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After so many crushing blows, so much self-immolation and such blatant, unbridled corruption you’d think that surely by now it has to be all over for New Labour.
But the battered and bloodied corpses of the cabinet just keep twitching. Nothing seems to kill them off. What’ll it take? Do we have to get out the flamethrowers?
The latest news from Guido Fawkes, who did the digging, is that the party’s spin doctor, epitome of arrogance and ‘psychotherapist’ , and now blogger Derek Draper (he’s author of New Labour’s pisspoor attempt at copying Kos or Obama’s netroots campaign, LabourList) is an unprincipled quack who may well have lied by omisssion about his credentials, pretending to have received a U.Berkeley MA when he actually got it part-time from a weekend school
How does that song* go?
Aneurin Bevan,
Your Party is dead
And the time for a new one is nye.
Would the last person left
Please turn out the light
New Labour, just fuck-off and die.
*Chorus of ‘Guy Fawkes’ Table’, by Atilla The Stockbroker
from his LPBarnstormer on Eastside Records
UPDATE
Draper replies on his personal blog to Guido’s allegations :
To clarify this I attended the Doctoral programme at the Wright Institute that lasts, on average, five to six years. Within that programme students qualifying receive an M.A. at the end of the third year. At that point I had completed a training that was very intense compared to UK psychotherapy trainings, and had undertaken many hundreds of supervised clinical hours, so returned to the UK to set up my practice. I always describe myself as a psychotherapist, have never claimed to be a clinical psychologist, although my degree is, in fact, an M.A. in Clinical Psychology.
[…]
However, it now seems clear that this episode was a clumsy attempt to smear me, concocted by Guido Fawkes and fed by him to David Hencke at the Guardian. A journalist I have hitherto always admired and respected. I think he was led astray by Guido Fawkes and made a genuine mistake. I did, however, as the Independent reports today, give him a bit of a rollocking when I saw him yesterday.
To recap: I have never said to anyone or written anywhere that I attended U.C. (University of California) Berkeley. The fact that Hencke himself wrote a “fact box” stating I had, which I never saw, was his mistake not mine. I attended the Wright Institute, a well respected graduate school for clinical psychology where after 3 years of full time study, I received an M.A. in Clinical Psychology. I have always said I studied in Berkeley not at Berkele
Guido in his turn claims more evidence of Draper’s mendacity is forthcoming.
This one will run and run: too many people loathe Draper to let it go. He is New Labour in a nutshell and his current trials are giving anyone who loathes them and him a great deal of justified satisfaction.
