No one in the Labour Party expects unbiased reporting by the Tory media. That Tory media includes the BBC, which has, in fact, been one of the most biased sources over recent years. That the Tory media should support the Tories against Labour, is then taken for granted. But, it is quite clear that this also extends to the media's support for the representatives of the Tories inside the Labour Party, primarily in the Parliamentary Labour Party, which again demonstrates the BBC and Tory media's support for the establishment elite against the majority and its democratic decisions. Over the last week, it has been obvious that the pre-planned coup by sections of the PLP, and supported by 172 Labour MP's, and by their co-thinkers in other privileged positions, such as MEP's and council leaders, also appears to have been coordinated with that Tory media, which has acted as its propaganda organ.
I watched the report on BBC News, last night, by John Pienaar, with disgust. His report from start to finish was a biased account of events surrounding the attempted coup against Corbyn, and Corbyn's response to it, along with the response of the hundreds of thousands of party members around the country that are coming to the defence of the elected party leader, and opposing the coup attempts of this handful of entryists and plotters, around the Progress party within a party.
All of this group that have acted unconstitutionally, bringing the party into disrepute, at a time when the focus should be on attacking a Tory party in disarray, were presented as having a natural right, as part of the establishment elite to ignore the wishes of the vast majority of party members. In doing so, they are presented as being moderates, and acting reasonably, when the very opposite is the case. When Ed Miliband is called upon to ask Corbyn to stand down, his statement that he is "No Blairite" is taken as good coin, as though it is all strands of opinion in the party that stands against Corbyn.
Ed Miliband was a better choice than his brother, and certainly better than Cameron. But, of course, Miliband, like his brother, is a Blair-right. They like most of the other Labour MP's, standing against Corbyn, came into the party as career politicians, who had gone through the channels of being student politicians, advisors and assistants to existing Kinnockite/Blair-right MP's, bureaucrats in a range of quangos and charities, that are required activities for the CV's of such politicians, prior to becoming an MP, and jumping on to the grossly extended front bench gravy train that keeps them in a comfortable cosseted existence, often for the rest of their lives.
Pienaar's report, like all reporting by the Tory media, starts from this basic framework, whereby the current establishment elite, such as the 172, are all moderates, and by implication the half million party members who support Corbyn, must be extremists, or as one of the 172 described them "a mob". His report, however, went beyond even that level of bias. It was laden with charged terms and phrases that were implicitly and sometimes explicitly hostile to Corbyn. For example, he referred to Corbyn being "a laughing stock" just by entering the Commons Chamber, at Prime Minister's Question Time.
In the evening, Corbyn addressed a large spontaneous gathering outside the School of African Studies in London. A few hundred people had gathered to hear Corbyn and McDonnell. Corbyn spoke passionately about the work that the Labour Party now needs to undertake to defend workers, women, minorities and the environment, in the aftermath of the referendum result. At regular intervals Corbyn was loudly cheered by the crowd. There was just one lonely heckler, who shouted to Corbyn "What about Europe Jeremy. You let us down". It later turned out that he was a Liberal candidate!
The charge is, of course, false. It was the official leaders of the Labour In campaign such as Alan Johnson and Hillary Benn, who failed to provide an inspiring campaign, partly because they are limited in doing so by their own politics, and the record of their own political actions in the last Labour government in creating many of the conditions in urban areas, that people are responding to, as well as their lack of opposition to austerity measures introduced by the last government.
But, the point is that this was a solitary heckler, who's intervention was quickly drowned out by chants of "Jeremy", by the vast majority of the crowd. But, Pienaar's report carried virtually nothing of Corbyn's speech, just as they carried nothing of the thirty odd meetings he did up and down the country during the referendum campaign, and which thereby facilitated the specious charge of the Progress party within a party that he had not been active in calling for a Remain vote. Instead, Pienaar's report carried the shout of this lone heckler, and then visibly cut the response to it from the crowd, giving the impression that the crowd was actually hostile to Corbyn. This was not just biased reporting, it was a distortion of the truth.
The same has been true of the BBC's vox pops of supposed Labour voters, who the BBC would have us believe are not going to vote Labour because of Corbyn. In fact, all of the actual electoral tests that the party has undertaken have been passed comfortably under Corbyn's leadership, reversing the decline that has been seen over recent years. Even those interviewed in those vox pops give the game away, by setting out as their reasons for not voting Labour, the abandonment of their communities by past Labour governments, past Labour governments whose main representatives are those very same MP's that are now plotting against Corbyn!
Pienaar then talked about the challenge to Corbyn that is expected to come today from Angela Eagle, who we were told was a "left-leaning" member of the PLP. But, as a prominent member of the Blair-right governments of Blair and Brown from 1997-2010, Eagle showed no indication of being "left-leaning", and was one of the primary Labour politicians responsible for the abandonment of working-class communities, which have in turn abandoned Labour over the last fifteen years, and were the main centres of opposition to Remain!
When the Tories last year introduced the Welfare Bill to cut £12 billion of benefits from the disabled and poorest in society, the then acting Leader, Harriet Harman, called on Labour MP's not to oppose it! Angela Eagle, along with her sister Maria, were among those who abstained on the vote. How on Earth can any Labour MP be considered to be in any way "left-leaning" when they cannot even bring themselves to do the decent thing and vote against £12 billion of cuts proposed by a vicious, right-wing Tory government aimed at the most vulnerable in society. It beggars belief, and it beggars belief that the BBC can expect us to believe that they are engaged in anything other than a propaganda war, that they can present the situation in such a way.
In fact, the BBC's reporting across all of its news and politics programmes more resembles war-time propaganda than anything else. That is not surprising, because the BBC, as part of the Tory establishment, is engaged in a war. It is a war in defence of establishment privilege against basic democracy. Jeremy Corbyn is not some radical revolutionary, but merely a social-democrat of the kind of Attlee, or Wilson.
That he is portrayed as anything but that is an indication of the extent that politics has been monopolised, over the last thirty years, by a conservative clique that acts in the name of an establishment based upon the ownership of money wealth. In the past, the ruling class was based on its ownership of productive-wealth, but today not even that is true. The current ruling class is, in fact, the enemy of productive wealth. It destroys productive wealth via its policies of austerity, and its programme of money printing to keep the prices of its paper wealth in the shape of shares, bonds and property inflated.
That model is crashing around the ears of the ruling class, for the simple reason that it has resulted in official interest rates at zero, whereas many businesses cannot even borrow to expand, whilst millions of families have to resort to pay day loans with 4000% p.a. rates of interest. It is crashing, because without real productive investment, their can be no expansion of profits, or the rate of profit, and so the payment of interest on all those shares and bonds, and rents on that property cannot increase, and the yield, therefore, continually shrinks, meaning that sooner or later, the prices of those assets must crash too.
That is not just happening in Britain by across the globe, which is why the political centre is collapsing, as seen in the collapse of Pasok, the rise of Syriza, Podemos, the Left Bloc, Corbyn, Sanders and so on. The old order is dying, and the BBC is simply trying to paper over its demise, in the hope that it will not be consumed in the fire.
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