Politics

The Great Left Wing Race Card Scam

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

George Osborne with despatch box

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The cynical, virtue-signalling Left think nothing of abusing the term ‘racism’, using it as a blunt cudgel to bash right wing policies when reasoned debate is too much effort. In this hysterical universe, even the Chancellor’s Budget can be deemed ‘racist’

Just so we are all on the same page, here is the dictionary definition of racism:

  • the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
  • prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.

There’s not too much ambiguity here, it should be fairly simple to understand. But not for Varinder Singh, Left Foot Forward pundit and secretary to an unnamed Member of Parliament.

Singh is possessed of a racism detector whose needle jerks from “Just about OK” to “Ku Klux Klan” if affirmative action isn’t baked into absolutely every government policy working its way through parliament. And the latest target of his ire is George Osborne’s 2015 summer Budget, which he casually labels “racist” for failing to sufficiently patronise and condescend to Britain’s ethnic minorities.

In order to arrive at this surprising conclusion, Singh relies on a report by The Runnymede Trust, which deduced that ethnic minorities will be disproportionately worse off as a result of George Osborne’s fiscal tinkering. And then he changes the definition of the word “racism” to mean “policies that fail to actively promote my own personal agenda”.

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The Guardian’s Endorsement Of Yvette Cooper Is A Failure Of Political Courage

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Yvette Cooper - Labour Leadership - The Guardian Endorsement - Jeremy Corbyn

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The Guardian has spent the past five years excoriating the Tories for their supposed persecution of the poor and the sick. And yet when it comes to the Labour leadership, they have endorsed a nonentity of a candidate on the basis that she is best placed to win back votes from a party it considers to be evil.

It is telling that most of the Guardian’s decidedly lukewarm endorsement of Yvette Cooper was devoted to discussing Jeremy Corbyn.

The fact that Corbyn looms so large in the campaigns of the other candidates says a lot about the state of the Labour leadership race, but it says even more about the Guardian-reading Left, and the gulf between their Tory-hating rhetoric and their desperate lack of imagination in coming up with an alternative policy agenda.

Here’s where the Guardian’s endorsement of Cooper really falls apart:

Labour is not a debating society; it was founded to represent the interests of working people at the pinnacle of power. This engagement in politics, this new excitement, must be channelled towards government. The brute lesson of May is that Labour cannot get there without first winning back significant numbers of Tory voters. Mr Corbyn will not do that. Those searching for an election winner must look elsewhere.

Yes, Labour will need to win over a number of Tory voters if they ever want to taste power again. But there are two ways to win the vote of someone who currently supports another political party.

First, you can move your political party so close to theirs in ideological and policy terms that it becomes possible to coax voters across by promising to be just a little bit more competent, or a touch more compassionate. This is what most of the Labour leadership candidates, including Yvette Cooper, are currently doing – largely accepting the centrist Tory narrative on a range of issues, but promising to implement the same agenda with a caring smile.

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Labour Has Lost The Ability To Persuade Its Own Members, Let Alone The Voters

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Tony Blair - Labour Leadership - Jeremy Corbyn - Annihilation

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Tony Blair attacked Jeremy Corbyn not thinking it would help, but in order to claim valuable “I told you so” points after a failed Corbyn leadership (which he would doubtless help to engineer). Why can’t the other candidates or their supporters make a positive, coherent case for their own campaigns?

Why has the Labour leadership contest descended into such a farce, with the bulk of party activists seemingly intent on going in one direction (Corbynland), and the angry rump of the Parliamentary Labour Party intent on thwarting their will by any means necessary?

Why has this become a contest characterised chiefly by the inability of nearly everyone – save Jeremy Corbyn – to connect with and persuade others that their candidate’s vision for the future of the Labour Party is the right one?

In truth, we should not be surprised. Because the Labour Party are conducting their leadership contest in exactly the same way that they fought – and lost – the general election in May. First, activists picked their team. And then they embarked on a deafening blitz of grandiose moralising and cheap virtue-signalling on behalf of their favoured candidate, barely pausing for breath and never stopping to hear to what the other teams are saying – other than to search for damaging soundbites, of course.

Apparently the Labour Party has forgotten how to campaign, in the age of social media. Where once there might have been an attempt to reach out to the supporters of rival candidates, to convince and persuade them that they should switch their support, instead there is a lot of shouting, a lot of sharing of internet memes, and not much else.

Unfortunately, the Labour Party’s big beasts are setting a terrible example to the broader membership by behaving in exactly the same way. Witness Tony Blair’s latest full-frontal attack on Jeremy Corbyn in the pages of the Guardian:

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Meet ‘Tessa’ – Labour’s Pop Star London Mayoral Candidate

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Tessa Jowell - London Mayor - 1

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Meet Labour’s Kylie Minogue

I’ve been getting all sorts of interesting correspondence since signing up as a Labour Party supporter last week in order to support Jeremy Corbyn and join the fightback against stale political centrism.

But by far the most amusing to date was a missive from Alan Johnson’s mailbot, desperately promoting his favoured choice for Labour’s London mayoral candidate. You could almost be forgiven for thinking that he had discovered a genuinely inspirational candidate, from the effusive sales pitch:

It starts with a look. Then a double take. Then a smile. A moment to work up the confidence and then they come over. Tessa cannot leave the house without meeting new people who want to say hello. I have seen this a hundred times, and believe me it’s not normal – no other politician inspires such warmth.

Tessa is a star. She is Labour’s Kylie – everyone loves her and she only needs a first name. She has a remarkable way with people that generates real affection. But that’s not why I’m backing her to be Mayor.

I backed Tessa right from the start because she has the right values to make London a fairer place to live. Through Sure Start and the Olympics she has a record of delivery that is second to none, and I know she can beat the Tories.

And today, I’m more sure than ever. But it’s not just because the opinion polls show she’s the only candidate who can beat the Tories – though they do and by a country mile. It’s because she has set out a genuinely compelling vision.

The “genuinely compelling vision” apparently was not so compelling that it made the main body of Alan Johnson’s email, but put that aside for a moment.

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Harriet Harman, Celebrated Feminist, Calls Margaret Thatcher A ‘Witch’

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Harriet Harman - Margaret Thatcher - Witch - Feminism - Sexism

Acting Labour Leader Harriet Harman gave a very revealing interview to the Guardian this weekend, looking back on her career as she prepares to return to the backbenches after serving in the party leadership since 2007.

Whilst one can – and should – strenuously disagree with Harman’s politics, no one can deny her role in the feminist movement or the trail she blazed by standing up to the horrifically sexist club that Parliament was when she was first elected in 1982. Given these accomplishments, it is a shame that she now ends her frontbench career presiding over a farcical leadership contest and the potential splitting of her party.

But the most memorable part was when Harman spoke about how terrified she was of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that she actually hid round a corner in the Houses of Parliament in order to prevent the approaching prime minister meeting her newborn baby:

Couldn’t the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher have taken her [to the Strangers’ Bar in Parliament]? Harman recoils. She wouldn’t have dreamed of socialising with her, she says.

“Very early on, I brought in one of the babies to the Commons and I saw her at the other end of the corridor. She was bearing down on me with two adoring parliamentary private secretaries trotting at her side, and she looked as if she was going to come and admire the baby. I had this terrible feeling of thinking, ‘I don’t want her to look at the baby’, almost like one of those cartoons where the witch looks at the baby and the baby shrivels. I didn’t want my perfect baby to have Thatcher’s eyes upon him.” Did she hide her baby from Thatcher? “No, I just shot off down a side corridor. It was very visceral, very heartfelt.”

I’m not sure quite what Harriet Harman intended this little vignette to reveal about herself, but it speaks volumes about the way many in the Labour Party see themselves and view their conservative opponents.

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