Forces of darkness ride south 44
Posted on
September 17, 2015 by
Chris Cairns
Archive for the ‘uk politics’
Better not together 254
Posted on
September 16, 2015 by
Jeremy Gilbert
Dear Blairite MP,
I’m writing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Labour Party members; some new, and some, like me, who have been loyal party members throughout our adult lives. I’m not writing to any one of you in particular.
The ones I’m addressing will know who they are.
It’s time to talk about us.
The Experts 278
Posted on
September 13, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Turns out it’s not just Scotland the media commentariat knows nothing about.
Ask again later 127
Posted on
September 12, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Here’s Atul Hatwal, editor of the influential Labour website Labour Uncut, speaking first in July and then reviewing his position with the benefit of hindsight in August.
Corbyn just won the leadership election in the first round with 60% of the vote. Don’t give up the day job, Atul. Well, actually, maybe you should.
The invisible members 291
Posted on
September 08, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The journey 285
Posted on
August 27, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
A thing that might happen next month 299
Posted on
August 20, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Social media is alive today with tales of people being refused a vote in the Labour leadership election on the grounds that they don’t support Labour values (if anyone even knows what those are any more). We suspect you’ll be hearing quite a bit about it in the press over the coming days.
The prevailing reaction seems to be slack-jawed astonishment at the planetary-scale car-crash the party has allowed to develop around the issue, with another “coup” story thrown in for good measure in the Telegraph.
We can only think of one way the farce could become even worse.
The geography of news 184
Posted on
August 18, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
An update, then: as we write, our anti-poverty fundraiser (which set out to gather just £500 for a young woman in Kidderminster fined almost £330 for stealing a 75p pack of Mars bars out of desperate hunger after her benefits were sanctioned) stands at a phenomenal £14,395.
The suicide note 220
Posted on
August 16, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Earlier today Gordon Brown gave a speech in London, on a subject and for reasons which are unclear. It was widely trailed in the press, however, as an intervention in the Labour leadership campaign, with the particular goal of stopping Jeremy Corbyn from winning. It was – naturally – broadcast live and in full by the BBC News channel.
Corbyn wasn’t mentioned by name so far as we noticed, but to tell the truth we drifted in and out of the rambling, 49-minute, 30-page monologue full of celebrity namedrops and unconnected anecdotes, hypnotised as we were by Brown’s relentless pacing up and down the room like a caged animal.
Nobody who isn’t getting paid should have to endure the entire grimness of it, so using the magic of technology we’ve compressed it all down to a mere fraction of its length (just 20%) for you, but without losing any of the tone, content or intellectual nuance.
We offer it to you as an elegy. It marks the day that Labour reanimated the walking corpse of the only person left in the party that it considers to have any gravitas – not to win an election, but to try to crush the first man in living memory to enthuse tens of thousands of new members to join a political party in the hope of restoring the values it was created to uphold.
It is the day the soul of the Labour Party finally died.
The people, the idiots 315
Posted on
August 14, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
There’s another rather bizarre Kenny Farquharson column in today’s Times. Under the headline “Holyrood wasn’t built for a one-party state”, it asserts that “the Scottish Parliament is no longer fit for purpose” on the grounds that the opposition parties are useless, as if that were the fault of the electoral system rather than their leaders.
After that, though, it just gets flat-out insulting.
Sticks and stones 198
Posted on
August 12, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This debate between John “Mental Mad” McTernan and Owen Jones from the BBC News channel this morning doesn’t need a lot of commentary from us, to be honest.
It’s like watching someone try to reason with voicemail.
Looking back with less anger 131
Posted on
August 12, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Here’s Michelle Mone on last night’s Channel 4 News:
When presenter Matt Frei sympathetically puts to her that she left Scotland because she was being “given a very very hard time” by Yes/SNP supporters, Mone denies it, saying “I didn’t actually leave, that wasn’t the main reason to have left Scotland”.
So where could Frei have come by such a misapprehension?
