Tag Archives: Jeremy Corbyn

Leeds, Spurs, Everyone: Give Arsenal’s Main Man a Chance   –   by Rob Atkinson


The Tories think you are STUPID. That’s why they talk at you in three word, alliterative sentences, which they repeat over and over. 
Strong and stable. Brexit means Brexit. Magic money tree. Enough is enough. Coalition of Chaos. 

It’s the crudest and most obvious form of brainwashing you could imagine, but the Tories think – because you didn’t go to Eton, Harrow and then the Varsity – that you will be easily-led enough to vote FOR fox-hunting, the end of our NHS, tax rises for everyone except the rich, cuts in police and education, the Dementia Tax – and all the other nasties that the Nasty Party wants to foist on the many, so that the few can continue to ride their beloved gravy train.

They think you’ll be daft and masochistic enough to vote AGAINST free education, a decent living wage, investment in housing and social care and 10,000 extra police to make our streets safer. They think you’re THAT stupid. Well, are you?
I have a three word sentence for you. VOTE THEM OUT. And a four word sentence. BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. 
Because, in one respect, the Tories are right. Enough IS enough. Seven years of Tory rule have dangerously weakened our front-line defences, driven teachers to despair, piled more pressure onto overworked and underpaid nurses and junior doctors. They’ve made a mess of the economy and a laughing-stock of the nation.

Now Trump is supporting the woman who failed as Home Secretary, who is failing as Prime Minister and who wants YOU to back her vague and uncosted manifesto – in effect, sign a blank cheque – for another five grim years, so that she can continue to run down vital services and sell off infrastructure. When Trump supports something, you know it can’t be good.
The last seven years of ideological austerity, which have seen national debt double to almost £2 trillion, are ample proof that the Tories are hopelessly malign and clueless. Enough really IS enough. And this election will be your last chance to make a fresh start before the Tories rig the democracy game to make sure they stay in power forever. Don’t be stupid. Don’t let them do it. The stakes are high, have your say on Thursday, and get rid of the Tories. 
Give Mr. Corbyn your trust and your faith. Give him a chance to put things right for the many, not just the few. It’s probably the chance of a lifetime to escape the yoke of neoliberalism. 

America missed the opportunity afforded them by Bernie Sanders. Look where they are now. We must not make the same mistake. 

#VoteLabour #JC4PM #ToriesOut

No Apologies, but This Latest Leeds Utd Failure Might Be MY Fault – by Rob Atkinson

MayBoJo

Get the Tories OUT

A quarter of a century ago, a general election loomed as Leeds United‘s league campaign headed towards an exciting, nail-biting climax. The exact same set of circumstances applies today and, now as then, United’s fate will be sealed a week early.

Although the situation today is identical, the outcome for Leeds at least is the polar opposite. Back in 1992, I told myself long before the end of the football season that I’d take a Tory election victory (it didn’t look likely at the time), if Leeds could only hold out and pip the scum to the last League Championship Title, frustrating the rest of football and the assembled media into the bargain. Some might say it was a bargain I made myself, with the devil himself. In truth, my joy at seeing Leeds become champions was only slightly tempered by John Major’s beating of the useless Neil Kinnock – but I was quite young and my priorities were perhaps not what they should have been.

I must admit, I had the same chat with myself just a couple of weeks back, when Theresa May showed exactly how trustworthy she is by calling a snap election – after having repeatedly sworn that she wouldn’t call a snap election. And now, the stakes are higher, for everybody, because now we have a government that is not only set on out-Thatchering Thatcher, it’s also committed to an austerity programme that hits only the poor and vulnerable, and has demonstrably failed to tackle the national debt (which has actually doubled since 2010). And it seems likely also that this incompetent and evil government was elected fraudulently in the first place. 

So the bargain I struck with myself when I heard there’d be an election after all, on June 8th, was a different one to that I agreed with whatever higher power in 1992. Now, my priorities are shaped by the bitter experience of what devastating damage can be wreaked by a Party without any conscience or compassion, driven by greed and an ideological hatred of socialist institutions like the welfare state and NHS. Nothing is so important as to matter more than getting rid of this shower, if at all possible, and despite the apparently gloomy (Tory-commissioned) opinion polls. I had no hesitation in telling my inner United fanatic that I would happily see Leeds condemned to at least another season of second tier football, if we could only have the truly socialist government that this country so desperately needs.

Whereas I unconsciously traded an unlikely John Major election success for The Last Champions triumph in ’92, now I’m begging for providence, fate, call it what you will, to allow a good and decent man in Jeremy Corbyn to replace May’s Ministry of fools, charlatans and liars as the ruling force in this country. Football is nothing beside that, and I’ll be happy to see Leeds United bottle it to fulfill my side of the bargain – just as long as the right result comes about on June the 8th.

I don’t know how superstitious you all are out there, though I’m uncomfortably aware that a sizeable proportion of Leeds fans are far and away to the right of me – so this confession is hardly likely to prove popular. I’m willing to engage in reasoned debate but, as ever, I’ll bin the mindless abuse. Still, on this occasion, unlike many of the times I’ve taken a stand on football matters, I’m stone cold certain that I’m correct.

Hopefully, Leeds United bottling this season’s chance at promotion will reap a reward in the shape of a brighter future for the whole country under Corbyn. If not, I have only the fates to blame – unless I choose to rail at people for being daft and crass enough to vote for a party hell-bent on destroying the NHS and killing thousands more hapless sick and disabled people through neglect and starvation. You see what I mean about high stakes.

I love Leeds United; I have done for well over forty years. But I will gladly see them fail if there’s anything in this mirror-image outcome as compared with 1992. It’s that important. For Leeds, there will be other years. For so many whose very existence is threatened by a continuation of this evil government, there can be no such guarantees – unless the polls are wrong, as they were a quarter of a century ago.

Leeds have done their bit, by failing, in their own inimitable style – despite a second-half rally against Norwich. As ever, it was too little, too late. Great, I didn’t really see them succeeding under Massimo Cellino – another liar and fraud – anyway. Now, all we need to square the circle, paying back the debt of conscience I owe from 1992, is a Labour victory in a few weeks time. I hope the more enlightened among you will join me in hoping for that, and in accepting it’s far more important than any dicey and probably heart-breaking football play-off place. Fight for what’s right and vote Labour. And let’s all have a fresh start from now onward.

Let June be the end of May.

You Are Mistaken, Prescott And Kinnock

Why Corbyn does NOT need nominations to appear on the leadership ballot. It’s quite clear, and the motives of those who are bending themselves out of shape to suggest otherwise are, at best, highly questionable.

TheCritique Archives

by Martin Odoni

There still seems to be a running attempt to make the nomination rules for a Labour leadership contest sound ambiguous. The latest Labour members to insist that Jeremy Corbyn requires nominations from the Parliamentary Labour Party in order to defend his leadership are former Deputy leader John Prescott, and former leader Neil Kinnock.

Why they are saying this, I am unsure. They may have misunderstood, or they may have darker reasons, but either way, an analysis of the rules themselves shows that they are incorrect.

The rulebook of Labour Party membership is available online in PDF format, and the rules for a leadership contest are laid out very clearly in Chapter 4, starting on page 15. Here is what it says about the selection-of-candidates stage; –

“Clause 2 Subsection 2A

Nomination.

i .In the case of a vacancy for leader or deputy leader, each nomination must be…

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Labour Party Putsch: The Traitors’ Dilemma – by Rob Atkinson

Corbyn2

Jeremy Corbyn – serenely immovable

This article was previously published in the Huffington Post

The die is cast, the ringleaders are known, their motives are nakedly obvious for all to see. The Parliamentary Labour Party coup, conceived months ago to be hatched when the timing was right, has not gone well so far. Firstly, several previous anticipated opportunities have failed to materialise. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour was fancied to lose the Oldham by-election, but it held the seat and the plotters, poised quivering and eager to pounce, had to slink frustrated back into the undergrowth.

Then, the Local Council elections. Again, there looked to be an opportunity, with the ever-obliging BBC prematurely reporting a night of disaster for Corbyn’s troops, only to be embarrassed as things turned out annoyingly well, with Labour emerging as the largest party. The EU Referendum was Last Chance Saloon – the final opportunity before the publication of the Chilcot Report, with all of its possible nasty ramifications for the Blairites of the PLP.

So, the script was written before the results were known, in line with furtive early preparations elsewhere pre-dating overt action. But yet again, the figures have not stacked up as desired. In the face of a brutal and mendacious Leave campaign, Corbyn’s Labour members voted almost two to one to remain – a highly respectable figure given the fertile territory the likes of UKIP and Farage have found among the disaffected and marginalised poor. Labour’s remain vote was only a percentage point or two short of that of the SNP – and nobody’s calling Nicola Sturgeon a referendum failure.

All of the pretexts upon which the anti-Corbyn movement hoped to base their rebellion have turned out to be duds. Despite their own professed agenda and the complaisant backing of the media, their motives are paper-thin and full of holes. But there’s that pesky Chilcot thing in the offing, and it’s imperative to get rid of Corbyn before he can use a damning report to start inflicting some long overdue justice. So, for the traitors, it’s realistically now or never.

But there’s another problem. The leadership challenge as such is probably not such a good idea. The incumbent leader would be on the ballot paper as of right, and looks set fair to trounce any and all opposition, possibly by a wider margin than even last September’s historic landslide. If Corbyn could be persuaded to stand down, that’d be a different matter. He’d then need to secure enough PLP backing to be nominated for a leadership election – which would of course be relatively unlikely, as demonstrated by the constitutionally impotent no-confidence motion. So a Corbyn resignation is decidedly the way to go. But Jeremy steadfastly refuses to budge, citing the enormous mandate he was given only nine months ago.

Hence the current impasse. The unedifying spectacle now playing out is a bitterly ironic one of deeply dishonourable men and women calling upon a decent man – that rarity in politics – to “do the honourable thing”, and resign. They seem eager to give him extra increments of time, hoping against hope he’ll “see sense”. The right-wing press throng the touchlines, oafishly cheering on these turncoats. But Corbyn knows that resignation would not be the honourable course. It would be highly convenient, for the would-be usurpers, but honourable? No way. So he carries serenely on, under immense strain, while his detractors seethe helplessly.

This is the classic Traitors’ Dilemma – act recklessly, or perform a humiliating retreat?. What are they to do now, if this inconveniently honourable and determined man refuses to fall on his sword? Skulk away again, with Chilcot waiting to explode in their faces? Hardly. Launch a challenge anyway then, and damn the consequences? Well, to be the means by which Corbyn increases his already massive authority in the Labour Party as a whole – that’s hardly the sort of history your average Blairite wants to be making.

Angela Eagle, who has shed tears of pure crocodile in the past few days, together with the rest of the opportunists thirsting for the kill, all of them are faced with the Devil’s Alternative. Whichever way they decide to act, they’re likely to plummet into an abyss of obscurity and ridicule. It really is a very problematic situation. But it’s one, let us not forget, entirely of their own making.

Prime Minister Mosley… and The 1,000 Days That Established The British Reich – by Rob Atkinson

The Daily Heil - peddling made-up rubbish since 1896

The Daily Heil – peddling made-up rubbish since 1896

The Daily Mail and the Mail Online have been indulging themselves again, venturing deep into the realms of fantasy and propaganda as they seek to plant fear and terror in the public mind over that nice Jeremy Corbyn, in an article subtly headed “Prime Minister Corbyn… and the 1,000 days that destroyed Britain”. Having originally adopted a stance of jocularly poking fun at his supposedly non-existent chances in the Labour leadership election, they now seem more than somewhat worried about Corbyn, not to say absolutely terrified. So they’ve done this little “glimpse into a crystal ball” thing, just to ratchet up the tensions a bit among their loyal if dim readership.

It’s all good, knockabout stuff in the time-dishonoured Mail idiom. Here we have the awful spectre of billionaires fleeing the country; there we find football’s Premier League reduced to a Hackney Marshes shadow of its former greedy glory as prima donnas head for pastures greener – and of course there’s the sale of our nuclear arsenal to President Putin, with our consequent cold-shouldering by the USA’s possibly pre-menstrual President Trump(!) There’s even a little joke – the boyband One Direction, leaving our shores, never to return. Geddit? It’s the stuff of a Thatcherite Tory’s nightmares, designed to get under the skin of the “Disgusted of Godalming” brigade, or anyone else daft enough to take the Mail seriously.

Rothermere of the Mail and Adolf Hitler - Best Friends Forever

Rothermere of the Mail and Adolf Hitler – Best Friends Forever

But here’s the thing. The Mail is not alone in its ability (for want of a less flattering word) to dream up a “brilliant imagining” as they so modestly hail their own speculative scare-fest. Let us do some imagining of our own; let us consider how things might have panned out if Lord Rothermere, one-time proprietor of the Mail and originator of 1930s headlines such as “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” in that esteemed organ, had actually had his heart’s desire – with Oswald Mosley elected as Prime Minister instead of the Conservative Stanley Baldwin in 1935…

The night sky over London was thick with choking black smoke, a triumphant marker of the fires raging in the parks, casting a faintly demonic glow over the faces of those witnessing the first mass book-burning of the Mosley era. At last, our nation would break free of the shackles of left-wing dogma, as the works of so-called “socialist intellectuals” disintegrated before the eyes of an eagerly-watching public. The scene was repeated across the length and breadth of a British Isles looking to flourish under the jackboot of the British Union of Fascists. 

Soon, all such subversive rubbish would be gone, and the newly-formed Nationalist Government could turn its attention to other forms of cleansing, towards the day when Britain would be ethnically pure and, along with its strong ally Germany, the proud joint masters of Europe.

Soon, too, the British people would have a Royal Wedding to enjoy, as King Edward the Eighth met his bride at the altar of Westminster Abbey. And then, joy unconfined, with a spectacular coronation for our beloved new Queen Wallis, followed by a honeymoon as guests of Chancellor Hitler at his Bavarian retreat. Here, yet stronger links would be forged between Germany and Britain, as the two most powerful nations in Europe looked to extend their joint empire south to the Mediterranean, and far beyond…

At home, those with the good luck to be part of Mr Mosley’s Aryan-dominated economic miracle would thrive, due in no small measure to the opportunities afforded them by the expulsion or disposal of various groups of “undesirables”. Of the old guard, the likes of Winston Churchill were placed under house arrest shortly after the ’35 election for the expression of “Unbritish sentiments”. Rebellions in Scotland, Yorkshire and other militant and intractable parts of the United Kingdom were put down firmly but fairly, by use of reasonable military force and with an acceptable level of casualties among the rebels. The ringleaders of these mutinies had the honour to become the first traitors publicly executed since the glorious days of Queen Victoria, with a mass example of national discipline taking place via machine guns in Hyde Park in mid 1936.

By late 1938, the map of Europe had been radically reshaped as France, caught helpless between Italy, Spain and Britain/Germany, was squeezed out of existence by this quadruple Fascist Alliance. Paris fell before the massed tanks of the United British/German Army, de Gaulle was guillotined in the Place de la Concorde and the scoundrels of the much-vaunted French intellectual society were forced to flee, via Switzerland or Portugal, across the Atlantic to the United States.

As time went on, further examples of sedition were rooted out and dealt with. Subversives like Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan, with their dangerous notions of welfare states and national health services, have been confined to a correction camp on the Isle of Wight, from where they are unable to peddle their filth. The idea of succouring the weak and unfit bids fair to undermine national prosperity, and the British/German peoples are solidly behind the abiding concept of “Survival of the Fittest” with its associated precept of “Work Sets You Free”, shared in Germany as “Arbeit Macht Frei“. Instead of being pampered and pandered to, those unable or unwilling to make a contribution to society are housed in dedicated camps, such as Rochdale and Coventry in Britain, and Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz in Greater Germany.

In these first three years of the Mosley administration, great strides have been made towards restoring Britain to its rightful pre-eminent world position. Great Britain is now respected abroad, in countries like Argentina and Emperor Hirohito’s Japan; we are once more a country where strong Aryans can make for themselves a good life, with no fear of racial dilution or that pollution of the mind which comes with the free publication of treacherous left-wing nonsense, now thankfully suppressed.

We at the Daily Heil can look back with pride at the part we played in bringing this new order about, as well as our sterling contribution in the first thousand days of Mr Mosley’s premiership. Let us look ahead now, under our Leader and his staunch ally Herr Hitler, to continuing prosperity for the master race in its natural homelands of Britain and Germany; we look forward with growing pride and optimism to a Kingdom/Reich which may last well beyond a thousand days, yea, even unto a thousand years!

Hail Mr Mosley and the Fatherland! Heil Hitler!! A rousing chorus, if you please, of “Hoorah for the Blackshirts”!!!

That’s one way things might have turned out, though it’s highly doubtful that the Mail would care to “brilliantly imagine” any such thing these days. All that Nazi-sympathising stuff is such a long time ago now, buried in their past and, surely, not to be mentioned by persons of taste.

Still – sauce for the goose, as they say. And alternate histories can hardly be as downright ill-grounded as pointless, biased, agenda-driven speculation about the future – now can they?