Recently I checked out The Red Roar, a site covering Labour-related issues, which was in reality doing little more than attempting to put the boot into anyone and everyone who was not opposed to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The thought occurred at the time that this operation may have some link to the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog. Now that thought has become a racing certainty.
The Red Roar’s latest outpourings are all that The Great Guido might have wished for: “Student Trotbusters”, “SWP Links”, anti-Semitism allegations, Labour NEC election claims - note that, like the Fawkes massive, The Red Roar missed Jon Lansman bowing out of the contest - kicking Momentum, and accusing Left New Media sites of spreading conspiracy theories. It’s not about Labour, it’s about Labour bashing.
It’s almost as if the Fawkes blog had farmed out the hatchet jobs on Left New Media to someone else - with one addition, the use of the fictitious term “Alt-Left”. There is, as any fule kno, no such thing as the “Alt-Left” - it’s a term coined by right wingers to suggest that the Alt-Right, which most certainly does exist, is just part of some political equivalence, and that those Rotten Lefties (tm) are equally bad. Oh what a giveaway!
And as if that were not enough of a sign that this is not a site Of The Left, but merely one that is sounding off about it, the Fawkes rabble has started endorsing The Red Roar, and not merely occasionally. A notable example is the sneering at LabourList for allowing Diane Abbott to be guest editor, which is held to be a move to the left (?). The post tells “The only up and coming Labour leaning site that doesn’t support Corbyn is Red Roar”.
Note that a shit-stirring site kicking the Labour leadership is being pushed as “an up and coming Labour leaning site”. Like heck it is. Another endorsement from The Great Guido is where the Fawkes rabble reinvent the deselection of Robin Wales as Mayor of Newham as “Momentum have deselected Labour’s moderate Mayor”. This is the usual bullshit, as Tom Copley AM has had to point out. And guess what? “Red Roar has the numbers”.
The Red Roar also gets one of those prized mentions in the Fawkes “Seen Elsewhere”, probably the major source of clicks to sites like the desperately dull Conservative Woman, which would be in dire straits without them. Expect the site to get more of those in future, as it ramps up its attacks on the Labour leadership and tries to find Momentum reds under each and every bed. And that means only one thing.
The Great Guido and The Red Roar are linked - maybe deniably, but linked they are. Attacking Left New Media using terms that would never be used by anyone to the left of the Tory right is just one giveaway of many. Being used by the Fawkes rabble as part of its attack-dog approach is another. If it walks like a Fawkes operation, quacks like a Fawkes operation, and smears like a Fawkes operation, it might just be a Fawkes operation.
All that is left now is for clueless Tory MPs and their pals in the Pundit Establishment to start quoting The Red Roar in the same reverent way they quote the Fawkes blog.
The Red Roar is a Fawking cuckoo. So don’t let it into your nest, Labour people.
4 comments:
The what what, now?
(That's NOT as in a posh 'what,what')
Red Roar was and is sympathetic to the Blairite Progress bunch completely out of touch with the membership.
It will quietly disappear very soon.
Interesting that the website is hidden behind a privacy wall (www.contactprivacy.com) so a normal whois lookup doesnt give you the owner.
Surely nobody could have ever have believed that Red Roar was anything other then a right wing sock puppet site? I spent ten minutes reading through it and every story was written in the bizarre tabloidesque shock and awe language that simply doesn't exit in the real world. Also, every single story was about internal machinations within the Labour Party, nothing whatsoever about society beyond that. The thing that right wingers don't understand about the left is that there are very few left wing activists, even from the New Labour Progress wing of the party who are involved in politics entirely for their own ends, even amongst the most misguided "centrist" there will be a basic belief that they are doing something worthwhile and making society better. Thats why a real left wing version of Guido Fawkes has never happened, there just aren't enough people with genuine left wing convictions who could be bothered readinga site devoted to petty gossip about no mark political pygmies. Real left wing sites like the Canary and Evolve are full of terrible stories about benefit claimants and disabled people beiing mistreated, NHS cuts, school under spending and the like, all mixed in with the stuff about the goings on in the Labour Party. The complete absence of any of this sort of stuff on Red Roar gave it away in an instant.
Post a Comment