Eyup, I’ll tell thee a story. In 1988 I was doing a Ph.D on computing tools for writers. I was also teaching a few hours a week in the computing department at a Sheffield City Polytechnic soon to gain university status and, decades on, fame as my adversary in Roddis v Sheffield Hallam.
The previous year I’d completed an M.Sc. there.
It came to pass that I was in a meeting with full time computing staff. Maybe I’d been asked to contribute to a course review; maybe it was Ph.D related. The details escape me but what does not is that across the table sat a woman more or less my age: mid to late 30s. Ruth Aylett had not taught me on the masters but I knew this much: as a teacher and role model she was held in high regard bordering on awe by her female students … as academic she was a high flier (she’d soon leave for Edinburgh’s prestigious Heriot-Watt) … and she had an infant son.
She in turn knew I was on the left. At some point in that meeting she looked me in the eye and, with exquisite appositeness, spoke of “soviet power plus electrification”.
I was impressed. Computer academics quoting Lenin were not your everyday occurrence.
Fast forward three decades. When I called out leftist journalist, Owen Jones – in respect first of Vladimir Putin, then Bashar al-Assad – I’d no idea that he and the child whose mum had cited Lenin that day were one and the same. It would be some time before a chance remark by a pal who’d known and been inspired by Owen’s trade unionist dad put me straight on the point.
Cross my heart and swear to die, this slender personal connection has in no way influenced my assessment of Owen, of whom I remain critical on the above points and his unhelpful – I don’t say inaccurate 1 – attacks on Corbyn in the end game of his leadership. But my own criticisms of Owen Jones on some important matters do not prevent my lauding him on others. Such as his willingness to go into the belly of the beast and, eyeball to eyeball, take on adversaries. (I don’t do that, and nor do those who write Owen off as “fake left”.) Such as his eloquence, command of facts and ability to keep his head under pressure; on show in his coverage of Palestine. And such as his courage, as a corporate journalist and by that fact vulnerable to repercussions, in speaking out, frequently and unflinchingly, on Israeli genocide and Britain’s complicity.
For these reasons I’ve featured his podcasts, approvingly, several times in posts on the ongoing mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Here though his skills and outrage are applied, in a shade under ten minutes, to a subject closer to home.
* * *
- Criticisms of ‘Jezza’ not being leadership material were beside the point. Though I deem the man honourable, with a long record of being morally on the right side of history, he’s no leader. But after years of apathy and cynicism read as acquiescence and consent, a public turned off by politicians offering less and clawing back more with each passing year – see my last post but one on ‘austerity’ – had been given hope. His inability to defend himself as leader of the opposition, in the face of the vilest slurs and treachery, boded ill should he have become prime minister. (See A Very British Coup for the why of that.) But whatever the personal limitations of Jeremy, the vein he struck ran deep and he tapped it with electrifying effect. Given this, Owen’s damning in this short video of the prime beneficiary, of forces for which he’d played useful idiot, can be seen as an act of atonement.
A few initial observations:
Firstly, that £20 billion black hole.
Several questions arise.
Firstly, is it only £20 billion? And the supplementals here are, where did that £20 billion or maybe more go? What was it spent on? Who was it spent on? Was it actually spent or is it a budget figure to guarantee payment of IMF loans to Ukraine, whose economy has collapsed and is likely to cease to exist, leaving the UK economy to pick up the tab when those loans (rescheduled last August) become due?
To be paid for by the low paid, those on social security, pensioners, the working poor, children and the most vulnerable in society rather than those who have more money than they shake a stick at.
Owen isn’t telling us or covering that ground. Though he does at one point attempt a not too subtle hint that it could be something to do with Gaza rather than risk bringing up Project Ukraine. Which, as has been noted on this site previously, represents a certain section of the self defined political “left’s” blind spot where they cannot and will not join the dots.
The other elephant in the room can be found at the beginning and the end of the clip. A matter which takes us to the heart of that “how” question which was raised on this blog a few posts ago.
As Stuart Campbell, over at Wings over Scotland, observed a few years back, what definitions are operating here when terms such as “far right” are bandied about? Whose definitions are they? Whose doing the counting? Is it down to how many twitter/X followers you have? Whose go the best lawyers? Who shouts the loudest?
Because getting organised together to tackle what Jones identifies as coming towards us in order to address that “how” question with any degree of efficacy is going to be problematic in a context in which those such as Jones and the ‘left’ he represents regard anyone, including on the political left, who takes a more grown up and nuanced view of, say, the geopolitical mess which has its focus on Ukraine or those for whom biological sex is immutable, as being on and of the “far right”.
“How” to address the “how” question when dogma focuses on symptoms – the £20 billion (+?) black hole, and forbids serious consideration of the causes; or excluding anyone because they don’t subscribe to the purity spiral view which undermines class action by splitting people into smaller and smaller sub-groups in a manufactured hierarchy of oppression; whilst labelling anyone and everyone who does not subscribe 200% to the proscribed line are likely to be labelled and proscribed as “far right”?
For sure, good arguments, but only up to a point. There’s a bloody long way to go to tackle that “how” question when this is a significant part of the operational environmental context.
“Good arguments up to a point” is pretty good going for a podcast under ten minutes. I couldn’t have done nearly as well.
Well, at least, unlike elsewhere, I’ve not been cancelled.
Yours is a voice much valued on this site Dave
But not, it seems, on others.
As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet unexpurgated:
Act 9 Scene 42
Having had contact with our mutual BTL colleague who advises has been through the exact same experience in exactly the same place, it seems that this quote from Hamlet has wider relevance and application in this context.
Though, being deliberately prevented from getting ‘fuck all done’ reveals that control of The Narrative is not a monopoly limited to the Corporate Media. Who knows how many other dishonest vanity projects are out there in the self-defined “Alt-Media space’?
On which note, no names, no pack drill (but nothing to do with this site) two other pertinent quotes spring to mind:
Firstly;
“Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.”
– Jane Austin
and;
“Vanity is the quicksand of reason.”
– George Sand
I’m off to ponder what I’ve been told a while over some ironing. Catch you later.