“There is not one story on any election anywhere in the UK that the BBC will not spin into a problem for me. It is obsessive beyond belief. They are obsessed with trying to damage the leadership of the Labour party and unfortunately there are people in the Labour party that play into that.”
“How shallow, facile and ill-informed many of the supposed well-informed major commentators are in our media”, shaping a debate that was “baseless and narrow”.
Jeremy Corbyn
The BBC are pushing the story, from ‘sources’, that Labour deliberately sabotaged the Remain campaign…
Corbyn office ‘sabotaged’ EU Remain campaign
Documents passed to the BBC suggest Jeremy Corbyn’s office sought to delay and water down the Labour Remain campaign. Sources suggest that they are evidence of “deliberate sabotage”.
One email from the leader’s office suggests that Mr Corbyn’s director of strategy and communications, Seumas Milne, was behind Mr Corbyn’s reluctance to take a prominent role in Labour’s campaign to keep the UK in the EU. One email, discussing one of the leader’s speeches, said it was because of the “hand of Seumas. If he can’t kill it, he will water it down so much to hope nobody notices it”.
Now I’ve read that quote from Milne somewhere before, a while back now, unfortunately can’t find the link…anyone find it? Post below. Why is there not more of that quote with the context that is needed? What is he trying to ‘water down’?
Why is the BBC pushing this now if the quote and Corbyn’s coolness about the EU were out pre-referendum? Are they trying to cobble together a case to say the referendum was illegitimate and a ‘fraud’ and so should be rerun?
Why not publish this before the referendum? Did they not want Labour voters to now that Labour didn’t really support the EU? If so who is committing the fraud here…Labour, the BBC or both?
No surprise perhaps that the author of the BBC story is Laura Kuenssberg….is this merely a revenge hatchet job after tens of thousands of Corbyn fans signed a petition calling for her to be sacked over her reporting.?….
Milne is a supporter of the EU, in principle, just not in its present form which he believes is run by aristocrats and big business…would he seriously be trying to kill Labour’s support for the EU?
The nationalist right has long set the agenda. Labour should back a referendum and make the progressive case for chang.
The modern EU [ has given us] a failed neoliberal model of capitalism the force of treaty, entrenching deregulation and privatisation and enforcing corporate power over employment rights.
The EU’s profoundly undemocratic and dysfunctional structures have been brutally exposed by the eurozone crisis and the devastation wreaked by Troika-imposed austerity.
The fallout from that crisis means the EU will in any case have to be restructured. Given those circumstances and the Tory commitment, it would be both wrong in principle and politically foolish for Labour not to back a referendum.
What would be fatal would be to allow the nationalist right to continue to dictate the EU agenda and wrap itself in the mantle of democratic legitimacy. The terms of debate have to change – for the sake of both Britain and Europe.
In 2015 he said exactly the same thing…..the EU needs reform but is good in principle….
The case for radical change in Europe can’t be left to the nationalist right
For the true face of the European Union, look no further than the war now being waged on Greece by its troika of euro creditors. No people have suffered more from the eurozone crisis than the Greeks. The victim of rapacious European banks, a corrupt elite, and a half-baked, lopsided currency union, Greece has paid a pulverising price for the financial crash and eurozone meltdown.
The Greek radicals hoped they could change Europe. But their experience has underlined how deep is the elite’s resistance to genuine reform.
Far from bringing people together, the eurozone is driving Europeans apart.
If radical progressive change were on the cards in Britain – or any other European state, for that matter – the EU treaties enforcing free markets, privatisation and corporate privilege would be a serious obstacle. As it is, British governments have consistently used their influence in Brussels to intensify corporate “liberalisation” and protect the City interests which played such a central role in bringing the economy to its knees in the crash of 2008.
It’s essential that the case for radical change in Europe – and a break with its anti-democratic, corporate-controlled structures – is not abandoned to the right. The experience of Greece and other troika-blighted eurozone states has hammered home how far the EU is from the benign oasis of progressive internationalism its supporters claim.
As things stand, however, voters in Britain will next year be offered the choice of a yet more corporate-controlled EU, shorn of social protections – or withdrawal on the terms of the nationalist right. In the interests of both Britain and Europe, that needs to change, and quickly.
Not sound like a man intent on burying the EU but one intent on radical reform on hard core socialist principles.
So just why is the BBC saying he sabotaged Labour’s Remain campaign when this quote was about a single Corbyn speech.
This is the closest I can find to the story…and its from the 5th June…and look who’s to blame…
Fresh Labour row as Jeremy Corbyn accused of watering down pro-EU letter
Jeremy Corbyn has caused a fresh row with his MPs after appearing to water down a letter setting out Labour’s commitment to the EU.
The letter, which was signed by around 200 Labour MPs, said the party was “united in arguing that we are better off remaining in the European Union”.
But Mr Corbyn’s office yesterday demanded that line be changed to say that Labour “overwhelmingly believes we are better off”.
One party source told PoliticsHome: “They literally went to all 200 MPs and said ‘Jeremy is changing the letter – here’s the new version, you’ve got an hour to say you want to unsign it or your name is remaining on it’. It is disgusting behaviour. People are very angry and a lot of them think Jeremy is actively sabotaging the Remain campaign.”
Mr Corbyn has faced criticism after a poll last week showed that half of Labour voters do not know where the party stands on the EU referendum.
Although he had been opposed to the EU throughout his political career, Mr Corbyn said he supported it after becoming Labour leader last year.
But he has been accused of not being vociferous enough in making the case for Britain to stay in the EU.
A spokesman for Mr Corbyn said: “Jeremy agreed one letter and that went out signed by the MPs.”
We’ve known for a long time that Corbyn was somewhat cool about the EU, why is it now that the BBC recycles an old story in such lurid terms as ‘sabotage’? They are peddling the language and narrative of Corbyn’s enemies within the Labour Party.
Not often we ‘support’ the likes of Milne or Corbyn here but as always said this site is about BBC bias and here they look to be taking sides and spreading ‘propaganda’ from the anti-Corbyn camp. Nick Robinson must be having puppies. [Maybe as a closet BBC Tory he wanted Corbyn to remain in power as a surefire vote winner for the Tories! LOL]
Jeremy Corbyn is a man of principles, even if some of them border on the deranged. He reflects an old school Labour, from an era when Tony Benn was chic. But he still represents, or rather better represents, the views of many working class Labour supporters. However, the parliamentary Labour Party, for which the BBC acts as a PR machine, genuinely thinks it can jettison those supporters. It believes it can retain ‘critical mass’, depending only on immigrants and middle class left wing liberals, maintaining the cities as strategic assets and abandoning Northern and Midland towns altogether. Mr Corbyn does not fully buy into this ‘vision’, which is why they want him out.
Man of principles? Well, up to a point…..remaining in the EU is that point.
All his previous anti EU comments were removed from his blog within days of him becoming leader of the party.
The New labour project was to turn the Labour Party into a sort of amalgam of the US democrats and a Euro philiac social democrat party…..to neutralise organised labour by balancing it with racial, gender and sexual identity groups, intellectuals and public sector managerialists to utterly jettison and betray the interests of the socially conservative, economically disadvantaged, zero hours, white working class.
Corbyn and his crew are further to the “left” in that they are trying entryist tactics to grab power for their clique but without really changing any of the above….they are globalists….though they call themselves “internationalists”.
They are now a rump, a legacy party….soon to be electorally usurped in their “heartlands” by UKIP….the voice of the disenfranchised and disaffected who come second to the special interest groups, migrants and asylum seekers.
As the red vicar Giles Fraser pointed out….these parties are finished, its pro v anti Brexit that counts now…the new political divide.
I really don’t want to be a compulsory spectator of the BBC’s partisanship within the Labour Party’s death throes (or re-birth, depending on who they’re talking to). It is bad enough to be stuck on the Subway Train of Gloom and Outrage as the Beeb tries to override the clearly expressed wishes of the majority of its viewers and listeners. I really could do without this insider information. Why don’t they just go back to finding Islamophobes under the bed? On the whole, I’d rather wait until the disaster movie comes out – a cross between ‘Duck Soup’ and ‘Brief Encounter’, knowing them..
Best five quid I ever spent. Given me no end of laughs. Now lets see Lame Brain Lammy and Abbypotomus stand for leadership. Given that apparently my pound is worth less I’ll stretch to a tenner. Five quid on each.
Jeremy Corbyn:
*Wouldn’t sing the national anthem and then claimed
a) He doesn’t know the words
b) He does but he was just commemorating the event in his own, respectful way
c) He’ll sing it in future.
*Offered terrorist killers Hamas and Hezbollah his friendship and hospitality but when confronted during PMQs claimed that he merely called them his “friends” in a rhetorical fashion and that he in fact wouldn’t dream of supporting them.
*Was adamantly against Britain’s membership of the EU until he thought it was politically expedient to be for it.
Corbyn never adopted a principle he couldn’t wriggle out of.
“Corbyn never adopted a principle he couldn’t wriggle out of.”
… he’s obviously borrowed the principle of “taqqiya” from his Islamic friends 😉
I didn’t think of that. Well, he’s not nearly as good at deception as they are.