Analysis

Video: Johnson booed amid chaotic campaign start. Corbyn receives very different reception on trail

Johnson’s chaotic start continues, while Corbyn receives rousing welcome even in Tory-held seats
Corbyn reacts to Swindon’s huge welcome

Potentially the defining moment of Boris Johnson’s general election campaign has been the scene of him being booed out of a stage-managed ‘PR stunt’ – by angry staff and patients, not by campaigners, as the visit was not announced in advance. The reality was, of course, ignored by the ‘professional’ media.

But Johnson’s chaos has not been limited to a single event. Instead, it has been a thread through the first days of his campaign, from the resignation of thirty-four Tory MPs who do not want to stand for re-election, to the endorsement by the reviled Donald Trump.

That thread continued last night, with a car-crash interview in which Johnson twice refused to rule out more NHS privatisation – followed in short order by a campaign-stunt announcement of a ‘ban’ on fracking that turned out to be nothing more than a suspension for as little as forty days.

Labour blew that out of the water with a reminder of its policy to ban fracking completely.

But little encapsulates the contrasting campaigns – and the two party leaders – than the difference between Boris Johnson’s escape from Addenbrooke’s hospital and the reception Jeremy Corbyn is receiving everywhere he goes.

Even in Tory-held Swindon, the contrast could scarcely have been greater:

Corbyn has received a similar welcome right from the launch of Labour’s campaign:

And the Labour leader’s energetic campaigning is ensuring that such welcomes – and the footage that goes with them – will be abundant. Corbyn is visiting no fewer than three towns just today, on a day in which the weather is keeping many half his age tucked up indoors: Swindon, Filton and Bradley Stoke near Bristol and Gloucester.

Boris Johnson, like May before him, has been forced by the public’s reaction into closed, stage-managed stunts that he hopes will – with the help of complicit Establishment media – create an illusion of a dynamic campaign.

Meanwhile, Corbyn is getting on with the real thing – and has plenty to tell people about Labour’s game-changing policy offer.

But of course the media will ignore or diminish as much as they can, so it’s up to the grassroots Labour supporters and all who want change to amplify every appearance, to bypass the ‘mainstream’ silence and misrepresentation.

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21 comments

  1. Hes not superman Hope the team are looking after him and security is good.Johnsons mob are capable of anything including accidents.Theirs an extraordinary amount of wealthy and powerful individuals who will try to stop him.from becoming PM…security is the word!

  2. Even more off topic than usual, sorry.
    On Twitter I bumped into and retweeted an almost poetic excoriation of Trunt by @RagingLibNana and found this video a bit further into her timeline:
    https://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/1189876856276652033

    Either I’m watching the wrong programmes, my memory has failed completely, or political satire on British TV is totally absent.
    What should I be watching that I’m not?

    1. David

      Redacted Tonight on RT. Lee Camp is I think the only political stand up on British tv. And it’s mostly about US current affairs. It’s next on at 5.30pm today.

      Political satire by British comedians is dead as a do-do. Ask Ian “how high?” Hislop!

      1. Thanks for that timfrom, I’ll be watching 🙂
        I’d never have expected ALL the comedians to take the thirty pieces, but maybe it was as simple for the right wingers to kill satire as this:
        “First we get educators used to controlling their own budgets and then we let them charge the students for being taught the skills we want to exploit.
        If we make education expensive enough the only ambition they’ll leave education with is to make enough money to get out of debt.”
        Sooner or later company slum housing and company shop credit will be used to tie people into zero hours contracts with indebtedness if the Tories get in again.
        It’s happened before.

  3. Yes actually got The Times today instead of the Guardian to see what the Right Wing Capitalist Barbarian Legal Thieves are up to.
    Apparently the Tories have CULLED CUMMINGS and brought in a AUSSIE JUNIOR ATTACK DOG – junior to what’s his name?
    The lightweight political simpleton Right Wing Barbarians are so irrelevant they actually BORE YOU TO DEATH!
    Remember all these Tory spending promises are based on the Right Wing Neo-Liberal Tories making A MASSIVE STATE INTERVENTIION by pushing HS2 back 5 years to give them £8b to try to CON the electorate that austerity is over.
    Oh apparently the Tory Manifesto will promote Johnson’s Brexit Deal and not mention No Deal.
    But someone should tell Broris he has Bad Brexit “B.O.”
    Capital is divided and the nationalist Neo-Liberal Tories have CRUSHED the Neo-Liberal globalists, with 38 such Tory MPs giving up and even the politically thick but 1% humane Parris in his Times column (a globalist) saying he will not vote for this Tory Party – when the the Tories say middle of the road, read right wing nationalist!
    Crush the Right Wing Barbarians intellectually and with JC and the grassroots get out direct to citizens!
    LAB4HOPE!

  4. I was just looking round JLM’s website to see if I could find any (further*) ‘evidence’ that they re-formed specifically to target and attack Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters – ie the left – and I clicked on the section entitled ‘News’, which were in fact articles, and scrolled down to the bottom of the page and found that there were six pages altogether. So I clicked on the sixth page and, as such, found that the first article they ever published was posted on February 3rd, 2016, and entitled ‘JLM Elects New National Executive Committee’.

    The third article, posted on March 1st is entitled ‘JLM NEC Meeting With Labour Party Deputy Leader Tom Watson MP’, with a picture underneath with the caption: ‘JLM NEC Members with Labour Party Deputy Leader Tom Watson MP, 29 February 2016, House of Commons, London.’ The article is very brief and consists of just five sentences, the last of which says: ‘Luciana Berger MP, Louise Ellman MP and Ruth Smeeth MP also attended the meeting.’ At the time of writing, there were just the three articles on that page – ie the last page.

    On the fifth page there is an article posted on May 7th entitled ‘Message to JLM from Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Tom Watson MP’, and it begins thus:

    ‘Dear members of the Jewish Labour Movement

    I wanted to write to you as the Jewish community prepares to hold ceremonies to mark Yom HaShoah, the Jewish day of remembrance for victims of the Holocaust which took place this week…’

    One gets the very strong impression that this was the first occasion that Watson ever wrote to them (expressing such sentiments), and hadn’t done so in previous years because the organisation wasn’t in existence, and THAT of course would explain away the House of Commons meeting at the end of February.

    Several articles further up the page, there is an article posted on May 19th entitled ‘Key Appointments for JLM’ which, in itself suggests that the group hasn’t long been formed, but in the second part of the article, with the sub-heading ‘Ivor Caplin to Chair JLM South East Region’, it begins by saying:

    ‘After JLM’s successful re-launch earlier this year, we are now moving on to the next stage of changing the way we organise locally’

    And it then goes on to say in effect that they are setting up regional branches of JLM for the very first time, which seems odd if you’ve been affiliated to the Labour Party for decades! THAT’s as far as I got in my search for ‘evidence’, but I think most people would agree that it all appears to point to ONE conclusion!

    https://www.jewishlabour.uk/news?page=6

    *On top of what the Electronic Intifada have found.

      1. Allan, all you need to know is the JLM is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation. If you are a LP member you’ll be getting suspended if you’re not careful. The JLM has such a hold on the LP that criticsm of that organisation, dedicated to destroying Corbyn, is not tolerated. They, along with the LFI, another sham organisation supporting the racist State of Israel, should have been booted out of the Party long ago.

        https://freespeechonisrael.org.uk/who-are-jewish-labour-movement/

  5. More Tory sleaze?
    They don’t seem to be able to help themselves.
    Tory MP Ross Thomson steps down amidst claims that he groped Paul Sweeney MP.
    https://youtu.be/8DfEIMUvkFc

    Tory MP ‘tried to stick his hand down my trousers’ says male Labour MP

    Ross Thomson under investigation by Westminster’s standards watchdog. A Scottish Tory MP was last night at the centre of sensational claims that he sexually assaulted a Labour MP in a Commons bar.

    Paul Sweeney said he was ‘paralysed’ with shock after Ross Thomson groped him while he spoke to friends in the Strangers’ Bar.

  6. Oh I didn’t know that Jack, and I was obviously just looking for evidence that the JLM set up shop at some point either just before Jeremy was elected leader OR just after, for no particular reason, and the fact that I DID is not of any importance or significance. Or so you would like people to believe!

    Jeeze, you’re so transparent Jack it’s a joke!

    1. Jeeze, you’re so transparent Jack it’s a joke!

      So are you Allan, the difference is I want to be transparent whereas you don’t!

    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_Against_Antisemitism#Criticism

      The All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism wrote in 2015 that

      We were somewhat disappointed to note that not all of the messages from that group (the CAA) have been in line with CST’s stated approach of seeking to avoid undue panic and alarm. We encourage Jewish communal leaders and others when speaking on antisemitism to follow CST’s example and to be reassuring and responsible in their language, taking into account the activity which as we have outlined had been undertaken before the summer and during it. So too, it is important that the leadership do not conflate concerns about activity legitimately protesting Israel’s actions with antisemitism, as we have seen has been the case on some occasions.[11]

      In January 2015, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research said that a CAA survey about antisemitism was “littered with flaws”, and “may even be rather irresponsible”.[

    3. ps – According to Wikipedia the CAA was established in Aug 2014 in response to an increase in antisemitic incidents that accompanied the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict.

      It was registered as a charitable incorporated organisation (CIO) on 1 October 2015.

      1. Even though the CAA is registered as a charity, because it engages in political activity it most certainly is not. It is yet another organisation set up to protect and support the illegal occupation of Palestine and smear those critical of Israel’s persecution and oppression of Palestinians.

      2. Agreed Jack – It really doesn’t require much digging about to find all the relevant info on both JLM and CAA. There are very comprehensive entries for both on Wikipedia. Just for starters it totally debunks the claim of the ‘over 100 year history’ of JLM.

      3. Isn’t it odd how someone posts some information about one of the groups who have been central to the ‘anti-semitism’ smear campaign against Jeremy and the left, and a number of posters manage to find fault with it. I wonder why!

        Anyway, apart from a flawed poll that they commissioned in January 2015 which received a lot of criticism, the CAA doesn’t appear to have felt the need to post any news/articles on it’s website until July 30th, just a few weeks before Jeremy was elected leader, and he had been the red-hot favourite pretty much from the start of the contest in mid June. And I can’t help but wonder why they would wait a year or so before applying for charitable status.

        As I say, it does seem odd that IF it was established in August 2014, that the only thing it/they appear to have done in their first year was commission the yougov poll just after the Paris attacks in January 2015. and then they suddenly spring in to life at the end of July, and within less than two weeks they are associating Jeremy with anti-semitism!

        I would suggest that after the reaction and condemnation of Israel for its attack on Gaza in 2014, the Israeli ‘PR’ machine, so to speak, saw its opportunity to divert attention away from ‘Gaza’ and garner sympathy for Jews/Israel in the light of the four Jews killed in the kosher supermarket in Paris, and so they came up with the idea of commissioning a poll, and THEN came up with a name to make it appear that some established group/organisation had commissioned it. But there wasn’t actually any group as such, and THAT’s why nothing more is heard about them or from them. Until the advent of JC, that is!

        Yes, I know it’s supposition, but I wouldn’t be at ALL surprised if THAT is what actually happened.

      4. Afterthought: And the fact that there’s nothing whatsoever on their website about the yougov poll ‘they’ commissioned implies of course that there was no website at the time because there was no ACTUAL group in reality!

      5. I just went on the CAA’s website again and put >yougov< in their search engine, and seven results came up, the last of which was just entitled 'Antisemitism Barometer', and dated July 11th, 2016, and just below the stats (on the AB page) with the black backgound at the top of the page, it says '2016-2017' (which is already highlighted), and '2015', and needless to say, when you click on it and scroll down, there's all the info about the yougov poll conducted in January 2015, and the fact that it was posted on July 11th speaks for itself (and of course implies that the 2017 stats were added later).

        Anyway, I then clicked on 'Read Media Coverage' on the right-hand side of the page, and scrolled down and ended up clicking on an article on the Mancunian Matters website (which I've not heard of before), and in an article posted on January 17th, 2015, and with the headline 'Manchester Jews face spike in terror threat due to 'troubling lack of understanding'', it says:

        Last summer’s protests across Manchester against Jewish businesses, particularly towards cosmetics retailer Kedem on King Street, have been accused as anti-Semitic, and one north west Israel support group has called for them to be made illegal.

        Raphi Bloom, co-chair of North West Friends of Israel, said: “The government, police and local authorities cannot ignore anymore the role that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement plays in stoking the fires of anti-Semitism.

        “By organising protests outside Jewish shops that overtly tell the owners, staff and shoppers themselves that they are ‘child murderers’, have ‘blood on their hands’ and are ‘Zio Nazis’ or ‘Nazis’, the BDS movement is guilty of engaging in, and encouraging, anti-Semitism.”

        And then further on in the article it says:

        Last year the CST recorded a 36% rise in anti-Semitic attacks in the first six months prior to Israel’s assault on Gaza, dubbed Operation Protective Edge. Between July 8 and August 27, more than 2100 Palestinians were killed, nearly 30 times as many as the total of Israeli fatalities.

        (Ends)

        Hmm…. 'stoking the fires of anti-Semitism'! Well even if the 'protesters' DID say the things it then claims they said, it's hardly anti-semitic, just as it WOULDN'T be anti-Catholic to call Blair a 'mass murderer' and a 'child murderer', who 'has the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands' (Blair converted to Catholicism some years ago as far as I'm aware). But then again, it wouldn't surprise me if it's complete fabrication, concocted and contrived to demonise the BDS!

      6. Apologies, the last sentence of the first paragraph in the above post should have read:

        ‘….. and the fact that it was posted on July 11th 2016 speaks for itself (and of course implies that the 2017 stats were added later).

  7. Tory MP “tried to stick his hand down my trousers” says male Labour MP.
    “I was obviously just looking for evidence” says Allan, all innocence… 🙂

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