Noam Chomsky wins - we don't have a free press

I am absolutely shocked by the bias in both Guardian and BBC. Particularly the BBC which has allowed Labour MPs in the rebel group to slander Momentum as "dogs" and "thugs" without the least bit of proof that there is any violence given or threatened by Momentum, which as far as I can see is ordinary supporters of Corbyn like me.

I expected bias in the Murdoch press, and any press which is owned and operated by someone with an axe to grind, but I really expected better fromthe Guardian and the BBC. They say that you only notice how inaccurate reporting is when you are close to a story, but this is more than that. They are using negative words to describe Corbyn, allowing claims that he lost the labour vote on remain although 62% of Labour voters voted remain, nearly as many (1% less) as the SNP who had all their MPs onside and campaigning for remain.

That there are newsnight journalists tweeting unattributed negative rumours on twitter accounts which identify them as being from Newsnight is shocking to me. They obviously are partisan. I feel I've wrongly argued in my head with Noam Chomsky for 20 years that our press are not as biassed as he said, only to have him win the argument, because they are.

The Guardian does publish occasional positive articles, but in the main it is a constant stream of hogwash from the partisan Polly Toynbee - who, I'm sorry, should be disbarred from writing anything at all with such a personal grudge against Corbyn. And neither the BBC or Guardian are challenging the renegade MPs on the fact that they can launch a leadership bid any time, and should do this or shut up if they believe in the democracy in the Labour Party.

There were marches yesterday all over the country for Brexit and those are reported. There were also marches all over the country for Corbyn, and those have not been reported. The BBC have a one line report in their Corbyn article on the website, saying there were marches in Leeds and Liverpool of about a thousand. Liverpool was 3000 at least and there were also marches and demonstrations in Durham, Cornwall, Cardiff, Hull and many other places.

They allow Angela Eagle to spin the lie that support among party membership is decreasing while 60,000 people have joined up in the last week. most of them, if my twitter and facebook groups are anything to go by, are joining because they are appalled by the behaviour of the PLP and the antidemocratic nature of the challenge to the leadership. It's scandalous that they allow her space to say things like that and don't properly balance with some facts.

The Immigration problem

I partially watched Question Time last night, partly because I turned over late, and partly because I turned off early.  It was a frustrating experience, because of the things that weren't said as much as the things that were.

The comedian on the panel, Russell Kane, talked about the attitude of his family towards the result and said that Labour had failed to take up the initiative on immigration and address the problems which the people in the country have with it.  He also gave us a window on the xenophobia, saying that his relatives were dancing around the room declaiming that the immigrants who were undercutting their jobs as plumbers and builders, were "going home".

In a nutshell, this is the problem facing all parties in the wake of the referendum vote.  The Leave campaign made a number of promises they couldn't have a hope of keeping (not least all the money for the EU going to the NHS) and that a vote for "Leave" was a vote for controls on immigration.

The problem all parties face is that it can't be, unless we abandon all hope of trading with EU countries and maintaining a relationship with the EU.  This, I believe, is at the heart of Labour's inability to deal with the immigration issue: any realist will tell you that if you want to do business in future with the EU under the single market, migration of labour will be a part of that.

I'm not saying that I think immigration controls would be a bad thing - I have been astonished at how little planning councils and government do for changes in population - but that they are impossible to impose in the way the Brexiteers promised if we continue to trade freely with the EU.

Now, I know that a lot of the people who voted for Brexit for the reason that they feel they are being unfairly affected by the incoming immigrants, will simply declare that we should give up the single market for that reason.  But then we have the overwhelming problem of how to handle the people who are living here under the freedom of labour within the EU - and all the British people abroad who are happily working elsewhere in the EU.  Untangling that isn't going to happen overnight or next week or next year... it's a complex and very costly exercise you're looking at, with ramifications which extend beyond our borders and beyond.

The rise of racist and xenophobic attacks is going to get worse if we don't do something about it, because the people who are threatened by immigration are not likely to be listening to reason arguments about the impossibility of doing what they were promised.  The problem is that their anger is likely to be directed at what they perceive to be the problem - the immigrants - and not towards the people who really deserve their ire.  The self-serving bunch of fools who made the promises in the first place.

Our country has been strengthened by immigration over the course of centuries - from the Romans to the waves of Jewish and Caribbean and Asian immigrants in the 20th century.  The addition of people in times of plenty was positive, adding colour and cuisine to the country.  A lot of the problems we have at the moment are entirely caused by austerity - the NHS underfunded, social housing sold off or under-replaced, unemployment high in areas where old industries have been killed off or died.  But it is easy to see why people who are directly affected by a drop in income because they are experiencing what they perceive as unfair competition from the immigrant community might place the blame on their neighbour and not on the government.

Solving the problem properly requires investment in the social fabric, to the NHS and the social services and social housing.  I think it also makes sense for there to be changes to the rules on free movement of labour, especially when there is a big disparity in living standards between a newly-joined state and the other places in the EU.  It stops states being able to plan for their populations if there can be mass migration from one place to another without any controls.  And moving because you have a job in another state is rather different from moving to another state because you can make more money there.  We have opted out of being able to influence a change, although it is questionable whether there is a will to make that change in the other countries of the EU.

The people who are doing manual or labouring jobs don't have any protection in the current climate.  They don't have job security, they don't have the safety net that once was offered to them, and they don't have the same level of housing benefit or social security to fall back on if they lose their job or come to the end of a contract.  If they are self employed things are even more precarious.  It isn't surprising that they are the ones who feel most threatened by an influx of people.  They are also more likely to be living in areas where there is cheap housing, which attracts people in similar trades.

In the end, people thought they were voting for a couple of things.  Extra investment for the NHS.  Controls on immigration.  The remain camp weren't able to offer anything to counter those promises except more of the same.  It's only surprising to me that the vote wasn't even more decisive.  And our problem now is that no-one can deliver on the promises made.  And that's going to make people angry.

TL:DR Cheer up! Stand up for what matters for you! Change the world for the better!

My children have been feeling pretty depressed by the result of the referendum, and I think that all the remain camp have been feeling low since the result.  The feeling deepened when it became clear that the Brexiteer plan was “win referendum” and they had no plan in place to deal with the fallout once they did, and the coup in the Labour Party has only made the directionless void in government even worse.

I’ve signed the petition for a second referendum because of the number and size of the lies told to the country, not least that the prospect of a free fall in the markets and prospect of a recession was “scaremongering”.  It is clear that many of the people who voted to leave thought that the gates of the UK would clang shut on the end of the count, and those people are going to be severely disappointed when they realise that the likelihood is that whoever is in government will have to agree a Norway-style agreement to the free movement of labour, which constitutes 80%+ of the movement of EU citizens. So it probably won’t change much.

The ones who thought a vote for leave was a vote for £350 millions plus to the NHS are going to discover that we will in all likelihood be paying the same to the EU and getting nothing in return, rather than the roads and fast broadband and investment for poverty-ridden areas like Cornwall.  If those areas are hoping that government will plug the gaps, they are going to find out how wrong they are.

However, we had an economy and a life before the EU and we can have one again.  During the swinging sixties we weren’t a member of the EU.  The way the country has been over the past ten years isn’t the way I want the country to be.  We’ve been chipping away at the NHS, removing the safety net for poor families, increasingly removing the very things that many people think is drawing others to the UK.  We don’t support families in crisis, we don’t provide for people who are too sick or too disabled to provide for themselves.

We are rewarding the richest in society and not demanding that they pay their fair share of tax, and we are making new laws which favour corporations and companies and not the ordinary people.  We have sold off our water, electricity, railways, and are busy selling off schools and hospitals. 

If this world isn’t the way you want it to be DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Join a political party which has a vision you can share - it won’t be 100%, there are going to be things you disagree with.  I joined the Labour Party last year once Jeremy Corbyn said that he didn’t support tracking, even though I had spent a lot of time fighting the Labour Party over their policies on Home Education.  I am naturally a member of the Green Party, but I couldn’t see that my membership was making any difference to what was actually happening, and so switched to the Labour Party.  If the coup against Jeremy Corbyn succeeds, I will join the Greens again.  

This is an ideal chance to examine what’s important to you, what sort of world you want for the future, and to decide to work towards it.  Too often the future is painted in financial markets and the prospect for interest rates and employment and not in terms of who we want to be, as people.  Do we want disabled people starving to death in their homes?  Children to be hungry at school and to need access to food banks in order to eat?  Hospitals losing money because they are paying profit to private companies? This is what we have now.  We can change it.

If you want a different type of Britain, it is time to stand up and work for it.  If you don’t feel able to join a political party, at the very least, support the causes you support, and write to your MP on a regular basis and tell him or her what you think.  They do take notice if a lot of constituents write - not the rote letters that the charities and pressure groups send out, but personal letters, will have an effect.

Set the intention, to support the things you value, and stand up for them.  I don’t think most people in the country are racist or intolerant of foreigners.  I think we are a tolerant, kind, polite society in general.  Don’t let the binary vote we were faced with change the way you think about other people.  An awful lot of them were deceived into thinking they were voting for the NHS, not against the EU.

And cheer up!  Politics is an artificial world but the sun still shines, the flowers still bloom and we have everything we had last Thursday and can make it through this morass.  And if enough people set an intention to defend the NHS, to improve life for the poor, to make the rich pay their dues, to prevent corporations from avoiding their fair share of tax… then maybe we can all change the world for the better, despite the last week.