You couldn’t make it up. The Labour right is always ready to be a parody of itself, from the ‘chicken coup’ to the huge ‘purge‘ of pro-Corbyn voters during the latest leadership campaign, to false allegations of antisemitism, to the hideous ‘revolt‘ that supported the bombing of innocent women and children in Yemen, there appear to be no depths of baseness or of ridiculousness that they won’t plumb.
A collective ‘Doctor Evil’, if you will. But this about takes the biscuit.
A week ago, Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson decided he had the authority to instigate an inquiry into ‘fake news’ – although it was very clear that his agenda was really to target inconvenient ‘alternative’ news sources, even those with excellent editorial standards.
To head this exercise, he appointed Michael Dugher – an avowed anti-Corbyn MP with a proud record of writing in appalling right-wing rags – as his ‘fake news czar’, so to speak.
And today, he started his war on fake news by (drum roll please)… sharing fake news.
Knowingly.
Dugher shared an atrocious and entirely untrue piece of libel by the should-be-ironically named right-wing group ‘Saving Labour’:
Corbyn is not attending Castro’s funeral. It’s made up. In other words, ‘fake‘.
Dugher tried to be clever about it, by tweeting it like this:
But, by using such an obviously-sarcastic ploy, all he achieved was to put on record the fact that he was sharing – promoting to his 29,000 followers and everyone they’re connected to, to the nth degree – something he already at least suspected and probably knew to be false.
Mr Dugher appears to be operating on the principle that if you throw enough manure, some will stick – at least in the eyes of some readers. But the reality is that people who throw manure end up smelling like shit. And this is beyond doubt the case with Michael Dugher.
Who, lest we forget, is supposed to be investigating and combating fake news, not sharing it.
I opened this article by saying ‘you couldn’t make it up’. If you tried to make something up that exposed the ‘inquiry’ for the agenda-driven sham it is, you couldn’t come up with something as effective as this nonsense.
And since this news is emphatically not fake, please make sure to share it so the ‘mud’ sticks where it should – on Mr Dugher and on his right-wing boss, Tom Watson.
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