ATTACKS ON SHARON GRAHAM

IN THE OBSERVER on Michael Savage reported on Sun 27 Jun 2021

The only woman running to be the next leader of the powerful Unite union has revealed that she received “disgraceful” online abuse for refusing to stand aside for two more prominent male rivals.

Sharon Graham, who has attracted an unexpected level of grassroots support, said she experienced a “rough ride” after refusing to end her campaign. She said troll accounts had mocked up pictures of her as Margaret Thatcher, and she had warned her family that she might lose her job because of the row.

Graham has been criticised for refusing to engage in talks to agree on a single leftwing unity candidate to replace Len McCluskey, a key supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership. Howard Beckett, a vehement critic of Keir Starmer, has pulled out to support the frontrunner, Steve Turner. The left is determined to defeat Gerard Coyne, seen as more supportive of Starmer. Graham, however, remains in the race.

“Being a woman in the trade union movement, and obviously a woman who has gone up against some of the most hostile of employers, I’m really used to being in difficult situations – so it takes a lot to rock me,” she said. “But I can understand why people don’t run against the establishment. We’re not in a playground picking football teams. This is the leader of one of the most significant unions in Britain and Ireland.

“I was never going to be involved in doing deals. This is the problem we have in the movement. There’s a moment in time, right now, where the union needs to be doing what I’m suggesting – it needs to go back to the workplace. And I believe that the membership wants this choice.”

Graham, who received a surprising 349 nominations from some of the union’s most powerful branches, said that none of her supporters had asked her to pull out. She said troll accounts had been sending her abuse, including disparaging mocked-up pictures, after her refusal to stand down. “I thought it was disgraceful,” she said. “If you’re a woman in a leadership role, it’s all the usual sexist stuff that you hear. It will never deter me. Maybe they’re a bit worried I might win.”

Graham said that the union movement had reached a “crisis point” and a non-established figure was needed to return Unite to its main cause of representing workers and end “an obsession” with the Labour party.

“I absolutely feel that we are at a crisis point in the trade union movement,” she said. “I don’t think I’m over-egging that. The union movement is on life support. For way too long, and it has happened over years and years, we have moved away from our core business. We have got to get back to the workplace. It is absolutely critical that we get back to doing what is on the trade union tin. If we cannot do that, then I think the union movement will be irreparable in years to come.”

She added: “I don’t have any regional secretary backing me. That’s the machine,” she said. “Every person supporting me has gone against their region. They’re doing it against the regime. We’re in this to really make change.”

Unite remains Labour’s biggest donor. Graham said that there would be no “blank cheques” for Labour under her leadership, but that the party would have “no problem with me” if it pursued policies that improved the condition of workers.

“This obsession at the moment with the Labour party, almost like we’re a branch of it, has made us weaker, unfortunately. Yes, politics matters. But the Labour party has effectively almost become the centre of discussions, when in fact jobs, pay and conditions should be the centre.”

She said women had been “let down” by unions, who had failed to adapt to the new industries in which women are over-represented. “This is not pin money that women are turning out for,” she said. “They’re often doing more than one job. Without a shadow of a doubt, in the post-Covid world, they will essentially lose their jobs more [without union help]. I genuinely feel that we have let women down.”

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Is the Corbyn Project Finished?

by Les May

THE day after Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour party on 12 September 2015 the BBC showed its filmed production of J. B. Priestley’s 1945 play An Inspector Calls which has been seen by some people as a call to British society to take more responsibility for working-class people. Certainly this is how I read the play. It is calling for a shift in attitude, but it’s not a prescription for how it can be achieved.

I grew up in the 1950s, a time when that shift in attitude had to a significant degree been achieved. My dad was in hospital and we lived on National Assistance introduced by the Atlee government in 1949. Unlike today my mum was not made to feel like a scrounger. Many of the scribblers who write the opinion pieces in our newspapers are too young to remember that world. They are ‘Thatcher’s Children’ and since her election in 1979 the centroid of politics has shifted to the Right, so they view any move away from that centroid as Left wing extremism and swallow the myth that the Social Democracy which underpinned those years was a failure. It did not fail. It was ruthlessly destroyed by Thatcher and her followers in pursuit of their own interests.

Whilst older people like me have been attracted to ‘The Corbyn Project’ because they want to see the more caring world I experienced as a child restored, other, younger people have been attracted by what they see as his willingness to break with the Blairite legacy they grew up with and promote an alternative vision of society. Labour’s ranks have been swelled by younger people joining the party and older people rejoining it. These are the people who re-elected him when, in 2016, the win in the EU referendum by the Leave campaign led to the spurious claim that he was to blame for not campaigning hard enough.

In fact he was much more successful in persuading Labour voters of the virtue of staying in the EU (60% voted Remain) than Cameron was in persuading Tory voters (60% voted Leave).

I can see much the same scenario building as we approach 29 March 2019. This is what Andrew Rawnsley had to say in The Observer last Sunday;

‘The Labour leader is not making any effort to prevent Brexit because he doesn’t want to prevent Brexit. The conclusion for Labour supporters ought to be clear. If they want another referendum, they will have to rebel against him.’

It’s not difficult to spot the non sequitur here. There is absolutely no guarantee that the result of a second referendum would be different from the first. Rawnsley wants Labour supporters who don’t want to leave the EU, and I’m one of them, to think it would. From there it’s only a short step to saying, ‘It’s Corbyn’s fault we left the EU because he did not call for a second referendum’ if we do in fact leave.

Corbyn’s unwillingness, so far at least, to call for a second referendum is a principled stance. As I have written before when I voted to Remain in the EU I assumed that result would be honoured. But I doubt that the people in the Labour party who have tried to get rid of him once will see it that way.

I think Corbyn’s unwillingness to commit Labour prematurely to a definite policy with regard to leaving the EU has been shrewd because it makes it difficult for Labour’s enemies to attack it. At some time it will have to be clarified. Or will it?

As things stand there does not look like a majority of MPs in the House of Commons who will vote to leave. If there isn’t then perhaps Theresa May will feel she has to call a second Referendum. That would let Corbyn off the hook, May would get all the flak and Jeremy would be seen as the man who respected the voters wishes. That certainly would not do him any harm in an election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inspector_Calls

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02z80kq

Whose Afraid of Jonathan Sacks?

by Les May

CARVED into the wall at Broadcasting House are the words of George Orwell, ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they so not want to hear’, which makes the juxtaposition of articles in the most recent copy of the Radio Times all the more interesting.

The ‘Pick of the week’ on Radio 4 is ‘Morality in the 21^st Century’ presented by ex-Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.  We are told that his aim is to ‘provoke thought and discussion never to proselytise or preach’ and that ‘Morality is what lifts us above the pursuit of self interest and self esteem’.  And in case you are wondering, yes that’s the same Jonathan Sacks who are few days ago was denouncing Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite and a racist because he did not like what Corbyn had said.  Or more correctly he did not like his interpretation of what Corbyn had said.  This in turn became his justification for his absurd comparison of Corbyn words with Enoch Powell’s speech.

The other article is by the BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson.  In it he comments ‘People have allowed themselves to be persuaded that there’s something wrong with being given open and unbiased information from BBC journalists’.  I think that Simpson is over egging the pudding a bit here because all media outlets select what is ‘news’, who they are going to quote or interview, and how much space or air time they are to be given, so reports are never going to be quite so unbiased as he suggests.  But that does not mean it is not worth making the effort.  He goes on to say ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t think any subject is too important to keep our minds closed to it’.  I agree and the fact that someone might be ‘offended’ by some subjects cuts no ice with me.  You are never going to change anyone’s mind unless you can talk to them.

Simon Kelner, who writes ‘think pieces’ for the ‘i’ newspaper, i.e. he’s a columnist not a journalist in the mould of Simpson, wrote last week that Sack’s used his Instagram account to tell the world that he was ‘a religious leader, philosopher, award-winning author and a respected moral voice’.   Clearly Sack’s is not a man over endowed with modesty or self doubt.  Kelner says that he is ‘definably, a Zionist’, which suggests to me that he, Kelner, has not actually spent much time trying to figure out what a Zionist is.  Seeking enlightenment I found that the explanation on Wikipedia runs to some 11,000 words which is 28 A4 pages.   Here is the link, I’ll let you figure it out for yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism

In a remarkable bit of inventiveness Kelner writes, ‘Not all Jews are Zionists, but (mostly) all Zionists are Jews, and I, as a liberal-minded British Jew (rather than a Zionist) am offended by Mr Corbyn’s pronouncements’. The flaw in this bit of twisted logic is that one chooses to be a Zionist, you are born a Jew.   To my mind that means that you can criticise a Jew for being a Zionist, but not for being a Jew.   (I would add that I feel uncomfortable using Kelner’s form of wording because in my own speech I prefer to say someone is ‘a Jewish person’ rather than ‘a Jew’, and ‘Jewish people’ rather than ‘the Jews’).

As for Kelner’s complaint that he is ‘offended’ by what Corbyn said, all I can say is ‘So what’?   Since when did Kelner, or indeed anyone else, have a right never to be offended?  No one seems to be too concerned about not offending me in matters just as close to my heart as Sack’s and Kelner’s hobby horse.

(Andrea Dworkin was once quoted in the The Observer as saying ‘All men are Nazis’.  After it was published there was no rush to defend men or censure Dworkin, so I am unlikely to feel I have to avoid making comparisons between some of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians and the behaviour of the Nazis.)

One of the curious things about the claims that Corbyn is presiding over a Labour party riddled with antisemitism is that I have not yet met anyone who has actually witnessed it.  And it’s not just my Labour friends who say this.  A friend who never misses an opportunity to denigrate Labour has made exactly the same point on more than one occasion.   Nor is antisemitic crime running riot in this country. About 15,000 prosecutions for ‘hate crime’ are launched annually.  Annual prosecutions for anti-semitism have yet to top two dozen. In spite of Margaret Hodge’s silly musings no one is being threatened by a new Holocaust.

So I think we can reasonably ask who is behind the repeated complaints against Corbyn.  On the photographic evidence published in the newspapers there seem to be two culprits, the Jewish Chronicle and the Campaign Against Antisemitism.   We also know from the films on the Al Jazeera TV channel which were shown in 2017 that the state of Israel has been interfering in UK politics and has tried to destabilise the Labour party.

Why? That’s easy. Corbyn is unashamedly on the side of the Palestinians.  It is to discredit any charges he makes against the state of Israel by claiming that he is an anti-Semite.  It's to turn Jewish people into victims, and by implication, Israel into a nation of victims.   It's no longer Israel that needs to leave the Occupied Territories; it's Corbyn and the rest of us who need to free ourselves of antisemitism.

I’m sure Corbyn has plenty of advisers and does not need my advice, but I’m going to give it all the same.  Fight these people on the basis of freedom of speech. Put them on the defensive for a change.  Remind people what Orwell said.   Remind them that the first thing the Nazis did was to suppress dissent, so remind people about how many British lives were lost in defence of that liberty. 

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War of the Words: Guardian vs Mail

ON June 22nd, this year, Dominic Ponsford writing in the PRESS GAZETTE remarked that 'The Daily Mail has launched its most savage ever editorial attack on long-time critic The Guardian accusing it of “fake news” and being a “purveyor of hatred”.'
Mr. Ponsford claimed at that time that:
'Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre appears to have been spurred into action by a Guardian cartoon which depicted the van which attacked mosque worshippers at Finsbury Park with the words: “Read Sun and the Daily Mail” on the side of it.'

 It seems that the Guardian had run a few stories in which it had compared the Daily Mail to an 'open sewer' and a reader’s letter which said it was an 'organ of hate speech'.

The Mail editor Paul Dacre responded that it wouldn’t matter if The Guardian’s 'infantile lies' were confined to the pages of a 'little-read dying paper'.

'But in this age of social media, they are spread and amplified through the great distorting echo-chamber of the internet, where the mob really does rule…'

In May, The Observer, from the same stable as the Guardian, had run a piece by the journalist Tim Adams in which he asked 'Is this the most dangerous man in Britain?' in an headline over a photo of Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre. 
Mr Adams claimed that 'Paul Dacre had never had much time for what he christened Cameron’s “chumocracy”.'
Tim Adams describes the intensity of Dacre's work ethic thus: 

'Each weekday evening between about seven and 10pm he leaves his office to sit on the paper’s back bench and remorselessly rehash that day’s offering, all the while delivering what staff call “the vagina monologues”, heated critical assessments of his journalist’s efforts, with scattershot use of his favourite word, “cunt”.  Though the Mail’s website, with its sidebar of celebrity shame, is the most visited news site in the world,  Dacre has little interest in technology.  He edits with a blunt pencil, often apparently with enough vitriol to shred his page proofs.'

Meanwhile, the current issue of Private Eye's 'Street of Shame' column describes how the great dictator Dacre seeks to deliver a 'style guide' to his paper's sub-editors on how to use the English language 'to ensure that [his] readers will perceive the world the way editor Paul Dacre prefers to see it...'.  The Eye asks 'DO YOU SPEAK DACRE?'.

Richard Blair on Legacy of George Orwell

In February 1937, an idealistic and ungainly Englishman in his thirties traveled to Spain to take his place in the trenches at the Aragón front to defend the Republic. His name was Eric Arthur Blair, remembered by history as George Orwell. This month, 80 years after the start of that adventure, Richard Blair, the writer’s only son, now a 72-year-old retired agricultural engineer, visited Huesca to take part in the opening of a major exhibition about his father.

TALKING to EL PAÍS during his brief stopover in Madrid on his way back to London, Richard Blair evoked the figure of Orwell and commented on the relevance of his legacy and the enormous interest in his final novel, 1984, which has become an international best-seller since Donald Trump became US president.
“It’s true that in recent weeks, with the references in the United States to ‘alternative facts’ [cited by Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s top advisors], there has been increased interest in his book. But my father has never gone out of fashion.” The book was not so much a prophecy as a fable about Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism, says Blair, although as he points out, some details from the novel that once seemed like science fiction have been part of our everyday life for some time, such as security cameras that watch our movements, or what some companies know about us from our internet activity, or how we use our credit cards. “Society has evolved toward what he saw. The world is becoming Orwellian,” he says.
Blair is patron of the Orwell society, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to spreading knowledge about the life and work of the writer, as well as debate about ideas, and that remains scrupulously neutral about politics. Which might explain why he is so careful in choosing his words when talking about Trump.
“I think that there is a lot of tension and compression in the White House right now. It is true that Trump is attacking the press, but he is a complete enigma, they are all maneuvering and learning to live with each other,” he says.
Nevertheless, he says he cannot help but be happy at the hike in sales of his father’s books, particularly as he inherited the publishing rights (“which expire in 2020,” he points out). But he recognizes concerns that this has been due to the public finding parallels between the current situation and the dystopia Orwell described.
Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted Richard in 1944. Ten months later, Eileen died on the operating table. Some of the friends of the tuberculous-stricken writer suggested that he give up custody of the child but he ruled out the possibility. The relationship between Orwell and his adopted son became closer when the two of them moved to the Scottish island of Jura, chosen because it was a healthier location for Orwell to overcome his illness and where it was so cold that “if you move six feet away from the fireplace, you freeze.”
Blair’s memories from those days are of a loving father who made wooden toys, who had a strange sense of humor, and whose parenting style had none of the political correctness of modern upbringings. On one occasion he allowed the three-year-old Richard to smoke from a pipe filled with tobacco collected from his cigarette butts. The result, aside from a vomiting fit, was that the child saw himself temporarily vaccinated against the vice of smoking.
It was on Jura that Orwell finished 1984, writing in his room during the day and spending the evenings with the child. One of their favorite activities was fishing, especially for the lobsters that filled out a diet otherwise made frugal by post-war rationing. One weekend in August 1947, however, on a journey back from a weekend of relaxation on the west side of Jura, their boat sank and they almost drowned. Blair says Orwell’s health suffered as a result. David Astor, owner of The Observer newspaper, which published the writer’s work, asked to be allowed import the newly discovered antibiotic streptomycin from the United States, with which he was treated between December 1947 and July 1948 in a hospital near Glasgow. But his efforts were in vain: Orwell developed an allergy to the medication. “His nails fell out and blisters appeared on his lips,” Richard recalls. The writer died in January 1950 at age of 46, when his son was about to celebrate his sixth birthday.
What is the most important lesson that Orwell taught us? For journalists, says Blair, there are many. “To be honest. The most important things are facts which can be corroborated, not reality as you want it to be. Journalists today do not have time to check facts, and errors are perpetuated and multiplied on the internet until they become true.” The writer’s son also recalls Orwell’s six rules for clear writing from his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print; Never use a long word where a short one will do; If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out; Never use the passive where you can use the active; Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent; Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.”
Blair finished up with his father’s definition of liberty: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Blair is particularly concerned about the lack of dialogue in contemporary society. “All people do is shout at one another, without actually listening.” And he is surprised to see young people who, instead of speaking face to face, spend all day staring into their smartphones. “Even couples in restaurants! Are they communicating with each other via text messages?!” he jokes. And what would Orwell make of the 21st century, the era of the internet, great scientific advances and post-truth?
“Ah, now that’s the million-dollar question. But it’s impossible to get into anyone’s head. Nor to come up with the answer by reading his books. If he were still alive he would be 113, and would have had a lot of new influences… There’s no point in speculating.” As such, we don’t know, and we can’t know. But he does go as far as to assume one thing: whatever his thoughts, they would be characterized by common sense.