Corbyn meets locals in five northern towns as well as wowing teachers at NEU conference
As MPs enjoy a long Easter break, Theresa May is again worrying her party by disappearing on another walking holiday – and was so desperate to avoid any interaction with the public that she reportedly had women’s toilets shut down for her personal use along the M54 motorway.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, by contrast, was today on an intensive tour of northern communities meeting local people and businesses, as well as receiving multiple standing ovations from teachers.
Liverpool
Corbyn received a hero’s welcome at the National Education Union (NEU) conference in Liverpool even before he had announced that Labour will scrap the damaging ‘SAT’ testing of 7- and 11-year-olds – and then that news went down a storm:
But that was only a fraction of Corbyn’s day, with the Labour leader visiting another four towns largely forgotten by the so-called ‘Westminster bubble’:
Leyland
Corbyn met community leaders and the Lancashire Police and Crime Commissioner in Leyland, where he heard their concerns about rises in crime fuelled by Tory cuts and called on the government to increase funding for community policing:
Blackburn
Corbyn found time in his busy schedule to spend time with Blackburn MP Kate Hollern for more discussions about crime and other issues facing the local community – and to sample some of the local cuisine, with proud restaurateurs eager to be photographed with the ‘Prime Minister in waiting’:
Halifax
Corbyn visited Calderdale in West Yorkshire, including a stop at Hipperholme near Halifax, where he was caught by the BBC trying his hand at archery at an outdoor centre providing a vital resource and outlet for local young people:
Winsford
In a visit to the Cheshire town of Winsford, Corbyn was out ‘on the doorstep’ in spite of heavy rain, to talk to local people about poverty, Universal Credit, housing, HS2 and healing Brexit divisions. He also found time to visit a local pub, where he was surrounded by well-wishers and spoke to local media:
SKWAWKBOX comment:
While Theresa May did everything she could to avoid even a passing encounter with the public, Jeremy Corbyn was out demonstrating that his reputation for boundless energy and appetite for meeting the people whose lives he aims to improve is well deserved.
There could scarcely be a starker contrast – or a better indicator of who is really providing leadership in the country even in opposition.
Bring on a general election and the Corbyn-led Labour government the country desperately needs.
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Theresa May once more hiding in plain sight. Legging off on a walking holiday, so eager to forsake her duties.
Jeremy Corbyn by contrast out and about at a teachers’ conference and visiting no fewer than four towns, mingling with residents and talking to them about their concerns. The difference is can be no plainer.
If there had been any doubt, it is now surely dispelled. Jeremy Corbyn is the REAL Prime Minister of this country. So let’s cut the crap, give May the heave and put Jezza in No. 10. I for one am waiting with baited breath for that ‘no confidence’ vote that will give us the chance to get ride of the odious Tories. Bring it on!!
This article is about the conflict within the US Democratic Party but it is well worth a read because it is remarkable how similar the situations are within our respective
parties.
Centrists the goal is bringing the country together in support of the status quo and ultimately all the class, racial, and gender divisions it intentionally and unintentionally perpetuates.
For progressives, it is about bridging these differences through constructing a shared radical politics of systematic change. In demanding that all people have a right to material security and political power, they are promoting a society where our common humanity transcends our socially constructed divisions, and where our differences are a source of strength not weakness.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/16/divisive-center-vs-unifying-left
Very much like the phrase “right to material security” – it expresses my view of socialism more concisely than I’ve ever been able to manage.
You won’t have noticed but I can be a bit wordy sometimes…
Thank you Steve H very interesting and informative article. 1
I was just checking out an article on the Telegraph’s website and, in the process, noticed another article (in the listing ‘More Stories’ on the side of the page) with the headline: Donald Trump ‘shown pictures of children hospitalised by Novichok to persuade him to act against Russia’. I couldn’t figure out what on Earth it was about – and didn’t for one moment think it was connected to Salisbury – so I clicked on it to check it out, and it transpired that it WAS related to Salisbury (and the alleged poisoning of the Skripals etc). Anyway, it starts as follows:
Donald Trump was shown pictures of children hospitalised by the Novichok attack in bid to persuade him to act against Russia, it has been claimed.
And a bit further on it continues:
Three boys were taken for hospital tests after they met the former Russian spy and his daughter in a playground before the pair were found collapsed on a bench.
Mr Skripal, 67, gave the boys bread which they fed to the ducks and the trio were later tracked down by police who saw the exchange on CCTV and sent them for tests.
And then a bit further on it says the following in relation to one of the boys:
It was not until around two weeks later that police knocked on his family’s door and told them they had identified him through CCTV and he needed to go to hospital.
His father Luke revealed that they had to take him “for a load of tests and then the police told us they had to burn everything Aiden was wearing that day”.
(Ends)
So having now read the article I’m thinking: ‘If three boys – three children – were hospitalised last year in the aftermath of the (alleged) poisoning, surely THAT would have been headline news all over the media and I would, as such, have heard about it.’ So anyway, I did a search and….. to cut a long story short, there WAS a bit of coverage of it at the time, but all it amounted to is that they had some tests done. And they were all perfectly OK of course. But the Telegraph article deliberately couches it in such a way so as to mislead readers by describing them – the three boys – as being hospitalised. And you are of course left thinking – well, initially anyway – that the reason Donald Trump is being shown the pictures is because they were poisoned and became very ill – ie you are led to believe that Donald Trump is being shown pictures of the three boys when they were in hospital after being contaminated and poisoned by Novichok. And the fact that in the middle of the article it says the following was of course designed to reinforce the falsehood the Telegraph was trying to dissemble:
It has previously been said that Mr Trump was persuaded to take action in Syria after seeing pictures of children suffering the effects of a sarin attack by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
(Ends)
And needless to say, there was no sarin attack at the time by Assad or anyone else! Or children suffering!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/16/donald-trump-shown-pictures-children-hospitalised-novichok-attack/
PS I can only hope that the police were able to determine which of the ducks ate the bread and that they were ALSO taken for tests as such. And the reason the three kids were perfectly OK is because there was no Novichok and it was all staged!!!
I was just in the kitchen having some lemon verbena tea and some toast when I suddenly realised something (in relation to the Salisbury saga), and it was SO obvious once I thought of it, and that is that Yulia Skripal HAD to be included in the ‘poisoning’ precisely because it WAS all staged. In other words, they couldn’t very well leave her in Russia and risk the chance of her having an unfortunate ‘accident’ in retaliation for her father being part of an elaborate plan to demonise Vladimir Putin etc (and that’s a very big ETC!). And just to recap on why I have always believed it was all staged, the following are a few of the reasons why (and I could list dozens more!):
1. It is inconcievable that Vladimir Putin would have a former agent bumped off just three months or so before the World Cup Football Tournament which Russia was hosting (according to my research) for the first time ever, or even if it WASN’T, but doubly so being the FIRST time.
2. It is inconcievable that Putin and the Russian secret service would plan to carry out such an operation using a chemical agent which could potentially kill hundreds of people AND do it in such a haphazard fashion – ie put it on the front door handle where it could be all washed off if it were to rain (and how on Earth would there have been any nerve agent left on the door handle after THREE weeks when it was supposedly discovered by chemical weapons experts or whoever, apart from the fact that THAT would have been the first thing they checked before entering the house, which in the REAL world they would have been doing the day after at the very latest!).
3. It is inconcievable that two people – even if they were the exact same size and weight etc – could suddenly be affected in exactly the same moment by a nerve agent they had been contaminated with some three to four hours earlier.
4. It is inconcievable that it would take five months to identify the two Russian agents that (supposedly) carried out the mission; more like five days, or a couple of weeks at the very, VERY most (the ‘Russians’ were duped and, as such, sent two agents to Salisbury on some pretext the plotters had come up with – eg Sergei Skripal got word to the Russian secret service that he had come by some highly classified documents etc, etc).
5. No ducks were reported to have suddenly died in the park where the Skripals fed them with some bread.
Tiresome conspiraloon alert. Get professional help, Allan .
jpenny, would you kindly fuck off you nasty little fascist #’#’. You just expose yourself for what you are when you use such vile black propanda techniques. It is precisely what fascists do, and I have no doubt whatsoever that THAT is precisely what you are! You are a shill, and the last thing your fascist paymasters want is for the millions of people they manipulate and deceive on a daily basis to begin to have their eyes opened and realise that they have been living in darkness.
Now we wouldn’t want that, would we! You really are a total sxxxxxg!
I too am concerned about the ducks – they could be novichok carriers and spreading novichok freely around the entire local area – not just Salisbury. Why oh why oh why are the press not all over the ducks?
Oh yes – silly me – because it’s all made up.
Yes, precisely, and the whole idea is completely quackers!
PS Do you use the duckduckgo search engine?
This would seem an appropriate place to post this latest offering from Craig Murray:
The Official Skripal Story is a Dead Duck
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/04/the-official-skripal-story-is-a-dead-duck/
Concerning a penny that just dropped:
In the Telegraph article I linked to above, and regarding one of the lads the Skripals gave some bread to, to feed the ducks, it says the following:
It was not until around two weeks later that police knocked on his family’s door and told them they had identified him through CCTV and he needed to go to hospital.
(Ends)
Well you can be absolutely certain that in the Real world the over-riding priority would have been to identify the assailants, as obviously anyone that became ill as a consequence of coming in to contact with the Novichocs would of course have been taken to hospital anyway. And my point is of course, that if the ‘authorities’ can identify and locate these three lads two weeks later, then they can without question identify – by looking through CCTV footage – who the would-be assassins are in the same time, and almost definitely a whole lot quicker.
I mean it’s simples, isn’t it: First you go through the CCTV collected from cameras in closest proximity to Sergei Skripal’s pad, and having identified two likely-looking suspects, you check the CCTV that was located in the direction they were headed, and so on. And when you finally get them on CCTV at the train station – and now know that they more than likely came by train – then you can start checking the CCTV at the train station to ascertain when they arrived in Salisbury, and then work through the CCTV gathered from premises or whatever in the area in close proximity to the railway station and so on.
In the Real World – and so we were led to believe anyway – there would have been dozens of people working round the clock checking through all the CCTV and, as I said in a previous post, it would have probably taken five days to track them down, if THAT, and their movements on both the Saturday and the Sunday.
The reason they left it for five months is because they wanted the sceptics – the free-thinkers – to point out the big black holes in the official narrative and then, suddenly announce five months after the ‘event’ that they have identified the culprits (and then let their mates at bellingcat supposedly actually put names to them). Hey presto, all your so-called free-thinkers are nothing but tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists.
The MO of the black propagandists and the corporate media is to ALWAYS emotionalise the masses every time, whether it be Syria/Assad, Russia/Putin, Venuzuela, Libya, Iraq OR – closer to home – the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn and the left during the past three years or more, etc, etc, etc. But once the emotionalisation has dissipated, they are much more likely to see, and be open to, the truth.
Trump was seriously misled over the claims that Russia is violating the INF treaty and he has also been misled over the START treaty.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-facts-how-politics-trumped-intel-in-nuke-treaty-pullout/
Just came across the following in my mailbox from medialens:
Assange Arrest – Part 1: ‘So Now He’s Our Property’
http://medialens.org/index.php?
It seems the above link just takes you to their website, so here’s a direct link to the article:
http://medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2019/900-assange-arrest-part-1-so-now-he-s-our-property.html
In case it’s been missed – just a note on the latest fake ‘antisemitism’ scam.
Richard Burgon has been targetted for saying the obvious , namely :
” “The enemy of the Palestinian people is not the Jewish people, the enemy of the Palestinian people are Zionists and Zionism is the enemy of peace and the enemy of the Palestinian people. We need to be loud, we need to be proud in support of a free Palestine.”
This was actually in 2014!! FFS.
The attack on him clearly demonstrates the BoD etc.zionist lobby’s intent to stifle criticism of that racist philosophy by pretending that it’s essentially the same as Judaism. Which – of course – it isn’t.
The problem is that Burgon has felt it necessary to apologise. Every backing away reinforces the narrative of the ethnic cleansers and smears Jews with their inhumanity. Now that *is* antimsemitic.
This is perverse, when are the Labour hierarchy going to grow a pair. There is a very clear demarcation in this case between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism so it would have been relatively easy to make a principled stand, another opportunity missed through cowardice.
It is self evident that capitulation to the Zionists is counter productive so why does the Labour Party continue to self harm. Someone must know the identity of these individuals, within the party, who are perpetuating this policy of subservience to our enemies. It is high time that the membership knew their identities too.
” why does the Labour Party continue to self harm?”
This is *the* question. After this time, one would have thought that the obvious would have hit home : that each apologetic concession feeds the real antisemites.
If I’m generous, I guess there is a rationale in attempting to kill a story before it grows legs. But I don’t think that this stands up to examination in reality.
There are psychopaths in every race and religion – and I’ve encountered more than my fair share of them over the years – and the elites, so-called, in just about every country on the planet are all, without exception, psychopaths. And THAT is why the world is the way it is, and our history – the world’s history – the way it was. They are, in effect, a totally different species from Homo Sapiens.
But for them, our Reality would be totally different. The vast majority of people on this planet would infinitely prefer to live in a peaceful world where there is no need for armies and weapons and where no-one lives in poverty and goes hungry, a world in which we care and share for each-other and our planetary home and Mother nature, and evolve to a higher level of collective consciousness.
I must confess I’ve not heard of Richard Burgon before. Anyway here’s the BBC News website coverage of it (for anyone else who, like me, hadn’t heard about this until RH mentioned it):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47952275
Here’s another excellent and erudite article on the Counterpunch website:
The Ilhan Omar Gambit: Anti-Semitism as a Reactionary Political Tool
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/17/the-ilhan-omar-gambit-anti-semitism-as-a-reactionary-political-tool/