Graham Hennessy

POLITICAL NEWSPAPER ARTICLES

Owen Smith’s PR team is apparently claiming victory after colluding with the Murdoch press, and claiming the "winning support" of "500 councillors". 

Oh. I see… 

I was always rubbish at maths at school. But a cursory bit of arithmetic conclusively shows that there is somewhere in the region of 7,000 councillors in the Labour party. So "500" hardly constitutes "winning support". 

This is just getting a little silly and embarrassing from the mass media now. Look, we all understand that our mainstream press are corporations, owned by non-doms, with a clandestine agenda, and if Jeremy Corbyn is elected Prime Minister, they are all going to be a lot worse off due to the taxes they've been avoiding under Blair, Brown, Cameron et al... but their ulterior motive is just egregiously transparent now to anyone with an IQ over 35. 

The current Labour Party Leader was elected barely a year ago on a huge majority. Owen Smith simply has the backing of a few hundred game show hosts and estate agents in suits... Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people are supporting a man that actually cares about humanity, about socialism... however much the PLP and the NEC try to move the goalposts, they cannot truly usurp democracy. To believe they can, is folly. 

This is going to be a landslide. Everyone here knows it. 

The result of this leadership election is going to be humiliating for Owen Pfizer-Amgen Smith and his misguided "Anyone But Corbyn" acolytes. 

When this is over, we really need to have a serious debate from all sides about how best to move forwards. I don't think "uniting the party" is an option anymore, and this is where I think Jeremy Corbyn needs to be more realistic. I think the 5-10% of the party that want to follow a watered-down neocon agenda should just break off, form their own thing, and leave the majority to Labour's true socialist roots.  

That's not said with malice, just an honest sense of practicality. 

DO I FILE THIS UNDER ‘A’ ?

I woke up this morning to the earth-shattering revelation that Angela Eagle has announced that she has cancelled advice surgeries in her constituency of Wallasey ‘on advice from police’. 

Ms Eagle told her local press: “We have been getting so much abuse direct to the office and the advice surgeries are normally done in public, [the police] have sent me an email advising me to cancel them.” 

Excuse me if I appear a tad sceptical… 

Anyone who has been following Ms Eagle’s undulating lurch from one paucity of political substance to the other, will know that her constituency are clamouring to issue a vote of no confidence in her… however, their wishes were curtailed by a somewhat spurious ruling by the NEC to suspend constituency party activity for the duration of the leadership contest … while Ms Eagle was running for leadership and doing her ‘Working Class Northern Gal’ routine (I wonder how the gals in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria feel about her vote to drop bombs on them? …sorry, I digress) 

Now, we are led to believe, she can’t hold advice surgeries, because it’s not OK with the police. 

But one can only imagine how well an "advice surgery" would go for her in the current political climate ... and where people might tell her to file that advice. Apparently, even her dog wants her out, (just a rumour). 

This whole business has - shall we say - a certain unpleasant olfactory presence. The events of the past few weeks would seem to point to the idea that the NEC and the PLP are involved in some sort of clandestine collusion. 

In the interim, I have some advice for Ms Eagle which should be safe enough, and requires no surgery: 

Please. Just. Go. Away. (Woof). 

‘PROGRESS’ IS SUBJECTIVE.

“PROGRESS”. 

A word straight out of the Tony Blair book of PR jargon. 

I’m not knocking the word itself. It’s a perfectly perfect word as words go. One which evokes feelings of positivity. Of moving forwards. Becoming more than you are. Affiliating with corporations. Betraying your socialist roots. (Sorry I got carried away at the end there). 

Wickipedia lists ‘Progress’ as “a political organisation”.  

Great. 

What ‘Progress’ seems to have achieved since its inception in 1996, aided in part by quarter-of-a-million-pound yearly donations from that famous beacon of Labour, Billionaire Lord Sainsbury, is to set itself up as a party almost unto itself inside Labour, backing individual candidates and policies. It has a huge influence in The Labour Party, but is rarely talked about in the mainstream press, which instead seem to have the typical corporate cheerleader daggers out for ‘Momentum’ - a true political organisation, with no corporate affiliation, largely made up of people with a desire to affect egalitarian change and back true socialist values. 

The Vice-chair of ‘Progress’ reads like a who’s who of the neoliberal movement, counting among its ranks such stalwarts of the centre-right as Jenny Chapman, Stephen Doughty, Tristram Hunt, Dan Jarvis, and Liz Kendall. 

A perfunctory glance into the background of Tristram Hunt reveals that he was Lord Sainsbury’s personal spokesman before he graced the Labour party with his presence as an MP. 

Progress also took money from Goldman Sachs, and The City Of London Corporation. It has an agenda rich in pro-privatisation and pro-corporate policy. It has campaigned in the past to reduce trade union influence in the Labour Party. 

It appears we live in an age where there are forces at work which are determined to subvert a quite beautiful human ideology like socialism, and use it as a vehicle for the dreams of individual avarice. In the Third Millennium, rampant capitalism and corporate hegemony have a ‘Momentum’ of their own.  

It's called ‘Progress’.