I have just been watching BBC's "Dateline London". The discussion not surprisingly included the challenge to Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party. Iain Martin, Editor of CapX, commented that the Labour Party was dead, not unusual for a right-wing Conservative to claim, but then went on to claim that the Labour Party had been taken over by the SWP! Sitting next to him was Polly Toynbee of the Guardian, who did not challenge this ridiculous notion.
It would be tempting to think that Martin's claim about the SWP was just the same kind of propaganda as his claim that the Labour Party itself was dead, but I don't think that is the case. I think it simply reflects that a) these journalists and other pundits from that milieu, find themselves in a world that they cannot understand that the only way they can try to understand events, is to make up these ridiculous fantasies, to believe in b) they are incredibly ill-informed, but get away with bull-shitting their employers, and anyone silly enough to buy the things they write, and c) they are obviously incredibly lazy, because even five minutes research on the Internet would disabuse them of the utter bollocks they espouse.
It would take less than five minutes, for example, of online research for their to find out from the SWP itself that it utterly opposes any activity within the Labour Party, and has done so for decades. A similar amount of time would disabuse them of the notion that the Socialist Party of England and Wales has any such interest either. If they don't believe what those organisations themselves have to say on the matter, they only have to read some of the other discussion on the Internet in any number of left-wing forums, where other left-wing groups criticise the SWP and SPEW, for their sectarian attitude towards the Labour Party, and failure to relate to it, and its members.
Either these journalists know that to be the case, and they are simply lying in order to spread disinformation amongst the wider public, to justify their own anti-democratic positions in relation to the Labour Party and its members, or, and I think this is more likely to be the case, it is simply easier for them to believe that this is the case, because it fits their preconceived world view, and is the only way they can rationalise the fact that the vast majority of the Labour Party, stands in opposition to it. And, starting from that preconception, they are too lazy to bother with even the most basic checking of facts. In fact, they are just as bad as those bigots I referred to in a previous post, who are not just wrong in their interpretation of facts, but bigots precisely because they do not want to allow the facts to get in the way of the preconceptions.
But, the claim is, of course, as anyone on the left knows totally ridiculous for other reasons. At its height in the 1970's, the SWP had no more than around 3,000 members. The Militant, now the Socialist Party, claimed around 10,000 members, but in reality it was probably no more than 5,000 at most. In both case, the numbers that were really active was much smaller. But, today both organisations number their members in hundreds not thousands. At best together both organisations, along with other such sects might total around 3,000 members. So, how on Earth could organisations that amount to no more than 3,000 even if they were all members of the Labour Party, which clearly they are not, because the SWP and SPEW reject activity within the Labour Party, have taken it over. How on Earth could they outweigh the half million people that have joined the Labour Party as members, or registered supporters?
It is clearly nonsense. Moreover, we all know that these right-wing journalists have connections with the secret services that have their own agents working in the various sects. Some of those journalists have themselves worked for the secret services in the past, some went on to be novelists, writing spy stories. So, if they don't trust what the sects say themselves about their own activities, don't trust what others on the left say about the activities of these different sects, why don't they just ask their friends in Special Branch or MI6, for the information? They would confirm to them that they are talking bollocks.
If these very highly paid journalists are so out of touch, so badly informed about the world they live in, and the things they pronounce upon, with such apparent knowledge and authority, its no wonder that they are completely lost when it comes to understanding what is going on, and continually get things so wrong in what they think is going to happen. We are often told that the problem with the Internet is that it will always require professional journalists to do all of the objective checking of facts, the research and so on that everyone else relies upon. But, its increasingly obvious that those supposed professional journalists, with a few honourable exceptions have been very far from doing any objective research and analysis.
Its no wonder that the number of people buying newspapers has continued to decline. Yet, these journalists continue to get their employers to pay them huge salaries, way beyond what any ordinary worker could expect. And a completely incestuous world is created by those journalists, as one set of journalists, as with Dateline, then invite on, as their authoritative sources, other journalists, who pump out this unsourced, ill-considered garbage as though it was gospel truth.
Its no concern of mine whether the owners of the newspapers and journals that employ these hacks, are getting screwed royally in paying huge salaries for a load of bilge, but if I were the owner of one of those publications, I think I would rapidly be showing them the door until such time that they could show they were worth their coin.
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