Tagged with Simon Danczuk

We may not like Simon Danczuk but he is entitled to fair treatment and natural justice

Sun DanczukI am not a fan of Simon Danczuk although in all my encounters with him he has been unfailingly polite and courteous which does count for something. He has a number of political views I don’t share, he shows far too little respect to a newly elected leader of the Labour Party, and some of his judgement seems bizarre. But that is not why he was pilloried in yesterday’s Sun, nor the reason he was suspended from membership of the Labour Party by its general secretary.

Whatever he has done, he is entitled to fair treatment and natural justice. In my view that should have meant neither basing any judgement on what is reported in the Sun, nor immediate suspension pending an investigation. Continue reading →

Destroying the Labour Party in order to save it

Inside Labour Corbyn‘We had to destroy the village in order to save it’; that maxim – a paraphrase of words famously uttered by a US Army major to a journalist during the Vietnam war – now stands a metaphor for the perspectives of a sizeable chunk of the Labour right. Cast aside pious invocations of the interests of ‘those that need a Labour government the most’, a staple of boilerplate anti-Corbyn polemics throughout the summer.

Maximising our chances of forming the next administration is but a secondary consideration when jobs for life are at stake, and a number of Labour rightwingers are openly proclaiming their readiness to terminate Corbyn’s career with extreme prejudice. Continue reading →

Owen Jones is as bad as Hitler?

That there Owen Jones, he’s worse than Hitler. Well, maybe not worse but equally as bad. At least according to Simon Danczuk, the Rochdale MP who recently caused a row by openly backing the planned change to extend the aigning on waiting time from three days to a week. According to Simon, the far left are as equally dangerous as the far right because their political positions are as equally unrealistic. I don’t disagree in fundamentals, but there is absolutely no equivalence between the extreme left and the extreme right. But before we move onto that, it is worth pointing out the Unite farrago is getting used as an occasion for all kinds of left-bashing. We’re not talking Leninism here, but anything that smacks of the 1992 Labour Manifesto is ripe for a potshot. If only some of these people attacked the Tories with equal gusto. Continue reading →

Labour MP Simon Danczuk supports Osborne’s benefits delay

Simon DanczukNo, it’s not April 1st. George Osborne’s alteration of the three-day delay for claiming benefits following unemployment has already been savaged as a “growth plan for food banks”.

Yet according to Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale and fresh from a questionable parliamentary selection prior to the 2010 general election campaign, this is “fair enough”.

Continue reading →