Watching live, I too did not think that John McDonnell’s Chairman Mao joke was wise, because of the obvious misrepresentation to which it was open in the right wing press. But in fact while the openly right wing media all have a go, they all respect the basic tenets of journalism by fairly reflecting both the content and the context of what Corbyn said:
The Labour shadow chancellor mocked the Chancellor – who he dubbed “Comrade Osborne” – for encouraging China to invest in British infrastructure projects…
After joking about the sale of public assets to the Chinese government, Mr McDonnell said: “To assist Comrade Osborne about dealing with his new found comrades, I have brought him along Mao’s Little Red Book.”
Mr McDonnell accused his Tory rival of selling off Government assets to foreign nations such as China.
He said: “Nationalisation is ok for him as long as its by any other state but ours.
“To assist comrade Osborne in his dealings with his new-found comrades, I have brought him along Mao’s Little Red Book.”
The Shadow Chancellor, who could not be mistaken for Jimmy Tarbuck even on a good day, was essaying a satirical dig at Mr Osborne for becoming too chummy with Chinese investors. He argued that Mr Osborne was nationalising our economy – but turning it over to the Chinese state.
That is pretty plain, is it not? And actually fair journalism.
Yet astonishingly the Guardian ran three whole articles entirely about the McDonnell gaffe. You could read every single word of these three articles and not learn the basic information provided in each of the three Blue Tory papers above. The utterly disgraceful Jonathan Jones, John Crace and Tom Phillips all managed to produce articles which utterly omit what McDonnell actually said and why he said it, to contrive to give the impression that McDonnell was quoting Mao straight and with approval.
As a member of the NUJ myself, I cannot say how much it pains me to see colleagues renouncing every single tenet of professional, let alone ethical, journalism in order to produce a deliberate distortion of the truth. Even the Blue Tory newspapers did not here sink to anything like the depths plumbed by the Red Tories of the Guardian.
Crace, Jones and Phillips have crossed a line and are not journalists. What are they? Paid lying bastards.
The embittered has-been Blairites at the Guardian, by-passed by history and despised by the public, still resentfully nursing their support for the Iraq War and insistence it improved the world, have turned a once great newspaper into a journalistic abomination.
UPDATE: This is absolutely beyond parody. The Guardian have just published a FOURTH article on this subject, by Roy Greenslade, which still fails to say that McDonnell was referring to Osborne’s disposal of British assets to the Chinese state. Instead Greenslade cuts and pastes the most damning comments he can find in the Tory media. Not of course including any of the Tory media quotes given above which, unlike the Guardian, tell you what McDonnell was saying.
When do you think the fifth Guardian article is coming?
No, habby.
I think Erdogan’s just realised he’s been had.
And gone mad.
Why does Habbabkuk say Brent Hoberman is Jewish? There is no mention of it on the Wikipedia page nor any allusion to that. He has been involved in many enterprises, as noted, and has South African ancestry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Hoberman
Is Habbabkuk Jewish? And claiming Mr Hoberman?
R4 managed to give McDonnell a hearing this morning, and despite a little hostility from the interviewer, made his case adequately. However, he stuffed it up in the Commons. He could have made much sport with Xi Jinping’s visit (described as China’s most authoritarian leader for some time) to London in October, and the servile buttcrawling that our Etonian head boy demonstrated then. Might also have mentioned the police attitude to the two demonstrations that accompanied the visit, too. Anti – Maoists – shunted to one side by the police and discouraged. Imported pro-Xi claque, waved through with expressions of delight.
Meanwhile, institutional corruption throughout the UK’s government and commerce, along with nepotism and patronage, are well in excess of anything Mao managed. This country’s on the skids, and sliding very fast.
The fifth Guraudinard attack is here: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/blog/2015/nov/26/john-mcdonnell-mao-george-osborne-public-services
I haven’t paid much attention to Corbyn since he castrated himself, three days after being elected. Has he come out against another war of racial extermination or is he quibbling about details and UN resolutions?
As for the Graun, it’s always been an arsewipe.
PS has anyone heard more about a Colonel in a zionist Einsatzgruppe being captured in Iraq?
“has anyone heard more about a Colonel in a zionist Einsatzgruppe being captured in Iraq?”
Seen it in a number of places.
But looks like it may be fraud.
It’s been suggested the pic is of some other sonderkommando killed in an earlier effort.
Put his name in the google thing and up it’ll come.
Suggest you actually read the report.
William Engdahl is not a fool.
http://journal-neo.org/author/william-engdahl/
I have a couple of his books.
“Un colonel israélien arrêté avec l’EI ? Non, un soldat mort en 2014”
http://observers.france24.com/fr/20151102-colonel-israelien-arrete-etat-islamique-soldat-mort-2014-israel-irak
It is one of the curiosities of British society that, 180 years after the death of William Cobbett, there is still not a popular journal defending the interests of the people.
There have been attempts and some of the, such as the Daily Herald, have been successful. This is not surprising when you consider that there is a much bigger audience for a journal supporting the masses than there is for one devoted to the interests of a relatively small elite.
The problem is that, from Reynolds News to the Herald, as soon as the enterprise becomes profitable there is a temptation to sell it to the highest bidder, whose reasons for acquiring it are, firstly, to stop it from supporting the poor and secondly to make money from its mass readership. Thus it was that the Herald ended up in Murdoch’s hands.
The internet, for the moment at least, offers the popular cause the opportunity of developing a medium which can easily compete with the capitalists’ media. In normal circumstances Labour and the Unions would have seized the opportunity, that neither has is simply explained: both the Trade Unions and Labour are run by cliques which claim to be able to manipulate the media. They do so by counselling supporters to surrender, a strategy that the capitalists embrace. That was why Murdoch embraced Blair and why The Guardian, whose stock in trade is its ability to ‘deliver’ the liberal middle class to the highest bidder, is so intent on squashing Corbynism before it establishes itself. It is, after all, what it did to Foot and Benn by establishing the SDP- now those running The Guardian see it losing its grip, and doing so very obviously. It set out to prevent Corbyn’s election and suffered a humiliating defeat, proving itself to be impotent in a test in which the whole ruling class was counting on The Guardian to employ its influence.
If it cannot squash Corbyn soon its raison d’etre will have disappeared and the auditions for its position will begin. At a time when the entire print media faces an existential crisis The Guardian knows that it is running out of lives.
If Corbyn can hang on a little longer-and Syria offers the perfect opportunity for scoring a cheap victory against the Blair/Cameronians, so weak is their case for war- The Guardian is fucked. And when it dies it will be found that it began as a Cotton Barons’ propaganda sheet, aimed at breaking the unions and co-operatives being built in Lancashire, (its first victory was to prevent Cobbett from winning election in Manchester) and has always been an enemy of the working people. After all in the US Civil War it held that it was “progressive” to support the slaveowners of the south. Nothing much has changed.
30% and rising: US Guardian traffic.
“…While these British publishers see around a quarter of their traffic coming from the U.S., The Guardian and Mail Online are at the higher end, with U.S. readership representing 30 and 35 percent of their overall traffic, respectively….”
http://digiday.com/publishers/uk-publishers-stack-us/
http://off-guardian.org/2015/11/26/cameron-overreaches-with-70000-claim-nobody-believes/
@ Sal Paradise
Very interesting quote. I’m trying to break my Guardian addiction, and this will help. Recently The Guardian has been even more hawkish than The Daily Hitler, and that’s not easy, as we know. But mostly it’s the omissions that bother me, of which the little red book sage is only one. The quote explains a lot, I just thought the editorial staff were Blair-ite liberals who didn’t have a clue; whilst true, it appears there is more to it.
Corbyn getting slaughtered again today. So dull.