UPDATE
Ms Stella Creasy is offended by this article. At 8.14am this morning 5 December she tweeted:
“This is just an offensive and wrong article and I hope Mr Murray retracts.”
Nothing in it is wrong to the best of my knowledge, but if anything is, I should be most happy to retract it. Nobody has indicated anything is factually wrong so far. I have changed the title of the post to be literal rather than sarcastic, because that was the only thing about it that was “wrong”.
But offensive? Really? She must be a very shrinking violet indeed.
Given that the whole point of this article is to suggest that Ms Creasy believes she should be above criticism and above democratic accountability, for her to describe the criticisms in this article as “offensive” purely proves my point. It is not offensive. It is legitimate criticism of somebody who lives off my taxes.
For me, the inevitable conclusion is that a woman whose Wikipedia page states “Creasy has aristocratic family connections on her mother’s side, including with the Howards, Earls of Carlisle (through whom she is related to Polly Toynbee), the Cayzer family and the present (9th) Viscount Gort who is her fourth cousin” believes she is not answerable to the hoi polloi.
If she regards this article as “offensive” and something that should be retracted, and given she described the extremely polite vigil in the video below as “intimidation”, I think we can all form our own view of Ms Creasy and her sense of entitlement to rule.
For the benefit of the media, she is currently organising a “public meeting” with in fact a highly selected and vetted audience to be seen to be “open and democratic” and justify to her constituents her decision to blow up Syrian children. Expect wall to wall media coverage of stooges coming out saying she convinced them.
The original article of which she complained starts here:
There is a very natural temptation for members of the SNP to laugh without sympathy at the universal media hostility faced by Corbyn and his supporters. That is because we faced an equally massive and equally unrelieved torrent of biased media propaganda during the referendum campaign, and then the entire Labour Party, including its left wing, not only did not condemn the biased media but actively sought to promote it.
On top of which the corporate media is in utter confusion in Scotland, and still largely under instruction to boost Labour, it being at least unionist. The peculiar result of this is that an alien landing in Livingston and following the media would come to the conclusion that John McTernan must be leader of the country, given his ubiquity on media and the extreme deference shown to him, especially by the state broadcaster.
I am however of a peculiarly forgiving disposition, and take the view that two wrongs don’t make a right. What is by any standards fascinating is the way that the media use precisely the same tactics against Corbyn they used against the SNP. First you have the expressions of scorn, of incredulity that such a view could be held, the dismissive body language of presenters, the comment of “unelectable” presented as fact.
When all that does not work, you get the portrayal of anybody putting forward a view outside the neo-con consensus as fanatic, desocialised and violent. We experienced precisely this with the massive “cybernat” campaign of the mainstream media, in which independence supporters were presented as hideous thugs and bullies. This is precisely the narrative which is now being relentlessly deployed on all media for the last 24 hours against the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. The narrative is reinforced by promoting a celebrity “victim”, preferably female and blonde. Step forward J K Rowling the first time, and Stella Creasy now.
Here is a shocking video of the hate-filled mob which besieged Ms Creasy’s constituency office, with the result that her staff dare not go to work and she herself felt intimidated.
Demonstration outside @stellacreasy’s Walthamstow constituency office against war in Syria – video @rhodri_jones
https://t.co/O9ULmc6ofU
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) December 1, 2015
Terrifying, wasn’t it? The truth is this was an extremely polite and quiet bunch organised in fact by the local vicar Stephen Saxby, who writes in Red Pepper:
This week I took part in a vigil with a wide section of the local community. I am deeply saddened by the misinformation about the vigil which has circulated in the media, and grateful to Sue Wheat for correcting the misreporting of the vigil.
I am also surprised that some in the party appear to be overly influenced by irresponsible coverage in the media, such as the Mail’s description of the peaceful people on our vigil being called ‘Hard-left hate mobs’ and the Mirror stating ‘Vicars, imams and net trolls target MPs’.
I am shocked by Tom Watson’s statement on Radio 4 today that ‘any Labour members on that demo should be removed from the party’.
At the same time as I condemn intimidation of MPs or their staff, I reiterate that the vigil was not intimidation, and condemn those who seek to portray democratic, peaceful actions as such. This is also is a form of intimidation.
For my part, I shall not be intimidated into not speaking on issues about which I am passionate and alongside others within and beyond the Labour Party.
I refute the erroneous allegations about me and about our peaceful vigil, and look forward to continuing to support Stella Creasy as MP for Walthamstow, and the campaigns to elect Sadiq Khan as mayor and Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister.”
It is astonishing that Tom Watson says that anybody in that video should be expelled from the Labour Party, and that the entire mainstream media has described it as “intimidation”. There really is a genuine attempt to delegitimise even the concept of dissent from the neo-con war agenda.
In truth, we all know that social media abuse does exist to a certain extent, just as abuse exists in every other form of human communication. But the one thing we learnt for certain from the Scottish referendum campaign, is that the media will report constantly any abuse allegedly from the anti-establishment camp, but will ignore the at least equally bad and quite possibly much worse torrent of abuse from supporters of the other side of the argument. The absolutely false connection of social media aggression uniquely to anti-establishment politics is an organised media propaganda trick as morally disgusting as it is pernicious.
The object to delegitimise a political view – be it Scottish Independence or Corbynism – is taken further in the current example. There is a concomitant media campaign to portray as an affront to democracy the idea of MPs facing reselection by party members – to portray the idea that an MP should have a lifelong right to the party nomination as norm.
This is a complete inversion of truth. The idea that MPs should be subject to reselection by members as the candidate at the end of the term for which they were chosen, is obviously in reality the more democratic. Should an MP be deselected, they have the democratic option to stand as an independent if they truly believe the voters were electing them, and not the party.
A final word on Ms Creasy. She has belatedly come out and denied the false reports all over the media that demonstrators gathered outside her home – though anyone who thought the Porsche Cayenne driving, Oxbridge Ms Creasy lives in a terrace in Waltham is very naïve. She is a fanatic supporter of Trident missiles and of any bombing opportunity going, and is precisely the sort of MP everybody should be trying to get rid of. Here is Andrew Neil exposing her for a shallow careerist fool:
Presumably that ranks as intimidation and abuse.
sorry to hear about you friends addiction to alcohol, Glenn, but now words will move that heavy stone off your heart strings.
I see we have two new ISIS specialists, Fred and RD, who obviously have lived among them for a while.
How do you connect with your informants? via satellite?
here is yesterdays story, in English, about EU satellite operators playing dumb and deaf with regards to cutting off those dishes that are in Syria.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-uses-satellite-internet-to-spread-message-a-1066190.html
” Satellite operators and their distribution partners generally can determine the location of the equipment they are supplying. When they install satellite dishes and configure Internet access, their customers are required to provide their GPS coordinates”
So how can wee best interfere in their communications, and, ehem their proxies finances here in London?
Thanks Robert, I appreciate your interest, you are a good man Robert!
=================
Herbie your excellent analysis needs no further elaborations:
The “deregulation” of the city that was started by the she devil M. Thatcher that paved the way for the likes of wonga et al with Mafiosi loan shark practices becoming the new “normal” and “legal” that in turn is the tip of the iceberg of the weaponisation of the financial concepts, that is seeking to level the playing field with the most corrupt practices in the way of not falling behind the competition!!
The lowest plateau probable being the reference and standard, dose not bode well for any workable future, as the system is grinding to halt and becoming stagnant as it is geared to only benefit the Oligarchs and their hand picked vassals and chums!
========
War on Terror is a nonsense that is getting peddled and has become to be accepted. Terror is a tactic, as in Night attacks, as in the Dawn raid, as in Laying ambush!!! There can never be a war declared against any tactics and if there is such a war, it is a comical nonsense. However this slogan has come to covertly denote the war of religions!
After the fall of USSR the only credible enemy that could ensure the huge defence contracts to be handed over to the relevant contractors whose insatiable appetite for the tax payers funds knows no bounds. As these were doing quite fantastically given the missile gap, sub marine gap, bomber gap, and any other gap that any contractor could think of and a get a hack to write up on in the rags!
USSR gone and no other enemy in sight those bent on exploiting fractures and divisions had to find a new arena for their wars and readjust the threat matrix to get on with funnelling the torrents of the tax payers funds into the profiteers and contractors accounts. Hence the notion of AQ, Daesh, et al, as well as the usual propagandists that are promoting a religious war, trouble is the enemy has not got much in the way of hardware, other than “IED”, “Barrel Bombs” (gas bottles filled with explosives) and Toyota four well drives!
Hence the narrative and the attention thereof cannot be on the ferocious little Yorkshire terriers snapping at our ankles and oh the humanity of it all!!! Instead the attention is on the zombie like “tayyyyrrrreer$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$T$” who are hiding under every bed in every community and their hatred runs deep and can strike any minute now!
Fact that personal liberties that we used to take for granted have long disappeared, along with heavier luggage allowed on the air plane and taking your won bottle of drink and much bigger hand luggage allowed on board the passenger liners have gone the way of our lost and buried personal liberties and instead we are told we are safer from threat that has the same death rates and those drowning in their own bath water or falling down the stairs en-route to the toilet!
Follow the money and see who has been coining it, and how the money is being spent, take away the rent subsidy for the poor and make them homeless and send in the tornadoes to drop £30,000 pave way missiles on Syrians!
“paved the way for the likes of wonga et al with Mafiosi loan shark practices becoming the new “normal” and “legal””
Absolutely, Fedup.
That’s why Creasy drivelling on about how she took on Wonga is such bollocks.
Like Western medicine, they deal only with the symptoms rather the disease.
The disease is private banking. A rather persistent parasite.
The other scam is allowing corporate entities to draw up contracts that suit themselves and themselves alone.
You’ll see that in everything from the energy companies thru transport to phones and internet etc, in outsourcing and govt procurement.
TTIP etc are but the global manifestation of this phenomenon.
“I see we have two new ISIS specialists, Fred and RD, who obviously have lived among them for a while.”
“The strategy that the likes pf Resident Dissident followed with Franco and Hitler”
“RD from his bath-chair has resorted to the old cartoon bogeyman game.”
Is that really the best you can do – clearly I won the argument yet again.
Mary
“As I have said before, Palestine is the hinge of our humanity.”
______________________
You can say it as often as you like but repetition doesn’t make it true – at least, not for people other than yourself.
It would be interesting if you could share with us why you consider the Israeli-Palestinian problem the “hinge of our humanity”. Why is it more significant (for you) than all other regional or global problems?
Robert Thanks…Aye the wee souls.. one can imagine it.. Cowering in a corner trembling.. a house spared This time.. But just across the street, Their wee best friends are Blown up, or young Lovers sepperated PERMANENTLY.
Fedup Great to hear you are still Doing great.. Kudos man
So, Stella Creasy does not like criticism, has she threatened to call the police yet, the poor wretch? She has voted according to her own reasoning, all of them have, regardless of international law or legal advise.
She deserves everything she has got coming to her and more.
Good update Craig. ‘The lady doth protest too much’. Queen Gertrude.
She would be best advised to shut up pro tempore. I suppose her Red Tory lot are narked that they will never achieve a long term position on the green benches whilst Jeremy is around.
Another Red Tory, Beckett, was ghastly on last night’s Any Questions.
~~~
Mr Fallon has been out in Cyprus seeing how things are going. How about dropping him into Syria itself and then he will get the true picture.
They keep talking about ‘the head of the snake’ meaning IS. But they are the real snakes. Their nest is located at 10, Downing Street SW1A 2AA
Danczuk is now complaining à la manière de Creasy.
She certainly achieved notoriety. She chose the wrong side. What a squealer.
They are so full of themselves. Embarrassing,
“She deserves everything she has got coming to her and more.”
Classy!
Watson tried to fix the Falkirk GE candidate. He tried to fix it so Len McLuskey’s (his ex flat mate) ex partner could be nominated as candidate for the seat.
Blair lost Labour millions of vote. The Blairites were imposed on the constituencies from HQ’s, against the local members wishes. The Labour leader is now elected by one member, one vote. Instead of a consortium of MP’s and Union leaders.
Forget Ms Creasy’s painful embarrassment, the real story is about the Conservative sociopath at party HQ driving a young party worker to suicide with his bullying.
he also deserves everything he has got coming to him, so does Lord Feldmann.
Maybe thats what our trolls here should concentrate on, the scum in the Government who are trying to cover up their putrid HR/PR disaster.
The Tories have started saying ‘Daesh’. To divert from their funding and arming ISIL/Daesh. Or their Muslim backers/voters have started to complain. In the North of England they have lost support and voters. Losing support in Oldham. % share of vote and number of voters down.. Trouble ‘at Mill.
The marginal Tory boys wouldn’t want to lose even more support. The opposition might even get their act together and bring them down. If the Blairites see the writing on the wall.
“Spokesman of Iraq’s Kata’ib Hezbollah (Hezbollah Battalions) popular forces Jafar al-Hosseini disclosing that captured ISIL leaders have acknowledged receiving logistical backup and intelligence support from the US.”
Well its from Hezbollah so it must be true!
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/haters-gonna-hate
Trying to change the issue away from bullying Tory’s are we? their cover up is far worse than the Stella Creasy show.
“Mr Johnson has said the blame should rest with Lord Feldman – an old university friend of David Cameron who was co-chairman with Mr Shapps until the general election in May – and has called for his resignation.
“I’m sure they thought they could sweep us under the carpet the levels of denials or obstruction proved to me that they had no real intention of changing their ways so we just had to keep on pushing and pushing and pushing and eventually the dam broke,” he added.
“I’m sure Lord Feldman was aware what was going on because my son made his complaint directly to him and in my mind the tragedy rests on his shoulders.”
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/politics/watch_father_of_bullied_wisbech_tory_calls_for_culture_change_in_conservative_party_1_4336591
don’t think a cultural change will do the trick, maybe they should flood Tory HQ, sow some grass seeds and raise some cows instead.
Am I the only one to feel disquiet at the spectacle of MPs who voted to bomb another country complaining that they have been abused on Twitter? In the 1940s when MPs voted to bomb Germany they did so in the certain knowledge that they would be bombed back and either they, or people they loved, might die. More recently they have been able to vote for bombing knowing full well they faced no risk whatsoever. I despise anyone who makes any sort of death threat, but I don’t seriously believe any MP is genuinely in danger and a little psychological discomfort is not such a great price to pay for voting for war.
Doesn’t an MP have as much chance as any civilian of being injured in a retaliation attack???
“Stella Creasy Demands I Retract Article”
______________________________________________
“This is just an offensive and wrong article and I hope Mr Murray retracts.”
______________________________________________
I don’t think the word “hope” translates to the word “demand” in most people’s vocabulary.
Dear Supporter of Veterans For Peace
On Tuesday 8 December members of Veterans For Peace will be discarding medals at Downing Street in response to the attack on Syria.
If you are available please support this action.
Tuesday 8 December 2015
1pm
Meet at Nelsons Column then walk to Downing Street.
Peace
Ben
ps. Our regular video person is away so we are asking for a few supporters to film and take pictures that we can use.
Ben Griffin
Coordinator
Veterans For Peace UK
~~~~
The former SAS soldier whose experiences in Iraq turned him into an anti-war campaigner
4 Jul 2015
Soldier Ben Griffin lifts the lid on the brutal scenes in Iraq that led to him going home on leave one day – and never going back
‘”I was deployed to Baghdad in 2005 alongside the American special forces,” he said. “In Iraq we were told we were out to catch ‘high-value targets. What we were actually doing was attacking civilians in their homes.
“We would sneak up to someone’s house in the middle of the night armed with rifles and pistols, explosives and grenades.
“We would drag them from their beds, put the men in one room and the women and children in the other,” Ben said.
“While interrogations were taking place, I would ransack the house and take their computers, mobile phones, money, banks statements and passports – anything we would consider of importance or value to that civilian family.”
Those operations would take between 10 and 20 minutes, he said.
“The men would be put in plasticuffs which are like cable ties for the wrists,” Ben said. “Any men we found of military age were detained, whether we were looking for them or not. By being there they were guilty of something.”
They would be dragged out with the family’s belongings.
“We’d leave the family with a hole where the door was, their house turned upside down and no males – no breadwinners, no heroes of the family,” Ben said. “We were being told these were dangerous men we were picking up.”
But he no longer believes this was true and said he was left “angry” by the experience.
“The house we were living in was one that one of Saddam’s henchmen had lived in,” Ben said.
“The prisons we were using were the same prisons. We had replaced Saddam [Hussein] with us. We had appropriated his palaces to become military bases.
“It tore me apart.”’
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/former-sas-soldier-whose-experiences-9587688
Daddy, I don’t want to be an M.P. anymore! It SUCKS! My bestie Thandie says like fuck it; WHAT DO YOU MEAN I pestered you to buy it for me, Daddy YOU SAID I would be good at it; It sucks, that’s what, people on the social media circuit, people I don’t even know, they call me a homely fatass. They say I’m dumb! They criticize everything I do, can’t you sue them? Are you going to let them speak to your daughter like that? This is worse than than that monster Nunn with his six offensive and terrifying 140-character attacks, it’s exactly the same kind of sexual harassment that the poor bare-breasted black pickaninnies of Africa have to face. I want to be a Viscount like Gorti; Why not? What, can’t you afford it now? Are we impoverished lower-class chavs all of a sudden? Don’t you even have enough money to lift your daughter out of the fucking bottom billion? No I don’t want to go to Treetops with Mother THIS SUCKS IT SUCKS IT SUCKS
“Trying to change the issue away from bullying Tory’s are we?”
I have no problem with bullying Tories been exposed having never been one and having campaigned against them at many elections – but I think it is you that changed the subject in the first place. If you want to annoy Tories might I suggest Guido or similar – you will find plenty there who share your intellectual level and techniques if not your politics.
“In the 1940s when MPs voted to bomb Germany they did so in the certain knowledge that they would be bombed back and either they”
I think you will find that the war started in 1939 (although I appreciate that supporters of Molotov-Ribbentrop may place the start date somewhat later). Those who attacked MPs after the declaration of war would I suspect have been dealt with rather more sharply than those yobs currently having a go at Stella Creasy. Perhaps you might wish to set out what is the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable threatening behaviour – or perhaps you could just remain silent and leave it for the yobs to decide.
So what will turn you into an anti war campaigner Mary – you know the war being waged by Assad against his own people for the last 5 years that has killed rather more people than our response to the terrorists attacking our allies. Or does being anti war mean you can pick and chose the wars that you oppose?
A very rational sounding lady, Lizzie Romilly? was the first to comment on Any Answers today. She is the treasurer of Walthamstow Labour party and wished it to be known that the protest outside the office was peaceful and orderly.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qv4kn
This lady presumably.
https://twitter.com/lizzieromilly
Calm down RD. That’s how wars start.
“the present (9th) Viscount Gort who is her fourth cousin”
I wonder if Craig and others might wish to say who they share a great,great,great, grandparent with so we can all play the guilt by association game?
Creasy is someone I’d literally never heard of till recently. Why on earth she thought she was deputy leadership material is beyond me. I’ve found in my life that there is a certain type of individual who always seeks a leadership position, and regards themselves as innate leader material. They are never all that smart, have no specific leadership skills, and find it hard to hide their arrogance, though they try hard. Parliament is full of these people, and they are easily manipulated by the various psychopaths who actually run the show.
As it happens, I’ve finally concluded that Cameron is also a psychopath. I also had him down as merely useless, but the conniving and dishonesty over Syria has persuaded me that there is something quite wrong with our PM. We really need a battery of psychological tests for our leaders, it doesn’t matter exactly what their politics are, we just need to know they are part of the world of normal people. Blair isn’t.
Of course the issue are the bullyboy tactics of the Tories, and more. Their tax evasion charter, refusing to tackle this chasm of 119.4 billion per annum, ejecting more happiness into the 1%, the crim inals in the City of London, the tax avoiding scum that pays their employees 300 bonuses but can’t pay more than 5 k taxes, multi billion TNCs who screw the treasury 24/7
all these are issues, as are the bombs that are financed on the backs of dead disabled people and the poor, not to speak of those workers in China who provide the wealth for our off shore cowboys.
Its a little primitive to concentrate on the minor misgivings of opposition parties when the real issue are the Government of the UK, their lying, their backward drive on all things human rights, their ignorance of international law, now spreading to ministerial codes of conduct, their ignorance of popular consent.
These are the real issues of today, this Government and their f..k ups, not some plushed up story about legitimate descend from the neocon narrative. get a life RD.
should be 300k above
What do you want the government to do about problems in China?????