Might be worth going and having a quiet lie down….
Intelligence services posing as Jeremy Corbyn supporters could be behind the abuse and intimidation of MPs on social media in an attempt to “stir up trouble” for the Labour leader, the Unite boss Len McCluskey has suggested.
In an interview with the Guardian, the general secretary of the UK’s largest trade union and one of Corbyn’s strongest supporters said he thought “dark practices” would ultimately be uncovered by the 30-year rule, under which classified documents are released into the public domain three decades after being written.
Asked if he believed the online abuse of Corbyn’s critics was posted by people trying to discredit his supporters, McCluskey said: “Of course, of course. Do people believe for one second that the security forces are not involved in dark practices?
“I have been around long enough … the type of stuff that we ultimately find out about, about who was involved in who, the 30-year rule.
Corbynistas are sufficient nutters that they don’t need the security services to do such things.
It’s a personality cult.
I tried to convince a guy I know that he has no hope, and just presented a load of figures. But he became like one of those 9/11 truthers going into deeper realms of fantasy about “deliberately distorted polls” and “manipulation”.
I share our host’s disbelief that this is actually happening, but I’ll note that even if it is, one thing the mandarinate will have learned from the modern enthusiasm for “freedom of official information”, the many exceptions to the 30 year rule, and series of inquiries including Chilcott is that the best defence against being pilloried in public for something that seemed sensible to you 30 years ago is “not to write dodgy shit down”.
Any operation against Corbyn or Momentum is likely to be in or around London or other major cities, therefore can be buried in training, justifiable operations against known terror supporters (it’s not as if Corbyn’s many ‘friends and acquaintances’ in Irish and Islamist terror groups don’t meet up with him and his), or merely moving around the capital.
Do the Corbynistas think the Tory activists/supporters who publicly express their hope he stays as leader are some sort of double bluff?
McCluskey – the 21st century’s answer to Arthur Scargill. Just as loud and twice as mad!
The man is seriously off his rocker. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous as hell with it…
The historians amongst you will be able to tell me if the politics of today is same as it always has been. I know it mirrors the dying years of the Roman Empire but apart from that has their ever been such a corrupt time with so many nutters and criminal types in charge or trying to be.
In the USA there is Clinton, Trump and Obama the first should be locked up in prison, the second should be impeached for his race relations and foreign policies failures and the third is likely to start many conflicts home and abroad.
At home we have Corbyn, Tom Watson(drag every bodies name through the dirt as long as he does so using parliamentary privilege), Margret Hodge (tax avoidance not for anybody except her)union conspiracy theorists, the motley crew of Labour MPs and one party state Sturgeon(who wants out of the UK into the more tyrannical undemocratic arms of the EU where she will have no powers at all). Not one of them a has rational bone in their bodies. Then we had the deceitful and lying duo of call me Dave and George. So may politicians out to line their own pockets and further their own interests. Fortunately there are some exceptions and they appear to be in government presently. Although at the whim of a socialist and progressive leaning public that could at some point change that and the nutters, corrupt and incompetent could be put in charge as is soon to happen in the USA.
It’s been far worse in the past, especially in the US.
“the third is likely to start many conflicts home and abroad”: if that is intended as a reference to Trump, it may well be the wrong way round. O has been a tepid warmonger, Hillary is certainly a warmonger; Trump has spoken out against America’s stupid and reckless propensity to invade and provoke. Whether he’d live up to those words is the great unknown.
The last comparable Republican was Reagan, who decided that the perpetual threat of nuclear war was madness; he lived up to that view and ended the cold war. As it happens he won it, but his ambition was simply to end it.
You have to remember that until W’s folly, it was the Democrats who had been, for a century, the warmonger party.
Antisthenes,
I don’t think so. Even in the past, I thought that some of the worst politicians were at least somewhat respectable.
I do think the following has happened: our lives are less and less affected by politicians, to the point where they are less and less important. They still matter, but it’s not like they’re running the telephones, cars or buses. There’s no imminent threat of invasion from France or Germany.
In thinking of what Antisthenes says, alas it has always been so. The situations change, but bun-fights, back-stabbing, hypocrisy and downright unscrupulousness are part and parcel of politics. Everywhere.
E.g. I’ve just been reading a potted history of Serbia up to 1914. It really does read like The Prisoner of Zenda, with corrupt elites overthrowing each other amid a rural illiterate peasant population.
And splits in the Labour Party… Ramsay MacDonald and the National Government ring any bells ?
SNP superficially looks similar to Sinn Fein in Ireland in 1919.
The difference today is immediacy: 24 Hour news needs something to fill the time and Teh Interwebs allows any crack-brain to spout drivel to a potential audience of billions.
But even then, remember that there were 3 newspapers in London alone that produced editions throughout the day and it was possible in cities to post a letter in the morning and have it delivered that afternoon not to mention telegrams. The BBC didn’t broadcast on the wireless throughout the day, but with a flick of the dial, one could find English language broadcasters operating from the Continent ( that’s how Roy Plomley started, for instance ).
Terrorism is also nothing new – just the perpretrators change: Fenians, anarchists, communists, fascists, Jews, Palestinians, Jihadists… next it’ll be Remainers.
It’s just that technology improves and with it the toll – it is a sad postscript to mention Munich, where an 18-year old, depressed and psychotic has killed 10 people ( 9 under 20 including himself ) with a Glock and a bag of 300 rounds. In the past it would have been someone’s service revolver that he’d procured…
Anon makes a useful point
“They still matter, but it’s not like they’re running the telephones, cars or buses. There’s no imminent threat of invasion from France or Germany.”
Again it goes in cycles and also depends on where one lives. The GPO took over (wired) telegraphs and telephones early on (1880s) London Transport was nationalised in the 1920s ( out of practical reasons), but the majority happened after the War. State and private monopolies exist everywhere even in the USA – at the moment there is a big fight in Germany because betting shops are endangering the states’ monopoies on gambling.
Invasion threats are part and parcel of the Bogeyman and Hobgoblin Threat (real or imaginary) that has always existed and governments exploit to distract the public. Today’s favourites are climate change and Jihadism. In the past it was the IRA or the Cold War or the miners. The desire for repression and control is always there.
(sorry me again – last post for a while )
Dearieme is right, but we have to remember that Reagan was truly ideologically driven and his avowed aim was to defeat communism. That’s how Star Wars came about – push the Soviets into an unwinnable arms race that would bankrupt them and at the same time reduce nuclear stocks. He was helped by the sudden deaths of successive Soviet leaders and the accession of a chap who saw that the game was up.
If I were a member of Mr McCluskeys union, I’d be calling for his head. This is the prick who supported boy Miliband and is now chucking money at a confused and Stalinist geography teacher.
not exactly picking the winners is he?
a confused and Stalinist geography teacher
That’s no way to talk about Mrs May!
McCluskey faces re-election soon, and his executive is largely hard left Corbynistas. So I think he’s playing to his gallery: he wants the executive’s support, and he is feeding their paranoia.
Dearieme, I think you’re doing the man who said, “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose,” a disservice.