be the occasional nod to ‘balance’ but for the most part the message will be negative and, in the more blatantly right wing press aimed at the underprivileged, demonstrably vitriolic.
That means ensuring that the messages of hope and change are disseminated widely by alternative media and generating protests against Tory policies and promoting civil disobedience to the point that public opinion shifts and the media have to cover the reasons for protests and to describe the options for change promoted by the opposition.
Protest and civil disobedience, of course, is not the remit of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. But Labour under Corbyn can refuse to play the traditional Westminster game of disowning and denigrating justified protest. That is the way to signal unity and to marry progressive movements (see my post yesterday on the media’s hate of movements) with Labour in opposition.
