Pictures of small community event presented as if linked to election campaign – when the real campaign saw hundreds gather and then go canvassing
Supporters of Keir Starmer are trying to dismiss former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s general election campaign as an independent – by ignoring his campaign.
Hack Tom Baldwin has published a picture that he claimed shows Corbyn’s inability to draw a crowd, along with a snarky comment about Corbyn’s popularity:
In fact, the gathering was an Eid event organised by local Muslims that was hit by bad weather. The day before – an actual campaign event – saw hundreds gather, not just to hear Corbyn speak but to go out an hit the doorsteps to reach Islington North voters with his message, as many responded to point out:
Campaigners described it as the biggest ‘conversion’ from audience to canvassers they have ever seen.
Baldwin is a former director of the so-called ‘People’s Vote’ campaign that played a huge role in amplifying the Labour right’s successful attempt to use a new Brexit referendum to sabotage Corbyn’s leadership during the 2019 general election. In 2017, where Labour promised to enact a Brexit for ordinary people in line with the 2016 referendum result, Corbyn destroyed the Tories’ majority and came within a few thousand votes of at least a coalition government. In 2019, after Keir Starmer disobeyed his leader to use his conference speech to promise not just a new referendum, but one with remain on the ballot, a complete flouting of democracy, Labour lost over fifty seats in leave-voting areas.
Now that the job is done, Keir Starmer has abandoned all talk of rejoining the EU or even the single market. Despite this, Baldwin has written a biography that is so fawning that Literary Review considered that it only just “manages… to stay on the right side of the line that separates sympathetic biography from hagiography”. A hagiography is:
an adulatory and idealized biography of a preacher, priest, founder, saint, monk, nun or icon.
At the same time, right-wing libel machine and alleged phone-hacker Lee Harpin – who eagerly shared Baldwin’s misleading post – claimed that 80% of people living in social housing estates back Labour and not Corbyn:
He was quickly put right, with much mirth, by someone who’s actually out canvassing in Islington North, who also pointed out residents’ unhappiness with Labour’s desperate attempts to persuade them to vote Labour instead of for Corbyn – and the often racist comments of the few residents who are clinging to Labour:
Corbyn’s campaign continues to welcome supporters who can help with canvassing, particularly on weekdays. By the sound of it, it will be fun.
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