Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 11:20 am Post subject: Jeremy Corbyn: Blairite coup attempt post Brexit referendum
Good article on the Corbyn coup attempt.
New Labour emerges from hibernation sooner than expected…and unready
by Kit
freedlandcorbyn
The unwillingness, on behalf of the Labour right, to unite with the rest of the party and attack the Conservatives at a time when they are politically divided and publicly humiliated neatly demonstrates the unacknowledged truth of British democracy – in fact, most Western democracies: We do not have an “opposition”, we do not live in a “two-party system”. The centre-right Tories and centre-left Blairites are really just two halves of a depraved whole. One large party, that holds a monopoly on power, and kindly lets us choose which colour of tie they wear while they’re in office. George Orwell described the future as “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” the reality is there are two boots, a left one and a right one, and – every now and then – we get to choose between them.
As such, it came as no surprise when, just hours after the Brexit results, Hilary Benn launched his coup. Anyone following the rampant anti-Corbyn media bias in the last leadership election, accompanied by the sickening grovelling following Benn’s pro-bombing Syria speech, knows who the MSM wants to to be in charge of the opposition. The election of Corbyn, much like Brexit itself, is one of those things that was just not supposed to happen.
The long-term plan was always to replace Corbyn before the next General Election. The chaos currently engulfing the Labour party is akin to waking up on the morning of an exam that you haven’t revised for – they really thought they had more time. As it is, they must try to make do.
The anti-Corbyn arguments are fractured and non-sensical, scripted with a different scenario in mind. Like that Two Ronnies sketch, where a quiz-show contestant is always answering the question prior to one he was asked. Bremain was supposed to win, and then the heavily pro-EU Blairites, that Corbyn was saddled with on the front bench, would have three full years to undermine Corbyn’s leadership by reminding everyone of his “luke warm” support of the EU, they would say he was “old-fashioned” and “out of touch with the pro-EU left”.
Those three years could also be spent, by Corbyn’s potential replacements, building up a campaign manifest and holding extensive auditions. Chuka Umunna could come out of hiding; the self-styled “British Obama” would be an excellent choice…if he had charisma. Those three years could be spent teaching him to give speeches and use the word “folks” a lot. The humiliatingly massive defeat that Liz Kendall (Peter Mandelson’s choice candidate) suffered would be further out of everyone’s minds by 2020. Benn himself may “reluctantly” take on “the burden” of leadership. Maybe David Miliband could be redeemed in the public eye…somehow. It doesn’t matter, 3 years gives you options, six months does not – hence the total lack of serious discussion as to who could replace Corbyn. Every Labour MP asked if they intend to run has answered “no”. The four that ran against him last time are out, and nobody wants to run against him now because – should they lose – it will put them out of contention for the “three year plan”.
The whole situation is seemingly crazy – because it is built on a false premise. The majority of the country, we now know, is anti-EU membership, and there will most likely be a General Election in the next few months. That the historically anti-EU leader of the opposition should be replaced in these circumstances is strange. That it should be done nine months after he won the most resounding victory in a leadership election in party history, is absurd…if you believe their stated reasons.
The argument being made by the herd of resigning shadow ministers goes like this:
British politics will be completely dominated in the coming years by the Brexit negotiations, and I do not believe that you have the requisite skills or experience to ensure that there is a strong Labour voice at the negotiating table as we undertake this monumentally complex task.”
resignation letter of Stephen Kinnock
Reading between the lines, what this really means is that there will be a big push laid on by most of the pro-EU MPs to make sure that either a)Britain does not leave the EU at all, or b)Britain leaves the EU in name only, and these “negotiations” ensure that we remain – at heart – a member of the fascist clique that is the EU. A country run for the corporate benefit and the enrichment of the ruling elite.
The work of Parliament, in the coming months, will be to undermine or ignore this referendum…by any means necessary. Jeremy Corbyn, whatever you think of his policies, has an in-built respect for democracy – he will not allow this to happen, and so he must be removed before “negotiations” start.
And so we come to the “revelations” that Corbyn may have “sabotaged the EU Remain campaign”. They first appeared on the blog of Laura Kuenssberg, political editor at the BBC. According to Kuenssberg: Jeremy Corbyn was secretly hoping Leave would win, and has reservations about our place in the EU. I’m not sure why “elected politician agrees with 52% of country about Europe” is a scandal, but apparently it is. The evidence she cites is pretty startling:
…documents passed to the BBC suggest Jeremy Corbyn’s office sought to delay and water down the Labour Remain campaign. Sources suggest that they are evidence of “deliberate sabotage”.
In the grand tradition of modern “investigative journalism” (see: Panama Papers), Kuenssberg has regurgitated a few choice quotes from some documents she was “passed” – without once confirming their veracity or releasing them entirely for public view. She posts the interpretation of a “source” that is never named, or examined for possible bias. It is a farce.
Not one of the (totally completely real) e-mails she was “passed” by the mysterious masked source is directly from Corbyn, or sent directly to him. The level of “evidence” being discussed is impressive:
A series of messages dating back to December seen by the BBC shows correspondence between the party leader’s office, the Labour Remain campaign and Labour HQ, discussing the European campaign. It shows how a sentence talking about immigration was removed on one occasion and how Mr Milne refused to sign off a letter signed by 200 MPs after it had already been approved.
A series of messages “seen by the BBC” show that Seumas Milne tweaked a letter about immigration last December. I’m not sure why these messages are fit to be “seen” by the BBC, and not by us. I’m not sure if the level of intelligence in journalism has dropped so sharply that they honestly consider this constitutes any kind of case. I am sure she uses the word “suggests” far too many times for a 1000 word article.
The Guardian, of course, have been all over this – a wonderful example of a paper being “on message”, despite having absolutely no idea what, exactly, “the message” is. Zoe William’s confused ramblings were brilliantly dissected by Jonathan Cook. Freedland’s sequel – a monolith neo-liberal flatulence and hypocrisy – is even more ridiculous. Corbyn is, Freedland states:
…guilty of ‘deliberate sabotage’ of the remain campaign. Members should remember this if they’re asked to re-elect him.”
It is a grand and confusing claim. At once seemingly libelous and irrelevant. The tone taken suggests that staying with the EU is a moral question, and that by (allegedly) half-arsing the campaign Corbyn has somehow behaved immorally – it somehow implies that being pro-leave is the same as being pro-war or pro-torture (not that Freedland has a problem with the former).
This is, of course, not true. And since there’s no direct evidence he did undermine the campaign, and since – short of secretly, directly, instructing people to vote against the official party line – any act of “sabotage” is completely subjective….you wonder how Freedland can possibly get an entire column out of this topic.
He does his best though, and only slips into falsehood, logical fallacy and disinformation half a dozen times. So well done him.
Corbyn’s base – the source of the enthusiasm and momentum which carried him to his famous victory last year – was the young. Second, the young voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union. Indeed, if 75% of all 18-24 year olds voted to remain, we can reasonably presume that figure was even higher among the left-leaning idealists who flocked to Corbyn a year ago.
This is pretty bad logic, for a number of reasons. Firstly, you can’t at once castigate Corbyn for his “lackluster campaigning”, whilst volunteering that he delivered the majority of his party’s vote (63%), including his young base. Secondly, it is not 75% of people under 25, it is 75% of the roughly 30% of that age group who voted. We have no idea how the other 70% would have voted, and it is statistically very unlikely that the minority turnout just happens to include the entirety of Corbyn’s young base. It is also flawed to suggest that Corbyn’s “left leaning idealists” would vote so massively FOR the EU, when the traditional leftist position has been anti-EU.
Whatever the motive, the facts are plain: Corbyn, McDonnell and their inner circle betrayed the hopes of the generation that believed in them most.
The facts are plain, ladies and gentlemen. Freedland has read the blog of a woman who “saw some documents”, and that’s good enough for me. That’s plenty of evidence, on its own, to back up all his defamatory rhetoric…but there’s also ANECDOTES:
Accompanying Labour canvassers in Yorkshire 10 days before the vote, I saw the effect for myself: Labour voters were still unclear whether their party was for remain or leave, and they were certainly not getting the unmistakable message that a vote to leave would be catastrophic for them in particular.
He talked to some guy in Yorkshire who didn’t know whether Labour was for or against the EU, and didn’t think that Brexit was literally the end of civilisation as we know it. Corbyn has to go, he is a traitor and heretic.
Of course, the most sickening part of this contemptible, slimy column is the blatant, extravagant liberal hypocrisy.
If we can venture, briefly, into an alternate universe – let us say that Remain had won. Let us say that instead of choking back panic for the past three days, the Guardian had been serving up crow. Let us say that Nigel Farage was demanding that Parliament ignore the referendum, and writing columns about how Boris Johnson was trying to sabotage the Leave campaign – citing as his evidence e-mails from last December, that were neither sent to, nor written by, Johnson himself. Would the Guardian heed these calls? Would they take them seriously? Never. Never in a million years.
Anyone questioning the integrity of the vote, or the campaigns, would be dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist” – as they were during the Scottish Independence referendum. “Bitter leavers” would be mocked, patronised, and encouraged to “move on”.
…but Brexit is apparently different. In this instance, no evidence is too small. No claim too ridiculous. No partition too full of joke names from the Antarctic. Establishment institutions are facing a real existential crisis, and desperate times call for really, really desperate measures.
The plot against Corbyn was always going to come out of hibernation eventually, but circumstance has forced it out too soon. Hopefully, it will not survive the winter.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 6:59 pm Post subject:
Majority of new Labour members support deselecting MPs who undermine Jeremy Corbyn
The finding comes admit an attempted coup by Labour MPs to oust Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn faces a motion of no confidence in his leadership amid criticism of his handling of the EU referendum campaign Getty Images
A majority of Labour’s new members would support the deselection of MPs who persistently criticise their party’s leadership, new polling suggests.
A study by academics at Queen Mary University and Sussex University established that 55 per cent of Labour members who joined after May 2015 would support such measures.
Deselection is the process by which Labour members in a local area change their party’s candidate at the general election when the party already has a sitting MP there.
It is usually instigated when an MP significantly upsets the members of their local party, but in recent decades its use has been rare.
The finding comes amid an attempted coup by MPs in the parliamentary party, dozens of whom have resigned en masse from Labour’s frontbench team and called for a change of party leadership.
Criticism of Mr Corbyn have ranged from claims he would not be able to win a general election to suggestions he did not campaign hard enough during the EU referendum.
Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has however stood firm, arguing that he has a mandate from the membership.
He was elected in September with landslide support from members, supporters, and affiliates. Since then the party has doubled in size.
Professor Tim Bale, one of the study's authors, wrote: "These people, then, are Jezza’s bezzas - his praetorian guard, if you like. And - surely rather alarmingly if you are one of those Labour MPs who isn’t content to hold your tongue - they seem open to using the prospect of deselection to ensure that there is a price to pay for badmouthing the dear leader."
Labour coup plotters protected by media giant tied to Blairite PR firm, linked to coup
A Sky News report identifying three senior Labour Party whips as the Blairite “choreographers” of Labour opposition to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was inexplicably self-censored on Monday. But the censorship comes as little surprise given Sky News’ longstanding connections to a powerful PR firm tied to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. The firm, Portland Communications, is not only directly connected to the Labour coup plotters, but had anticipated a Shadow Cabinet “mass resignation” contingency plan to oust Corbyn at least six months ago – long before the EU referendum results.
Five paragraphs identifying the Blairite ringleaders of the coup were deleted from a Sky News report hours after being quoted in an investigation by The Canary.
The Canary reported that the individuals identified were part of a wider network of Blairite elites affiliated to the Fabian Society, who have seen Jeremy Corbyn’s landside victory in Labour leadership elections as a direct threat to the New Labour ‘old guard’ in the party.
On Tuesday afternoon, Labour Party MPs passed a 172-40 vote of no confidence against Corbyn’s leadership of the party. Corbyn refused to resign on grounds that doing so would be unconstitutional, and that he would “not betray” the Labour members who voted for him.
While many of the MPs who have risen against Corbyn’s leadership are not themselves Blairite, The Canary’s investigation on Monday revealed that the core instigators of the mutiny are part of a pro-Blair ‘old guard’, who have carefully orchestrated the party’s uprising against Corbyn.
Yet shortly after the publication of our story, including passages quoted from Sky News identifying core instigators of the mass resignations, Sky News updated its report with a new version of the article, in which those passages were removed.
The earlier version of the Sky News report, which has now been completely scrubbed from all published versions available online, suggested that the sudden uprising was not spontaneous, but carefully planned.
The report quoted Sky News political correspondent Sophy Ridge accusing one of Corbyn’s own whips, Conor McGinn MP, of coordinating the resignations to “try to cause maximum impact”:
Meanwhile, the party’s leaders in the Lords – Baroness Smith of Basildon, Labour leader in the Lords, and Lord Bassam, the chief whip – are likely to boycott shadow cabinet meetings while Mr Corbyn remains, a spokesman for the House of Lords said.
Former shadow education secretary Lucy Powell, who resigned on Sunday, insisted the resignations were not a ‘planned coup’ against Mr Corbyn, but a reaction to the ‘seismic’ events which have shaken Westminster in recent days.
But Sky’s Senior Political Correspondent Sophy Ridge said she understood that the man choreographing the resignations is Conor McGinn, Labour MP for St Helens North.
She said: ‘He’s ringing shadow cabinet members and ministers, organising the timings and co-ordinating the resignations to try to cause maximum impact.
‘This is significant because he’s one of Jeremy Corbyn’s Whips – tasked with ensuring party discipline.’
The earlier version of the article can still be viewed via Google’s cache feature here.
Screenshots of original paragraphs of earlier Sky News article, 27 July 2016, as published via Yahoo News UK. These paragraphs have now been deleted from across the web.
The Canary’s investigation quoting the Sky News report was published on Monday at 6pm. In less than twenty minutes – by 6.19pm – Sky News had scrubbed these five paragraphs entirely from its report.
Screen Shot 2016-06-28 at 13.02.33
Screenshot of updated version of Sky News article on original Sky News website – update in which censorship occurred was 6.19pm
Below are images from Google Search showing that the original paragraphs had been captured by search engines earlier in the day, before Sky News decided to delete them from all published versions of the article across the web:
Cl-rkd6WgAET9B_.jpg-large
Screenshots of Google search capturing the original now deleted paragraphs identifying the Blairite ringleaders of the anti-Corbyn coup. Courtesy of Andy Fugard of UCL
Coordinated Blairite uprising
The Canary confirmed on Monday that Labour MP Conor McGinn, who describes himself as a pro-interventionist admirer of Tony Blair, is connected to a wider network of Labour Party Blairites.
Among them is Marcus Alexander Roberts – Ed Miliband’s campaign field director and later Sadiq Khan’s campaign manager, who worked with McGinn at the Fabian Society. Roberts in turn is a co-director with Will Straw on the anti-Corbyn blog, Left Foot Forward.
Straw, the son of Blair’s former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, ran the failed cross-party Britain Stronger in Europe campaign. He publicly demanded Corbyn’s resignation on Monday afternoon.
Straw’s colleague, Marcus Roberts, runs Zentrum Consulting Ltd., a political lobbying firm that was hired under the direction of former Blair minister Peter Hain to ‘re-found’ the Labour Party.
Roberts involvement in this Blairite ‘re-founding’ process began precisely during his role as Deputy General Secretary at the Fabian Society, during which he worked with Conor McGinn while the latter was Vice Chair of Young Fabians.
Corbyn’s Blairite whips turn on him
The censored Sky News passages confirm that Conor McGinn worked closely with Hilary Benn, Corbyn’s now resigned Shadow Foreign Secretary, in coordinating the sudden spate of resignations.
Benn, a supporter of the disastrous 2003 Iraq War, was Secretary of International Development under Tony Blair.
In addition to McGinn, the deleted Sky News paragraphs reveal that two of Corbyn’s other most senior whips had also been involved the coordinated mutiny: Baroness Angela Smith of Basildon, who as of May 2015 has been Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords; and Lord Steve Bassam, Jeremy Corbyn’s chief whip.
In one now-censored sentence, Sky News reported that Baroness Smith and Lord Bassam “are likely to boycott shadow cabinet meetings while Mr Corbyn remains.”
Both peers have direct ties to former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his successor Gordon Brown.
Baroness Smith served under Blair as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Northern Ireland Office from 2002 to 2006, and then at the Department for Communities and Local Government, before taking up various positions under Prime Minster Gordon Brown.
Before also serving under Brown, Lord Bassam was appointed by Blair as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Office in 1999, then served in several other positions including as Government spokesperson for the Home Office until 2008.
Baroness Smith has close ties with the Fabian Society where Marcus Roberts and Conor McGinn previously held senior leadership positions, including working as a mentor with the Fabian Women’s Network Mentorship Scheme.
Sky News – no comment
Multiple requests to Sky News to comment on the news organisation’s self-censorship of its own reporting on the Labour coup received no response.
The Canary contacted Lucy Ellison, Jim Cockin, Stephanie Jones and Francoise Cairns from Sky New’s PR team, as well as the journalists who would have been directly familiar with the editorial process around the report in question: Sky News’ Political Editor Faisal Islam and Senior Political Correspondent Sophy Ridge whose reporting was expunged.
The Canary also asked Adam Boulton, Sky News presenter and Editor-at-Large, about the censorship.
Not a single acknowledgement or response was received.
Sky News’ self-censorship on the Blairite orchestrators of the Labour coup within the heart of the Corbyn camp, and the media organisation’s refusal to answer reasonable queries about the matter, raise urgent questions about Sky News’ role in broadcasting a one-sided narrative of events because of undue political influence.
Sky News has close ties to Portland Communications, a public relations firm founded and run by Blairite Tim Allan, a PR consultant and advisor to Tony Blair from 1992 to 1998. His last post in government under Blair was as Deputy Director of Communications at No. 10 Downing Street.
He then went on to become Director of Corporate Communications at BSkyB, before leaving to set-up Portland. In an interview with PRWeek, Allan describes the move from Sky to establishing Portland:
So I had lunch with Tony Balls [then head of Sky], and we came up with the idea that I would leave with the external PR account, then with Bell Pottinger.
PR Week goes on to report that Balls “agreed to pay six months of fees upfront, which covered all Allan’s overheads for the first year. Portland was born.”
From Sky, to Portland, to the Labour MP who tabled the motion against Corbyn
But an exclusive investigation on Tuesday by The Canary’s Steve Topple has found that Portland is directly linked to the anti-Corbyn uprising. Portland Communications’ Advisory Board includes Blair spin doctors Alastair Campbell and Jimmy Leach, along with Kitty Ussher, former Parliamentary Private Secretary to Margaret Hodge, who was Blair’s Trade Minister until 2007.
It was Margaret Hodge who first tabled a motion of no confidence against Jeremy Corbyn on Friday.
The Canary asked Portland Communications by email whether the firm, or people affiliated with the firm, were involved in the mounting campaign to oust Corbyn, but received no response.
Tony Ball, Tim Allan’s former boss at Sky, later also went on to join Portland Communications’ leadership team himself.
Sky News Editor-at-Large Adam Boulton is personally close to the Blairite network. In 2006, Boulton married Tony Blair’s communications advisor Anji Hunter. The wedding was attended by Blair, and several other senior Blairite officials including Portland’s Alastair Campbell, along with Peter Hain, David Blunkett and Tessa Jowell.
As The Canary previously reported, Peter Hain – former Europe Minister under Blair (among other senior ministerial positions) – had arranged for Labour to contract the Fabian Society’s Marcus Roberts to ‘re-found’ the party, in 2011.
In his autobiography, Outside In, Hain admits that during his ministerial term, he was part of a “shadow” group inside the Labour Party set-up by Blair to prepare for a referendum, to get Britain to join the Euro currency. Much of this group appears to now be mobilising to uproot Corbyn from leadership of the party.
The close links between Sky News’ editorial department and Blairites leading the mobilisation against Corbyn, may explain the media organisation’s inexplicable decision to self-censor its own reporting on the identities of those Blairite ringleaders.
The silence of Sky News editors Adam Boulton and Faisal Islam, and political correspondent Sophy Ridge, suggests an alarming lack of transparency and basic impartiality in the firm’s editorial decisions – and an ongoing unwillingness to answer simple questions from reporters.
Steve Topple’s report also points out Portland’s wide-ranging connections across a full range of British – and international – news outlets.
The Blairite PR firm mobilising against Labour’s ‘hard left’
According to Topple’s investigation for The Canary, several Labour activists campaigning against Corbyn on social media are simultaneously affiliated to Portland Communications, as partners, staff or consultants. They consistently put forward a view that the uprising against Corbyn is widespread and heartfelt throughout the Labour Party.
The most prominent example is Thomas Mauchline, who heckled Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday at the Gay Pride march in London, blaming him for the EU referendum result. Mauchline is a Senior Account Manager at Portland Communications.
The episode was widely reported across the media, including by Sky News.
Mauchline demanded Corbyn’s resignation, and posted videos of the encounter on his Twitter feed.
Numerous anti-Corbyn campaigners who have received extensive social media attention are also affiliated to the firm, Topple reports. Portland Communications’ analyses posted on the firm’s website refer disparagingly to the “hard left” of the Labour Party aligned with Corbyn.
Mauchline’s own longstanding opposition to Corbyn’s rise to Labour leader is evident in an August 2015 post on the LabourList website, where he admits, “we moderates in the party were smashed.”
The term ‘moderates’ appears to be a polite euphemism for politicians representative of Tony Blair’s New Labour vision for the party.
The post shows that Tom Mauchline aligned himself with the Liz Kendall campaign – a Blairite contender for leadership of the party.
In response to queries from The Canary, Mauchline denied that he had any advanced warning of the incoming resignations, but admitted he had “mutual friends” in the Kendall campaign team as well as those of other ‘moderate’ Labour politicians opposed to Corbyn.
Privately, though, Portland staffers appear fully aware that opposition to Corbyn has little credibility with Labour members.
In his LabourList post last year, Mauchline explained the key problem facing the Blairites in Labour – namely that they had completely lost touch with the wider Labour Party membership:
In a search to become the party of government we have adopted the language of the centre ground, which fails to resonate with the rest of our movement. Whether this was the right decision doesn’t matter – it makes winning internal elections hard.
Part of Mauchline’s role at Portland appears to have involved monitoring Corbyn’s election strategy.
In the same month as his LabourList post, Mauchline offered an analysis of Corbyn’s leadership campaign for Portland Communications, noting that its rapid growth was because its message “resonates with the Labour heartlands.”
Portland Communications: advanced warning of mass resignations
Although Mauchline assured The Canary he had no idea that mass resignations were impending, this is not entirely true.
In January 2016, Mauchline posted an analysis of the first reshuffle of Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet on the Portland Communications website.
The post reveals that as early as the beginning of this year, Blairite members of the Shadow Cabinet had agreed an informal “pact” to conduct mass resignations in the event of favoured Blairites being dismissed from their positions by Corbyn.
The post also showed that Mauchline was well-acquainted with informal networks of organising among Labour’s anti-Corbyn politicians.
The Portland Communications staffer was also aware that “mass resignations” were viewed by the Shadow Cabinet as a political option to sideline Corbyn, if deemed necessary:
The ‘Anyone But Corbyn’ MPs are getting organised. Almost as soon as Dugher was removed texts went out to MPs and prominent Labour figures with the lines to take in support of him. The ensuing outpouring of dismay on social media from MPs would have helped to close down Corbyn’s options. Whilst these texts/WhatsApp groups are standard practice now, what is more interesting is the rumoured NATO-style pact amongst moderate members of the Shadow Cabinet which would mean mass resignations if key moderates are removed from posts.
The publication of Mauchline’s analysis on the Portland Communications website illustrates the firm’s startlingly prescient advanced knowledge of the Shadow Cabinet’s “mass resignation” contingency plan to oust Corbyn. The EU referendum results appears to have provided a convenient pretext to put this “NATO-style pact” in motion.
An exclusive investigation by The Canary can reveal that the current Labour ‘coup’ being instigated against Jeremy Corbyn appears to have been orchestrated by a PR company where Tony Blair’s arch spin-doctor, Alastair Campbell, is a senior advisor.
He sits alongside several other figures, all of whom have direct links to the centre-right of the Labour party, and the Fabians at Portland Communications.
Portland Communications is a political consultancy and public relations agency set up in 2001 by Tim Allan, a former adviser to Tony Blair and director of communications at BSkyB.
The firm works globally on campaigns for numerous companies, institutions and governments, and describes its activities by saying:
we help our clients find their way through this new faster, noisier and contested landscape. We design and deliver communications strategies – and are trusted by some of the highest profile organisations, governments and individuals in the world.
Its corporate clients include Barclays, Morrisons and Nestle, and it say their team is made up of “former senior advisors from the highest level of British government and politics, the EU, the UN and the World Economic Forum”.
However, Portland came to The Canary’s attention after an incident surrounding abuse being thrown at Jeremy Corbyn, while he supported Pride in London on 25 June.
He was heckled by apparent Labour party activist Tom Mauchline, who jeered at him that:
it’s your fault! When are you resigning? It’s your fault! I had a Polish friend in tears because you couldn’t get out the vote in Wales, the north and the Midlands. You need to resign. […] Take control Jeremy and resign […] stop using the gay movement as a shield to protect your weak leadership.
The video was quickly up on the BBC website, which also included an interview with Mauchline afterwards, explaining his reasons for the verbal diatribe he gave to Corbyn. The piece of footage is accredited by the BBC as being “Courtesy of Tom Mauchline”.
Mauchline is a Senior Account Manager for Portland Communication, previously working for the campaign group 38 Degrees. But oddly, Mauchline appears to not be the only ‘Labour activist’ working for Portland. In fact, the majority of its staff have direct links to the party.
Stephen “Steve” Race says in his Twitter bio that he does “a lot of #LabourDoorStep”. Race also works for Blue Rubicon (consultants who often provide commentary on the Labour party) as a partner, and was a senior researcher for Labour MP Ben Bradshaw.
Gregor Poynton describes himself as “Formerly @ScottishLabour @UKLabour @bsd […] Quite a bit of digital, politics”. Poynton is head of content and brand at Portland.
Kevin McKeever‘s Twitter header is an image of Labour pin badges. He also works for Portland, as a partner.
The three men all share two things in common. They are all acquaintances of Tom Mauchline, but furthermore two of them stood as PPC’s in the 2015 general election for Labour. Poynton hoped to be nominated, but was eventually caught up in the Falkirk fiasco. None of them were elected, and none of them supported Corbyn in the leadership contest. McKeever supported Andy Burnham, Steve Race backed Liz Kendall and Poynton (who incidentally is married to former Labour MP Gemma Doyle) appeared to back Kendall as well, as he is a supporter of the centre-right Labour faction “Progress”.
Their Twitter timelines show they are all actively promoting the campaign against Corbyn. Retweeting each other, sharing the same video footage of Alastair Campbell – with McKeever writing in his local newspaper and even creating a short film of the Momentum rally at Parliament Square on Monday:
Follow
Kevin McKeever @kevinmckeever
Went down to Parliament Sq to see the rally for myself. I saw a protest dominated by SWP, SA and others outside Lab
7:56 PM - 27 Jun 2016 · Houses of Parliament, United Kingdom
539 539 Retweets 323 323 likes
But this is just the tip of the iceberg surrounding Portland Communications and its links to the Labour party.
Steve Morris, managing partner was formerly head of communications for both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown; Mark Flanagan, senior partner, was head of digital communications for Brown; Justin Kerr-Stevens, partner – former communications advisor for both Blair and Brown; Rebecca Gwilliam, director – former special advisor (SpAd) for both Blair and Brown.
Ailsa Williams, associate director, was a
n/ailsa-williams-6a49b223?authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=aWVH&locale=e n_US&trk=tyah&trkInfo=clickedVertical%3Amynetwork%2CclickedEntityId%3A 83093596%2CauthType%3ANAME_SEARCH%2Cidx%3A1-1-1%2CtarId%3A146711798647 0%2Ctas%3Aailsa%20williams" target="_blank">former researcher for two MPs in Blair’s government and Robert Watkinson and Toby Orr (both partners at Portland) were also involved in “Africa Practice” where another former Blair MP, Tony Colman, is a director. Jonathan McClory, partner, used to work for Blair’s preferred think tank Policy Exchange
Also, another three partners at Portland were previously producers for both ITN and BBC.
But go higher up the food chain at Portland, and the links are even stronger.
Its advisory council is made up of three members: Alastair Campbell, Blair’s infamous spin doctor; Jimmy Leach, Blair’s former head of communications and previously executive editor at the Guardian, and Kitty Ussher, former Labour MP for Burnley, parliamentary private secretary to Margaret Hodge and a writer for Peter Mandelson’s “Policy Network”.
And at the top of the Portland tree are the likes of Tony Ball, former CEO of BSkyB and Fox; George Pascoe-Watson, former political editor of the Sun; Jim Rosenberg, former head of communications for the World Bank, Lisa Shields, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Sir Stephen Wall, former EU adviser to Tony Blair.
Furthermore, Laura Kyrke-Smith (formerly of Portland) is currently head of communications for David Miliband at the International Rescue Committee, was previously chair of the Labour Campaign for International Development (LCID) and a speechwriter for Glenys Kinnock.
To spell it out in layman’s terms, Portland Communications is a company organised, fronted and controlled by a plethora of apparatchiks of Tony Blair and the centre-right of Labour.
But how does all this directly tie-in with the current attempted coup against Jeremy Corbyn?
As The Canary reported, it would appear that 15 of the shadow secretary of states and nine of the shadow ministers who resigned were affiliated to the Fabian Society. And it still appears that the Fabians are at the heart of this.
Sky’s Sophy Ridge tweeted on Monday:
Follow
Sophy Ridge ✔ @SophyRidgeSky
I'm told the Labour MP co-ordinating & choreographing the resignations is @ConorMcGinn - significant as he's in Jeremy Corbyn's Whips Office
9:42 AM - 27 Jun 2016
257 257 Retweets 78 78 likes
Ridge went further, saying that:
He’s ringing shadow cabinet members and ministers, organising the timings and co-ordinating the resignations to try to cause maximum impact. This is significant because he’s one of Jeremy Corbyn’s Whips – tasked with ensuring party discipline.
As The Canary said:
McGinn was appointed chair of the Young Fabians, and is still active in the society […] And of course, Margaret Hodge, who co-penned the no-confidence motion, is vice president of the society. Take into account, also, Fabian journalists like Polly Toynbee calling Corbyn “dismal, spineless and lifeless” – and you may have your “committee of war”. Furthermore, former prospective parliamentary candidate and Fabian Will Straw called for Corbyn’s resignation – in his position as director of “Britian Stronger in Europe”.
In a separate article by our International Editor, Nafeez Ahmed, it was highlighted that:
in May, McGinn told PoliticsHome.com that Blair’s government was the most “transformative government in the last 100 years of British political history,” and described himself as a pro-interventionist […] McGinn had formally joined the pro-EU cross-party campaign, Britain Stronger In Europe, as a “political champion”, alongside Hilary Benn.
Furthermore, Ahmed also went on to describe the relationship between McGinn, Benn and Will Straw, via the latter’s role as executive director of Britain Stronger in Europe. Straw was also a director of the blog Left Foot Forward, alongside one Marcus Roberts. Roberts was previously deputy general secretary of the Fabians, and also runs Zentrum Consulting.
As The Canary described:
In 2011, the Labour Party had also hired Marcus Robert’s consultancy outfit, Zentrum, to run the ‘refounding Labour’ campaign at the behest of Lord Peter Hain, another Cabinet minister under Blair. Effectively, then, the Fabian Society had been hijacked into a Blairite ‘refounding’ Labour process under Roberts’ leadership. According to Dan Hodges, citing “senior party officials,” Zentrum was “being used to effectively bypass the party.” “Someone is refounding Labour,” concluded Hodges. “But who?”.
So what we can deduce is that a previous “refounding” of the Labour party was attempted – but seemingly failed.
However after Corbyn’s successful leadership election, those who wanted the party to return to, as Ahmed described it, a “pro-war, pro-corporate model of the Democrat Party’s neocon hawks”, decided the need for rapid transformation was paramount.
Enter Portland Communications.
It surely can be no coincidence that so many of the employees of this company are affiliated to both Labour and the Fabians. Nor is it a coincidence that the parent company of Portland, Omnicom Media, was contracted to do PR work under Tony Blair’s leadership and that of Ed Miliband. But what has seemingly been the game changer with this attempted coup, is Portland’s countless links to the media.
I’m sure if most ordinary members of the public sent some mobile footage of them abusing Jeremy Corbyn off to the BBC – the organisation wouldn’t look at it twice. Yet, strangely, Tom Mauchline’s was posted almost immediately. Furthermore, while the Tory party has itself been imploding, the media have given their full attention to the state of the Labour party.
This is not a string of random acts. This is a coordinated attack on Corbyn’s leadership (because let’s be frank, that’s what it is), and it is coming from one source. The Fabian Society. A society who are funded by the likes of HSBC, Cuadrilla (who, oddly, Portland do PR work for) Barclays and Lloyds – while masking themselves with the veneer of advocating ” social progress […] gradualist, reformist and democratic means in a journey towards radical ends. We are a pluralist movement and create space for open debate.”
That, in itself, is debatable.
The Fabians have mobilised their assets in both the parliamentary Labour party, in the media and in the sphere of public relations, namely via Portland Communications – to inflict as much damage as possible on Corbyn. And thus far, it appears to be working – albeit utterly against the will of the party membership and trade unions.
Unfortunately for them, one thing stands in their way – grassroots supporters.
And with over 200,000 having signed a petition calling on the membership to support Corbyn – the Fabians and their shadowy mercenaries may well have a fight on their hands.
Update:
This article originally said that Steve Race worked for Portland Communications; this was incorrect. He is an associate director of Blue Rubicon, whose former director of strategy, Spencer Livermore was campaign director for Labour’s 2015 election. Livermore was previously director of political strategy for Gordon Brown, and his colleague at Blue Rubicon, Patrick Loughran, was a SpAd for Lord Mandelson.
This article also stated that Gregor Poynton stood as a PPC in Falkirk. This has since been amended to reflect that Mr Poynton (married to former Labour MP Gemma Doyle), did not stand, but was embroiled in some controversy in Falkirk, after it was alleged he had paid for 11 people to join the Labour party.
A Sky News report identifying three senior Labour Party whips as the Blairite “choreographers” of Labour opposition to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was inexplicably self-censored on Monday. But the censorship comes as little surprise given Sky News’ longstanding connections to a powerful PR firm tied to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. The firm, Portland Communications, is not only directly connected to the Labour coup plotters, but had anticipated a Shadow Cabinet “mass resignation” contingency plan to oust Corbyn at least six months ago – long before the EU referendum results.
Five paragraphs identifying the Blairite ringleaders of the coup were deleted from a Sky News report hours after being quoted in an investigation by The Canary.
The Canary reported that the individuals identified were part of a wider network of Blairite elites affiliated to the Fabian Society, who have seen Jeremy Corbyn’s landside victory in Labour leadership elections as a direct threat to the New Labour ‘old guard’ in the party.
On Tuesday afternoon, Labour Party MPs passed a 172-40 vote of no confidence against Corbyn’s leadership of the party. Corbyn refused to resign on grounds that doing so would be unconstitutional, and that he would “not betray” the Labour members who voted for him.
While many of the MPs who have risen against Corbyn’s leadership are not themselves Blairite, The Canary’s investigation on Monday revealed that the core instigators of the mutiny are part of a pro-Blair ‘old guard’, who have carefully orchestrated the party’s uprising against Corbyn.
Yet shortly after the publication of our story, including passages quoted from Sky News identifying core instigators of the mass resignations, Sky News updated its report with a new version of the article, in which those passages were removed.
The earlier version of the Sky News report, which has now been completely scrubbed from all published versions available online, suggested that the sudden uprising was not spontaneous, but carefully planned.
The report quoted Sky News political correspondent Sophy Ridge accusing one of Corbyn’s own whips, Conor McGinn MP, of coordinating the resignations to “try to cause maximum impact”:
Meanwhile, the party’s leaders in the Lords – Baroness Smith of Basildon, Labour leader in the Lords, and Lord Bassam, the chief whip – are likely to boycott shadow cabinet meetings while Mr Corbyn remains, a spokesman for the House of Lords said.
Former shadow education secretary Lucy Powell, who resigned on Sunday, insisted the resignations were not a ‘planned coup’ against Mr Corbyn, but a reaction to the ‘seismic’ events which have shaken Westminster in recent days.
But Sky’s Senior Political Correspondent Sophy Ridge said she understood that the man choreographing the resignations is Conor McGinn, Labour MP for St Helens North.
She said: ‘He’s ringing shadow cabinet members and ministers, organising the timings and co-ordinating the resignations to try to cause maximum impact.
‘This is significant because he’s one of Jeremy Corbyn’s Whips – tasked with ensuring party discipline.’
The earlier version of the article can still be viewed via Google’s cache feature here.
Screen Shot 2016-06-29 at 08.27.47
Screen Shot 2016-06-29 at 08.28.23
Screenshots of original paragraphs of earlier Sky News article, 27 July 2016, as published via Yahoo News UK. These paragraphs have now been deleted from across the web.
The Canary’s investigation quoting the Sky News report was published on Monday at 6pm. In less than twenty minutes – by 6.19pm – Sky News had scrubbed these five paragraphs entirely from its report.
Screen Shot 2016-06-28 at 13.02.33
Screenshot of updated version of Sky News article on original Sky News website – update in which censorship occurred was 6.19pm
Below are images from Google Search showing that the original paragraphs had been captured by search engines earlier in the day, before Sky News decided to delete them from all published versions of the article across the web:
Cl-rkd6WgAET9B_.jpg-large
Screenshots of Google search capturing the original now deleted paragraphs identifying the Blairite ringleaders of the anti-Corbyn coup. Courtesy of Andy Fugard of UCL
Coordinated Blairite uprising
The Canary confirmed on Monday that Labour MP Conor McGinn, who describes himself as a pro-interventionist admirer of Tony Blair, is connected to a wider network of Labour Party Blairites.
Among them is Marcus Alexander Roberts – Ed Miliband’s campaign field director and later Sadiq Khan’s campaign manager, who worked with McGinn at the Fabian Society. Roberts in turn is a co-director with Will Straw on the anti-Corbyn blog, Left Foot Forward.
Straw, the son of Blair’s former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, ran the failed cross-party Britain Stronger in Europe campaign. He publicly demanded Corbyn’s resignation on Monday afternoon.
Straw’s colleague, Marcus Roberts, runs Zentrum Consulting Ltd., a political lobbying firm that was hired under the direction of former Blair minister Peter Hain to ‘re-found’ the Labour Party.
Roberts involvement in this Blairite ‘re-founding’ process began precisely during his role as Deputy General Secretary at the Fabian Society, during which he worked with Conor McGinn while the latter was Vice Chair of Young Fabians.
Corbyn’s Blairite whips turn on him
The censored Sky News passages confirm that Conor McGinn worked closely with Hilary Benn, Corbyn’s now resigned Shadow Foreign Secretary, in coordinating the sudden spate of resignations.
Benn, a supporter of the disastrous 2003 Iraq War, was Secretary of International Development under Tony Blair.
In addition to McGinn, the deleted Sky News paragraphs reveal that two of Corbyn’s other most senior whips had also been involved the coordinated mutiny: Baroness Angela Smith of Basildon, who as of May 2015 has been Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords; and Lord Steve Bassam, Jeremy Corbyn’s chief whip.
In one now-censored sentence, Sky News reported that Baroness Smith and Lord Bassam “are likely to boycott shadow cabinet meetings while Mr Corbyn remains.”
Both peers have direct ties to former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his successor Gordon Brown.
Baroness Smith served under Blair as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Northern Ireland Office from 2002 to 2006, and then at the Department for Communities and Local Government, before taking up various positions under Prime Minster Gordon Brown.
Before also serving under Brown, Lord Bassam was appointed by Blair as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Office in 1999, then served in several other positions including as Government spokesperson for the Home Office until 2008.
Baroness Smith has close ties with the Fabian Society where Marcus Roberts and Conor McGinn previously held senior leadership positions, including working as a mentor with the Fabian Women’s Network Mentorship Scheme.
Sky News – no comment
Multiple requests to Sky News to comment on the news organisation’s self-censorship of its own reporting on the Labour coup received no response.
The Canary contacted Lucy Ellison, Jim Cockin, Stephanie Jones and Francoise Cairns from Sky New’s PR team, as well as the journalists who would have been directly familiar with the editorial process around the report in question: Sky News’ Political Editor Faisal Islam and Senior Political Correspondent Sophy Ridge whose reporting was expunged.
The Canary also asked Adam Boulton, Sky News presenter and Editor-at-Large, about the censorship.
Not a single acknowledgement or response was received.
Sky News’ self-censorship on the Blairite orchestrators of the Labour coup within the heart of the Corbyn camp, and the media organisation’s refusal to answer reasonable queries about the matter, raise urgent questions about Sky News’ role in broadcasting a one-sided narrative of events because of undue political influence.
Sky News has close ties to Portland Communications, a public relations firm founded and run by Blairite Tim Allan, a PR consultant and advisor to Tony Blair from 1992 to 1998. His last post in government under Blair was as Deputy Director of Communications at No. 10 Downing Street.
He then went on to become Director of Corporate Communications at BSkyB, before leaving to set-up Portland. In an interview with PRWeek, Allan describes the move from Sky to establishing Portland:
So I had lunch with Tony Balls [then head of Sky], and we came up with the idea that I would leave with the external PR account, then with Bell Pottinger.
PR Week goes on to report that Balls “agreed to pay six months of fees upfront, which covered all Allan’s overheads for the first year. Portland was born.”
From Sky, to Portland, to the Labour MP who tabled the motion against Corbyn
But an exclusive investigation on Tuesday by The Canary’s Steve Topple has found that Portland is directly linked to the anti-Corbyn uprising. Portland Communications’ Advisory Board includes Blair spin doctors Alastair Campbell and Jimmy Leach, along with Kitty Ussher, former Parliamentary Private Secretary to Margaret Hodge, who was Blair’s Trade Minister until 2007.
It was Margaret Hodge who first tabled a motion of no confidence against Jeremy Corbyn on Friday.
The Canary asked Portland Communications by email whether the firm, or people affiliated with the firm, were involved in the mounting campaign to oust Corbyn, but received no response.
Tony Ball, Tim Allan’s former boss at Sky, later also went on to join Portland Communications’ leadership team himself.
Sky News Editor-at-Large Adam Boulton is personally close to the Blairite network. In 2006, Boulton married Tony Blair’s communications advisor Anji Hunter. The wedding was attended by Blair, and several other senior Blairite officials including Portland’s Alastair Campbell, along with Peter Hain, David Blunkett and Tessa Jowell.
As The Canary previously reported, Peter Hain – former Europe Minister under Blair (among other senior ministerial positions) – had arranged for Labour to contract the Fabian Society’s Marcus Roberts to ‘re-found’ the party, in 2011.
In his autobiography, Outside In, Hain admits that during his ministerial term, he was part of a “shadow” group inside the Labour Party set-up by Blair to prepare for a referendum, to get Britain to join the Euro currency. Much of this group appears to now be mobilising to uproot Corbyn from leadership of the party.
The close links between Sky News’ editorial department and Blairites leading the mobilisation against Corbyn, may explain the media organisation’s inexplicable decision to self-censor its own reporting on the identities of those Blairite ringleaders.
The silence of Sky News editors Adam Boulton and Faisal Islam, and political correspondent Sophy Ridge, suggests an alarming lack of transparency and basic impartiality in the firm’s editorial decisions – and an ongoing unwillingness to answer simple questions from reporters.
Steve Topple’s report also points out Portland’s wide-ranging connections across a full range of British – and international – news outlets.
The Blairite PR firm mobilising against Labour’s ‘hard left’
According to Topple’s investigation for The Canary, several Labour activists campaigning against Corbyn on social media are simultaneously affiliated to Portland Communications, as partners, staff or consultants. They consistently put forward a view that the uprising against Corbyn is widespread and heartfelt throughout the Labour Party.
The most prominent example is Thomas Mauchline, who heckled Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday at the Gay Pride march in London, blaming him for the EU referendum result. Mauchline is a Senior Account Manager at Portland Communications.
The episode was widely reported across the media, including by Sky News.
Mauchline demanded Corbyn’s resignation, and posted videos of the encounter on his Twitter feed.
Numerous anti-Corbyn campaigners who have received extensive social media attention are also affiliated to the firm, Topple reports. Portland Communications’ analyses posted on the firm’s website refer disparagingly to the “hard left” of the Labour Party aligned with Corbyn.
Mauchline’s own longstanding opposition to Corbyn’s rise to Labour leader is evident in an August 2015 post on the LabourList website, where he admits, “we moderates in the party were smashed.”
The term ‘moderates’ appears to be a polite euphemism for politicians representative of Tony Blair’s New Labour vision for the party.
The post shows that Tom Mauchline aligned himself with the Liz Kendall campaign – a Blairite contender for leadership of the party.
In response to queries from The Canary, Mauchline denied that he had any advanced warning of the incoming resignations, but admitted he had “mutual friends” in the Kendall campaign team as well as those of other ‘moderate’ Labour politicians opposed to Corbyn.
Privately, though, Portland staffers appear fully aware that opposition to Corbyn has little credibility with Labour members.
In his LabourList post last year, Mauchline explained the key problem facing the Blairites in Labour – namely that they had completely lost touch with the wider Labour Party membership:
In a search to become the party of government we have adopted the language of the centre ground, which fails to resonate with the rest of our movement. Whether this was the right decision doesn’t matter – it makes winning internal elections hard.
Part of Mauchline’s role at Portland appears to have involved monitoring Corbyn’s election strategy.
In the same month as his LabourList post, Mauchline offered an analysis of Corbyn’s leadership campaign for Portland Communications, noting that its rapid growth was because its message “resonates with the Labour heartlands.”
Portland Communications: advanced warning of mass resignations
Although Mauchline assured The Canary he had no idea that mass resignations were impending, this is not entirely true.
In January 2016, Mauchline posted an analysis of the first reshuffle of Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet on the Portland Communications website.
The post reveals that as early as the beginning of this year, Blairite members of the Shadow Cabinet had agreed an informal “pact” to conduct mass resignations in the event of favoured Blairites being dismissed from their positions by Corbyn.
The post also showed that Mauchline was well-acquainted with informal networks of organising among Labour’s anti-Corbyn politicians.
The Portland Communications staffer was also aware that “mass resignations” were viewed by the Shadow Cabinet as a political option to sideline Corbyn, if deemed necessary:
The ‘Anyone But Corbyn’ MPs are getting organised. Almost as soon as Dugher was removed texts went out to MPs and prominent Labour figures with the lines to take in support of him. The ensuing outpouring of dismay on social media from MPs would have helped to close down Corbyn’s options. Whilst these texts/WhatsApp groups are standard practice now, what is more interesting is the rumoured NATO-style pact amongst moderate members of the Shadow Cabinet which would mean mass resignations if key moderates are removed from posts.
The publication of Mauchline’s analysis on the Portland Communications website illustrates the firm’s startlingly prescient advanced knowledge of the Shadow Cabinet’s “mass resignation” contingency plan to oust Corbyn. The EU referendum results appears to have provided a convenient pretext to put this “NATO-style pact” in motion.
172 MPs signal they want Labour to go back to being a party of financial oligarchy and war
Jun 28, 2016, 4:42 PM from London, England
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https://www.twitter.com/paulmasonnews/status/747817425010294785 _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
The next day, the Guardian published an op-ed piece by Robert Hunter. Its readers were not informed that Hunter is a high-level US state operative. The former president of the Atlantic Treaty Association, and US ambassador to NATO—amongst numerous other key US military appointments—he is described on Wikipedia as “helping to ‘recreate’ NATO, and breaking down barriers between NATO and the European Union.”
Hunter insists that the referendum vote is an example of “mob rule” that should be ignored and that parliament should overturn the result through elections for a “new leadership and a new government.”
The Blairites have translated this instruction into political action. It is they who engineered the vote of no confidence in Corbyn—based on the charge that the Labour leader “betrayed” the pro-EU aspirations of the younger generation. The same edition of the
Guardian features an article by Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff. He declares that Labour must now “speak for the 48% of the country who want to Remain in the EU.” Corbyn “clearly can’t be that person”, so a new leader is needed “to run in the general election on an explicit promise to negotiate with our partners to salvage our position in Europe...” If elected, Labour’s first task would be to hold a second referendum, he writes.
Yesterday, Labour’s Geraint Davies and Jonathan Edwards of Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) presented a motion to parliament calling for a second referendum on whatever terms are agreed for a British exit from the EU.
The Socialist Equality Party condemns these manoeuvres. They recall nothing more than the actions of the Syriza government in Greece, which last year called a referendum on whether to accept a further round of EU austerity measures in the expectation that they would be agreed. When a massive no vote was returned, Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras repudiated the result and carried on regardless.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/07/01/brxe-j01.html _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2016 11:21 am Post subject:
Senior Labour Party insider reveals plan to oust Corbyn was in play 10 months ago (EXCLUSIVE)
JULY 1ST, 2016 Nafeez Ahmed NAFEEZ AHMED NEWS AND POLITICS
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Senior Labour Party insider reveals plan to oust Corbyn was in play 10 months ago (EXCLUSIVE)
A senior policy official in the Labour Party has told The Canary that the decision to challenge Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was planned by a core group in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), almost as soon as he won his landslide victory in September 2015.
The lifelong Labour member, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to potential political repercussions, has held high-level executive positions in several Labour groups formally recognised by the party’s National Executive Committee. She currently chairs one such major Labour Party group, and has briefed prominent MPs and Shadow Cabinet members on key policy issues.
“Jeremy Corbyn’s victory was a complete shock to the PLP, and even after the leadership elections, the PLP refused to accept it”, said the Labour insider. They continued:
“I was among the party officials who had lobbied MPs to add Corbyn’s name to the ballot sheet. And I can tell you that not a single MP who did so believed that Corbyn had even the slimmest chance of winning the leadership contest. When he did, they couldn’t believe it.”
The Labour official said that although she had supported Corbyn’s nomination, and welcomed his capacity to mobilise voters, she did not believe he had the qualities to lead the party into winning a national election.
But she said that his radical approach had brought a much-needed shake-up that was making the party more in tune with its members.
Open secrets
“It was an open secret in the party that a leadership challenge would take place,” the official said.
Discussions about this started in September last year. The PLP believed that Corbyn was a liability for the party, and that he had to be removed one way or another. The only question was when, and how.
According to the senior Labour Party official, within a month or so after his victory the PLP had already decided on a basic strategy that would depend on how Corbyn fared in coming elections:
It was agreed that they would assess how he did in the council elections, the Mayoral elections, and the EU referendum. The PLP knew he had massive popular support amongst the party membership, so they had to find a way to justify a leadership challenge that would somehow bypass the members. Focusing on and exaggerating weaknesses during those elections was one way of doing this. They agreed that this would allow them to challenge Corbyn’s suitability to lead.
She added that the thrust of anti-Corbyn plotting came from MPs active in two Labour Party organisations, Labour First and Progress. Progress, described by the New Statesman as “the original Blairite pressure group”, is directly connected to several key MPs in the coup.
Too much democracy
The biggest fear in the PLP, the source said, was that consolidation of Corbyn’s power in the party would lead to a fundamental shift that could endanger the position of the more ‘moderate’ or centrist MPs.
The rise of Momentum, the grassroots campaign that has emerged around Corbyn’s leadership, was increasingly seen as a threat to the Labour status quo.
Momentum activists have urged Labour members to block right-wing candidates in the National Executive Committee elections. The PLP feared that if Corbyn survived as leader of the party, the future position of centrist and centre-right MPs in the party would be threatened. The Labour insider said:
Jeremy Corbyn and those close to him knew that this was coming. People talk, and the discussions about a leadership challenge were happening everywhere at certain levels in the party machinery. However, they did not know exactly who was going to instigate it, or how.
According to a member of Momentum’s national leadership team, a coup against Corbyn was widely anticipated due to the movement’s growing power:
The National Executive Committee (NEC) elections are coming up, and already Momentum campaigning has meant that the Constituency Labour Parties (CLP) have overwhelmingly nominated pro-Corbyn, left-leaning candidates. That’s despite a lot of savvy campaigning from the more right-wing sections of Labour, which means that the PLP knows that after the NEC, they will be increasingly marginalised from the party machinery.
The source mentioned that the right-wing Labour group, Labour First, had invested significantly in its own NEC candidates, but largely failed due to the popularity of nominees backed by Momentum.
Secret coup plot proposed seven months ago
Commentators have thrown cold water on the idea that the uprising against Corbyn in June was pre-planned or staged, insisting that all the evidence shows the spate of mass resignations that followed Hilary Benn’s sacking from the Shadow Cabinet was “spontaneous.”
But these pundits appear to have a short memory span. In November 2015, The Times confirmed that a “secret plot” to oust Corbyn as leader was already underway, and being explored by a number of prominent Labour MPs.
According to The Times report (paywall):
Senior Labour figures and MPs have sought legal advice on how to unseat Jeremy Corbyn in the hope of building support for a plot against him… rebels, including some of the party’s most prominent MPs, have been told by lawyers that in the event of a leadership challenge Mr Corbyn could be removed and denied a place on the ballot paper by MPs.
The report by Sam Coates, Francis Elliot, and Philip Webster noted that the ‘rebel’ Labour MPs were fully aware of Corbyn’s popularity amongst the party membership, and sought to use party procedures to bypass them:
Mr Corbyn’s critics fear that his popularity among the party’s supporters would make him easily re-electable as leader in the event of a putsch. He has gained support among Labour’s 383,000 members since he was elected in September, all of whom would have the right to vote in a leadership election… Rebels are desperate to keep Mr Corbyn off the ballot paper after a Times poll last week found that 66 per cent of Labour members and supporters still thought he was doing a good job. His support among his own MPs was much lower… Rebels believe that if they can find a challenger to Mr Corbyn and unseat him, he will struggle to obtain the support of enough MPs to get back on the ballot paper.
Coup preparations
The acceleration of the coup plot can be detected from subsequent press reports.
In March, The Independent reported that Corbyn’s own allies were expecting a coup: “Mr Corbyn’s allies in the party fear that MPs dissatisfied with his leadership could stage a coup if Labour performs badly in May’s elections.”
That month, Paul Waugh offered further detail in the Huffington Post:
‘Moderate’ Labour MPs believe that they have ‘one last shot’ at ditching Mr Corbyn before his allies use this year’s party conference in September to change the rules to protect him from a ‘coup’ by the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).
These Labour sources confirmed that they had decided to push forward the coup plan until after the EU referendum:
With few MPs wanting to disrupt the EU referendum on June 23, the expectation among a growing number of MPs is that there could now be a challenge in July, before the Commons breaks up for its annual summer recess.
Lucy Powell’s husband: “Corbyn will not be leader”
The following month, according to 72-year old Labour Party member Malcolm Cowl, in casual conversation he was told by James Williamson – husband of former Shadow Cabinet Minister Lucy Powell – that a coup against Corbyn would be launched after the EU referendum.
In an interview with The Canary’s Bex Sumner, Cowl described the conversation in early April at the Railway pub, on a Tuesday quiz night:
This particular night, one of the members of the quiz team, who is an A&E consultant [called James]… suddenly turned to me, who he didn’t really know, although I think he’d been told about me, and said: ‘Jeremy Corbyn will not be leader of the Labour party by October.’ And so I asked him why October was significant. And he said: ‘We won’t be making a move against him until after the local elections and the referendum.’ So I said: ‘Oh, there’s a coup planned, is there?’ and he said: ‘Yes.’ Now what he didn’t know is that I knew he was Lucy Powell’s husband, and I knew that because another friend of mine had told me, and this man was the best man at their wedding.
The Canary received confirmation of the conversation from the Office of Lucy Powell MP, but a spokesperson denied that the discussion implied a coup. In a statement, Powell’s office said:
… having spoken to Lucy’s husband this was a conversation that was listened into in the pub months ago. Someone raised the issue of a challenge to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership after the local elections, and her husband commented that if there was a challenge to come, it would be after the European Union referendum given the importance of that vote.
A spokesperson for Powell, however, said that Cowl’s interpretation of the conversation was mistaken:
“This misunderstanding of a conversation in the pub weeks and weeks ago does not amount to anything. Lucy’s husband has been a member of the Labour Party for 15 years and had no knowledge of any plot because there wasn’t one.”
Cowl has been heavily involved in the trade union movement and wears his radical political views on his sleeve. An avowed anti-capitalist, he recently rejoined the Labour Party due to his support for Jeremy Corbyn, but stands by his recollection of the conversation with Powell’s husband.
So who is lying? The eyewitness who supports Corbyn, or the Office of Lucy Powell MP?
Well, by May press reports were emerging that quoted Labour insiders admitting – contrary to the statement from Powell’s office – that a “plot to oust Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader” was in full swing at that time, “with veteran MP Margaret Hodge said to have been persuaded to stand against him to spark a leadership contest.”
The idea was for Hodge to be “used as a stalking horse before dropping out to allow moderate MPs to remain unscathed as they launch their leadership bids.” And a large cohort of MPs had already been enrolled in the coup plot.
The plotters, reported The Telegraph, were “close to signing up to 50 MPs to the cause” – indicating that a month before the uprising began, Hodge was part of a core PLP group lobbying Labour MPs in preparation for the coup:
It is thought any coup will not happen before the June 23 EU referendum so as not to damage the party’s pro-EU efforts.
Of course, it was Margaret Hodge, Tony Blair’s former Minister of State at the Department of Trade and Industry, who tabled the motion for a vote of no confidence against Corbyn on 24 June. Hodge’s motion was backed by fellow Blairite, Ann Coffey, a Parliamentary Private Secretary to Blair in 1997, before holding several junior ministerial positions in Blair’s government under Alastair Darling.
Hodge’s central role in the coup preparation fits with what has been revealed by The Canary’s Labour source: that much of the plotting for the coup against Corbyn was going on amongst senior PLP members through the Blairite pressure group, Progress.
Margaret Hodge sits on the Board of Patrons of Progress. One of her colleagues at Progress is Kitty Ussher, who used to work under Hodge as her Private Parliamentary Secretary when Hodge was Blair’s Trade Minister.
Screen Shot 2016-07-01 at 15.14.12
Screenshot from Progress green paper, ‘A positive benefit’, published in December 2013
As The Canary has previously reported, Ussher is Chief Economic Advisor at Portland Communications, the PR firm founded and run by former government spin doctor for Tony Blair, Tim Allan.
Back during the Labour leadership contest, BuzzFeed reported that Allan was a key funder of Corbyn competitor Liz Kendall. And six months ago, Portland published an analysis on its website noting the existence of a “mass resignation” pact among Shadow Cabinet members that would be invoked to isolate Corbyn if key ‘moderates’ were sacked by him.
The Portland-Progress connection through an ongoing working relationship between Hodge and Ussher perhaps explains how Portland was aware of the “mass resignation” pact – one of its key leaders was in direct contact with a Shadow Cabinet member who was instrumental in that very pact.
Democracy without the people
The Canary’s findings raise urgent questions about the Labour coup, its driving motivation, and its undemocratic nature.
The official position, uncritically endorsed by the wider media and political class, is that the coup against Jeremy Corbyn was a spontaneous democratic response to a shocking loss of confidence in his leadership due to the failure of his EU referendum campaign.
But 63% of Labour voters, like that of the SNP, chose Remain. No similar calls for the removal of SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon were forthcoming, demanded or expected in that party.
Rather, as the Labour Party members who have spoken to The Canary allege, the coup against Corbyn had been planned by a core group in the PLP as soon as he had won the leadership elections in September 2015 – the EU referendum simply provided a pretext to pull it off.
Far from being a concern about Corbyn’s ‘unelectability’, their chief concern has been their own electability in the context of a Labour Party whose members reject the ‘moderates’ or ‘Blairites’ or whatever you want to call them,” said the senior insider in charge of a Labour-NEC affiliated group.
This investigation provides compelling evidence that the coup to depose Corbyn has been conceived and led by a cohort of senior Labour politicians with close ties to Tony Blair, and others who align themselves with the New Labour ‘old guard.’
Those who began leading discussions and plans for the coup appear to have operated across a range of different institutions and networks linked to the centre and centre-right of the Labour Party, and have attempted to leverage their connections in these networks to push forward the campaign to oust Corbyn.
In a follow-up investigation, The Canary will flesh out the allegations of our Labour source using public record data to identify the core group in the PLP who led this process.
If our Labour insider is correct, then the coup plans were motivated by the self-serving fear that Corbyn’s transformation of the party would mean Blairite, centrist and centre-right politicians lose their power, popularity and perhaps even their positions.
The real reason the permanent political class is trying to topple Jeremy Corbyn
The astonishing scenes of the last week in UK politics have seen the figureheads of the establishment media and politics go to war with Jeremy Corbyn. This is because the permanent political class is freaking out over Corbyn’s rising popularity among formerly disillusioned voters, and how that imperils their grip on power. Here is how.
Over with the Labour establishment, they tried to halt Corbyn’s rise from the get-go. Remember the purge, scaremongering and refusal to work with a Corbyn front bench?
The reason Labour had a new leadership election process last time round, was the result of the parliamentary Labour Party and the NEC long term efforts to diminish the power of Trade Unions. By widening the vote to Labour voters, and quieting the voice of Trade Unions, the Blairite factions of the party gambled on those new voters being to the right of the Unions.
But they got a shock. It turned out that many were actually well to the left, and ready to take a chance on a democratic socialist like Corbyn. So, the Party responded to those new supporters as ‘infiltrators’.
This was a bizarre move, because if Labour don’t win back these voters, they are sunk in 2020. Labour need to win an extra 106 seats next election to gain a majority, an almost impossible task. But that almost impossible task becomes totally impossible without a mass, popular movement to re-engage the public. Just 24% of people voted Conservative in the last election, 76% didn’t. The largest gains went to socially democratic populists the SNP, who killed Labour in Scotland. The biggest losers were the Liberal Democrats, the only ‘centrist’ party in town.
So why would the Parliamentary Labour Party NOT want to harness the power of a populist, social democratic movement? Especially when it is the only chance they have of regaining office in 2020. Or sooner, if a general election is called in the wake of recent events.
It is becoming ever more clear that the Parliamentary Labour Party in Westminster has become a part of a permanent political class alongside their Tory and Liberal Democrat counterparts. Disengagement and voter apathy means a fairly stable job, a few seats lost and won either way each election and no big surprises. The chance to earn a great wage and pass policies which guarantee lucrative consultancy/director roles after politics. All done with the passive acceptance of a disaffected electorate, half of whom don’t even bother to vote anymore. To this permanent political class, a popular movement based on social democratic values is about as welcome as a fart in an elevator.
This is why Harriet Harman planned to cull over 100,000 so-called ‘infiltrators’ from the vote. This is why self-appointed voice-of-the-left Polly Toynbee, the Guardian editorial team, and most of the press (right and liberal) were busily character assassinating Corbyn and anyone who would give him their vote.
But despite all efforts, Corbyn won with a greater landslide in 2015, than Blair did in 1994. The ‘unelectable’ Corbyn galvanized a thumping majority against a hostile media, commentariat and even parliamentary party.
Since then, membership of the party as doubled, and Corbyn moved ahead of the Conservatives in the polls.
How did the conservative permanent political class respond? They freaked out. This freak out is best summed up by this near-hysterical tweet by Prime Minister David Cameron.
The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family's security.
Over 15,000 people joined the Labour Party within 24 hours, and they’re still joining. This is significant. Back in 2011, political party membership in the UK was at an all time low; just 0.8% of eligible adults in the UK were members of political parties, versus 3.8% in 1983. But while general membership was in decline, membership of ‘other’ parties was on a steep rise. This was a signpost that perhaps the problem was not the apathy of the public to politics, but the apathy of the political class to the aspirations and values of the public.
But since the No Vote in Scotland, the rise of the SNP and Greens north of the border, and the victory of Corbyn – large sections of the public are reengaging with the political system again in ways not witnessed for decades.
Between 2002 and 2013, the SNP membership grew to just over 20,000. In the two year since, it rocketed to well over 100,000.
With it’s freshly-arrived members, the Labour Party swelled to around 290,000 members – more than the Conservatives (134,000), Liberal Democrats (61,000) and Green’s (60,000) combined.
Furthermore, it appears that Jeremy Corbyn plans to galvanize the power of this membership to bring democracy into policy making. In short, it looks like Labour members will be supporting policy development in a way unheard of by mainstream parties before now. This would remove the power of the front bench and parliamentary party to act against the will of the membership – this should empower Corbyn’s team to drive through the radical social democratic policies he has in mind.
In short, there is now a distinct possibility not only that a truly progressive, social democrat Labour Party could win in 2020, but worse, that they could topple an unpopular Tory government even before then. An unconstrained Labour Party with Corbyn at its head, and John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor, could deliver the sort of coordinated opposition, uniting with workers and their unions, disenfranchised groups and their campaign groups – to start landing big punches now. The sorts of actions that Blue Labour would never take, could now be back on the table. There could be general strikes, there could be mass rallies utilising the full power of these groups, there could be the kind of concerted, unrelenting uproar that tore the Tory Party apart in the early 1990’s.
How did the Parliamentary Labour Party respond? With mutiny.
But their grand coup is now laying in tatters. They had no vision, no figurehead, and no plan. Meanwhile, the Labour membership, Momentum, the unions and Corbynites around the country did. After the attempted coup, a petition called “A vote of confidence for Jeremy Corbyn after the Brexit vote” gathered more than 230,000 signatures in a week and continues to rise. A hastily convened confidence rally outside parliament this week saw more than 10,000 supporters pack out Parliament Square at a moment’s notice to back the Labour leader. The leaders of the 12 strongest unions in the United Kingdom also wrote a letter of support following the attempted coup.
This weekend, there have been rallies across the country with tens of thousands of people joining to demand Corbyn remain in place and lead the Labour party back to its natural home – the labour movement.
— Rachel Brandwood (@RachelBrandwood) July 1, 2016
People continue to rally at the hashtag #Corbyn4All to demonstrate the diversity of Corbyn supporters which the mainstream media and the neoliberal establishment of the party refuse to acknowledge.
This is unprecedented in modern history. No one marched to save Tony Blair. No one marched to save Gordon Brown. No one is marching to save David Cameron.
The permanent political class is freaking out because the only thing that can beat out Project Fear, is Project Hope. A Tory-lite Labour opposition was and is never going to win in 2020, but an energetic and awakened Labour movement can. Even worse, if they do win, there is a very real chance that the domestic and foreign policy of Britain could transform in a truly radical way. We could be a few months or years away from the most progressive government since Clement Attlee’s post-WWII government delivered the NHS, a national education system, nationalised transport and energy, and rolled out the biggest social housing programme in our history. This is an electoral choice that the UK hasn’t had the opportunity to make in decades.
The permanent political class is facing the most real and present threat to their power since 1979. They are going to throw every weapon in their armoury at ensuring that doesn’t happen. But none of those weapons is more powerful than a tight-knit, grass roots movement with its eye on shared vision of an inspiring future. They don’t fear Corbyn because he might be unelectable, they fear him because he, and the movement he represents, might be unstoppable.
Get involved!
For Canary readers who are current or potential Labour supporters, you can sign this petition to back Jeremy Corbyn (if you haven’t already).
Momentum has also called on Labour supporters and members to:
Contact their MPs to express their support.
Thank their unions for continuing to back Corbyn.
Express themselves on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtags #OurPartyOurLeader and #KeepCorbyn.
Join its group and the Labour party to make their voices heard.
More background that undermines the coup plotter's claims of responding to Brexit
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Road To Somewhere Else the view from the dark side: politics, media, cities & culture
Anti-Corbyn plots & the myth of the un-electable left
By Daniel Margrain
Corbyn speaking at the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival and Rally in 2015
In 1978, the Australian social scientist, Alex Carey, pointed out that the twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: “the growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.” The corporations that now dominate much of the domestic and global economies recognize the need to manipulate the public through media propaganda by manufacturing their consent in order to defend their interests against the forces of democracy. This is largely achieved as a result of coordinated mass campaigns that combine sophisticated public relations techniques.
The result is the media underplay, or even ignore, the economic and ideological motivations that drive the social policy decisions and strategies of governments’. Sharon Beder outlines the reasoning behind the coordinated political, corporate and media attacks on democracy:
“The purpose of this propaganda onslaught has been to persuade a majority of people that it is in their interests to eschew their own power as workers and citizens, and forego their democratic right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now largely confined to policies aimed at furthering business interests.”
This is the context in which the UK political and media establishment are attacking Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and demeaning the membership who had the temerity to vote for him, securing the biggest electoral mandate of any Labour leader in British political history. It’s the possibility that Corbyn will break the iron-clad neoliberal consensus that scares the establishment the most. As Mike Sivier has shown, the significant role the media have played in undermining Corbyn’s leadership, as well as their failure to explicitly acknowledge the establishment coup against him, can be traced back until at least April.
But arguably, the plot to oust Corbyn began the moment he became leader after a hardcore group that included shadow chancellor Chris Leslie, shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt, shadow communities secretary Emma Reynolds and shadow defence secretary Vernon Coaker, all refused to serve under him. Others included shadow transport secretary Michael Dugher, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Shabana Mahmood, shadow international development secretary Mary Creagh and shadow Cabinet Office minister Lucy Powell.
The corporate media also played their part in what has arguably been the most vitriolic and biased reportage ever witnessed against any British political figure in history. What Media Lens accurately described as a “panic-driven hysterical hate-fest right across the corporate media spectrum” actually began during Corbyn’s campaign to become leader. As the media analysts noted at the time, “the full extent of media bias against Jeremy Corbyn can be gauged simply by comparing the tone and intensity of attacks on him as compared to those directed at the other three candidates: Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall.”
The intensity of the media attacks on Corbyn increased after the election despite the fact that he secured ‘the largest mandate ever won by a Party Leader’. The focus of these attacks included what colour poppy Corbyn would wear, his refusal to sing the national anthem, whether he would wear a tie or do up his top button. All of this was granted national news headlines and incessant coverage. Not to be outdone, in October last year, the BBCs political editor Laura Kuenssberg featured in an almost comically biased, at times openly scornful, attack on Corbyn’s reasonable stance on nuclear weapons. The BBC then broadcast five senior Blairite Labour figures all opposing Corbyn without any opportunity for an alternative viewpoint.
Kuenssberg followed up this hatchet-job three months later when she helped to orchestrate the live resignation of Labour shadow foreign minister Stephen Doughty on the BBC2 Daily Politics show as the pre-requisite to accusing Corbyn’s team of ‘unpleasant operations’ and ‘lies’. Then came the non-story about Corbyn’s state-funded salary and pension initially reported in a April 12 Telegraph article.
Allied to all this, have been the attempts by the Blairite Friends of Israel rump within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) to topple Corbyn using the specter of antisemitism as a weapon with which to achieve it. Arguably, among the the most comprehensive analyses of the McCarthy-style witch-hunts undertaken so far have been by Tony Greenstein (who has been at the forefront of moves to combat genuine cases of antisemitism on the fringes of the Palestine solidarity movement) and the journalist Asa Winstanley.
In an excellent piece published by the Electronic Intifada (April 28, 2016), Winstanley outlined the links between right-wing, anti-Corbyn Labour and the pro- Israel lobby within the party. He meticulously shows how this lobby manufactured an ‘antisemitism crisis’, pinpointing the individuals involved, the tactics and dirty tricks used and the connections to powerful individuals whose ties lead to pro-Israel groups both in London and Israel.
The latest attack on Corbyn centred on another contrived ‘antisemitism’ accusation, this time made by Jewish-Zionist Labour MP, Ruth Smeeth who Wikileaks have revealed is a ‘strictly protected’ US informant. Smeeth staged a highly publicised walk-out during Corbyn’s launch of a review into the Labour party’s supposed ‘anti-semitism crisis’ last Thursday (June 30) which, as Jonathan Cook pointed out, was in fact, “a crisis entirely confected by a toxic mix of the right, Israel supporters and the media.”
A few days earlier another manufactured and staged anti-Corbyn story made the headlines. This time it centred around a Corbyn ‘heckler’ at Gay Pride, who in fact, as Craig Murray observed turned out to have been Tom Mauchline who works for the public relations firm, Portland Communications, whose ‘strategic counsel’ is Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former media chief who helped to sell the illegal invasion-occupation of Iraq.
In addition to all of this, Corbyn’s pro-Remain position with respect to the EU referendum has provided his critics with the ammunition they need in their attempts to undermine him further. Chief among these critics is Angela Eagle, one of the many Oxford educated Blairite plotters who resigned her post in order to position herself as a potential replacement for Corbyn and who claimed to be dissatisfied with Corbyn’s performance during the EU referendum campaign. However, as the graphic below would appear to indicate, Corbyn did much better than Eagle in defending their respective Remain positions:
According to a YouGov poll, Eagle commands just 6 per cent support from Labour members while a greater number than last time said they will vote for Corbyn if he were to stand again. In other words, just like last time, Corbyn would likely win more votes than all the other candidates combined. This grass-roots popularity for Corbyn must be seen against a backdrop in which the Labour party gained 60,000 members in one week following the attempted coup against him. Membership of the party currently stands at about 450,000 – a figure that is higher than it’s last peak of 405,000 members last seen under Tony Blair’s leadership.
This would almost certainly translate into Corbyn receiving more votes than his Blairite predecessor Ed Milliband did at the last General Election. With the proportion of the Labour vote increasing under Corbyn, the two main parties are neck-and-neck at 32 per cent. This undercuts the recent claims of elder statesmen like David Blunkett and Neil Kinnock that Corbyn is an electoral liability for Labour.
This narrative is consistent with the notion that the left are un-electable more generally. Such a narrative is a myth. As Craig Murray posited, the idea that you have to be right-wing to win elections is belied by the fact that the SNP under Nicola Sturgeon won the people of Scotland over on a left-wing ticket. Secondly, as he rightly says, there is no point being elected just so you can carry out the same policies as your opponents. Third, the British public’s ‘enthusiasm’ for somebody like Blair in 1997 was not based on policies known as Blairite. As Murray astutely points out:
“The 1997 Labour Manifesto was not right-wing. It did not mention Academy schools, Private Finance Initiative, Tuition Fees, NHS privatisation, financial sector deregulation or any of the right wing policies Blair was to usher in. Labour actually presented quite a left wing image, and figures like Robin Cook and Clare Short were prominent in the campaign. There was certainly no mention of military invasions. It was only once Labour were in power that Blair shaped his cabinet and his policies on an ineluctably right wing course and Mandelson started to become dominant. As people discovered that New Labour were “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, to quote Mandelson, their popular support plummeted. “The great communicator” Blair for 90% of his Prime Ministership was no more popular than David Cameron is now. 79% of the electorate did not vote for him by his third election.”
Murray continues:
“Michael Foot consistently led Margaret Thatcher in opinion polls – by a wide margin – until the Falklands War. He was defeated in a victory election by the most appalling and intensive wave of popular war jingoism and militarism, the nostalgia of a fast declining power for its imperial past, an emotional outburst of popular relief that Britain could still notch up a military victory over foreigners in its colonies. It was the most unedifying political climate imaginable. The tabloid demonization of Foot as the antithesis of the military and imperial theme was the first real exhibition of the power of Rupert Murdoch. Few serious commentators at the time doubted that Thatcher might have been defeated were it not for the Falklands War – which in part explains her lack of interest in a peaceful solution. Michael Foot’s position in the demonology ignores these facts. The facts about Blair and about Foot are very different from the media mythology.”
The reality, as one commentator put it, is that in corporate media and political establishment parlance, “‘un-electable” is media-political code for ‘likely to be highly electable but ‘will not serve elite interests.'”
This description applies to Corbyn. The ‘un-electable left’ meme is likely to intensify the longer Corbyn manages to hang on. In these unsettling and unpredictable times, it’s the one propaganda weapon the establishment is certain to cling to as their means of attempting to prevent democracy from breaking their grip on power.
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July 4, 2016 · Posted in anti-semitism, corruption, current affairs, government, media, politics · Tagged alex carey, Angela Eagle, asa winstanley, craig murray, Daily Politics, establishment plotting, Israel Lobby, jeremy corbyn, Labour gained 60K members, laura kuenssberg, manufacturing consent, media lens, myth of un-electable left, Ruth Smeeth, sharon beder, Tom Mauchline, tony greenstein, UK political and media establishment
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More background that undermines the coup plotter's claims of responding to Brexit
Road To Somewhere Else the view from the dark side: politics, media, cities & culture
Anti-Corbyn plots & the myth of the un-electable left
By Daniel Margrain
.......The latest attack on Corbyn centred on another contrived ‘antisemitism’ accusation, this time made by Jewish-Zionist Labour MP, Ruth Smeeth who Wikileaks have revealed is a ‘strictly protected’ US informant. Smeeth staged a highly publicised walk-out during Corbyn’s launch of a review into the Labour party’s supposed ‘anti-semitism crisis’ last Thursday (June 30) which, as Jonathan Cook pointed out, was in fact, “a crisis entirely confected by a toxic mix of the right, Israel supporters and the media.”....
Simon Hardy gives the facts about Corbyn's victories so far that you won't read in the rest of the press
28 June 2016
The rally in support of Jeremy Corbyn in Parliament Square.
The reactionary fall out from the Brexit vote continues to tear through society. The Labour membership and the Labour left are now under the most sustained attack seen since the Bevan-Gaitskell clashes of the 1950s. The Labour Party is in a state of civil war – the mass rally of 10,000 Corbyn supporters outside Parliament felt like a battle cry of the rank and file against a cynical, mendacious coup by the Bitterites.
Their claim is that Corbyn is unelectable. Between back-handed compliments that he is, in the words of the sacked Hilary Benn, 'a good man, a principled man', the right wing narrative is that Corbyn is an electoral liability for the party. This narrative is spun out in the media – a example of how sinister elites try to turn a claim into a reality. What was the old adage about lies repeated often enough? They try to prove their lie through a coordinated set of resignations from the shadow cabinet. This plan was revealed in the Telegraph two weeks before the referendum – it is not a spontaneous display of anger, it is a premeditated coup against the Labour left.
But the tremendous display of support for Corbyn across many parts of the Labour Party and from the trade unions reveals the class divide at work here.
Here are some facts about Labour under Jeremy Corbyn that you aren't seeing in the Mirror or the Guardian.
1. The biggest mandate
Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership with the biggest mandate from party members that any leaders has ever won - 59% - more than all the other candidates put together.
2. Huge membership increase
Labour's membership has increased dramatically under his leadership - over 380,000 members.
3. Byelection victories
Labour has won 4 by elections since he became leader, Oldham West, Sheffield Brightside, Ogmore & Tooting. Oldham West, Tooting and Sheffield Brightside saw Labour win on an increased majority.
4. Mayoral elections won
Labour won London Mayor with Corbyn as leader. Sadiq Khan won with the largest personal vote a single politician has ever received in Britain, 1.3 million. It was also the first election of a Muslim candidate to a western capital city. Labour also won Mayoral elections in Salford, Liverpool, Bristol.
5. Good local election performance
In the local elections in 2016 Labour's performance was as good as 2001, when Labour won a second landslide in the general elections. Labour has repeatedly been ahead of the Tories in the polls since the start of 2016.
6. Anti-austerity victories
Labour under Corbyn has helped fight off cuts to tax credits and disabled people's PIP payments - scoring significant blows against the Tories austerity agenda.
7. Won the Remain vote among Labour voters
Whilst the Brexit vote was very disappointing, Labour delivered 63% of its 2015 voters to vote Remain in the EU referendum. Compared to the SNP's vote of 64% of their voters and 70% of Liberal Democrat voters, Labour didn't perform qualitatively worse. David Cameron and the Tories couldn't even deliver a majority of their voters - only 42% voted to Remain.
Even if the right wing's arguments were true that Corbyn doesn't 'look' like a leader or doesn't 'get his message across in the media', it just means that Labour is doing exceptionally anyway. Imagine how well Labour would do if its MPs were loyal to their members and leader and Labour could present a united campaign, unhindered by in-fighting?
If the coup plotters stand a moderate left candidate in a leadership battle, Labour members should not be tricked into supporting them as some kind of unity candidate. They would be a front for the disruptive coup plotters.
One simple question from Andrew Neil leaves Labour coup leader Angela Eagle floundering (VIDEO)
Interviewing Angela Eagle MP about her leadership bid against Jeremy Corbyn, Andrew Neil had a simple question:
Other than Trident, what are the main policy differences?
A question that you’d think a group of people who spent months plotting a coup might be able to answer, but it left the Labour coup’s candidate floundering:
Even after Neil repeated his question, the MP for Wallasey was still unable to name a single policy that set her apart from Corbyn, despite being so against him.
And this lack of vision comes after everything the rebelling MPs have sidelined to carry out their coup.
For these MPs, gaining control of the party was more important than capitalising on a Conservative party split down the middle. It has been more important that standing up for junior doctors, whose contract is now being forced on them by the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
But most of all, removing Corbyn was held in higher regard than one of the biggest political moments of a generation. Fighting to ensure the interests of ordinary people during the chaos of Brexit came second place to seizing the Labour party leadership.
This simple question from Neil has exposed the plotters. After handing the Conservatives free-reign on the Brexit narrative, Eagle has revealed that the plotters do not even have a vision. She could not name one inspiring policy that sets her apart from Corbyn. From Eagle, all we hear in response are phrases like “strong, united opposition”. It seems the plotting MPs abandoned the nation in the name of empty buzzwords. And not for the first time.
In her answer, Eagle attempted to rebrand herself as anti-austerity. But in doing so, she fails to distinguish herself from Corbyn. It appears the leadership hopeful is trapped. She knows anti-anti-austerity is not a good look, and the membership would roast her for such a stance.
But what has the Labour candidate done to oppose austerity? Eagle and all the rest of the MPs who resigned to topple Corbyn abstained on the 2015 welfare bill, which allowed the Tories to make a further £12bn of ideological cuts to public services.
Abstaining is certainly not opposing austerity. This refusal to oppose austerity is infact a tacit approval. If you’re supposed to be challenging the Conservatives in government, and you don’t oppose their core economics, you serve to legitimise them.
Eagle and the plotters need to head back to the drawing board. The rebels have consumed the media discourse on how ‘unelectable’ Corbyn is, and how they are the ones who can provide an “effective opposition”. Yet, when it comes down to it they don’t have a single galvanising policy on offer. No vision, no values, no plan.
WATCH: This embarrassing video is cracking everyone up, except the Labour coup and Angela Eagle
Get involved!
For Canary readers who are current or potential Labour supporters, you can sign this petition to back Jeremy Corbyn (if you haven’t already).
Momentum has also called on Labour supporters and members to:
Contact their MPs to express their support.
Thank their unions for continuing to back Corbyn.
Express themselves on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtags #OurPartyOurLeader and #KeepCorbyn.
Join its group and the Labour party to make their voices heard. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Our MP, Angela Eagle, this morning announced her intention to stand as a Labour leadership candidate.
On learning about this prospect a couple of weeks back, some locals found it surprising, and many more found it astonishing, given that she’d scraped a very poor 4th in the poll for deputy leader, conducted in the summer of 2015. Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader, and the man she’s challenging for that leadership, breezed home superbly well with a virtual 60% mandate from members – a new record. This was followed by solid by-election successes and a huge rise in membership which continues to this day.
A small crumb of comfort for Angela was that her own Wallasey branch of the local Constituency Labour Party had graciously nominated her for deputy (a nomination that still stands) and selected Corbyn, whom she seemed supportive of at the time, to be leader.
But how did Angela repay her local members’ and Corbyn’s loyalty and backing?
By throwing it back in their faces, going against her own recent approval of Corbyn and by claiming that he lacked the leadership to win an election. Hunnh??
So what’s changed in the meantime? What’s behind this amazing transformation from Corbyn backing deputy leader no-hoper to burgeoning Labour leader and potential Prime Minister who despises Corbyn, all set out under a banner screaming “Real Leadership” and with the predictable backing of the BBC and mainstream media?
Very little, from our vantage point.
In fact, we have very long memories and can still recall the time in 1992 when Bridlington born Angela first set a tentative toe in Wallasey.
Firstly, we need to set the scene by briefly describing what had been going on politically in this town, a stalwart Tory seat under Ernest Marples and later Lynda Chalker. Following a spirited campaign, the iron grip of the Tories had been loosened and virtually broken by Lol Duffy and team in the run-up to the 1987 general election, against all the odds. And when we say odds … what was very odd was the behaviour of a very panicky Frank Field in neighbouring Birkenhead.
Upon hearing that the May election in Wallasey was getting too close to call, he went public, encouraging the town’s electorate not to vote Labour – to vote Tory – anything to prevent the popular people’s choice winning it. This was at a time when Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley were conducting a national witch hunt to purge the party of persons they regarded as ‘too left wing’. So forget about Lol and his campaigners achieving a 40 % rise in Labour’s fortunes. At Walworth Road, the Labour Party’s HQ, paranoia swept all before it.
It seemed the dirty deed done by Field had the desired result. If 280 more people had voted for Lol Duffy, he would have unseated Tory Lynda Chalker.
Over to a 1992 article in Private Eye for a concise summary of the 1992 Wallasey candidacy, where the rulebook was frantically torn up by Kinnock. Lol Duffy was excluded, previously unheard of Angela Eagle was secretly slotted in and put in a position where she could profit from Lol and his team’s achievements five years earlier, all against the local public’s wishes:
And here we are now in 2016, with Blair supporting Angela Eagle’s dubious origins long forgotten, and with the slotted in Wallasey MP now on the brink of gaining the Labour Party leadership.
But how curiously reticent she is about the details of what happened in 1992 – if her write up on http://www.angela4leader.org* is anything to go by:
As readers can now appreciate, in Wallasey we are very poorly served. And please be warned. Let’s not make the mistake of extending that poor service to the whole country.
Oddly enough ( !) I can't find it mentioned in the MSM, including Morning Star and Mirror. Perhaps they missed it!. _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
She starts by stating that “Mr Corbyn appointed me and press released this without my knowledge or consent whilst I was in the middle of cancer treatment.”
It is interesting to compare this very negative statement to what she is reported to have said to her local paper at the time on January 14th 2016 “I’m thrilled to bits at my new appointment.” She then goes on to say: “and will be making a phased return to Parliament over the following weeks.” Then saying: “I’m very grateful for the support of the Labour Party leadership”. [1]
Some change in tone, inference and emphasis, if not fact. The statements seem to paint a completely different picture of events.
She then states: “He then sacked me the next day…” then goes on to say that she “decided to make the best of it and to serve.”
She then goes on to say: “When I went back to Westminster, I discovered that he had sacked me but hadn’t told me” but then says she “worked hard for him (sic) on his (sic) Arts policy, loyally (sic) didn’t go to the press”.
She then goes on to say it was difficult or impossible for her and her other colleagues on the front bench to get decisions from Corbyn’s office.
She then goes on to say that JC was: “missing in action during the EU referendum, including going on a week’s holiday three weeks before the day.” And that she found this “unforgivable”. I am glad she is not my employer.
She says: “the tipping point” for her was the fact that Jeremy had said he wanted an early Brexit but that she didn’t and that disagreement on this meant she had to resign. So the Tory party can unite on vastly different views on EU but the shadow minister for Culture, Media and Sport thinks that an opinion by her leader on the timing of Brexit is so fundamental to her Labour party values and sense of duty and loyalty that she could not serve anymore. OK.
She then goes on to say that she “voted no confidence in him as leader” because she “found out from other front bench women how unwilling and unable Corbyn is to communicate with, listen to or work with anyone outside his narrow group.” There are of course several women many prominent now serving in the cabinet successfully who don’t seem to share this view.
She then goes on to claim that JC: “isn’t prioritizing winning elections.” One might wonder what the PLP are currently doing but in my experience all ordinary Corbyn supporters I meet want to win. If you can’t afford a decent and affordable place to live, to have an elected leader who will prioritise mass social housing, rather than previous leaders who prioritised building a private property portfolio, is pretty urgent.
She then says she that she “wished I never had to say all this publicly” but that she was doing so at this time because we need to “know the truth about what Corbyn’s leadership is like.” Well Thangamn we do. The majority of hundreds of thousands of Labour party members have seen his successes in election after election in the past 9 months. We have also seen the u-turns of the government over many crucial issues. We have also seen the crushingly negative and inaccurate (see LSE study) press coverage. We have seen and heard the aggressive table thumping speeches to the PLP by Neil Kinnock (who never won an election for Labour) being received to what sounded like 170 or so baying hounds whilst outside in parliament thousands of members came to show their support and solidarity only to be described as “dogs” by the PLP. And his resolution in not letting this “break him as a man” which has been reported as the aim. We see the loyalty he inspires in his current shadow team who must be under immense pressure.
She then goes on to give her opinion that Labour cannot win a general election under JC. And that in her opinion Labour would need to “convince swing voters who voted Tory last year” and keep Labour voters voting Labour . She doesn’t offer her analysis of how JC leadership impacts Green voters, people who have previously not voted because Labour seemed to be Tory lite, or the effect on UKIP voters or on others such as regional nationalists.
She ends on: “I hope that’s clear.”
Is it clear? Why the discrepancy on the public utterances at the time, and now?
Her post was published on Facebook on July 17th.
On 27th June (see letter below) she wrote:
Thangam Debbonaire resignation letter
It was a “great pleasure to serve you and the party” and that “We agree on so many things and I genuinely admire your honesty and strength of conviction.”
Her analysis certainly chimes with that coming from Blairites, Progress MPs, Blairite supporters and commentators including Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail, David Cameron and the PLP that have gone along with them. We can summarise: lack of leadership, doing little in EU debate and unelectability. We JC supporters must disagree – 100%
There are many types of leadership of course in the textbooks and what is true is JC has mobilised a generation into politics and revitalised the Labour party. His nuanced support of the EU reflected what many felt whether they voted remain or leave. Analysis of his appearances by academics does not support the view that JC underperformed in the EU campaign. Angela Eagle who now also criticises JC on EU, prior to the coup had praised JC for his performance.
Thangam’s Wikipedia page has already been updated with these news stories by someone called Philip Cross – he edits other Wikipedia pages such as those of Paul Dacre editor of the Daily Mail. His Twitter tag is @philipcross63. In his (re)tweets he is very anti-Corbyn.
Private constructive criticism of anyone is fine. Orchestrated public condemnations of a leader in the media are not fine.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2016 11:32 pm Post subject:
Owen Smith worked as PR chief for biotech firm hit by $762m fine
The Labour leadership candidate headed UK corporate affairs for Amgen in 2008, while it was under investigation in the US for risking patient safety
Labour candidate Owen Smith in 2006
Owen Smith in 2006 at the time the investigation into Amgen began.
Holly Watt and David Pegg
Tuesday 19 July 2016 20.09 BST Last modified on Tuesday 19 July 2016 http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/19/owen-smith-worked-as-p r-chief-for-biotech-firm-hit-by-762m-fine
Owen Smith, who now faces Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership battle, worked as a lobbyist in the pharmaceutical industry for five years before becoming the MP for Pontypridd in 2010.
After working for the US giant Pfizer, Smith moved to the controversial biotech firm Amgen in 2008. At the time, Amgen was battling an investigation into one of its most successful anaemia drugs, Aranesp.
Amgen was ultimately fined $762m for illegally promoting the drug to cancer patients in a way that increased the likelihood of their deaths. Amgen was hit with the fines after it emerged that the California company was “pursuing profits at the risk of patient safety” as it promoted a non-approved use of Aranesp.
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Smith was in charge of corporate affairs, corporate and internal communications and public affairs at the British division of Amgen while the biotech company was being investigated.
The main whistleblower on Aranesp filed her case against Amgen in 2006, sparking a US investigation that took several years to conclude. The whistleblower also claimed that Amgen systematically overfilled vials of the drugs, when selling them in America, which enabled doctors to “pool” the excess amounts.
The doctors were then encouraged to bill Medicare and private insurers for the use of the excess drug, creating a system of “liquid kickbacks” according to one lawyer on the case.
Amgen also produces a drug called erythropoietin – better known as EPO – which it produced under its Epogen brand name. Epogen was connected to the international cycling scandal, which involved cyclists such as Lance Armstrong.
A spokesman for Smith said: “Prior to progressing his career in politics, Owen served Amgen in the role of corporate affairs director for the UK and Ireland.” Born in Morecambe, Lancashire, Smith is the son of Welsh historian Prof Dai Smith. He was educated at Barry Boys comprehensive school, in south Wales.
After studying history and French at the University of Sussex, Smith spent 10 years working at the BBC. He was a producer on Radio 4’s Today programme and the Welsh political show Dragon’s Eye.
He then became a special adviser to Paul Murphy, the former Northern Ireland secretary. After three years with Murphy, Smith moved to Pfizer, where he was paid a reported £80,000 a year as a lobbyist. He first tried to become an MP at the Blaenau Gwent byelection in 2006, but lost out. He won the ultra-safe Labour seat of Pontypridd four years later.
Owen Smith: decent bloke, good politics. But is that enough?
Zoe Williams
Zoe Williams Read more
After joining parliament, Smith rose through the Labour ranks rapidly, becoming the shadow work and pensions secretary in the first months of Corbyn’s leadership. He resigned in the aftermath of the referendum.
Now 46, Smith ran into controversy this week when he described himself as normal. “I am normal. I grew up in a normal household. I’ve got a wife and three children. My wife is a primary school teacher.”
Colleagues around Smith were aware of his ambitions for several months before he entered the Labour leadership contest. He delayed his entrance into the race as the soft-left option because he had been at the bedside of his ill brother.
Owen Smith, Labour MP for Pontypridd, launches his Labour leadership campaign at Coleg y Cymoedd on July 17, 2016 in Nantgarw, Wales. The ex-shadow work and pensions secretary has pledged to hold a second EU referendum on the terms of Brexit and has proposed a £200bn "British New Deal" investment programme.
By Miles Goslett | 11:52 am, July 20, 2016
Labour leadership challenger Owen Smith accepted a £60,000 donation from an accountancy firm which has been accused of promoting tax avoidance on an “industrial scale”.
Smith received the gift from City firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers in November 2011 while serving as a shadow Treasury minister.
He said the benefit – in total worth £58,530 – was a “donation in kind” for “ad hoc advice” provided to Labour during the passage of the Finance (No. 4) Bill.
Smith received this advice for a period of six months, until May 2012.
Links between the Labour Party and PwC were particularly strong at the time, with shadow cabinet ministers during the last parliament including Ed Balls, Chuka Umunna and Rachel Reeves also accepting free advice worth hundreds of thousands of pounds from the company.
However, some of their colleagues were always suspicious of the cosy relationship and last February Public Accounts Committee chairman and Labour MP Margaret Hodge declared this sort of help from PwC was “inappropriate”.
Hodge’s committee also produced a report at that time which accused PwC of “the promotion of tax avoidance on an industrial scale”.
Hodge wrote in February 2015 that evidence PwC had provided to her committee two years earlier – in January 2013 – was “misleading” – in particular its assertions that “we are not in the business of selling schemes” and “we do not mass-market tax products, we do not produce tax products, we do not promote tax products”.
News that Smith was happy to accept such a significant gift from so controversial a source, albeit prior to publication of Hodge’s report, sits uncomfortably with his claims to be a socialist and promise to close the gap between the “haves and have nots”.
It also highlights a key difference between him and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Although Corbyn raised about £220,000 in cash and gifts during last summer’s Labour leadership contest, almost all of that cash came from trade unions. None of it was from big business.
Smith has already come under fire for his previous job as an £80,000 a year lobbyist for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, triggering a row with Corbyn’s allies who regard having held such a post as Blairite.
Before working for Pfizer, Smith worked for BBC Wales.
Unusually, he secured his full time job for the broadcaster at around the same time as his father took up a senior management post there.
Smith Jnr’s CV states that he began working for the BBC in 1992 months after leaving the University of Sussex, but it is understood he did so on a freelance basis initially before becoming a fully fledged producer. He later worked for the BBC in London.
His father, Prof David Smith, confirmed to Heat Street that he and his son were employed by BBC Wales simultaneously, with Smith Snr being appointed head of radio at BBC Wales in 1993.
In 1994 Smith Snr became Head of Programmes at BBC Wales.
Smith Snr told us: “I didn’t appoint Owen and I wasn’t Owen’s boss.” He also said that they didn’t work on any programmes together, ruling out any suggestion of nepotism.
However, Owen Smith has been able to make some use of his BBC connections. In 2013 he was given two tickets worth £781 to watch Ireland play Wales at rugby. His benefactor? BBC Wales.
A spokesman for Owen Smith said: “When working on complex legislation, MPs routinely take advice from relevant experts. In 2011 Owen was one of several shadow ministers who received some advice from PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and this was registered as a donation in kind for the work she performed. PwC were able to offer background support on objective analysis of the legislation. Throughout this process, Owen lead Labour’s opposition to the Tory proposals to give millionaires tax cuts. The BBC has tens of thousands of employees of whom Owen was one. He joined them in 1992 and was subject to the normal recruitment processes.” _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Even the mainstream media feel compelled to drop hints that Owen Smith is not what he is being promoted as. The Guardian’s words yesterday were unintentionally revealing;
the former shadow work and pensions secretary plans to pitch himself as the soft-left option
Note “to pitch himself”. For PR professional Smith, political stance is nothing to do with personal belief, it is to do with brand positioning. On Channel 4 News last night, an incredulous Michael Crick pointed out that the “soft left” Smith had previously given interviews supporting PFI and privatisation in the health service. He also strongly supported Blair’s city academies.
As chief lobbyist for Pfizer, Smith actively pushed for privatisation of NHS services. This is not something Pfizer did very openly, and you have to search the evidence carefully. Footnotes often tell you what is really happening, as in this press release in which Owen Smith says of a Pfizer funded “focus group” study:
We believe that choice is a good thing and that patients and healthcare professionals should be at the heart of developing the agenda.
You have to look at the footnotes to see what kind of choice Owen Smith is actually talking about. Note to Editors 3 includes
“The focus groups also explored areas of choice that do not yet exist in the UK – most specifically the use of direct payments and the ability to choose to go directly to a specialist without first having to see the GP.”
Well, at least it is clear – direct payments from the public to doctors replacing current NHS services. Smith was promoting straight privatisation. As Head of Policy and Government Relations for Pfizer, Owen Smith was also directly involved in Pfizer’s funding of Blairite right wing entryist group Progress. Pfizer gave Progress £53,000. Progress has actively pursued the agenda of PFI and privatisation of NHS services.
Owen Smith went to Pfizer from a Labour Party job, while Labour were in government, and there is no doubt that his hiring was an example of the corrupt relationship between New Labour and big business which is why the Blairites are so hated by the public. It is also beyond any argument that if Pfizer had any doubts about Owen Smith’s willingness to promote the Big Pharma and NHS Privatisation agenda, they would never have hired him.
Owen Smith is a strong supporter of Trident and assiduously courts the arms industry. He is a regular at defence industry events.
Perhaps most crucially of all, Owen Smith joined his fellow Red Tories in abstaining on the Tory welfare benefit cuts.
I do not doubt Owen Smith’s expertise in brand positioning. I expect that there are indeed a large number of Labour Party members who might vote for a left wing alternative to Corbyn. But I also suspect that Smith has adopted the PR man’s typical contempt for the public, who are not as stupid as he seems to think. There is no evidence whatsoever that Smith is a left winger. There is every evidence that he is another New Labour unprincipled and immoral careerist, adopting a left wing pose that he thinks will win him votes.
Quiz: Who said it – Owen Smith or Jeremy Corbyn?
https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/politics/quiz-said-owen-smith-jere my-corbyn/ _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Ben Riley-Smith 30 JULY 2016 • 8:14AM
Senior Labour rebels are so convinced that Jeremy Corbyn will win the leadership contest that they are planning to elect their own leader and launch a legal challenge for the party's name.
Leading moderates have told The Telegraph they are looking at plans to set up their own “alternative Labour” in a “semi-split” of the party if Mr Corbyn remains in post.
The move would see them create their own shadow cabinet and even elect a leader within Parliament to rival Mr Corbyn’s front bench and take on the Tories.
Jeremy Corbyn: MP's considering splitting the party should 'think carefully'Play!02:17
They are considering going through the courts to get the right to use Labour’s name and assets including property owned by the party across the country.
They would also approach John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, and argue that having more MPs than Mr Corbyn means they should be named the official opposition.
While the plans are in an “embryonic” stage, it will increase fears that the party will further fracture if Mr Corbyn wins the leadership on September 24.
Corbyn launches Labour leadership campaignCorbyn launches Labour leadership campaignPlay!01:02
“The notion that we’ll all go back to happy families is nonsense,” said one prominent Corbyn critic, saying that the plan would help avoid the “nuclear” option of a full party split.
Another said: “We can be liberated from the drag anchor and the poison that is Jeremy and his team and would be able to take the fight to the Tories.”
Support for the move is not universal, with some Labour moderates saying a legal challenge would be unlikely to succeed and warning creating a de facto alternative leader would be too provocative.
But the fact the plans are now actively being considered by some of the party’s most senior moderate figures shows the level of despondency at Owen Smith’s chances of success.
The former work and pensions secretary’s campaign team remain hopeful they can close the gap with Mr Corbyn, who was given an early poll lead of more than 20 points.
Owen Smith launches his Labour leader bidOwen Smith launches his Labour leader bidPlay!01:52
However MPs are now turning their mind to what happens if Mr Corbyn wins a second leadership victory in as many years and seeks to reassert his authority on the party.
“Essentially, the majority of MPs will formally set up their own grouping under an alternative Labour banner,” one senior moderate told The Telegraph.
“It is not a ‘we’re off to set up a new party,’ it is a ‘this is our party, we’re not leaving but our current situation is intolerable’.”
“The Parliamentary Labour Party would elect a leader which may or may not be Owen [Smith]. Other candidates could come into the frame at that point.”
The MP added that there would be a series of “graduated responses” that could eventually see the group “legally apply still to be called Labour”.
Another moderate said Labour backbenchers who have briefs shadowing departments would increase staff and take a more formal role challenging the Tories in the Commons.
It would put them in direct competition with Mr Corbyn’s shadow ministers, creating a ‘party within a party’ with independent policy positions and a whipping operation.
Corbyn: 'We're not allowing any intimidation in the party'Corbyn: 'We're not allowing any intimidation in the party'Play!00:22
“It is like American politics. We will have an anti-Tory caucus that concentrates on taking the fight to the Tories,” said a Labour MP.
Mr Bercow, the Commons Speaker, could be forced to decide which groups becomes the official opposition under powers granted under the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975.
“He is deeply concerned the current situation is damaging the mother of all parliaments,” one moderate speculated.
The comments reflect widespread concerns that Mr Smith will struggle to beat Mr Corbyn despite this week unveiling 20 "socialist" policies designed to win over the leader's left-wing supporters.
In a separate development, Richard Burgon, the Labour MP and Cobryn ally, said supporters of the leader were being “demonised” as “bullies” and “thugs”.
The shadow justice secretary also accused Labour MPs who oppose Mr Corbyn of trying to "intimidate" his supporters. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Labour coup plotter MPs have been briefing the press that if the Labour Party membership backs Jeremy Corbyn again in the leadership election (as they likely will), they'll deliberately paralyse the party by triggering one leadership contest after another in a desperate "war of attrition" against labour party democracy.
An unnamed Labour MP was quoted by the independent as saying "If we don’t win [the leadership] this year, we will do it again next year and, if necessary, the year after. At some point before the next general election, he will go. The only question is when" [source].
The decision to make these threats is tied up with Jeremy Corbyn's statement that he is considering letting local Labour constituencies re-select their MPs, so that local labour Party supporters get the chance to clear out venal, self-serving, corrupt, right-wing, expenses-scamming, lazy and/or incompetent MPs and replace them with other people who are more likely to actually represent their views and interests in parliament.
Re-selection is obviously an existential threat to the Westminster gravy train that so many Labour MPs have been complacently riding for the last couple of decades. Between 1997 and 2010 five million voters abandoned the Labour Party. This didn't happen because the public shifted to the right as the Blairites love to claim (socialist policies like a not-for-profit NHS and renationalisation of the railways are still incredibly popular), but because so many complacent Labour MPs stopped even pretending to care about serving the needs of the communities that elected them.
Running off to their chums in the mainstream press to express appalling self-serving anti-democratic sentiments is bad enough, but the fact that these cowards briefed the press without even giving their names just goes to show what kind of people they are.
The coup plotters whinge on endlessly about abuse (much of it completely fabricated) yet they're perfectly happy making disgusting anonymous threats against Jeremy Corbyn, the the Labour Party membership, and the concept of Labour Party democracy.
These people are clearly so concerned about retaining their ticket to ride the Westminster gravy train, and so afraid of being deselected by the democratic will of their own constituents, that they're prepared to threaten to paralyse the Labour Party with one leadership election after another just to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn.
The stupidity of it is that the more the self-serving coup-plotter MPs behave like this, the more people are going to feel justified in feeling that the Labour Party really does need a thorough clean out of cowardly anti-democratic party-wreckers via the re-selection of Labour MPs before the next General Election.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
130,000 Labour members they win legal battle to vote in leadership election
https://t.co/7AOsZjJ5Pb _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
And also hired a room in the Commons on behalf of Michael Meacher for the showing of 'Loose Change II, which showing was cancelled, allegedly because Michael Meacher was threatened he'd end up 'sleeping with the fishes'.
Here's a list of the 'good guys' who supported Corbyn in the 'No confidence' vote:
These MPs voted Confidence in Jeremy Corbyn
Posted on June 28, 2016 by seagullnic Standard
FORTY MPs voted full confidence in Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party… in Tuesday’s vote. We name them.
Updated and revised at 12 July 2016.
Also note that since voting confidence in Jeremy Corbyn, Liz McInnes and Pat Glass have since resigned.
Andy Burnham
Andy McDonald
Angela Rayner
Barry Gardiner
Bill Esterson
Carolyn Harris
Cat Smith
Catherine West
Clive Lewis
Dave Anderson
Debbie Abrahams
Dennis Skinner
Diane Abbot
Emily Thornberry
Gerald Kaufman
Gill Furniss
Graham Morris
Ian Lavery
Ian Mearns
Imran Hussain
Jeremy Corbyn
Jo Stevens
John McDonnell
Jon Trickett
Jonathan Ashworth
Kate Hoey
Kate Osamor
Kelvin Hopkins
Liz McInnes
Margaret Greenwood
Pat Glass
Paul Flynn
Peter Dowd
Rachael Maskell
Rebecca Long Bailey
Richard Burgon
Ronnie Campbell
Rosena Allin Khan
Steve Rotheram
Tulip Siddiq _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
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!) I can't find it mentioned in the MSM, including Morning Star and Mirror. Perhaps they missed it!.