Back to calling Corbyn supporters delusional and thick, are we.
“Thick as pigshit”. As soon as Jeremy Corbyn appeared on the ballot paper, this was essentially the analysis of much of the media, the Labour right and the Tories when it came to his supporters. Indeed, I’m directly quoting here the words of Janan Ganesh, Financial Times hack, former BBC Sunday Politics regular, and a bloke who says “banter” a lot and not ironically.
This is media and political groupthink summed up rather crudely. But basically it went like this. Labour lost in 2015 because it was too left-wing. It lacked economic credibility. Its leader was seen as a bit weird. In 1983, Labour had presented a left-wing manifesto to the nation, and suffered its greatest post-war defeat as a consequence. So how on earth does making Labour’s most left-wing backbencher (a title shared with John McDonnell) leader, a man with no frontbench experience, who will double down on all the reasons voters just rejected Labour, make any sense at all? Who will go ‘Ed Miliband isn’t for me, but count me in for Jezza!’ Why can’t you see that total electoral oblivion awaits? The left’s counter-arguments at the time — about winning over young voters, non-voters, former UKIP voters, Scottish voters, and so on — were dismissed as wishful thinking on acid. Here’s a debate I had with Toby Young during the first leadership election in which these two worldviews collided.
For many pundits and people in politics, this analysis was an absolute pillar of their entire political worldview. How they understood the so-called ‘centre-ground’; how politics is fought, won and lost in Britain; England in particular as a small ‘c’ conservative country; needing to win over Tory voters and how you shift your policy offer and messaging: these were all articles of faith, the way these pundits and politicians navigated and understood the political universe. It didn’t matter who the leader was, actually: Labour standing on an unambiguously left-wing manifesto would spell electoral oblivion. The Tories could commit to killing the firstborn and Labour would still get 20% of the vote. The same pundits who’d say: “we don’t agree with UKIP supporters, but we need to understand what makes them tick, and to understand their legitimate grievances” — they would not extend the courtesy of this basic political curiosity to Corbynites because, well, they were just way too out-of-this-world delusional.
And then, at 10pm on June 8th 2017, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn won 40% of the vote and deprived the Tories of their majority. Central assumptions they held about politics suddenly died. The way they looked at the world suddenly made no sense. They were lost.
Now, I went from someone who campaigned for Corbyn to become leader to being utterly consumed with political doom-and-gloom. But for me, it wasn’t the vision or policies on offer that were the problem (if anything before the election they seemed too moderate to justify the fuss), but bad presentation. I wanted desperately to be wrong, and spent the general election campaign doing everything I could to prove myself wrong. Being wrong was probably the most exhilarating experience of my entire life. The left I’d always believed in and fought for my entire adult life was now more powerful than ever, on the cusp of power even. It was a political liberation. The facts had changed, I had made a mistake — a very big mistake as it happened — and I happily readjusted my analysis so that it was in sync with political reality.
Not so for the rest of the punditry and political elite. No, this was a nightmare. Politics no longer made sense. That memory of the exit poll, of Corbyn’s Labour Party winning a similar share of the vote as Tony Blair in his pomp had to be somehow scrubbed from existence. There had to be a route back to the pre-10pm June 8th 2017 world when everything made sense and we were the grownups and the left were delusional, were mad, or just thick as pigshit.
Which brings me to the hoo-ha over Newsnight. Oh god yes, I am so so bored of this already and would probably prefer to gouge my eyes out with a biro than continue this much longer. I did not enter political activism to enter into spats with public broadcasters over hats, and I’m also aware the bad faith brigade are trying to drag out an entirely disingenuous row over a hat. But last week, the flagship BBC current affairs programme Newsnight selected a picture of Jeremy Corbyn, not suited up in his usual politician’s attire, but wearing a fisherman’s cap which has always made pundits go hahaha he’s left-wing and that hat makes him look like Lenin, applied a colour filter which altered the hat and made Corbyn’s face red, and then placed this against a red-washed image of the Kremlin and Moscow skyline. The effect was to make it look like he was in a Soviet-era poster.
Anyone who denies this looks like Jeremy Corbyn in a Soviet-era poster is so utterly drunk on maximum strength bad faith I’m surprised they can still function.
Here’s the original to underline that the picture has been altered (above all, red washed), as anyone with functioning eyes and a basic level of good faith can see.
The broader context: last week, the main press attack on Corbyn was that he was a Kremlin stooge. Here’s the Daily Mail.
So on Newsnight on Friday, I challenged the programme for reinforcing a broader press line that Jeremy Corbyn — despite expressing solidarity with Russian dissidents and demanding tougher measures on Russian oligarchs than the Tories — was a Russian stooge.
The pushback has centred on the hat. The sodding hat. Basically those alleging mocking up Jeremy Corbyn as though he was in a Soviet poster next to the Kremlin the week the Tories and their media allies are demonising the Leader of the Opposition as a Kremlin stooge was clearly reinforcing the said smear campaign are now hat-obsessed cranks. Take the following from the Birmingham Post’s political editor who pushed back on those alleging a problematic bias.
You know what? The hat really is a secondary issue here. Yes, the hat looks different from the original, but again, that’s not the key point: it’s the “yes they did make it look a Soviet poster” which is kind of the problem given the broader context. I mean, why is this hard to even grapple with.
The other pushback has been, well we put the Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson against the same background the other week! I mean sure, but for some reason you managed to find a picture of him in a suit and didn’t red-wash his face to make him look like 1950s era Soviet propaganda.
Take this response from another BBC journalist.
It’s really quite straightforward. You’re the BBC, a public broadcaster with a theoretical duty to always be impartial when covering politics. Newsnight is your flagship political current affairs programme. Could it maybe, just maybe, be more than a little suggestive to have a discussion partly about whether Corbyn is a Russian stooge — in a week when much of the press and Tory MPs are suggesting Corbyn is indeed a Russian stooge — against a backdrop which looks self-evidently like Corbyn in a Soviet poster next to the Kremlin? “Are we framing this inadvertently to be pretty damn suggestive here?” is what a BBC editor could have said. Even Newsnight’s Evan Davis, who I like and respect very much, said the picture had been chosen as a “provocation”.
So anyway, to go back to the beginning. All the pundits and politicians whose political universes turned upside down, who have been desperate to return to that pre-10pm June 8th 2017 world, have been falling over themselves to ridicule the left as swivel-eyed conspiracy theorists over the Newsnight debacle. This used to be their comforting understanding of Corbynism: that it was basically a bunch of delusional/thick as pigshit conspiracy theorists who only really existed on social media, and who the rest of Britain thought were quite, quite mad. And here they go again, in their desperation to scrub away the bitter and really quite disturbing memory of June 8th, trying to prove that’s all the Corbynites were, just a very vocal but completely unrepresentative bunch of thick-as-pigshit weirdos, the election was just some weird blip, the commentariat can return to its (baseless) condescending sense of superiority. Reality has fatally upset their political worldview. Rather than alter their political worldview, they’re trying desperately to find ways to force reality to reconcile with the said discredited worldview.
You know what, I don’t think this is a good idea for them. Because after getting everything from Brexit to Corbynism completely wrong, this is a clear recipe for continuing to be totally and arrogantly out of touch with reality.
And finally: on the left being conspiracy theorists. No, the conspiracy theorists are a political and media elite who are constantly trying to portray the Leader of the Opposition as a stooge or pawn of hostile foreign powers and a sympathiser with terrorist organisations. This is, incidentally, not very healthy in a democracy, is it? I mean, that’s kind of how tinpot regimes like Putin’s Russia portray their opposition leaders, isn’t it? So there we have it. The punditry and political elite have no choice but to claim up is down, left is right, they’re the rational in-touch-with-reality brigade, supporters of a party leadership which just won 40% of the vote are the ones in cloud cuckoo land, end of story, case closed. And all I’d say to them is: if that comforts you, fill your boots.
EXCITING POSTSCRIPT
Jolyon Maugham, prominent QC and committed opponent of Jeremy Corbyn, has written a piece about a senior BBC figure telling him that the Corporation does encode negative messages about Corbyn into its imagery.
