What a difference a change of party and circumstance makes: when the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre and his trembling minions at the Daily Mail went after the memory of Ralph Miliband - as a means of getting at his younger son, who was then Labour leader - they denounced Communism - for which they really meant what happened in the former Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin - as a murderous ideology that killed millions.
So when Jeremy Corbyn succeeded Ed Miliband as Labour leader, and there was talk of party members being able to hold their MPs to account, off went the press once more. This was Stalinist! It was one step from the Gulag! It would turn hardworking, respectable people into Un-Persons overnight! There would, we were told, imminently be purges of ideologically impure Labour MPs. Dozens and dozens of them.
And here we are four years after Jezza was first elected, and the number of deselections so far is, er, none. Nil. Nix. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Not a sausage. Bugger all. The spirit of Uncle Joe has somehow failed to drive out all those Labour MPs that our free and fearless press said it would. But the threat of deselection is still out there.
The problem for the press is that it is not Labour where the D-Word is being bandied around, but the Tories. Despite the claim of James Cleverly (who isn’t, but is now the party chairman) protesting “THERE IS NO DESELECTION MECHANISM IN THE [Conservative] PARTY” last June, there is. And it is all over the papers today.
Metro has told readers “ID cards may be withdrawn from rebel MPs … Tory no-deal ‘traitors’ could be deselected”, while the Express has shrieked “BORIS VOWS TO BOOT OUT BREXIT REBELS”. The Telegraph prefers “PM warns rebel MPs: back me or be sacked”, and the Mail agrees: “BACK ME OR I’LL SACK YOU”, as does the Times, with “I’ll kick you out of party, Johnson tells Tory rebels”.
And if that were not Stalinist enough, along has come the Murdoch Sun to thunder “WHY should the Government promise to enact some as-yet-unwritten and arguably illegitimate law being cooked up by Remainers with their rogue Speaker? … The Government runs the country, not a cross-party rabble”. Democratically elected MPs? Democratically taken decisions? The sovereignty of Parliament? Pah! Away with them!
Strange how Stalinism becomes so much more acceptable when the boot is so firmly on the other foot. And when it is the right-wing press’ preferred party which is under the cosh, resorting to threatening deselection of MPs by the personal order of Polecat Dom, and all the time realising it does not have the numbers to see out the week.
So we don’t get to hear about Bozo The Clown having an advisor who said Tory MPs don’t care about the poor, and claimed that the poor were poor because they were inferior. But we do get heartwarming coverage of a rescue puppy being delivered to Number 10.
Pravda and Izvestia never went away. They just came over to the UK under another name.
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14 comments:
Dunno about Pravda, Isvestia and Stalin - Given the far right policies of these tory creeps, a more accurate comparison would be Volkischer Beobachter, Der Sturmer and Hitler.
And speaking of mass murdering war criminals and liars......Oo look who this morning crawled out from under the nearest media stone but Blair in full-on whiney snivelling mode. Expect to see more of him and Brown and the rest of the quisling gang as an election looms......
Can we deselect The Fail, The Torygraph and the Murdoch presses please?
The final paragraph reminds me of the old adage about the Soviet press that there was no izvestia in Pravda and no pravda in Izvestia.
With the majority of the London press, one gets neither izvestia nor pravda.
Anonymous at 13.03 who used to be that bloke Andy McDonald referred to,
Thanks for illustrating so perfectly why it will always be a piece of piss for the right to triumph in this country.
You're not a clever person really are you Bertie?
On the contrary - it's the idiots who believe Corbyn is the Messiah and will deliver a Socialist Garden of Eden that are "not clever". Delusional, yes. Clever? No.
Just watched war criminal Blair snivelling his worst in a C4 "News interview" by multi- coloured decaying gimp Snow - who said the mass murderer would have had "moral authority" if it hadn't been for the Iraq war. Obviously, according to Snow, the war victims in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia are of no account. Nor are the hundreds of thousands of innocent dead, nor the millions of lives destroyed through deliberate assaults on their communities and societies. To say nothing of the appalling socioeconomic damage inflicted on British society and inevitable endangerment of the Union.
Incredibly, Blair whined, "I've got grandchildren", while Snow failed to point out there are whole swathes of Iraqi, Afghani and Yugoslav families deprived of THEIR grandchildren, sons, daughters, grandparents, mothers and fathers, all caused by the Blair-Brown gang of disgusting war criminals. As usual, it's all about Blair and his self-pity. And that useless prick Snow again let him get away with it.
Blair remains a piece of execrable political detritus of the worst type. The sooner he takes his arse off to join his urfascist pal Murdoch the better. They deserve each other.
Bertie, being anonymous doesn't work because we know it's you.
You're worse than Ian Beale. He's such a squealer
This brings to mind the alleged question a puzzled Nikita Krushev asked of JFK : "how do you get your media to print such lies?. We have to threaten ours".
Is it possible for Tim to make any post about Corbyn without someone popping up to call Blair a war criminal?
Is it possible to draw attention to Blair's war criminality after he makes a public political statement without someone trying to deflect attention from said Blair's guilt?
After all, it's he who re-enters the political arena and tries to affect outcomes. If he doesn't like the heat - which the disgusting twat obviously doesn't - he should stay out of the kitchen. There are millions of victims on the other side of the world (and this side) who wish he'd never shown his self pitying face in the first place.
In short, fuck him and the horse he rode in and out on. Plus his attendant equally guilty lynch mob.
No.
"Is it possible to draw attention to Blair's war criminality after he makes a public political statement without someone trying to deflect attention from said Blair's guilt?"
But Tim's post wasn't about Blair. It'd be like if people suddenly started pointing out that Mao Zedong was kinda a bad person every time Tim posted an article about Toby Young.
But self pitying Blair (and his apologists) re-entered the public arena and attempted to re-shape the issue for his own gain. Therefore, he and his previous mass murder and illegal actions are subject to further exposure.
Blair is British and "alive", Mao was Chinese and is dead. Toby Jug is a far right dickhead. Hope this helps. But I doubt it - Blair apologists are beyond help.
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