Michael Foster has lost his High Court attempt to stop Jeremy Corbyn having his name on the ballot paper in the leadership election. Alistair and his chums at Portland Communications will be spitting feathers, i wonder what wheeze they will come up with next in their increasingly frantic attempts to overthrow Corbyn, they must surely be running out of options now. Michael Foster is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, a real live bully, which is somewhat ironic given the current attempts by Alistair and his chums to portray Corbyn and his supporters as bullies! An interesting fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no MSM source have pointed out is that the QC acting for Foster is one Gavin Millar QC who just happens to be the brother in law of - - - - Alistair Campbell. Well well well, what a coincidence!
It never really had much business being in the courts in the first place, and perhaps gives some clues to where a lot of the funding is coming from in the first place. Michael Foster was the one at the Labour Friends of Israel meeting heckling Jeremy to “say Israel”.
A few of us on here went to school with a nipper who was de facto director of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East. He was explaining the disparaties of funding to me over Facebook. LFI spent 10mil on getting their candidates into place for Parliamentary seats.
“We (LFPME) got no money”, he said, cheerfully.
You don’t really have to walk on eggshells to say that Jeremy Corbyn is a supporter of Palestinian rights and that the issue has been effectively off the agenda since the 90s.
For sure, if Corbyn had said it he would be flayed in the media, so I don’t really mind that people are all over it!
I would’ve thought it was a pathetic & infantile accusation no matter who was catching the heat. I am v.even-handed srs.
Precisely. And for those who are saying it’s fine to pick Smith up on it because he/his supporters would have picked Corbyn up on …well that’s true but also school playground behaviour. Are you really saying this is what you want the Labour Party to be?
I think you may be missing some context. If Smith wants to bang on about how there was no misogyny in Labour before Corbyn, he is more than fair game for this.
And no, I don’t fucking like it. Labour members didn’t ask for this contest, but we will contest it.
well, yes, someone is overlooking context, but I don’t think it is Me + Fatso!
By saying Smith will get the same as Jo Cox?
No, I’m not missing any context. I understand what has been said, I’ve seen it.
im saying that the playground rules that you seem to say are ok will simply destroy the party. I’m bored of the Labour Party already. It’s being shown up to be the home to massive cunts. I’m not sure I’ll ever vote for them again, no matter who is in charge, and I’ve voted for them at every election bar one (where I tactically voted Liberal).
You’re about four weeks late to the party to moan about people destroying the Party. Possibly nine months too late. Possibly ten years too late. P’raps sir forgets all the time wasted on the pointless Blair/Brown conflict.
The only thing that’s happening here is that Smith is getting pulled up for things he has said. That is entirely fair comment - he has made plenty of them himself.
He said from the outset that he’d campaign “with integrity and decency at all times”. I don’t think he has - hence the meme. I think at the end of it, we’re perhaps going to see a few dozen MPs fundamentally irreconcilable with the new direction of the party. They have to go, in my opinion. The public will not vote Labour if they think we’ve got the wreckers in again.
Originally posted by @pap
Very good write up of the Salford event.
Burgon had an emphatic response to those who claim that “an Islington-based croissant-muncher” cannot appeal to Labour’s working-class base: “by the way, we eat croissants in Leeds as well - we will not be patronised by people from the Guardian trying to tell us how working-class people live.” He makes a credible point. Very few of Corbyn’s critics are themselves obviously attuned to working-class life.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sam-harrison/jeremy-corbyn-salford-manchester_b_11176572.html
https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/43148/Dont+compromise+with+the+Labour+right
The masses love a picture, you know this! 
.
But nobody can believe a word Owen Smith says, just a short perusal of his history compared with his present miraculous conversion to socialism would show you that. Issuing a death threat is a very serious offence resulting in prison time. The police are usually very quick to arrest anyone doing so, after all it is not difficult to trace a sender of an e mail. Presumably Smith has handed over this written death threat to the Plod. Thought not. These increasingly outrageous claims by the New Labour has beens are part of their strategy, dirty tricks are their stock in trade. Mandelson, Campbell and co are past masters at it. Poor old Owen Smith is just being used, ‘useful idiot’ is the correct term i believe. Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely correct not to engage with them beyond issuing a statement condemning ‘all abuse’. He knows that as soon as he responds to a particular so called threat and condemns it, he will immediately be jumped on by the forces railed against him saying,‘ah, so you admit that this threat was made by one of your supporters’. He can’t win. His opponents can just throw out any old nonsense to smear him, secure in the knowledge that it will be dutifully reported as fact by Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC, The Guardian and pretty much the whole of the MSM. Just a few examples from recent times. Labour whip Conor McGinn,(who lets not forget organized and choreographed the rolling resignations of the shadow cabinet ministers, from the whips office where he was laughably responsible for unity and discipline), stated that 'someone told him that he overheard Jeremy Corbyn threatening to ring McGinn’s father, who is a member of Sinn Fein. FFS, my mate told me that Jeremy threatened to tell my dad on me! Of course this was all over the front pages next day being reported as fact that ‘Corbyn threatens Conor McGinn with his Sinn Fein Father’. Then we had Dame Tessa Jowell going on Newsnight telling the nation that Angela Eagle was bullied and received homophobic abuse at a constituency party meeting in Wallasey. A couple of days later it was revealed that Angela Eagle wasn’t even at this meeting. The whole story was a concoction of bare faced lies. Of course there was no retraction, but mud sticks. In the present climate, with Corbyn’s opponents trying every trick in the book in their attempts to discredit him, Jeremy Corbyn is right not to rise to the bait. Let’s face it, if there was anything at all, however minor, in Jeremy Corbyn’s history that is factual, and damaging to him, it would have come out by now. You can take that to the bank. Which is why all they have left is a constant drip drip of increasingly hysterical ‘stories’ in the hope that some mud will stick, if they keep up a constant barrage of this nonsense, in the minds of some of the gullible Jermy Corbyn will be linked. Jeremy Corbyn - - - Sinn Fein, Jeremy Corbyn - - - Bully and homophobe. This is how it works, and the likes of Mandelson and Campbell know it, this is how they have been plying their trade for the past 20 odd years. They can say anything they like ‘in confidence’ to one of their tame journalists and it will be in the paper the next day.
By the way, when did you stop beating your wife and kids? See how easy it is!
When they stopped breathing.
Mr Corbyn is coming to Liverpool on Monday. There’s a big rally going on at 7pm at St Georges Hall Plateau, which is going to look pretty awesome if he pulls the kind of numbers commensurate with the rally that was organised in two days flat. I shall be going to that with the family, of course.
Over the course of the campaign, the outdoor rallies are going to put a real lie to the idea that he can’t get people out there, especially in comparison to the half empty halls or sterile, carefully staged shoeboxes that Owen is turning up at.
The naughty step not working for your kids anymore?
The missus is becoming an oftentime companion in ye olde activism. She accepted the Facebook invite without a prompt. Juvenile Unit #2 has been Corbyn to the core ever since he was nominated in the previous leadership election. She follows him on Snapchat
We do have a slight situation with fence sitter Juvenile Unit #1, who has remained neutral throughout the coup. Her excuse is that she’s working a lot, and she is. She’s doing loads of talks and chaperoning in the capital, and very proud are all of we of our little urban achiever. One must feel that she’s in and out of St Thomas’ all the time for figurative splinter removal.
Said that “if in doubt, leave it out” was a perfectly sensible position to take, but also remarked “fence sitting is alright, but people will remember it more if you were on the right side”. She will not be coming to the rally. The “London hustle” (her words, not mine) continues unabated in the capital on Monday.
I think maybe you are being a tad generous to Smith there pap. The judge’s ruling was passed in full to lawyers of the interested parties at 9 AM this morning, before his public statement at 2 PM. It is inconceivable that team Campbell, Foster and co would not have passed this on to to Smith. So when he told the lunchtime news that it would be wrong for the High Court to rule that Jeremy Corbyn should not be on the ballot, he already knew that the judge had ruled in favour of Corbyn. Just weasel words from a professional spin doctor. This is a man whose job it was to put positive spin on a pharmacutical company, (Amgen), who had been fined $760 million for illegaly promoting a drug, (Aranesp), to cancer patients in a way that “increased the likelihood of their deaths”. Amgen received this massive fine after it emerged that the company was “pursuing profits at the risk of patient safety” as it promoted a non-approved use of Aransep. Smith was in charge of corporate affairs, corporate and internal communications and public affairs at Amgen while the biotech company was being investigated.A whistleblower also claimed that Amgen systematically overfilled vials of the drug which enabled doctors to “pool” the excess amounts. The doctors were then encouraged to bill Medicare and private insurers for the use of the excess drug, creating a system of “liquid kickbacks” according to lawyers on the case. Amgen also produces a drug called Epogen which was connected to the international cycling scandal, which involved cyclists such as Lance Armstrong. The mystery to me is why someone with Smith’s CV would be let anywhere near the Labour Party, never mind giving him a safe parliamentary seat. And these Plotters want him as leader! It just goes to show how completely out of touch they are with the average person on the street.
I’m a few hours behind here, but where or what exactly is the straw man argument that you’re accusing Flahute of making?
I did spot that afterward, tbh - but nice write up.