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Samizdata quote of the day Jeremy Corbyn is happy to talk to Irish Republican Army men, avowed anti-Semites and Hezbollah militants; but he refuses “out of principle” to talk to the Sun newspaper, a right-wing tabloid.
He campaigns for the national rights of Venezuelans and Palestinians; but he opposes self-determination in Northern Ireland and the Falkland Islands.
He’d like to admit as many Syrian refugees as possible, but is curiously ambivalent about why they became refugees in the first place, telling RT that Assad’s chemical attacks may have been a Western hoax.
He is relaxed about Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, but he can’t stand the idea of Britain having one.
He says taxpayers should be able to opt out of funding the military, but not out of funding trade unions.
He wants to re-open coal mines that have been uneconomical since the 1960s; yet, oddly, he wants to wean us off fossil fuels.
– Daniel Hannan
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Yes – that just about sums up Comrade Jeremy.
As many people say, it is a good job the left has double standards or they wouldn’t have any standards at all.
And he was elected by the members of the Labour Party who cannot have been unaware of any of this. He’s their man, the true face of the British Left. How often did we hear, even when he was winning them landslides, that Blair was âa Toryâ, not really one of them? They can’t say that about this nutcase; they’ve been banging on about âthe soul of the Labour movementâ for months.
It appears that, as with the U. S. Democrat party, every Labour Party platform item is “free stuff for you” and/or “take from those who are not you”.
Most politicians are high level confidence tricksters who will say anything, anything at all to achieve power. All of their mental abilities and training are directed at this target. As a result they have no brainpower left over for technical matters, so conspiracies of Unions, bureaucrats and crony capitalists can talk them into crazy things.
If you think “conservative” politicians are any different you should look very hard at David Cameron.
Has there been any analysis of the age demographics within the Labour Party that can provide some clues as to why this kind of person was chosen?
As we have seen, much of the Union politics in the U.S. is dominated by older and pensioned members.
Or, is this perhaps a “slick” move to offer up (and thus dispose of) a piece of dead political meat, rather than one of the more promising lambs for the current worship leanings of the British electorate?
I do not think anyone currently in UK politics is that slick, RRS đ
I don’t dispute all the double standards here, but the point about coal mines is incorrect. Not all British deep coal mines have been uneconomical since the 1960s. Indeed some were making a profit until this year, when they were seen off by carbon taxes, and a new one near Wakefield is due to open next year. Corbyn actually said that he would like to look at reopening coal mines where possible; in the case of recent closures such as Hatfield, this is not quite as absurd as it sounds to people who thought they’d all closed.
It is also perhaps worth remembering that clean burn technologies allow for vastly reduced pollution levels.
And as all mines have limited reserves, it would be possible to reopen recent closed mines while retaining a long-term aim of getting rid of fossil fuels altogether.
I hope regulars won’t mind me posting, I am new to it while being a regular lurker, I’m afraid.
That is entire consistent, as widespread abject poverty would hugely reduce Britain’s need for energy.
Don’t be afraid, post away! The locals only occasionally rip people to shreds, most of the time they are (fairly) nice đ
@ Bendle – that’s very interesting. Is it still the case that these mines are/would be profitable at union pay rates and working conditions?
llater,
llamas
I really liked this bit:
“Jeremy Corbyn … is a shambling, self-righteous repository of every second-rate, lazy, 1960s Marxist nostrum.”
Indeed, but, Bendle, remember that pollutant is not, say, merely nitrous oxide or sulphur dioxide from coal combustion, but in Lefty-La-La world, CO2 is also a ‘pollutant’, even though you and I breathe it out, [and plants lap it up (as it were)], proving that we pollute Gaia as well. So although the range of pollutants may be reduced, by categorising CO2 as a ‘pollutant’ and making up scares about ocean acidification, the Lefty Warmist Ecoloons invoke ‘quantum effects’ with CO2, which acts as a greenhouse gas whilst simultaneously getting dissolved in the oceans, ‘acidifying’ vast swathes of still alkaline ocean by being in 2 places (and states H+ & HCO3-/CO2 H2O) at once, and never mind the buffering.
So anyway, burning graphite or diamond would still be producing a ‘pollutant’ to this lot, so we should highlight the lies and quackery that are ranged against our long, slow and perilous ascent from the Stone Age to the electron age.
I still can’t get over the hilarity of England burning WOOD in an effort to be “green”. Yeah, deforestation as a “green” movement. Ya gotta love it. This comes from the same geniuses who say that co2, (which currenlty comprises about .04% of the atmosphere), is going to kill us all within a century, even though it was 16-25 TIMES higher in earth’s past, especually during the earth’s Cambrian period. That period, also known as the Cambrian Explosion, housed the greatest leap in biodiversity our planet (and therefore our known universe) has ever seen.
But not let get tripped up by a little thing like facts when we have agendas to attend to.
Dan Hannan is usually a pretty astute thinker, but perhaps someone can explain to me why he’s suggesting that Corbyn is thrust and forced upon the leftist electorate, a candidate so left wing THEY can’t stomach it, and yet he has a projected 59.5% of the vote amongst the leftists? If he’s suggesting that a popular labor candidate amongst the labor party constituents would suck in a general election, he’s not making that point clear at all.
Corbyn will romp in the next election.
Thailover, I didn’t read anything in that article which suggested that Corbyn was “thrust and forced upon” Labour. Hannan’s comment was that Corbyn is someone Labour “has just inflicted on itself.” Big difference. Unless I missed something.
I enjoy reading and, especially, listening to Hannan. He always has something interesting (and often amusing) to say. “He [Corbyn] says taxpayers should be able to opt out of funding the military, but not out of funding trade unions.” Or, one might add, the BBC. But I do have one small quibble. Hannan opines that leftists want a revolution which will be complete “only when the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” But that quote is from Denis Diderot, no leftist he (indeed, more of a proto-libertarian), and the entire line was “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” (My emphasis.) The omission is important. I think that, by selective omission and context, Hannan has distorted the meaning of that quote to suit his own ends, which are not those of Diderot.
Hannan likens the rise of Corbyn to that of Bernie Saunders here in the US, and I think that’s an apt comparison. Over here, we are also witnessing the simultaneous rise of Donald Trump, sort of the mirror image of Saunders, and in some respects I think the same political forces are at work in both cases (we’re all angry and disgusted with politics as usual; we just express that disgust in different ways). Is there anyone equivalent to Trump in the UK?
Not only will he not romp in the next election, the next election will be Labour’s 1924 moment.
What do you call someone who would arm our enemies, whilst disarming our own forces and those of our allies?
Many names spring to mind Quisling, PĂ©tain, Philby, Burgess, McLean, Blunt, Cairncross, etc.
Indeed the question is whether Corbyn is a true believer, a Soviet spy under deep cover or a Tory mole. I’m pretty much discounting the last one as nearly 40 years is a long time as a non-drinking vegetablist.
Laird, from your quote Diderot (about whom I know nothing) does sound like a leftist.
Tut tut! You need to put your Red Queen head on and believe three impossible things before breakfast here.
Since when has making sense ever been a prerequisite for being a lefty?
Thailover
Its worse than just cutting trees to fire your generators.
You also transport the trees across a bloody great ocean before you do so.
So energy dense local coal=bad, energy light imported wood=good.
You would have to be an intellectual to be stupid enough to think thats a good idea.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomzeller/2015/02/01/wood-pellets-are-big-business-and-for-some-a-big-worry/
To a large extent, these pellets will end up as fuel for massive municipal boilers in Europe, where wood is increasingly replacing coal as a means of producing heat and electricity â a move that many governments there consider comparatively clean and climate-friendly. Exports from the U.S., largely headed to E.U. nations, doubled between 2012 and 2013, jumping from 1.6 million short tons to 3.2 million short tons, according to federal statistics, with some industry speculators guessing that those numbers â nudged by tough emissions goals that European nations must meet in the next five years â could increase 10-fold by 2020.
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No, Alisa, it sounds like a libertarian, railing against the two primary impediments to human freedom: government and organized religion.
No, Laird, he sounds like someone who believes that violence is the solution to his problems. He might believe that he has a libertarian end in mind, but his violent methods would inspire any opponents to use the same means against him.
I like to think of Corbyn’s win as a triumph of markets.
Corbyn is supplying a product that his supporters profoundly want: Illusion. They want to believe that world can be fixed and made fair if they could only be put in charge and silence everyone who disagrees with them.
This product is perfectly tailored to their needs. It is, if you will, a Size 3 hat for a people with a Size 3 head.
Unfortunately for them the rest of the hat buying public have different sized heads and Corbyn’s hat is useless to them.
What Nick said. Also, I see no reason why religion – organized or not – should be detrimental to freedom.
Diderot was a pre-French revolution “enlightenment” type, friend of Rousseau and one of the encyclopedists. He died just before the revolution broke out, so did not have the opportunity to translate his literary violence (see e.g. the “strangled with entrails” quote) into actual killing or support thereof, but the balance of probability must be that he would have. Karl Marx was one of many later left-wingers who expressed approval of his writings, and the quote has often been used in an approving sense by violent socialists. Hannan is well within a long tradition of using the quote in a left-wing sense. Thus I’d say Hannan and Alisa are right, and Laird incorrect, or at best defending a thoroughly unusual view of Diderot (which is OK to do here, of course). I stand by my view that only his just-in-time death prevented Diderot from offering some luckless victims of the terror very convincing proof that he was not a libertarian. Of course, he might then have ended up in a losing revolutionary faction and become a victim himself. đ
I’m not sure you’re going to get very far arguing that an eighteenth-century thinker was libertarian or leftish, as they are both from the same root (as indeed is much of modern ‘conservative’ thinking) – Diderot was advocating freedom for the individual, which is the avowed goal of both libertarians and socialists, albeit both tend to overemphasise the mechanism of freedom (individual liberty or the state) at the expense of liberty. He is basically at the root of both lines of thought.
And before anyone complains, yes socialism is far more wrong than libertarianism. I would have thought that was wrong.
During the 1917 revolution, Lenin and his pals rather enthusiastically took to killing a king, as well as many priests – and yet, somehow those killings failed to produce the coveted freedom. Like I said, I don’t know the first thing about Diderot and his actual thoughts as an individual, but I very much dislike the quote and approve of the way and context in which Hannan used it.
llamas apologies for the late reply. I think it’s hard to answer that question because so much is different now – mine owners will mainly go after the more easily-gettable coal now than say 30 years ago, for instance. Wage rates are pretty good, though so much more work is done by contractors. Until very recently overmen, shotfirers etc could earn ÂŁ1000+ in a weekend at Daw Mill in the Mdlands – proof perhaps that without the taxes, coal can actualy be a very lucrative business.
Perry, thank you for your welcome, Mr Ed for your comment.
I do recall at the time of the UK miners’ strike in the 1980s, the media never mentioned the pay rates for miners as a factor in the mines being economic (or not), which baffled and infuriated me. Thank you Bendle for shedding some light on current rates to me, the great-grandson of a Yorkshire miner.
And a few years ago, c. 2010, I found out that a crane driver at a power station got an annual rate of ÂŁ78,000 for a 6 months of the year job, the site being brought on stream in winter and the job ending.
Elect Corbyn and the entire UK becomes Rotherham and time to leave pronto.
And pigs might fly. He’s the Tory dream candidate.
I agree with Mr. Platypus, this bloke makes Labour unelectable. But if by some unfathomable dark miracle he did win due to the planets lining up in all the wrong ways, Madam and I would indeed leave the country, pronto.
Perry, and friends, come here to Australia! As I said in an earlier post, Australia needs more people of a libertarian mind! As a country that wants migrants, this could be a way to help decentralise the country!
As an added bonus, we currently have a vaguely ‘Liberal’ government, British ‘liberal’, that is.
Because they would use a lot of water, i don’t think you’ll be able to farm hippos, Perry. Would Platypus farming do?
The young seem to like Corbyn. If they could get out the vote of theses youngsters Corbyn could win
Laird said:
I was referring to his claim that many “moderate” labor party members were refusing to “serve” under him, and threatening to break away, creating yet another party. And he said…
“That story is over now. The People’s Party has given up on the People. It lost the last election because most voters, at least outside Scotland, saw it as way too far to the left. Instead of trying to accommodate the concerns of the electorate, it has doubled down, veering completely away from the mainstream and, in effect, inviting voters to like it or lump it.”I found this “like it or lump it” comment inconsistent with a 6/10ths majority support from the labor electorate.
I also like Hannon’s speeches, especially the “cork our hulls” speech he gave a few years ago which thrust him into notoriety here in the states. But alas, the non-left in the UK is still rather left wing from a USA perspective. He, at that time, supported Obama. (So he’s not to be entirely trusted, (wink)).
Laird asked:
I wouldn’t know. I’m a freethinker and Ayn Rand Objectivist living in Jesus country, Tennessee. (I’m used to writing “Ayn Rand Objectivist” because most people here in Jesus country never heard of Objectivism, but her name is a lightning rod ‘world over. I would guestimate that the people that love her and hate her are 10 times the number of people who even remotely understand what she was saying. A very odd phenomenon.)
thefrollickingmole, the irony doesn’t stop even there. Not only are these idiots destroying greenery in an effort to be green. Not only are they burning energy-light wood in place of energy dense coal, not only are they shipping it half way around the world in diesel burning ships, but they’re also destroying trees, i.e. “co2 scrubbers” in the process. So not only are they putting CO2 in the atmosphere when they burn inefficient energy, they should as well count the co2 that’s NOT being ‘eaten’ by the now felled forests.
When someone does something THIS stupid…follow the money to find who the real culprit is. That the general public lap such policies up with any critical reflection, it doesn’t bode well for the human species.
Sorry, that sould be, “That the general public lapd such policies up *WITHOUT* any critical reflection, it doesnât bode well for the human species.
I don’t know much about Diderot, other than he was the chief editor of the EncyclopĂ©die for decades, and the title page of the EncyclopĂ©die sports an image of Lucifer, bearer of light or enlightenment. (I rather like that).
Nicholas said,
His opponents were paternalistic (Catholic) church and (monarchy) state, which needed no prompting towards suggested violent reciprocity, but rather that was their first chosen method of operation, torture and the assumption that human beings and their lives were theirs to dispatch or dispose of at whim.
Let’s stop pretending that history hasn’t proved time and time and time again that religion, without being neutered by a representative government, is an never-ending atrocity, and this was not isolated to the medieval Catholics, but also true of the Eastern/Russian Orthodox and even true of the protestants in early America.
There is a DAMNED good reason Thomas Jefferson wanted his Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom (and freedom from religion) to be inscribed on his tombstone, but not (or rather than) his US Presidency.
Laird @ September 15, 2015 at 3:50 am:No, Alisa, it sounds like a libertarian, railing against the two primary impediments to human freedom: government and organized religion.
He was not against government, he was against hereditary authority. Which, with organized religion, were impediments to freedom at that time.
Both have been defanged, declawed, and gelded since then. Monarchy is a ceremonial figurehead. Organized religion has been reduced to its benevolent aspects. (Islam is not actually organized.)
The chief impediments to freedom today are ideological tyrannies and kleptocracies; the other great impediment is the soft but ubiquitous appetite of social improvers to regulate everything they can touch.