Corbyn - not a nice man

Mr. Charts

Legendary member
Messages
7,370
Likes
1,200
People are fooled by this man because he speaks quietly so they think he must be "decent" :rolleyes:


Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters are making much of Owen Smith’s work as a corporate lobbyist for Big Pharma before he entered politics. Whether he behaved unethically is irrelevant. To anyone who knows the culture of the left, his old job description alone can be enough to damn him.
Reciting ‘corporate lobbyist’ in many left-wing quarters produces the same effect as reciting Satan’s name in a nunnery. No wickedness is unimaginable once such a demon is conjured from the depths. As I would expect, Corbyn supporters are already implying on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that Smith wants to privatise the NHS. Whether Smith responds in kind will tell you whether moral arguments can still move left-wing minds.
I can make a fair case for saying that Jeremy Corbyn is the most hypocritical and unscrupulous leader in Labour’s history. His paid employment while he was an MP was nothing so elevated as corporate lobbying. It consisted of working for the propaganda stations of Russia and Iran. If you watch the YouTube videos of Corbyn in action, you cannot pretend that he is challenging his paymasters or even politely expressing an alternative point of view. He is a mouthpiece for his ugly employers. A willing rather than a merely mercenary mouthpiece, I grant you. Hatred of the West and the willingness to excuse any state as long as it is anti-Western animated him. He is a propagandist for the love not the money.
Having said that, as he reinforces his employers’ prejudices and avoids discussion of their crimes, every one of the consoling cliches that surround Corbyn and his supporters falls apart.
‘Jeremy is a decent man’. Really? No decent person is the flunkey of fantastically corrupt states. ‘Jeremy is left-wing.’ Is he? He has a funny way of showing it. Iran and Russia are self-proclaimed conservative states. Iran is the bastion of theocratic Shia conservatism. It persecutes ethnic and religious minorities – until Assad began his mass murders, Iran was the worst place in the world to be a Sunni Muslim – and jails trade unionists. Putin, meanwhile, tells the European far right to reject liberalism, and embrace his reactionary nationalism. From a Russian point of view, Corbyn and Seumas Milne’s most prominent comrade is Marine le Pen.


You cannot support oppression abroad and freedom at home. No one has the right to be shocked by Corbyn’s association with a holocaust denier, or his supporters’ willingness to resort to the grossest abuse of women, while their Pilate of a leader washes his hands and looks the other way. It is all of a piece.
Yet the moral argument against Corbyn has found few takers. Until very recently, mainstream liberals have been as uncomfortable as Labour members and trade unionists in facing the darkness on the left. It remains a staple assumption of the arts, broadcasting, and comedy that racism and anti-Semitism, say, or hatred of gays, can only be found on the right.
They have erected elaborate defences against the notion that their friends are just as likely to resort to bigotry and stupidity, and are if anything more likely than conservatives are to turn their backs on the victims of oppression in Iran or any other anti-Western state.
If Owen Smith were to campaign on the issue he would be met with an explosion of whataboutery. What about Saudi Arabia, for instance? And indeed it is the case that British politicians support Saudi Arabia’s theocratic monarchy and try to pretend there are meaningful differences between its Wahhabi ideology and the ideology of Islamic State. But Western leaders appease because they believe jobs will be lost and oil supplies will be endangered if they break with the kingdom. They go along with Saudi Arabia because they believe they have to. The far left goes along with Iran and Russia because it wants to. It will ally with them and any other anti-Western regime or movement, however conservative it may be. Even their opposition to pro-Western dictatorships is in bad faith. If the Saudi monarchy were to break with Washington tomorrow, they would drop their supposed concern for its victims, as smartly as they dropped their concern for the Iraqi dictatorship’s victims, when Saddam went from being the West’s ally to the West’s enemy.
Smith ought to fight the smears Corbyn is directing against him with inconvenient facts of his own. I wonder if he will dare. His message to date to party members is that Jeremy is a decent guy. I admire him for returning Labour to its radical roots, Smith says. The only thing that is wrong with him is that he is a hopeless politician. If you make me your leader, you can have a competent version of Corbynite radicalism.
In other words, he is trying to flatter them away from their leader. He may fear that if he tells them that their hero is an unprincipled hypocrite, it will reflect badly on them. Either they are fools for not seeing Corbyn’s wickedness when they voted for him. Or they are unprincipled hypocrites themselves for seeing and not caring. An attack on their leader’s immorality will also be an attack on them. An honest critique of Corbyn would puncture their own self-righteousness. And given the catastrophic position the English left finds itself in, their self-righteousness is all they possess.
And yet, and yet, you cannot talk of left-wingers as a bloc. Many who joined the Corbyn movement have had a hard political education, and been repelled by the foul air of intimidation it has brought into Labour politics. Owen Smith may hope that an honest critique of Corbyn will shift more away from him. Most Corbyn supporters do not, he may calculate, believe in excusing and indulging Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. They are decent people at heart motivated by justifiable fury at the rotten state of England.
Whether Smith goes with hope or fear will tell us much about him – but much more about the modern Labour Party.

From The Spectator
 
There are still millions in Russia who think Uncle Joe Stalin was a wonderful man who "loved the people" and deny he killed 20 million +
None so blind as those who will not see.
 
People are fooled by this man because he speaks quietly so they think he must be "decent" :rolleyes:


Agree strongly.

Has been a thorn on Labour party's side throughout his career. Sat on the back benches opposing most. Now the boot's on the other foot, his not too pleased.

I reckon he played a clever game with Brexit vote hoping Tory party would split. Funny that, as it goes he's having double whammy issues of his own.

Do not think he is much of a leader or a politician to represent the people that he speaks so much of. :(
 
Agree strongly.

Has been a thorn on Labour party's side throughout his career. Sat on the back benches opposing most. Now the boot's on the other foot, his not too pleased.

I reckon he played a clever game with Brexit vote hoping Tory party would split. Funny that, as it goes he's having double whammy issues of his own.

Do not think he is much of a leader or a politician to represent the people that he speaks so much of. :(

I hope he does get re-elected, then Labour splits and they all end up in the wilderness for the next 30 years.

The party has little to no talent these days.

Even when they were in office, the inevitable disaster followed as is always the case.
 
An infantile, unworldly politician who never grew up beyond his hero, Wolfie in "Citizen Smith", spiked with a typical Trotskyist viciousness.
 
I hope he does get re-elected, then Labour splits and they all end up in the wilderness for the next 30 years.

The party has little to no talent these days.

Even when they were in office, the inevitable disaster followed as is always the case.


You may be right. They couldn't even get rid of Mrs T as bad as she was and it took the Tory's to achieve that.

I reckon same again, will take the Tories to get rid of Corbyn. ;)
 
You may be right. They couldn't even get rid of Mrs T as bad as she was and it took the Tory's to achieve that.

I reckon same again, will take the Tories to get rid of Corbyn. ;)

The Welsh windbag was no match for Thatch, and neither was anybody else, either in this country or abroad.
A pity Major didn't fulfill his early promise when he took over. Europe being his undoing.
Well at least now we are now correcting that mistake ! :)
 
You may be right. They couldn't even get rid of Mrs T as bad as she was and it took the Tory's to achieve that.

I reckon same again, will take the Tories to get rid of Corbyn.

This is not comparing like with like. The Tories got rid of Mrs T after the poll tax mess so removed their own leader. If the Tories manage to get rid of Corbyn he is not their leader so it is a different scenario unless you are implying that he is really a surreptitious plant by the Tories in the Labour party :)
 
A pity Major didn't fulfill his early promise when he took over.

He couldn't as by then the Tory majority was too low and they relied on the Ulster Unionists IIRC which meant they couldn't push through much of what they would have if they had an overall majority. The UK was also going into recession which made policy commitments more difficult to enact.
 
This is not comparing like with like. The Tories got rid of Mrs T after the poll tax mess so removed their own leader. If the Tories manage to get rid of Corbyn he is not their leader so it is a different scenario unless you are implying that he is really a surreptitious plant by the Tories in the Labour party :)

Labour in particular Kinnock (top man) got rid of the looney left prepared ground for late John Smith and subsequently Bliar.

What I meant was that the Tories are good at knifing each other and blood letting. They are so very good and hyper efficient to the point of being clinical.

I don't see issue of Europe going anywhere soon but igniting a recession where deals will be harder to make.
 
I hope he does get re-elected, then Labour splits and they all end up in the wilderness for the next 30 years.

The party has little to no talent these days.

Even when they were in office, the inevitable disaster followed as is always the case.

Trouble is when change is due Generals Elections are generally lost rather than won as people vote to get rid of the party in power. And who do they swing to in order to effect that? The next biggest party in terms of number of seats, that's who. And who will that be? Surprise, surprise it's Labour.

We've seen it all before, they came back into power after the last time they were consigned to the wilderness forever as unelectable following a major desertion of members to the new Social Democrats.
 
I don't see issue of Europe going anywhere soon but igniting a recession where deals will be harder to make.

Why are they harder in recession ? from what I can see deals are easier to make in recession than when times are booming in my view.
 
We've seen it all before, they came back into power after the last time they were consigned to the wilderness forever as unelectable following a major desertion of members to the new Social Democrats.

They only came back because they moved to the right and away from their traditional roots which as said by Atilla was all down to Mr Kinnock and unless they do the same again they will stay in the wilderness. In my view people vote on how they feel economically and almost everything else is irrelevant. After all when Blair went to war in Iraq it made no difference in the 2005 election as times still felt good economically for much of the UK. It was only after the 2008 crisis that Labour lost power and that was because the party was over at an economic level for many people in my view.
 
They only came back because they moved to the right and away from their traditional roots which as said by Atilla was all down to Mr Kinnock and unless they do the same again they will stay in the wilderness. In my view people vote on how they feel economically and almost everything else is irrelevant. After all when Blair went to war in Iraq it made no difference in the 2005 election as times still felt good economically for much of the UK. It was only after the 2008 crisis that Labour lost power and that was because the party was over at an economic level for many people in my view.

The shift made it easier, but the crucial element was people wanting rid of the Tory government.
 
Well I don't see it that way, Major came to power in recession which fits with people voting based on how they feel economically. Labour remained in power until (yet again) economically things took a nosedive and then they were gone again.
 
Well I don't see it that way, Major came to power in recession which fits with people voting based on how they feel economically. Labour remained in power until (yet again) economically things took a nosedive and then they were gone again.

Ok, but if you remember the times when there was a gulf between left and right (nationalisation vs privatisation as one example) how was it that the floating voters jumped that gulf? Could their thinking really change so dramatically in so short a time?

The explanation is that they wanted the government out and jumped to vote for the party most likely to achieve that result.
 
Why are they harder in recession ? from what I can see deals are easier to make in recession than when times are booming in my view.

There are always losers and winners. Redistribution of monies, wealth and assets.

People will fight harder during bad times, be less giving or generous.

Ofcourse, there was and is nothing to stop the UK exporting what ever it wants now anyhow so I can't fathom what difference it will make making new deals. Much ado about nothing from the Brexit camp.

Mr Dyson is a plank in my opinion. Fact that he exports 81% of his products to outside of EU and still mouths of about Brexit being a grand old idea is just how far people will stick their heads up their own ends.


Deals can be made anytime including now but in general more probable during upturns and good times imo.
 
Well I don't see it that way, Major came to power in recession which fits with people voting based on how they feel economically. Labour remained in power until (yet again) economically things took a nosedive and then they were gone again.

Major came into power because the Tory party was in power during the groovy 80s when Raganomics boosted the whole Global economy and it seemed they were better at managing the economy.

Had nothing to do with their policies of decimating manufacturing and cutting back on social services, selling national treasures to reduce PSBR. Just simply World Trade was booming.

As a recession was approaching Labour was talking about raising taxation and fear of unions, strikes and the lates 70s were still fresh in public minds so they stuck with that old addage the devil you know is better than the one you don't.
 
People will fight harder during bad times, be less giving or generous.

Not in my experience they don't and if anything it is the opposite as they will give more away to get a deal that offers something even if not ideal but is better than nothing where both sides lose out.
 
As a recession was approaching Labour was talking about raising taxation and fear of unions, strikes and the lates 70s were still fresh in public minds so they stuck with that old addage the devil you know is better than the one you don't.

The only point I was making here is that people vote on how they feel economically. If not then Blair would have got hammered in 2005 for taking us into a war 2 years earlier which the whole country was against.
 
Top