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Yes Owen, that is about right

The likes of Ukip or Donald Trump or the French Front National are understood as manifestations, however unfortunate, of genuine grievances: the movements behind Bernie Sanders, Podemos and Jeremy Corbyn are dismissed as armies of the self-indulgent and the deluded.

For we do get to ask, well, where are the successful applications of the sort of policies being recommended?

Venezuela?

35 thoughts on “Yes Owen, that is about right”

  1. “On these, two of the biggest judgment calls of our time, the left was right and still seethes with resentment that it wasn’t listened to.”

    The left will always ‘seethe with resentment’. Just like water will always be wet, and the sky blue.

  2. JuliaM – August 11, 2016 at 8:02 am

    The left will always ‘seethe with resentment’

    Indeed. It is their most endearing attribute. Long may it continue.

  3. Owen Jones, like Richard Murphy, is at best a fair weather friend; at worst a shit. Who was the MC at all those Corbyn rallies last summer? Who was the big cheerleader in the press? Who knew all about Corbyn’s 40-year record as a nonentity? Who called and is still calling for exactly the policies that only the Corbynistas are offering?

    Owen, like Ritchie, enjoys the purity of permanent opposition, of always being the prophet in the desert, speaking g ‘truth’ to a corrupt world. When suddenly having thrust into their hands the chance,the resource to go to the nation and make their case, they recoil.

    They are fundamentally dishonest men.

  4. I was wondering how I might donate some food to the poor, suffering people of Venezuela. Do those Venezuela solidarity campaigns still exist? Are they organising relief efforts?

    Or were, they in fact in always in solidarity with the ruling oppressors rather than with the people?

    Don’t answer that…

  5. Owen’s take on this is interesting: he’s quite right about the bahviour of the same centrist bit of the Labour Party. He identifies their hypocrisy- he glosses over the Corbyn mob’s equal evils, though.

    The thing that really strikes me is the way he completely believes that a few students voting for an old man to lead their debating committee is evidence of a political revolution. There are now new believers here, the changes to Labour Party rules is just giving us a new way of quantifying their numbers. They are still irrelevant.

    All this is just like getting your bank balance to eight decimal places- it’s a different way of looking at the same thing.

    Quite why the Labour Party has decided to eviscerate itself in public over this is beyond me.

  6. Dishonest indeed:

    Anything other than gratitude for New Labour’s record is regarded as unforgivable self-indulgence. The Iraq war – which took the lives of countless civilians and soldiers, plunged the region into chaos and helped spawn Islamic State – is regarded as a freakish, irrational, leftwing obsession.

    It was a Labour government that took the country to war. If you are in charge, it is your bloody responsibility.

    The left defended New Labour against the monstrously untruthful charge that overspending caused the crash

    Who said that? The charge is that overspending on shite left us in a bad state to deal with the mess, which is true.

    but the failure to properly regulate the banks (yes, the Tories wanted even less regulation) certainly made it far worse, with dire consequences.

    An economic analysis from someone that supported Bolivarian Socialism. Slight credibility gap. Oh, by the way, it’s quality not quantity of regulation that counts. More ill-thought out regulation will fix what exactly?

    On these, two of the biggest judgment calls of our time, the left was right and still seethes with resentment that it wasn’t listened to.

    Ummm… both fuckups happened while lefties were running the show.

    Parallel universe?

  7. Reading Mises Daily a few minutes ago. They were talking about the parlous state of Venezuela today after 14 years of socialism and ended their comment with this quote “The choice for mankind… is between capitalism and chaos” (Mises 1944, 63; 55). “

  8. @Cynic, aah, but you see, Blairites were, and are, actually always Extreme Right (see: twitter, currently).

    So the Blair government was an Extreme Rightist government.

    Hence the Left is always right after the fact.

  9. The scum who support socialism are exactly that: scum. Evil scum.

    Too much of their evil sewage has flowed under the bridge and too many are dead/destroyed for any sort of numpty-ness to pass as an excuse.

  10. @abacab

    Yes, absolutely. Shift them goalposts, Comrade Smith!

    Some good examples of leftie debating tactics in Owen’s Grauniad piece, there:

    – shifting goalposts after the fact, so left is actually right. Check.*

    – misrepresent your opponent’s position (“the monstrously untruthful charge”) to something that suits you, then attack that position that they never actually took. Check.

    No wonder us and lefties just end up talking past each other most of the time.

    * once, I actually read someone stating that Ed Balls was a conservative. That was their getout: he wasn’t a leftie, he was a conservative.

  11. @Cynic, indeed.

    I’ve heard them say that Stalin’s régime was extreme right, due to minor policy differences.

    But when you say that National Socialism differs from communism just by minor policy differences, apparently you’re thick and don’t understand.

  12. Not bad, but not upto the standards of ‘Trump orders assassination of Hilary’ media twisting coverage over in the US and Canada

  13. His implication that only the Left opposed the Iraqattack is simply bollocks.

    And at least when I opposed it I opposed it for sensible reasons: God knows why the Left opposed it. Maybe they thought Ba’ath socialism was their natural ally.

  14. Owen has two monstrous credibility issues:

    1. His cheerleading for the tyrants in Venezuela even when it was obvious it’s all a disaster with ordinary people ransacking supermarkets for food;

    2. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Cameron and Goldman Sachs on the Remain side.

    These should in any sane world fuck his credibility from right and left.

  15. UKIP, Trump and the FN are seen as “manifestations … of genuine grievances” because they get millions of votes from the general public. Corbynites are “armies of the self-indulgent” because they don’t have any support outside their own little circle.

  16. Owen Jones, or more accurately his political contortions, articles and interviews, can make me ill on occasion.

  17. Rob/BF

    I am hoping that in the event Maduro does fall, the new Venezuelan government asks May to extradite Jones and Abbott for their collusion with that regime. It would be sure to solidify her support in this parish certainly….

  18. But, but, but Van_Patten…

    It wasn’t true socialism. They can’t be blamed because it went wrong. That just means that the revolution was hijacked. Probably by the CIA and the bankers. True socialism would have worked. It would. It would!

  19. Dearieme,

    “His implication that only the Left opposed the Iraqattack is simply bollocks” – the difference being that the left reelected Blair after he attacked anyway. The favourite phrase on CiF at the time seemed to be ‘hold your nose and vote Labour’. Where are they now?

  20. After calling Iraq “genocide” a lefty friend in Liverpool justified voting for Blair again with the phrase “that was a one-off”.

  21. “Genocide”.

    They quite literally don’t know what words mean, do they? They just say something that sounds dramatic. Big words for little minds, I guess.

    On Brexit morning, I overheard a posh leftie colleague saying with an authoritative tone that the economy was in “freefall” as a result. What had happened? The FTSE and sterling forex had dropped a bit, then stabilised. Odd kind of freefall that, when you stop falling long before you hit anything.

    Ah, Brexit morning…

  22. It is one of the great political triumphs that the Labour Party has shifted the blame for the Iraq war solely on Blair’s shoulders.

  23. I think Owen is actually, and rarely, right here with the specific quote. In that there are genuine grievances behind the desire to support Corbyn et al. It’s the leaders making the false promises they know from history cannot be kept who are evil
    Their voters are merely deluded.

  24. And at least when I opposed it I opposed it for sensible reasons: God knows why the Left opposed it. Maybe they thought Ba’ath socialism was their natural ally.

    I remember the Left’s opposition to the Iraq War: 90% of it was reflexive anti-Americanism. When Bush started beating the war drums, the Left all said that the sanctions were working. But up until that point, they had been saying the sanctions were killing thousands of Iraqi children and should be stopped. Had Bush decided to normalise relations with Saddam Hussein, such as the manner in which the US treated Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov at the time, they’d have criticised him the same way the US relations with Karimov were criticised. Whatever the US policy was towards Iraq – from war to sanctions to anything – the Left would have opposed it. Most of them even opposed the Taliban being kicked out of power in Afghanistan FFS.

    Also, the Left’s “predictions” didn’t so much come true as they put forward the most bewildering array of possible outcomes and one of them sort of happened to come true. The Left predicted a humanitarian disaster, but this didn’t transpire as a result of the invasion itself: it came about during the insurgency a year later, and the tents put in Jordan before the invasion lay empty as the population knew damned well the US military wasn’t going to kill them. I went to Iraq in June 2004 and sure it was a shithole, but it wasn’t a place you’d need to flee. A few months later that all changed.

    There may have been some Lefties who worried about the vacuum left in a post-Saddam Iraq, but I don’t recall many saying the Iraqis would behave like savages and tear each other – and their country – apart. Lots of talk about Iran taking over, which never happened. And who can remember the “Stalingrad-like defence of Baghdad”? I can. And the talk of the American army getting shredded by the Republican Guard, and chemical weapons being deployed, and a million other fanciful scenarios.

    There were many good arguments to be made in opposition to the Iraq War, and the Left made very few of them.

  25. Bloke in Wiltshire

    Tim Newman,

    A lot of lefties are simply unthinking pacifists who oppose all wars. But you ask them what their alternative is, and they don’t have one.

    Lefties are generally ignorant people who live in a bubble with other lefties because they never have stepped out of the public sector. School, university, education/social work/BBC etc. If you explain to these people the problem with the minimum wage, it’s clear that no-one has ever been over it. Because all their social connections are like them.

    Personally, I opposed Iraq simply because I didn’t think it was necessary. I thought it was about Blair’s ego, his desire to leave a mark, not about British interests or humanitarian need. Sure, Saddam was a bastard, but it’s pretty clear looking at the region that they all are. You can have that bastard Assad bombing civilians, or bastard ISIS raping women. And if ISIS got to run the place, they’d do both.

  26. “A lot of lefties are simply unthinking pacifists who oppose all wars. But you ask them what their alternative is, and they don’t have one.”

    The ILP called for Great Britain to disarm totally in 1936, and just three years later were branding Chamberlain et all as appeasers who had betrayed us.

    In short, they cannot analyse issues or problems beyond the millimetre depth of childish emotion.

  27. Ironman

    After calling Iraq “genocide” a lefty friend in Liverpool justified voting for Blair again with the phrase “that was a one-off”.

    Very good…

    BiW

    Personally, I opposed Iraq

    Blair was a progressive interventionist – nothing more really needs to be said?

  28. Bloke in Costa Rica

    Cynic: re ‘genocide’—that’s an accusation that’s levelled against Israel by the usual scumbags of commie and Islamofascist persuasion. No-one seems to ask them why, given the efficiency and martial prowess of Israelis, there are still Arabs left un-genocided.

  29. Aye, those Israelis sure are some of the most incompetent genociders around.

    Google sez:

    How many Palestinians are in the West Bank?

    There were 3.76 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, up from 2.89 million 10 years earlier. According to the U.S. Census population growth mid-1990-2008 in Gaza and West Bank was 106% from 1.9 million (1990) to 3.9 million persons.

  30. A lot of lefties are simply unthinking pacifists who oppose all wars. But you ask them what their alternative is, and they don’t have one.

    On the contrary, I’ve found most to favour violence and bloodshed provided it harms the United States and her allies and advances their own causes. The anti-war and anti-nuke Left never had much of a problem with Soviet aggression or Soviet nukes.

  31. A daft old leftie of my acquaintance alway likes to say “The USA is the rogue nation”. Alas, W & O have kept proving her at least half right.

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