by John Ward
I am the first to admit that the US, Russia, China, Brussels, Whitehall, MI6 and Mossad interfere in the politics of nations they perceive to represent a threat. But I expect rather more than suggestive ideological speculation as the basis of truth. There may well be forces determined that Jeremy Corbyn will never become the British Prime Minister, but the obstacles in his path are largely self-inflicted.
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An opinion circle I value highly yesterday sent me an article about Jeremy Corbyn written by Jonathon Cook. It purports to suggest credibly that there is an organised neocon conspiracy to ensure Mr Corbyn never gains power in Britain.
The article appears in the American Herald Tribune, which is nothing whatever to do with the more famous International Herald Tribune. The AHT is described by Factchecker sites as often about ‘promotion of the deep state conspiracy as well as highly negative speech directed at Israel and Jews….factual searches reveal ‘mostly false claims’ in the articles published there’. Cook himself is avowedly pro-Palestinian.
That said, we never know these days who is checking the fact-checkers, and in the past I have read pieces at this site that had a ring of Truth.
This particular article would be compelling if it was (a) even handed and (b) an accurate portrayal of Corbyn’s electability. Let’s start on the plus side. There is and always has been a massive streak of anti-Jew orthodoxy on Britain’s Stalinist Left – it was there half a century ago when I was at Uni, and it’s still there today. But it has without question been blown out of all proportion by Britain’s Establishment media.
Corbyn himself is an Arabist, but he’s not an anti-Semite, he’s anti-Zionist. And yes, he has supported political violence on many occasions in the past….and I can’t name a single Western politician of any note in the last 60 years who hasn’t. We are very much in the land of what one might clumsily call hyper-ocrisy here.
Sadly, the rest of Cook’s piece is 24-carat radical chic élitism.
1. Russell Brand is a tiny minority appeal, hysterically funny metrocomic whose ideas don’t bear examination. He didn’t shame Jon Snow into anything, because Snow is a shameless censor on the same page as Jonathon Cook. Imagine Jennifer Flowers in trousers with an anarchic sense of humour, and you’re about there. The idea that he has attracted “a large following” is beyond ridiculous. He is a London élite media gulch microcrosm.
2. I’ve read Cook’s “plot” paragraphs three times now, and I cannot see one iota of real evidence beyond the CIA’s track record, about which I do not need any convincing. To call the evidence circumstantial, however, is to be very kind to every confluence of circumstances.
3. The latest polls in the UK show Labour miles behind a potential Tory government headed by Boris Johnson. The single biggest reason on the Right is that Corbyn seems to hate everything about Britain. He’s not alone in that view, but it’s not exactly a vote-winner. The biggest reason on the Left is that Jeremy of Nazareth has shown since his 2017 “success” (which was a failure) that he is up there on the same cloud of serial mendacity and shifty blame-dodging as all the rest of the ethical hydras in Westminster. He has been asked time and time again to proffer his views on the EU (he hates it, and always has) and always given weasel answers – such that the Party position on a Second Referendum and how to effect Brexit is a set of fairground tealeaves wrapped in Pravda newsprint and hidden behind an iron curtain.
4. The people in the Corbyn-Labour dictatorship of the private school proletariat are the same nest of vipers who have been splitting, resplitting, hiving off and tendentiously adding up to nothing since the days of Arthur Scargill, Vanessa Redgrave and Derek Hatton in the 1970s: Momentum is simply Militant reborn, and Jon Lannsman was active in both organisations. They worship the idea of a Hard Left Britain that simply doesn’t exist. Michael Palin explaining in Life of Brian that “No we are not the fucking People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, we are the Palestine Liberation Front an’ we spit on the fucking People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine” was a clinically accurate satire on these people.
5. The Leftlib axis in 2019 Britain is split four ways. Mathematically, Corbyn was never going to win anyway. Since the desertion of nearly 15 MPs to other Parties, the sole response of Corbynistas has been to continue the blatantly obvious purging of just about the only Party MPs (like Kate Hoey) who are national heroes. Easy for these lunatics with bumper majorities in Islington and Muswell Hill to be champagne socialists: but beyond the People’s Republic of Lambeth & Camden, they are a laughing stock.
6. Cook uses the phrase “vast majority of the activist Labour membership” supporting Corbyn, but signally omits to record that the “huge rise” in such membership numbers was the result of a cynical attempt by Ed Miliband to get ‘ordinary’ Labour voters to become a counterweight to a trade union movement that didn’t like him much. In fact, after 2011 Momentum stuffed that membership with their Socialist Workers’ Party followers: that and that alone is what elected Corbyn as leader…and keeps him there. As old Joe Stalin said, “It’s not the votes that count, it’s who’s allowed to vote”.
Alot of pension-deprived WASPI women voted Labour in 2017. Since then, Corbyn has consistently failed to promise them anything in the way of restoration of their civil rights. The reason is simple: he prefers correct minority grievances to the plight of 3.65 million grandmothers who don’t normally vote Labour.
And that just about sums up our Jeremy: he gives good divisive, but is clueless on the adhesive thing.
Jonathon Cook needs to get out more. Whenever the next election is, the resultant House of Commons is going to consist of a blocking group of rabidly pro-EU Liberal Democrats supported by non-Corbyn Labour MPs versus the combined votes of anti-Europe Tories supported by (perhaps) the first Brexit Party MPs – if, and only if, Nigel Farage reconfigures his brain towards cooperative alliance rather than egocentric personality cultism.
I am very happy to take on board interesting and well-supported radical views on British politics and neocon US interference therein. I am less keen on biased ideological claptrap masquerading as The Real World.