Congratulations Jeremy Corbyn.

This picture is from the centre of Liverpool a few weeks ago, one of over thirty rallies Jeremy Corbyn held up and down the country in the Labour Leadership campaign.

They happened everywhere from major cities to rural areas like Cornwall and they represent a new movement which has taken membership of the Labour Party to 540,000 not included affiliated members of Trades Unions.

I did eventually get a vote as a Trades Unionist myself but it was a real struggle.

Many people didn't - there are also lots of stories of people being denied a vote, then contacting the party to say that they were disappointed as they would have 'voted for Smith', as a result of which they magically got sent their ballot paper......and then voted for Corbyn.

Then there's 130,000 people who were denied a vote from the outset.

For the record Jeremy Corbyn won 313, 209 votes compared to 121, 751 a year ago and he pulled in 61-8% of the vote compared to 59-61% last year. 

So that's sorted out now.

End of.

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)
Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

The Labour Leadership Election.

What did I do today?

I casted my vote;

It's been a struggle to get it - I'm not a Labour Party member my vote comes through my union membership, which, luckily, I still have even though work is over for me.

The Labour Party put a few obstacles in my path before I got the vote, even though it's my right. I suspect that many people would have been put off - I wasn't.

It's a funny thing when a political party goes to such lengths to stop its members voting - to the extent of going to court to prevent 130,000 people having a vote that they should have been given.

At the end of the day, 172 highly paid and privileged members of parliament think that they matter more than the views of 100's of thousands of Labour party members and affiliates.

No one has had a harder fight to become and then remain the leader of his party than Jeremy Corbyn. If, as I hope, he wins this vote he will have demonstrated that he is ideally placed to take on the problems of turning this country around and ending the unfairness and inequality of life under the tories.

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)
Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

The lies about Jeremy Corbyn

I'm reprinting this article from yesterday's 'Independent', which reports on a recent study by London School of Economics academics into the media coverage of Jeremy Corbyn's  Labour leadership;


"Three-quarters of newspaper stories about Jeremy Corbyn in the first months of his leadership either distorted or failed to represent his actual views on subjects, a study has found.

Academics at the London School of Economics analysed the content of eight national newspapers between 1 September and 1 November 2015, when Mr Corbyn was first elected

The media researchers found that in 52 per cent of articles about the Labour leader, his own views were not included – while in a further 22 per cent they were “present but taken out of context” or otherwise distorted.

In just 15 per cent of 812 articles analysed, Mr Corbyn’s views were present but challenged, and in only 11 per cent were they present without alteration.

“Our analysis shows that Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader,” Dr Bart Cammaerts, the project director concluded.

“These results relating to sources and ‘voice’ are evidently troublesome from a democratic perspective.

“Allowing an important and legitimate political actor, ie the leader of the main opposition party, to develop their own narrative and have a voice in the public space is paramount in a democracy.

“Denying such an important political actor a voice or distorting his views and ideas through the exercise of mediated power is highly problematic.” 

Examples given by the researchers of distortions include one incident in which Mr Corbyn was presented as having criticised commemorations of the First World War in a 2013 speech. 

The newspaper included in the study were The Sun, The Daily Express, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, the Independent, the Daily Mirror and the Guardian.

In terms of tone, fewer than 10 per cent of articles were judged by the researchers to be positive, while more than half were antagonistic or critical. Around a third had a neutral tone.

28 per cent of articles analysed were based on anti-Corbyn Labour party sources, while 23 per cent were based on pro-Corbyn sources.

Mr Corbyn’s supporters have been highly critical of media coverage around the Labour leader, judging it to be overwhelmingly hostile.

The Labour leader has himself also hit out at the media, banning journalists from asking him questions at the front door of his home.

“We have a party under attack from much of the media in this country like it has never been under attack before,” he said in May.

Or, in other words, the papers have just been lying about Corbyn for the last year.


Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)
Home:helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

Angela Eagle's crocodile tears.

Angela Eagle is due to announce her much delayed challenge to Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of The Labour Party this morning.

But we all thought she was going to do it a week ago - and so did she.

On 4th July, Andrew Pierce wrote a piece in The Daily Mail headed; " Eagle plots her Labour Coup in a Luvvie eyrie; Potential leadership challenger planned tactics in London's £1000 a year Ivy Club"

Pierce went on to describe the exclusive 'Ivy Club' as;

"Much loved by celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Queen guitarist Brian May, the achingly cool private members’ club is the last place you would find Corbyn, who prefers to relax on his North London allotment."

In fact it's a private area above the incredibly expensive 'Ivy' restaurant.

The Mail's source overheard a conversation between Eagle and two advisers on Friday 1st July, discussing whether she should mount a leadership challenge on the 4th or the 5th of July.

The source quoted her as saying;  ‘I shouldn’t have cried,’ in a reference to her 'breaking down' in an interview on radio 4 about Corbyn.

One of the advisors replied "It made you look human but you can't do it again".

It seems to be a characteristic of the Blairites - last week we saw Tony Blair's cynical use of 'emotion' in his post Chilcot press conference.

Now we have Angela Eagle (who is no push over at all), her voice cracking with emotion, whenever she wants it to.

She may be a lot more emotional soon - last week at a packed meeting, her constituency party overwhelmingly passed a motion calling on her to back Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.

We'll see how that plays out after she announces her challenge.

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)
Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neiwlithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

Angela Eagle; a plotter exposed.

We are still waiting with 'bated breath' to find out if Angela Eagle is going to stand against Jeremy Corbyn for leadership of the parliamentary Labour party. She's been threatening to do so on a daily basis for the last 10 days.

I think she.....may do.

If she does, her role in the attempted coup against Corbyn has been well and truly exposed by the Blogosphere.

If you remember Hilary Benn (son of Tony Benn, longstanding friend and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn) phoned him in the early hours of 26th June to tell him he could no longer support him. He was fired and then, on an hourly basis, other members of the shadow cabinet resigned - one by one.

This was an attempt to make it look as though support was slowly and steadily growing; it wasn't.

It was a crude attempt to disguise a coup that had been planned in advance.

One of the first group to resign was Angela Eagle.

Now, thanks to 'Evolve Politics', we know that a friend of Eagle's, Joe McCrea, bought a series of Website domain names like; 'angela4leader.org', 'Angela4leader.com', and 'angela4leader.co.uk' at 6pm on 25th June.

You can check out the story here;

http://evolvepolitics.com/angela-eagles-leadership-website-registered-blairs-pr-man-2-days-ago/

This is the record of when the domain names were purchased;

That was about 8 hours before Benn phoned Corbyn and about a day before Eagle resigned from the shadow cabinet.

McCrea is a PR man for an  NHS Clinical Commissioning group and lives in Derbyshire.

I looked up his LinkedIn entry and found that he worked as a 'special parliamentary advisor' for New Labour, working for health secretary Frank Dobson and then worked at Downing Street for a year helping to prepare Tony Blair's answers for Prime Minister's questions.
Eagle has denied any knowledge of these transactions but has admitted that she knows McCrea.

That should come as no surprise; 'Buzzfeed' has unearthed these Twitter conversations, I'm afraid my copying is not very expert;


  @angelaeagle

Such an honour to chair Labour's NEC & conference Thanks for the flowers now my year is over #Lab14

Joe McCrea‏@jbmccrea 24 Sep 2014

@angelaeagle And a better Chair there could not possibly be, comrade!

3:18 pm - 24 Sep 2014 

McCrea has been busy trying to recruit new recruits to Labour to vote against Jeremy Corbyn. 

I checked out Angela Eagle's voting record and found (unsurprisingly) that she was an enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, while Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were vocal opponents of the war. 

It looks as though the attempted 'Coup' against Jeremy Corbyn used the all planning skills they learned during the Iraq War fiasco.

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)
Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn.

Over the last 7 days a huge battle has been going on; the majority of Labour M.P.'s have been trying to get Jeremy Corbyn to resign as Labour Leader, despite his huge majority won only 9 months ago.

The thing is, any one of them could have stood against him at any time - but they knew they would lose.

If he had been foolish enough to have resigned he could not have stood again under the rules but as Labour Leader they cannot stop him from standing again.

Which is why they were so vicious and rude and why they even enlisted David Cameron, the tory leader, to call on him to go.

It didn't work because Jeremy Corbyn has been fighting for what he believes in for over 40 years - he's dealt with three generations of right wing Labour M.P.'s and watched them, in turn, bring the party down whenever they lost a democratic vote. 

It's no coincidence that this failed 'coup' took place when it did - in the week that 'The Chilcot Report' into The Iraq War came out.

There are still a substantial number of Labour M.P.'s who were selected in the time of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson and still share their discredited politics to this day.

No one would be more concerned about the publication of the report at a time when the Labour Leader responding in parliament happened to be one of the wars strongest critics - a man who has kept up his principled opposition and criticism ever since.

It's no surprise that Corbyn was heckled by those Labour M.P.'s during the debate and why they wanted him out.

But in fact those of us (like Corbyn) who opposed the war in 2003 were right.

There were millions of us.

I watched the interviews of Tony Blair's cabinet - Jack Straw, Margaret Beckett, Harriet Harman and his 'spin Doctor' Alistair Campbell, after the report came out.

They had a script which may well have come from some P.R. company; "there was no deceit".

I watched Blair at his press conference; all crocodile tears and false sincerity. He said that he acted in sincerity on the best intelligence at the time.

Well, here's how the old joke goes;

A young actor is interviewed by a rather elderly and unscrupulous Hollywood producer; "You got style, you got talent, now all you need is sincerity. If you can fake that you got it made."

For the record, Blair and Colin Powell were unable to persuade the U.N. security council because no one believed their lies.

China, Russia and France would not move because their intelligence services told them that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and was no threat.

We went to war based on lies and it would have been wrong even if it had worked out well - it didn't.

No one has a right to overthrow a government they don't like - it's illegal. The only legal basis to go to war is either "self defence" or through a U.N. security council resolution.

Anything else is just plain unlawful - it happens but it's wrong.

It wasn't self defence and there was no U.N. security council resolution authorising war - everything else is just lies. It was an unjustified war of aggression and that was a charge at the Nuremburg trials of the Nazi leaders at the end of the second world war.

The Chilcot Report was scathing; despite what Blair and the others said, this war will go down in British History as an illegal and unwarranted war and it would have been even if things had turned out well.

In fact, somewhere between 150,000 and 1 million Iraqis died as a direct result of this war. We don't know the exact number because the British and American governments made a deliberate decision to not record the number of deaths they caused.

In itself this would amount to a war crime.

179 british servicemen and women died and thousands were injured; sent there by their generals with inadequate equipment and no plan.

The legacy of the war is Al-Qaeda and ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, none of which ever existed in Iraq until after the invasion.

Healthcare, education, infrastructure all destroyed; a country returned to the middle ages by Bush and Blair.

If I seem angry, I am. In 2003 I was on the two giant demonstrations against the war; I campaigned.

At the time we were patronised and ridiculed.

One of the placards the millions of people carried said "Not in my Name" and today that is very relevant. The Nuremburg trials established that it is no defence to an allegation of 'War Crimes' that you were 'following orders' or just went along with what happened.

Blair and those members of his cabinet who voted for war committed War Crimes and should be prosecuted, as should the generals and the Ministry of Defence officials who ran the war.

Quite rightly, Jeremy Corbyn issued an apology on behalf of The Labour Party for what it did in 2003, even though he had opposed the war.

It's time for the likes of Blair, Straw and all the others to go to jail.

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)
Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com