Who are you calling a braindead Trot?

Press-FreedomRecent weeks have seen Jeremy Corbyn ridiculed as ‘the political equivalent of a child’s invisible friend’, ‘ugly, dispiriting, and out of touch’, ‘the bearded Messiah’, ‘dangerous’, ‘puerile’, ‘completely unfit for any kind of senior political office’, ‘a malevolent clown’, ‘an extremist who has spent a political career embracing nasty causes’, ‘a gormless Marxist’, and ‘a tinpot meddler’ prone to ‘engrained political pathologies’.

Those with the temerity to back him have been branded ‘Trumpton revolutionaries’,’pig ignorant lefty click activists’, ‘psychotically furious about everything’, ‘terribly well-orffff, doncha know’, infantile and possibly mentally impaired’, ‘petulant children’ and ‘gibbering perpetual adolescents’. Continue reading

Peter Oborne and the Tory crisis – unfit to run a newspaper, let alone a country

Peter OborneGood on Peter Oborne. Good on him for telling the Barclay Brothers to stick their job. Regular paid writing gigs are hard to come by for journos, so to spurn what is one of the cushiest jobs on Fleet Street for a matter of principle shows him to be a writer with value and integrity, however much regular readers and me disagree with Oborne’s politics.

There are some fascinating parallels between the pen portrait he draws of life at The Telegraph and the sorry state the Conservative Party find themselves in. As I’ve argued previously, the Tories have become dislocated from their core business support and now represent the most backward and socially useless sections of British capital, along with a still hefty but sure-to-dwindle residual support. Continue reading

Ding dong the witch is dead – Tories seek to crush power of free market

Whatever you think of the good taste of celebratory Thatcher death partying, it is an interesting spectator sport watching the Tories tie themselves up in knots over a chart-topping Wizard of Oz song and whether the BBC should permit the “free market” in music downloads to determine what it plays (admission: I’ve downloaded two versions in the last few days).

The Daily Telegraph which bizarrely refers to the song as an anti-Thatcher anthem — hardly what Judy Garland had in mind — is carefully hedging its position: their printed front page lead has “BBC chief refuses to ban Thatcher death song” in response to demands by Lord McAlpine and Sir Gerald Howarth, but the website has moved on to “Play Margaret Thatcher death song, her supporters tell BBC“. The clincher seems to be Nigel Farage’s more pragmatic than genuinely libertarian line of: Continue reading