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Tuesday 18 August 2015

blog 150 Jeremy Corbyn (my next ex-husband) & why Bill Hicks was right.

That would be ‘Corbyn’ with a WHY?

And the bit about being his fourth wife was just a ghastly dream where JC was Saruman’s kindly but less well preserved uncle. Andy, Liz and Yvette were goblins and the backseat Blairites were Orcs. D Miliband was the cave troll and Mandelson was the Nazgul. It all ended badly.

You’ll have gleaned from this bloggy that I’m a left of centre gal and I grieve still for the pre-New Labour days before activists ran from the party like Rohan villagers from Wargs. However, even I can see that the labour party may not benefit in the long run from having a politically rigid hippy called Jeremy who is addicted to wedding cake – as front man – even if there is no other option with a pulse.

Where are the believable women? Other parties found some! After  my experiences as a labour councillor in the 80s / 90s I will not even ask about a credible black candidate.

But the problem is not Jeremy’s foibles. E.g. folk have made much of Jem being teetotal. So am I. It’s not weird though I did suffer some booze-related confusion recently. Trying to read an article without my specs, I thought it said ‘Corbyn 20 pints ahead...’ No, the problem is that he is a bad reaction against the pain of Blairitis.

The symptoms of Blairitis were Thatcher-lite-ness, warmongering, bank-arselicking, sycophancy and addiction to sound bites.

Even the mad messiah himself is rattled. Blair wrote in The Guardian that electing Corbyn would lead to the “annihilation of the Labour party”. And who would deny that Blair knows a thing or three about annihilation? It may – I suspect – have the opposite effect and invigorate the party. What it won’t do is make it electable.

This still doesn’t quite explain either the party’s or the media’s pants wetting hysteria.

Far be it from me to suggest that it’s just business as usual. The double whammy of media indolence and the government’s ongoing need for distractions means that ANYTHING that diverts attention and can be hyped – will be.

If you listen to the news you will be aware that – even quicker than I expected (blog 76. Pension Plunder Charter) – certain chicken nuggets have come home to roost. There’s a massive increase in attempted frauds aimed at separating the gullible from their pension pots in the first three months of the new draw-down rules. Is that headline news every night? Is Osborne being brought to book?

We still have the ‘so called’ migrant crisis. A few hundred folk (some from countries we helped to screw over)fleeing horrors we could not imagine are in Calais. Bear in mind that, for example, of the estimated 4million+ Syrian refugees 70% are living in countries – however poor – bordering Syria. A huge proportion do not live in refugee camps but derelict buildings, abandoned sheds and on streets. Yet the frenzy in the British media aided by Cameron’s ‘swarms’ speech would suggest that all four million of these unfortunates are clinging to one giant lorry bound for Buckingham palace (hmmm – now there’s an idea). But – yeah – in the shape of the most desperate people on earth the bogey man is coming to get us - again.

Slavery is really back in vogue again if anyone is interested.

Oh and we just had the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima – a reminder that we can kill (and did) 140,000 people with one weapon and lots of countries have this technology.

Neither this government nor the last labour one did anything to cure the British social disease. So Tim-rich-but-dim will be chief exec of almost anything while Trevor-poor-but-clever will still be wasted in a call centre or on a zero hours contract packing shelves.

In Bill Hicks’ classic set ‘Relentless’ he outlines, with desert dryness, how the first Bush Iraq war was really – to use his words – “The Persian Gulf Distraction”; an expensive deadly distraction from domestic issues that were not being addressed. I was struck by the same old same old SAME OLD nature of political/media tactics and somewhat depressed by public gullibility.

But it may partly explain why everyone has gone Corbyn crazy. The media milks alarm. It stops people thinking. The government of the day likes low grade panic because it stops people putting two and two together and realising who is really shafting them.

Frankly I’ve no strong views on Jeremy. My blog after the election said the Labour party should take advantage of its inevitable time in the wilderness and use at least the first 18 months to shake itself down (see blog 135 Kim Kardashian & UK elections – I TOLD you...) Bland Harriet who has wandered off into a mum’s-coffee-morning oblivion really can’t do any harm because she’s ruled herself out of leadership by her behaviour and also out of her own gob.

The left has been snivelling round the sidelines for the longest time while the smarmy, slick, shallow, image-obsessed, rent-a-quote, not-quite-tories bullied their way to the top of the labour party. If Corbyn wins he could usefully re-educate Labour on how to be an effective opposition party. OPPOSITION is a vital part of democratic government. (It shouldn’t be left to satirists).


But if – in the long term - Corbyn is the great white hope of the left I’m staying under my duvet.