Yesterday was a remarkable day, as people across the nation gathered in huge protests against Donald Trump and Theresa May’s appeasement of him. Online the fury with the UK’s ‘Neville Chamberlain in drag’ Prime Minister, with the #ResignMay hashtag trending all evening, through the night and into this morning.
Rightly too. Mrs May’s floundering on Brexit is so severe that she will cling to the most faeces-covered straw and she has debased international discourse and demeaned our whole country by her spinelessness.
That the media would try to turn the nation’s attention back onto Jeremy Corbyn was inevitable – and it has already begun.
A risible article by Guardian journalist John Harris, for example, tries to direct our outrage at the Labour leader by equating Corbyn’s Brexit strategy with ‘backing’ Trump:
This, of course, is patent nonsense. The parliamentary equations of Brexit have not changed one iota, as a brilliant comment by Twitter user @Mungo_5 pithily pointed out:
I demand JC paints arse like EU flag & streaks thru WM. Won't stop A50 either, but still…
— Svarožić 🇭🇷🥀 (@Mungo_5) January 30, 2017
Nor would successfully blocking the Article 50 bill make any difference, even if the impossible could be achieved – the referendum result would still stand, the Tories would still have to find a way to get it past Parliament and Labour would make itself easy meat for the right-wing press to paint as having contempt for working class leave voters.
Harris and others are misdirecting their readers and, ridiculously, attempting to pin blame for May’s brown-nosing toward Trump on Corbyn, unless Corbyn and Labour switch to a futile gesture that will make no difference to the result and would seriously damage the party’s credibility with a huge tranche of the population.
This is just as nonsensical as the media making Corbyn responsible for winning the referendum campaign and the eventual result Corbyn’s supposed ‘failure’, even though he had no part in calling the referendum and worked harder than anyone for a Remain win.
Labour cannot prevent the Article 50 bill passing and Corbyn’s responsibility to his members and the country is to put Labour in the best possible position to defeat the Tories in the next General Election. That much, at least, is not rocket science.
But the media have never let logic, commonsense or rationality prevent their ludicrous blame-pinning in the past and they are already trying to get you looking at Corbyn while May implodes.
So it’s up to you and me not to let them. Fill your conversations and your timeline with the one true, relevant and undeniable fact that Theresa May is now failing this country internationally as badly as the Tories have failed in nationally over the last 7 years. Point the finger where it belongs and don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise.
In other words, make this your mantra and don’t be diverted:
#ResignMay #ResignMay #ResignMay #ResignMay #ResignMay #ResignMay #ResignMay
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Reblogged this on Declaration Of Opinion .
The Guardian printed a slightly edited version of this today. Thank you for the line of argument
There is a certain irony in an MP whose party’s coalition with the Conservatives opened the way for the horrendous mess we now face talking about caving in to the Conservative agenda, and one might just sigh and move on ( Labour’s incoherent position on article 50, letters 30 January). However Alistair Carmichael’s alternative truths cannot be left to fester unchallenged. Labour’s position is not as he depicts it (as I suspect he well knows). As democratically mandated (whatever one thinks of the validity of a flawed referendum) Labour must allow the bill to progress to its final vote. In the meantime Labour’s amendments will reveal the extent of the devastation to the NHS, to all public services, including education, to the environmental and climate protection, to agriculture and the quality of food and to workers’ rights if the Government has its way. The Government will then have to accept or reject these alternatives to their “hard Brexit”. Accept and Labour has won at least a “soft Brexit”. Reject and the public see Brexit for what it really is, the final throws of the neoliberal project which even the IMF is admitting a failure. At this point a total rejection of Brexit by the public is possible, demanding a rerun or an election.
Thanks John – do you have a linkg for that Guardian article?