Remember the BBC’s hyperbolic, apocalypic doom-mongering about ‘austerity’?…
When you sit down and read the Office for Budget Responsibility report it reads like a book of doom. It is utterly terrifying, suggesting that spending will have to be hacked back to the levels of the 1930s as a proportion of GDP. That is an extraordinary concept, you’re back to the land of Road to Wigan Pier.
“The scale of cuts details in non-protected departments will face cuts of roughly another third. You have to question whether that is achievable. We are told that 60 per cent of the cuts are still to come. We are facing an extraordinary, cavernous financial hole, which to some extent yesterday’s razzmatazz around a politically popular budget rather glossed over.
Curiously no such wild ravings about the Corbyn manifesto, no cries of ‘utterly terrifying’, no dark messages about returning to the bad old days of the grim and miserable 1970’s with the dead unburied and mountains of uncollected rubbish in the streets swarming with rats and the unions running riot.
The BBC has a very short memory when it suits and is quite capable of looking away and bluffing it when it comes to examining the economy under the Tories.
Since 2010 the BBC has bombarded the government with shocked analyses of its austerity plans and their effects…the BBC has blitzed the Public with the message that austerity is appalling and, on the other hand, debt under the Tories is massive and growing prodigiously fast. This is a contradictory message Labour likes to push as well.
Indeed it is the current message…various Corbynistas came onto Campbell’s show today to tell us of the evils of austerity and the crippling debt that the Tories have burdened the country with. Campbell said absolutely nothing and let them get away with making those contrary claims….and making no mention of the fact that Corbyn wants to add massively to that debt that the Corbynistas complain so loudly about.
You may have noticed a paradox though…on the one hand they complain of austerity, on the other they complain of the mounting debt. What’s missing is firstly the truth, secondly some basic intelligence and understanding.
Why is the national debt rising? Because we still have a deficit. Why do we have a deficit? Because the government spends more [on all those services and infrastructure so beloved of the Corbynistas] than it raises….and that’s despite attempts to bring down the deficit, attempts of which the same Corbynistas complain bitterly before complaining about the mountain of debt.
But wait…let’s have some context, some history.
Why do we have that massive debt and that deficit anyway? It must be the Tories’ fault coz it’s growing under their reign. Right? Wrong.
That debt is Labour’s debt, the deficit is Labour’s deficit. Until the deficit is zero the debt will keep rising…to get the deficit down and the debt down you have to make cuts, or improve the economy massively….neither one of which Corbyn is capable of.
Way back in 2009 the accountants PWC predicted that the debt in 2015 would be around £1.4 trillion…and they were pretty much spot on. 2009? That’s when Labour were in power…so it confirms that it is Labour policies that put us in the position we are in now….the BBC at the time even confirmed it…naturally it was John Ware, along with Andrew Neil, one of the few real journalists at the BBC prepared to tell the inconvenient truth…
A recent IPSOS/MORI poll found that 50% of people still do not accept that there is a need to cut spending to pay off the national debt, now rising at a giddy £5,656 per second, and set to go on rising until 2014 when it will settle at just under £1.4 trillion.
And who is to blame for austerity?….from the same 2009 programme…
An even higher percentage of the electorate are probably unaware that based on current government forecasts, Britain’s is facing not one but “two parliaments of intensifying pain”, as the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) predicted.
The IFS said that for each of the next eight years, a new round of cuts will have to be found to fill the black hole in the nation’s finances – a hole the Treasury estimates amounts to a £90bn shortfall between tax revenues and government spending.
So in 2009 the IFS were predicting that to get our finances in order we would face two parliaments, 10 years, of cuts….that is Labour’s fault.
The debt we have now is Labour’s fault. The austerity we have now is Labour’s fault.
Shame that BBC presenters, and even their so-called expert finance and economics journalists, are today still expressing shocked outrage at the level of debt the ‘Tories’ have burdened us with….and oh yes…those utterly terrifying spending cuts that take us back to the 1930’s as a proportion of GDP? Why did Norman Smith not just take us back to around 2000/2001 when Labour were in power and the level of spending was almost exactly the same as the 1930’s…and we were in the black…and the country wasn’t reduced to poverty and ruin or indeed put on the road to Wigan Pier? That came soon after as Labour went on a massive spending spree and let the Banks run riot. A golden age of finance indeed.
Kuenssberg has been pushing the idea that it is possible and morally acceptable to bin Brexit, to betray those who voted in the referendum to leave the EU….just vote Labour and seee your EU dreams come true!…what she misses, apart from the fact that such a move would indeed be a betrayal, not just of the voters but of democracy itself, is that most people, even Remain voters, now want Brexit to be implemented with as little fuss and as quickly and efficiently as possible….even the lefty New Statesman can see that…
The number who want Brexit stopped or radically softened is only 25 per cent.
Almost a year on, Theresa May is pursuing a “hard Brexit” (the Prime Minister prefers “clean”) and is on course to secure a landslide election victory. But Remainers hope that tactical voting by “the 48 per cent” against anti-EU candidates could yet thwart the Conservatives. Their ambitions, however, are likely to be disappointed. The truth, which few have recognised, is that “the 48 per cent” no longer exist.
After voting Remain, they ceased to act as a unified political bloc. The crucial figure for understanding May’s decision to pursue Brexit is not “the 48 per cent” or “the 52 per cent” but the 69 per cent – the number who believe the government has a duty to leave the EU (more than a third of whom voted Remain). A mere 21 per cent agree that the government should either block Brexit or seek to prevent it through a second referendum.
“The 48 per cent” are not even united on the desirability of a “soft Brexit”. Only 24 per cent, according to YouGov polling, believe it is more important to enjoy tariff-free trade with the EU than it is to control immigration (16 per cent believe the reverse, while 40 per cent, like Boris Johnson, want to have their cake and eat it). Fifty two per cent believe May’s proposed Brexit deal would be “good for Britain” (only 22 per cent believe it would be bad) and 61 per cent believe it “respects the referendum” (only 11 per cent believe it does not). Far from believing the government has no mandate for a “hard Brexit”, 64 per cent believe this version respects the vote and only 12 per cent believe it does not. Finally, 55 per cent support May’s assertion that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, while only 24 per cent oppose this stance.
Politics, of course, is about leading opinion, not following it. But to grasp their predicament, Remainers most recognise that they enjoy the support not of “the 48 per cent” but “the 25 per cent”. These figures help explain why the Conservatives enjoy a mammoth poll lead (leading among Remainers in yesterday’s ICM poll), why the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats have not surged and why promising a second referendum would not be an electoral panacea for Labour or a new party.
As long as Remainers speak as if there is a nascent “progressive majority” built on “the 48 per cent”, they will repeat the very mistake that led to Brexit: misreading the electorate.
The BBC are being highly misleading in their reports of what the Scottish Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson, said today about government restrictions to welfare for families with more than two children. Davidson said, in an interview with Emma Barnett on 5 Live [12:12], that she thought the rules on welfare were entirely right but if on implementation they were found not to work as intended then she was prepared to see them reviewed.
The following BBC news bulletin immediately reported this as Davidson saying she was ‘open to seeing the rules reviewed’ without any qualification that she believed the rules as they stood were fine until proven otherwise…this gives the impression that she thinks that the rules are in fact wrong and need revision already…that just isn’t the case.
This is the BBC trying to spin the impression that even the Scottish Tory leader is against the ‘controversial’ rules and they must change.
Rape clause: Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson ‘open to review’
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 live’s Emma Barnett, Ms Davidson said she would be willing to examine whether there were “better ways of doing it” if it was felt to be necessary.
Only later admitting that she said she was open to reviewing the rules if, once implemented, ‘there are issues with that’……..
“In terms of how that works on the ground, if there are issues with that, then I am completely open – if there are better ways of doing it – to reviewing that.”
So why try to give the impression, and indeed make out absolutely in its other reports, that Davidson thinks the rules are already in need of review?
Have to say Barnett was pretty useless in the interview failing on several occasions to understand what was being said even as Davidson gave clear, coherent and reasoned aswers to her questions.
Davidson wanted a higher percentage of immigrants who came to the UK to head towards Scotland, more of the brightest and best. Barnett just couldn’t work that out..how can Davidson get more immigrants when the Tories were promising to lower immigration? Simple…Scotland gets only 4% of the total immigrants to the UK…Davidson merely said that she wanted a higher percentage of that total, even if a lower total, to head towards Scotland. Now a mere 4% of 300,000 or so, perhaps later maybe say 10% of 30,000…it’s a percentage thing not a pure numbers argument. Davidson merely questioned why Scotland attracted fewer than its fair share of the brightest and best. Simple, you’d have thought.
Then there was child poverty…welfare is not devolved so Barnett wanted to blame the UK government for higher child poverty in Scotland…Davidson said that all things being equal it then must be the educational and economic policies of the SNP that caused the higher poverty in Scotland…which is a fair and reasonable assessment….and yet Barnett just couldn’t undertand that argument.
So three major arguments Barnett couldn’t understand despite Davidson making her case quite plain and simple. Guess Barnett just didn’t want to understand…despite Davidson repeating her arguments several times….oh and Barnett told us that the ‘so-called bedroom tax’ was a bad thing. No bias there then. At one point Davidson noted that Barnett seemed to be reading off a Labour Party press release…Barnett quite discomfitted…as she’d been caught bang to rights really….it did indeed sound just like that.
Barnett was based in Edinburgh in the Elephant House cafe where JK Rowling wrote her fantasy fiction about magic and mystery….how very apt for a BBC fantasy politics production.
The BBC was pumping out excited, conspiratorial, sensationalist stories about Trump’s sacking of Comey yesterday, even suggesting this smacked of Nixonian intrigue and coverup. Trouble is in all their reporting, on the radio at least, they missed out, funnily enough, the crucial fact that told the lie to their version of events….that Trump sacked Comey after he had misled Congress last week…the BBC were reporting he had been sacked almost at random, out of the blue…they demand to know why Comey hadn’t been sacked when Trump became President, why now? Curious they don’t actually seem interested in the actual answer…even suggesting it is a cover up…
Was it a cover-up?
The abruptness and timing of Mr Comey’s dismissal, to put it mildly, is highly suspicious.
That BBC report even mentions that Comey was up before Congress last week…but fails to mention the crucial fact that he ‘misled’ them…which explains the ‘abruptness’ of the sacking….
Just over a week ago, the FBI director talked about his agency’s investigation into Russian meddling in the US presidential election – and possible Russian ties to the Trump campaign – before a Senate committee.
A crucial fact is missing though, one which the Telegraph kindly shares with us…
The move came as it emerged Mr Comey gave inaccurate information to Congress last week about Mrs Clinton’s emails.
So why has the BBC, including the ‘beauty’ Jon Sopel, otherwise been reporting all day that it is a complete mystery why this sacking came so suddenly when it knows the answer?
Yep, it’s all a mystery to the BBC…
If the dismissal was because of the email investigation, why act now? How the Trump White House answers that question will go a long way toward determining whether the cover-up allegations die down over time.
Why has the BBC not been making much noise about the fact that the Democrats wanted Comey sacked but are now ‘outraged’ at his sacking?…indeed only last week Clinton was blaming Comey for her failure to win the Presidency.
One week ago, Clinton said during a forum that she was “on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on Oct. 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off.”
So was Comey in league with Trump…and Trump in league with the Russians as the BBC suggest? Surely Comey must have been…oh….er…but he was in charge of the investigation into alleged Russian links to Trump’s team [not Trump himself]…so if Clinton thought he was in collusion with Trump/Russians how could he be in charge of such an investigation? Conflict of interest?
Seems the Dems change their stance to suit…and the BBC is quite unconcerned about raising such difficulties solely interested as they are in attacking Trump.
The BBC also fails to point out that Comey had been heavily criticised by the professionals in the FBI for not putting Clinton in the dock…hence he then went on to reopen investigations leading to the letter that Clinton blames for her downfall….though she could otherwise have been in prison really.
Traducing Trump always trumps the truth for the BBC. Fake news…the beauty.
And does the sacking of Comey mean the investigation nto alleged Russian links to Trump’s team is over? Of course not…it is such a high profile investigation Trump would never be able to kick it into the long grass and ‘cover it up’..if there is anything to cover up.
The late Sir Gerald Kaufman famously dubbed the 1983 Labour manifesto “the longest suicide note in history”. The draft version of the party’s programme for the election on June 8 runs it a close second. It is as if the Blair years had simply not happened.
A government led by Jeremy Corbyn would renationalise energy and the railways. It would impose wage caps on businesses. It would water down the controls put in place to mitigate the levels of immigration caused by the last Labour administration, declare war on private education, introduce rent controls, freeze rail fares, abolish university tuition fees and render Britain’s nuclear deterrent almost useless.
The manifesto seems as rooted in the Seventies as its leader, who was also heavily involved in drawing up the 1983 document that took the party to its worst post-war defeat.
Quite clear what the Telegraph thinks of the manifesto…editorial hyperbole? No…an entirely accurate summation of the Corbyn project as it sets out to tax the rich until the pips squeak, nationalise industry, release the unions from their shackles and impose huge costs on the country to pay for a vast range of ‘populist’ policies designed to attract the easy vote…just where will Corbyn get the money to renationalise all those industries, to abolish university fees, to fund all the schools and all the new schools needed to educate those pupils who are taxed out of private education etc etc etc? Where does the hundreds of billions come from? Borrowing? And how do we pay that off? How does your kids or grandkids pay that off? Highly irresponsible policies designed for short term electoral gains based around buying votes rather than being a responsible government that shepherds its resources, nurtures the economy instead of leeching off it, and creates a future that does not burden today’s young with massive government debt….which means even more austerity in the future or bankruptcy.
However, read the BBC’s two senior political journalists and you’d really be none the wiser as to the dramatic and ruinous nature of Labour’s broadside to a modern and prosperous Britain.
Chris Mason and Kuenssberg produce two reports that are so anodyne and unchallenging that you’d think they were coming out of Labour HQ itself. Apparently this manifesto [not yet signed off] is entirely harmless…and indeed may be quite attractive to many we are told…Mason’s total analysis comes to this really…
There is meaty stuff in this, which some people will delight in seeing a big party [surely he means big government] advocate at a general election.
Others will label it a throwback to a different political era.
They both list massive spending commitments but seem entirely unconcerned about where the money will come from to fund them. The BBC’s ‘reporting’ puts a fine gloss on the manifesto and doesn’t critique it at all…indeed we get more than a hint of approval and less any sense of actual hard nosed examination of the proposals…consider the Telegraph’s blast…just one paragraph that says more than two complete BBC reports…..
The fantasy-land nature of the manifesto is underscored by a host of spending commitments made with total abandon – free school meals; double paid paternity leave; increased benefits; 10,000 more police officers; 3,000 additional prison staff; billions extra to be spent on the NHS and social care; higher public sector pay – all before the costs of renationalising FTSE-quoted companies has even been factored in.
The BBC unfortunately seems to be peddling the fantasyland politics and delusional economics of Corbyn’s Old Labour.
The BBC loves fake news, so much so that it set up a special unit to hunt it down and expose those who create and exploit such deplorably misleading misinformation.
The BBC also loves telling us that the government has stitched up secret deals with businesses to persuade them to stick with the UK after Brexit. When Nissan went away happy after a meeting with May the BBC spent days going over it trying to spin a story that a secret deal had been done…despite denials and absolutely no evidence. The BBC is still peddling such gossip as news…only a couple of days ago it repeated the claim.
So the BBC is the champion of truth and honesty in news, the exposer of secret backroom deals with Big Business…especially when it concerns Brexit.
Or is it? It seems that such pious journalism is an option, a choice, such powers of investigative integrity only exercised when it suits.
Consider the government has met with the Scottish fishing industry to reassure them that their interests will be front and foremost after Brexit….the BBC would normally be all over it trying to invent some narrative about how sordid and corrupt this all is, it would be frontpage news and on every bulletin…however, all is quiet at the BBC…the story is relegated to the Scottish pages…this is their top story, on the frontpage, UK page and Scottish page…
I’m sure it’s a major story in Scotland…or not…but what about the Scottish fishing industry and its future?
Consider this…not only is this a big story about the future of Scottish fishing and a Brexit story to boot, it turns out Sturgeon has made a huge cock-up and has been peddling fake news about this meeting claiming that the government are planning to sell out the fishermen.
The BBC has decided this is not a story. And yet it is not one, but two major stories…Scottish fishing may have a much better future out of the EU and Sturgeon has caught lying, spreading fake news.
Ruth Davidson has accused Nicola Sturgeon of a “grubby” attempt to spread “trash” about the UK Government betraying Scotland’s fishermen during Brexit after the First Minister’s claim to have written proof backfired spectacularly.
Ms Sturgeon took to social media to highlight selective extracts of a private letter from Andrea Leadsom, the Environment Secretary, to the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation (SFF) and claimed it showed the “Tories are planning to sell out Scottish fishing”.
But her claims prompted angry fishing leaders to release the full letter, with Bertie Armstrong, the federation’s chief executive, stating that on “any reading” it makes clear that the UK Government is committed to exiting the hated Common Fisheries Policy (CFP).
Even the Guardian has the central issue on the frontpage….
Nothing to see here is the BBC’s message…no ‘clickbait’ headline to attract reader’s attention….they hope that even if you do somehow end up on the Scottish page you’ll bypass this story.
The BBC burying bad news for the SNP….suddenly not interested in fake news, suddenly not interested in a major Brexit story. LOL.
The BBC day in day out attacks ‘social media’ for allowing far-right racist comments, it never lets a chance go by to attack Breitbart and paint it as a white-supremacist, anti-semitic site, it consistently attacks anyone who supports Trump and tries to demonise them as racist or in the pay of the Russians subverting democracy by various methods [see Panorama and the BBC’s scaremongering about right-wing bots]…conversely it has little to nothing to say about left-wing racism and hate. It took them a long time to get around to working up any interest in anti-Semitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party and shows no interest in the SNP’s and its supporters’ antics, naturally it shows no interest in Muslim anti-Semitism and anti-Western, anti-British prejudice…only today we heard a mention by a caller on Campbell’s show about Labour’s anti-semitism saying this was why he wouldn’t vote Labour, this was immediately countered with a claim that the Tories had their own problems with islamophobia…referencing Zac Goldsmith [who we’ve looked at …he made no mention of islam in his mayoral bid…it was Khan himself that ran ‘as a Muslim’]…no comment from Campbell to rebut this slur.
Oddly no mention of this story from the BBC, which has been on Guido all day, and is now in the Mail….
What follows is an appeal to Jeremy Corbyn supporters to think again. It’s from Chris, a Labour party member, who does not want to give his full name for fear of abuse. He has compiled a vast, but by no means exhaustive list of the moral and political failings of the Labour leader. He told me:
I’ve noticed that a few of my very clever, thoughtful, moderately left-wing friends were pro-Corbyn, which amazed me. What I discovered was that they knew almost no facts about him or his fellow travellers. I then noticed that any given critical article about Corbyn only listed one or two facts about him. Normal, good people, who aren’t political anoraks like me, don’t have time to read hundreds of articles on politics – they read a few articles and base the rest of their opinions on gut feeling and general trend of the headlines/social media. I decided to collate in one place the most striking, verifiable facts about Corbyn and the movement he represents.
They are well worth reading…..
I write this as a passionate leftist and liberal. Below is a list of facts about Jeremy Corbyn which have not previously been collated in one place. The reader can make up their own mind, based on these facts. This list has been broken up into three sections: ‘Ethics’, ‘Leadership & Electability’, and ‘Social Media & Activists’.
Part One: Ethics
1. Against peace in Ireland
During the 1980s and 1990s, Jeremy Corbyn supported the IRA and opposed the Northern Ireland peace process:
By voting against the peace process and the Anglo-Irish Agreement in Parliament, as he believed republican nationalists shouldn’t have to compromise (the evidence is here and here).
By attending and speaking at annual pro-IRA commemorations for terrorists between 1986 and 1992. The programme for one such event reads: ‘In this, the conclusive phase in the war to rid Ireland of the scourge of British imperialism…force of arms is the only method capable of bringing this about’.
By aligning with terrorists. Corbyn was general secretary of the editorial board of the hard-left journal Labour Briefing which supported IRA violence and explicitly backed the Brighton Hotel Bombing, which killed 5 people and maimed 31 others. In its December 1984 leader, the editorial board ‘disassociated itself’ from an article criticising the Brighton bombing, saying the criticism was a ‘serious political misjudgement’. The board said it ‘reaffirmed its support for, and solidarity with, the Irish republican movement’, and added that ‘the British only sit up and take notice when they are bombed into it’. Alongside its editorial, the board reprinted a speech by Gerry Adams describing the bombing as a ‘blow for democracy’. The same edition carried a reader’s letter praising the ‘audacity’ of the IRA attack and stating: ‘What do you call four dead Tories? A start.’ They had previously printed the following:
We refuse to parrot the ritual condemnation of ‘violence’ because we insist on placing responsibility where it lies…. Let our Iron Lady know this: those who live by the sword shall die by it. If she wants violence, then violence she will certainly get.
If Corbyn wanted to support a unified Ireland through peaceful means he could have supported the SDLP (Northern Ireland’s Social Democratic and Labour Party), which wanted to unify Ireland through a democratic process. Instead, Corbyn attended ‘Troops Out’ rallies where the SDLP were denounced as sell-outs. In 2015, on BBC Radio Ulster, Corbyn refused five times to specifically condemn IRA violence and terrorism. He hung up rather than answer the question. You can listen here.
Corbyn also appointed as his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who opposed the peace process as late as 1998 as it meant compromise. McDonnell also said (before, admittedly, later apologising):
It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA. Because of the bravery of the IRA and people like Bobby Sands we now have a peace process.
It is worth remembering that the IRA bombed, shot, or beat to death 1,696 men, women and children, and of course did not achieve a united Ireland.
2. For the Iranian religious right
Jeremy Corbyn has been paid £20,000 to appear five times on the totalitarian Iranian regime’s propaganda channel, which was banned in the UK for its role in filming the tortured forced-confession of Iranian liberal journalist Maziar Bahari. By hosting interviews, Corbyn gives the propaganda the ‘credibility’ of a Western politician. It’s fascinating to hear Iranian democracy campaigner Maziar Bahari’s own thoughts on Corbyn, who he describes as ‘a useful idiot’, and goes on to say:
People who present programmes for Press TV and get paid for it should be really ashamed of themselves — especially if they call themselves liberals and people who are interested in human rights.
The Iranian regime executes gay people, democracy activists, Kurds, and orders the rape of female prisoners. But Corbyn is happy to take their money and aid their propaganda campaign. Watch the end of this clip as Jeremy hosts a caller who describes the BBC as having hosted ‘Zionist liars’.
3. For anti-Semites
Jeremy Corbyn has praised and supported Raed Salah, an Islamist who has been accused of spreading the Blood Libel (an old antisemitic conspiracy that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make their bread). Salah has also been charged with inciting racial hatred and violence, and has claimed the Jews were behind 9/11. Corbyn has said: ‘Salah is a very honoured citizen’, ‘Salah’s is a voice that must be heard’, ‘Salah is far from a dangerous man’, and ‘I look forward to giving you tea on the terrace because you deserve it!’.
Corbyn wrote in defence of a vicar who suggested that 9/11 was an inside job by the Jews.
Corbyn invited Hamas and Hizbollah to Parliament and called them his ‘friends’. Bear in mind that Hamas’s Charter is explicitly genocidal – it makes it clear its supporters want to kill Jews and repeats Nazi conspiracy theories. Their founding Charter also rules out any peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestine problem. It says:
Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement… There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.
Corbyn doesn’t invite extremist Zionists to parliament, only extremist anti-Semites.
As his right-hand man, Corbyn appointed Seumas Milne, who has argued we should focus more on the positives of Stalin’s communist dictatorship. Milne was also part of the pro-Stalin and pro-Soviet fellow travellers of Fergus Nicholson’s wing of the British Communist Party (he was not an official member), and worked at the pro-Soviet paperStraight Left. Milnehas also blamed Russia’s recent invasion of the Ukraine on the West, and has hosted a propaganda media conference for Vladimir Putin.
5. Against self-determination
Corbyn suggested that the Falkland Islands should be shared with Argentina, ignoring a referendum in which 99.8 per cent of the islanders voted to remain British.
Part Two: Electability and Leadership
Jeremy Corbyn has repeatedly demonstrated he isn’t a viable leader. Here’s how:
Corbyn has shown he has little idea about how to handle the media. Even left-wing newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent have complained that the Corbyn team, through incompetency, release their press statements too late to give them full coverage the next day. One example was the announcement of an internal inquiry into anti-Semitism in the Labour party, wider coverage of which would have taken pressure off Corbyn and the Labour party. Instead, the announcement was made late on a Friday night – meaning the saga dragged on.
On national television, Jeremy Corbyn refused to back a shoot-to-kill policy if a Paris-style machine gun attack happened in London. He then changed his mind and backtracked a day later.
Corbyn’s botched attempt at a publicity stunt on a ‘ram-packed’ train was questioned by Virgin who released CCTV images showing the Labour leader appearing to walk past empty seats before he had filmed a video showing him sitting on the floor of a train carriage. Another image released by Virgin also showed Corbyn having later found a seat.
The following advisors and colleagues have resigned under Corbyn or disowned him in the last ten months, citing incompetence and his unelectability:
Neale Coleman, the former aide to Ken Livingstone, resigned following the unexpected announcement of policies he had not be consulted on.
Richard Murphy, the left wing tax specialist who was initially supportive of Corbyn, and whose policies the Labour leader took up, has now disowned him due to his failure to create a detailed plan. He said he had lost faith in Corbyn’s vision.
David Blanchflower resigned, citing his lack of ability and electability. And Simon Wren-Lewis criticised the Labour leadership for not campaigning ‘more strongly‘ in the EU referendum.
World famous left-wing economist Thomas Picketty has also resigned as Corbyn’s economic advisor, criticising his ‘weak’ EU campaign.
The Labour MP Thangam Debonaire disowned Corbyn after saying the Labour leader hired and fired her while she was receiving cancer treatment – all without a single word. Her full, shocking account can be read here.
The Labour MP Lilian Greenwood, who never publicly criticised Corbyn, and who voted with him on Syria, resigned as the Shadow Transport shadow, claiming Corbyn has repeatedly undermined her. Oh, and there’s also….
The 172 Labour MPs, whose views range from centrist to centre-left to fully left-wing, who voted that they had no confidence in Corbyn’s leadership.
But these aren’t the only indications Corbyn isn’t up to the job:
Corbyn has the lowest public approval rating for an opposition leader after ten months since records began. An Ipsos Mori poll said Corbyn’s rating was -41, compared to -32 for Michael Foot at the same time during his doomed leadership.
Every large-scale study into why Labour lost the 2015 general election came to the same conclusion: Labour was not trusted on the economy. Corbyn’s response? To promise £500billion in spending but refuse to say where the money will come from.
Jeremy Corbyn also had a disastrous referendum campaign. Having been pro-Brexit for decades – voting against Common market membership in 1975, and against the Maastricht Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty as an MP – his ‘pro-Remain’ campaign was, at best, half-hearted. What’s more:
Corbyn missed the first day of the Labour ‘Remain‘ campaign so he could attend an anti-nuclear weapons rally instead.
Leaked emails show that during the EU referendum campaign, Labour party ‘Remain’ campaigners came to the conclusion that the Corbyn Team were deliberately sabotaging their efforts.
A full 45 per cent of the millions of Labour voters weren’t aware that Labour was for ‘Remain’.
Corbyn’s first actions after the referendum was to, unwisely, call for the immediate invoking of Article 50.
Part Three: Social Media & Activists
It cannot be emphasised enough that abusive Corbyn supporters only represent a vocal minority. However it is also clear that Labour wasn’t experiencing the problems of abuse and intimidation prior to the birth of this current movement. In the process of fact checking, it became apparent that some incidents of abuse may have been exaggerated in order to criticise the pro-Corbyn movement. However, it’s simply not possible to claim that the hundreds-upon-hundreds of separately documented incidents, abusive voicemails and phone calls, physical confrontations, police callouts and death threats are all exaggerations. Here are a list of just some of them:
Over 40 female MPs have written to Jeremy Corbyn pleading with him to try to curtail the abuse they receive from his supporters. It’s not clear what Jeremy Corbyn has actually done about this issue.
Across the country, Labour constituency meetings have been temporarily suspended by the NEC because of the levels of abuse and intimidation taking place at some of these gatherings.
Since challenging Corbyn’s leadership, Labour MP Angela Eagle has been called a ‘dyke’ at a constituency meeting, and has been told by police that, for now, she should not hold constituency surgeries because her safety cannot be guaranteed.
BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg has received abuse from Corbyn supporters, including being called a ‘whore’ and a ‘bitch’.
At the release of the Labour anti-Semitism report, Labour MP Ruth Smeeth was abused by a Corbyn supporter. Meanwhile, Corbyn apparently watched and said nothing.
Of course, there are many other facts to bear in mind when making your choice for Labour leader. It is up to each individual to vote with their conscience, but all of us must strive to vote based on the facts.
Yours sincerely,
CG (name anonymised to avoid harassment and abuse)
Just why was Kuenssberg so insistent that Corbyn say if he would dump Brexit if he didn’t get what he wanted in negotiations as PM?…and is the camera set up deliberately to get ‘Vote Labour 8 June’ deliberately in frame?
‘This is a very important point to make for lots of people. As you say, we don’t know what will happen in the negotiations…. if you are PM can you categorically say we would definitely leave because if you won’t there is a chink of a possibility that things might change and we might end up looking differently about our options.’
Vote Labour, get Remain? Corbyn refuses to say if he would take UK out of EU as Prime Minister. https://t.co/A3uePVoyZe
Ah, here we go…Kuenssberg admits her line of questioning was all about getting Corbyn to say he’d leave…and this matters….because public opinion might change…Kuenssberg is trying to legitimise a second referendum and a Brexit backtrack…..and encourage people to think Labour might betray the Brexit vote…so ‘Vote Labour’ and you might get Remian!……
If the proposed EU side of the bargain is draconian, or, in this volatile world, the facts and public opinion have changed significantly, why on earth would any political party want to tie itself to a firm position either way…..even reluctance and hesitancy count – because in this election, particularly over Brexit, every word and every move will matter.
Kuenssbergs whole line of questioning was set up to suggest Brexit is not settled and can be reversed…so vote Labour…a double whammy there for the BBC…get rid of Brexit and get the BBC’s preferred choice of Party into Office.
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