No self-respecting socialist or Labour supporter should buy the Guardian
On and on they go. I didn't realise just how bad the Guardian campaign has been until someone had the bright idea of doing a compilation. An incessant drip drip of poison against Jeremy Corbyn allied to a monotonous one-sided propaganda campaign about non-existent 'anti-semitism' in the Labour Party. There are plenty more of these articles at the bottom of this post.
The fact that the Daily Express, Mail and Sun are so concerned about this 'anti-Semitism' should tell you all you need to know.
You might think that the Guardian's readership having fallen from nearly 1/2 million a decade ago to about 150,000 today that they might have taken care not to alienate the hundreds of thousands of Corbyn supporters who joined the Labour Party.
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Owen Jones demonstrates his fierce independence from the Guardian consensus
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The Guardian seems to have a bottomless pit of stupid journalists and vacuum heads
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I’m not sure who they are but five filters have done a remarkable job in collating some of the more tedious attacks by Guardian columnists on Jeremy Corbyn. I have added a few more from the Guardian’s sponsorship of the false anti-Semitism campaign.
They are all on one theme – in the words of Suzanna Moore ‘Corbyn’s Uselessness has lost its charm.’ Their many but not varied columnists deploy a variety of approaches, but all with the same monotonous message.
There is the bludgeon approach of Nick Cohen ‘Labour has the stench of death – meet the killers’. Cohen doesn’t do subtle. There is the smug approach of Jonathan Freedland No more excuses: Jeremy Corbyn is to blame for this meltdown. Then there is the concerned ‘left-winger’ aka Owen Jones Jeremy Corbyn says he's staying. That's not good enough(Jones always falls on the wrong side even if it is for the right reasons!).
Then there is the resident ‘concerned’ Tory Matthew d’Ancona who misquotes John Donne ‘The bell tolls for Corbyn's leadership, but where are Labour's centrists.’ There is even the fake sympathiser, Polly Toynbee who hawks her social conscience around the TV studios but when push comes to shove backs free market capitalism. Why can't I get behind Corbyn, when we want the same things?
Toynbee has the gall to write Free to dream, I'd be left of Jeremy Corbyn.as if we have forgotten that the last time Labour went leftwards Polly Toynbee helped found the SDP which guaranteed Thatcher her victory in 1983. Their hypocrisy is only matched by their dishonesty.
One should not of course forget the Observer’s pompous and verbally incontinent political correspondent Andrew Rawnsley who professes that The really scary thing about Corbyn? He's not radical. Who would have thought that Rawnsley was a genuine revolutionary!
There is John Harris who is happy to write the first rubbish that comes into his head Twitter parodies won't worry Corbyn. But his supporters deserting him should
Marina Hyde is the Guardian’s resident vacuum head who makes Jonathan Ross seem like an intellectual. She genuinely believes that ‘His remain colleague’s effort level was not so much half-arsed as quarter-arsed.’ is amusing in Labour is making the Conservative omnishambles era look like a utopia’.
One of the qualities of these empty rhetoricians is their pomposity. Raphael Behr is the most pompous of all in a field with stiff competition. In his Jeremy Corbyn, you broke it – now you must own itBehr summed up the Guardian’s lack of principle when he berated Corbyn over his lack of support for Sellafield and nuclear energy in the Copeland by-election.
According to Behr Corbyn should act like any other Labour right-winger and bury his deeply held convictions about nuclear energy for the sake of transient electoral approval. ‘The Tories were not shy of reminding people that the Labour leader was ideologically hostile to the engine of their local economy.’ The Guardian, following in the footsteps of the Lib Dems simply does not understand a principled politician. Principles must be sacrificed for pragmatism.
So when we have another nuclear disaster, as happened at Windscale in the 1950’s who will remember that Corbyn refused to bow to the tabloid’s populism?
In the middle of the first leadership election campaign Michael White, who used to be its parliamentary sketch writer and was from memory genuinely funny, could find nothing else worth saying other than Jeremy Corbyn: is the world ready for his sandals and socks?
My favourite article is by Islamaphobe Nick Cohen Don’t tell me you weren’t warned about Corbyn. Written just before the General Election it is a text book example of mendacity and how the class of political commentators and pundits speak to themselves.
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Not one Guardian columnist matched this blog's analysis!  |
In an election, they [the Tories] would tear them to pieces. … Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it.
One senior Labour figure told me he thought Corbyn was endangering British democracy. … The 60% of the population who do not want Conservative rule are faced with Conservative rule without end, with the only pressure for change coming from an ever-more audacious right.
More troubling for you ought to be the question why might May, a prime minister with a fragile majority, not bother to call an early election. One cabinet minister explains her insouciance thus.
He and George Osborne used to worry about how Ed Balls and Chuka Umunna would strike back against their austerity programme. Now ministers do not give Labour a second’s thought.’
The ever thoughtful Cohen finished with a self-righteous flourish of anger:
‘In my respectful opinion, your only honourable response will be to stop being a fucking fool by changing your fucking mind.’
Contrast this with my own blog. On April 20th, when Labour was behind in the polls by over 20%, I wrote an article Labour Can Win if Corbyn is Bold – the Key Issue is Poverty and the Transfer of Wealth. My article began:
‘It was Harold Wilson who said that a week is a long time in politics. Seven weeks is a political eternity. Theresa May has taken a gamble that her 21% lead will hold. It is a gamble that she may yet come to regret.
There is only one direction that her lead can go and that is down. Once her lead falls then a snowball effect can take over. What is essential is that Labour marks out the key areas on which it is going to base its appeal. The danger is that Corbyn is going to continue with his ‘strategy’ of appeasing the Right and appealing to all good men and women. If so that will be a recipe for disaster.
No election is guaranteed to be without its surprises. Theresa May is a cautious conservative. She is literally the product of her background, a conservative vicar’s daughter. Reactionary, parochial and small-minded, she is a bigot for all seasons. What doesn’t help is that she is both wooden and unoriginal. The danger is that Corbyn tries to emulate her.’
Hindsight is a wondrous thing but foresight is a rarer quality. Unlike the Grauniads I could not understand what the pundits saw in May. She reminded me of that Agatha Christie title, ‘The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side’. I had a feeling that St. Theresa would come unstuck but not one Guardian columnist displayed an iota of doubt. So confident was I that for the first time in my life I entered a bookies and placed a bet, thus enjoying my prediction even more!
Cast your mind back. There was a wall to wall consensus that Corbyn was going to fail and badly. Labour's Tory MPs such as Peter Kyle and Joan Ryan of the pro-Israel lobby, appealed to the electorate on the basis that they too hated Corbyn.
I confess to fearing that I might have egg all over my face. Perhaps there was something I hadn’t yet grasped since no one else saw it the way I did. Yet going canvassing in Brighton Kemptown, where a Tory majority of 700 was turned into a Labour majority of nearly 10,000, I was convinced that the tectonic plates were shifting.
I confess to fearing that I might have egg all over my face. Perhaps there was something I hadn’t yet grasped since no one else saw it the way I did. Yet going canvassing in Brighton Kemptown, where a Tory majority of 700 was turned into a Labour majority of nearly 10,000, I was convinced that the tectonic plates were shifting.
Five days before the election I was even more convinced that there was going to be a major upset. At this stage the polls were firm in the view that May’s wobble had come to an end. The Guardian was gleefully looking forward to the end of the Corbyn experiment. As idiot Guardian columnist Matthew d’Ancona was writing ‘The bell tolls for Corbyn’s Leadership’ I reaffirmed my view in General Election - Is Labour on the threshold of victory? I wrote
‘Strong and stable Mrs May found that her slogan had made her a figure of fun as she dodged having to directly debate Jeremy Corbyn. She even sent her Home Secretary into bat for her in the debate between party leaders earlier in the week, despite Rudd having only lost her father two days before.
It would be a mistake for people to be over confident at the fact that the Tories made major slip-ups over things like the Dementia Tax, taking food of children’s tables etc. It is clear that the Tories and the Mainstream Media (BBC et al.) are going hell for leather over the question of Corbyn’s devotion to the State, be it Ireland, Terrorism or Trident.
The essence of what I wrote was correct. The Tory lead has shrunk. My fears that Corbyn might backtrack have not come to pass in the economic sphere. Labour’s manifesto was unexpectedly radical.
I have thought of suggesting to Guardian editor, Katherine Viner, that I would be prepared to replace Cohen and Owen Jones for half their combined pay. Not only would the Guardian save a fortune but they would gain someone whose prime quality was not repeating the truisms of the political pundits.
However I soon woke up and realized that my day dreaming was going nowhere. The function of Guardian columnists isn’t to provide analysis and independent thought. Their role is to propagandize for the neo-liberal agenda. Although the Guardian isn’t as crude as the Express or Mail, it shares the same basic assumptions about the free market.
If the Guardian had any self-respect they would have fired Nick Cohen, a useless and repetitious Islamaphobe. They would have promoted Jonathan Freedland to Keeper of the Guardian Cat. Cohen is a permanent testimony to the Guardian’s change from being a genuinely liberal paper, with socialist columnists like John Palmer its European editor. It was a paper that used to have excellent Middle East correspondents such as David Hirst and Michael Adams, whereas today it has surrendered that region of the world to the Independent’s Robert Fisk and Patrick Coburn.
In 1968 I remember how Victor Zorza predicted the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, putting an end to the Prague Spring. Even when I was on the dole I ensured that I had enough money to buy the Guardian each day. Today the only time I get it is when I shop at Waitrose and spend over £10 as it comes for free! It never fails to disappoint.
Editor Kath Viner, under the baleful influence of Freedland, is determined to exhaust the diminishing funds of the Scott Trust. The Guardian is losing so much money that it is doubtful that it can survive for more than 2-3 years, hence the pathetic pleas on its website for readers to make a donation. It is as if, amongst all the good causes, you are going to donate to the Guardian rather than the starving children in Gaza or the refugees of Rohinga. Why should we pay Freedland’s salary when he is the Guardian’s Zionist gatekeeper, determined to ensure that whatever atrocity Israel commits, the Guardian will never question the world’s only Apartheid state.Ten years ago I contributed a series of articles to the Guardian’s Comment is Free. My contributions and others attracted the attentions of the Zionist lobby who set up CIF Watch. The idea of an anti-racist critique of Zionism and Israel was too much. The Guardian ran up the white flag and I and others were excluded. The late Georgina Henry, who originally hired me, was by then a marginal figure as Matt Seaton, their bicycling correspondent took charge.
Perhaps if the Guardian survives as an Internet paper in 30 years there will be some bright young journalist who will uncover the story of where the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign originated. S/he will no doubt relook at the Al Jazeera programme The Lobby concerning the Israeli Embassy’s role. If they are diligent, they will go on to examine the role of the United States in destabilising the second major party of the US’s main ally in Europe. It is inconceivable that those who have made destabilisation of Latin American countries into a fine art, who ran Operation Gladio in Europe, would be prepared to sit back as an anti-NATO anti-Trident politician became leader of the Labour Party.
Perhaps if the equivalent of Wikileaks gets hold of US Embassy cables we will learn even sooner about their and Israel’s role in the anti-Corbyn campaign. Perhaps we will even learn whether Freedland and other Guardian columnists were on the payroll of either Embassy and what the Guardian’s links were with MI5. If the Guardian had any political integrity it would have already have begun investigating these matters but the sad fact is that the Guardian of today is a pro-war rag that runs with a neo-liberal pro-imperialist agenda.
An article worth reading on the anti-Semitism campaign is John Booth’s Labour, Corbyn and anti-semitism in The Lobster. Enjoy these headlines because they tell the sad, sorry story of a once good liberal paper that went to rack and ruin.
Tony Greenstein
Tony Greenstein
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| The Guardian was nothing if not predictable |
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| One more on the Guardian's boring theme - yet it will not examine why all its useless columnists sang the same song |
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| What Bloodworth means is Hamas and Hezbollah - the 'worrying connections' of the Tories with the Saudis and Yemen are not of course worrying |
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| Another useless supporter of Progress |
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| The only cruelty is that inflicted on gullible Observer readers who read this rubbish |
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| Despite getting it spectacularly wrong Freedland has learnt nothing |
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| The capacity for self-delusion is endless |
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| Former New Labour MP Martin Kettle seriously believed this utter tripe |
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| One more reason why London needs a genuinely radical Mayor |
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| I suspect that Suzanne Moore thought this was original - it isn't - James Dean got their first |
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| Let's hope she didn't join |
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| I don't know what the answer to this question is - one explanation is that you are a shrivelled reactionary prune |
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| When all else fails, try being polite |
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| Polly is really a radical - if only Corbyn were electable unlike David Owen |
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| One amongst many pathetic predictions |
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| Idiocy without limit - how was Blair going to secure his 'legacy' - wage another useless war? |
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| Let's hope this useless right-winger is deselected |
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| One of the themes of Corbyn's detractors was that they were simply interested in democracy |
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| Yes we hate you and no we will still vote Labour! |
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| Sometimes one wonders whether even Cohen believes this rubbish |
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| The wonder is that Nick Cohen has the audacity to show his face after June 8th |
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| Gaby doesn't get why she speaks more rubbish |
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| I won't even begin to ask what a 'real leader' is |
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| Polly is nothing if not unoriginal |
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| I must have missed the eating of humble pie |
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| Poetically batty |
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| Polly seriously expects us to believe that one of the founders of the SDP is to the left of Corbyn |
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| I hadn't realised before that Andrew Rawnsley was a radical - the only thing he's ever fought for is a good seat in a restaurant |
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| Another empty headed Guardian columnist |
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| Another Guardian empty head - Marina Hyde actually believes she is witty which is a problem |
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| Nick Cohen is a prophet whose warnings were fortunately disregarded - there has been no mea culpa for getting it so badly wrong |
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| I suspect that Michael White actually thinks he is amusing |
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| The pretentious Rafael Behr |
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| Spot the difference between Owen Jones, the Guardian's resident lefty and Freedland and the Express/Mail |
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| Yvette Cooper, New Labour's war mongering former home office minister was the Guardian's choice for leader |
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Even for Freedland this is one of the most stupid articles - do Jews suffer from state racism, deaths in custody, violent attacks, synagogue arson - being a minority doesn't make you oppressed - but Freedland is nothing if not superficial
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| I suspect Freedland still he thinks he was right even if the electorate was wrong |