WhY aRe ThErE nO wOmEn In LaBoUr??

It’s not that Suzanne “yet another Grauniad transphobe” Moore is really thick enough to believe this, it’s that she and The Guardian think we are thick enough to believe this:

For the past few years, in every chat I have had with a senior Labour person, they have acknowledged that the party needs a female leader. The Tories have done it twice. Maybe the Lib Dems will appoint Jo Swinson. But Labour has a shortage of women, not on its benches but in its inner circle. This inner circle includes the same people who struggle to deal effectively with sexual harassment cases and antisemitism, so it’s understandable they would find it challenging to track down a woman – any woman! – with the intellectual depth and mental agility of the present leader.

You wouldn’t think from this the Labour Shadow Cabinet is gender balanced. No mention of Diane Abbott either, but then she’s a sore point for Moore, having stood against her and lost her deposit during the 2010 general elections. No mention either of any politics that might be of interest for somebody an alleged feminist, but then Moore’s brand of feminism is entirely driven by a jobs for the girls mentality rather than dealing with problems encountered in the world outside the Westminster bubble. It’s pathetic what The Guardian is reduced to in attempting to smear Corbyn and Labour.

Lily in parliament!

In events bizarre even for 2019, we’ve had what is possibly the first depiction of an anime character shown in the UK parliament and it was everybody’s favourite trans zombie Lily!

Joanna Cherry holding up a poster of Lily saying shut the fuck up terf

Unfortunately it was transphobe/terf defender Joanna Cherry who held up that poster of Lily, not as a rare example of anime getting a trans character right, but in an attempt to prove this particular picture was a death threat and the very word TERF was a slur on women. Which it isn’t of course, but you may ask yourself, well, how did we get there?

Lily says: shut the fuck up TERF

It all started with SonicFox, professional gamer, gay black furry and trans ally, tweeting a short video of him playing Mortal Kombat 11 and applying a fatality on Sonya Blade while shouting “die TERF”. Sonya Blade’s voice actor being one Ronda Rousey, ex-wrestler and still transphobe, not to mention a Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist. A nasty piece of shit in other words, with Sonic Fox letting off some steam there. He posted it to his Twitter and that would’ve been the end of it, if not for Helen Lewis.

Helen Lewis is one of the Grauniad/New Statesman stable of pet transphobes, also including Germaine Greer, Hadley Freeman, Suzanne Moore and Julie Bindel. These are all career media “feminists”, largely left irrelevant as times moved on, who have found new relevance by becoming transphobes. In the process intentionally or accidentaly providing cover for American right wingers to expand to the UK. Lewis found Sonic Fox’ tweet, immediately did her “I want to speak to your manager” schtick and demanded he recanted. Which he didn’t of course. He just found this whole thing hilarious, a bunch of white, middle aged, English TERFs demanding he stop mocking them.

Which started the usual TERF brigading, where they rope in all their followers to mass report, mass harass somebody to get their account suspended or them fleeing from Twitter. They ultimately got their victory by getting Sonc Fox suspended for a couple of hours and forcing him to delete his tweet. In the process Lewis got the usual sort of meme responses from people annoyed by her transphobia, several of which featured this picture of Lily, holding a badly photoshopped in gun, saying “shut the fuck up TERF”. And it’s one of these tweets that Joanna Cherry cited in a Human Rights Committee Q&A session in the British parliament. And she lied about it. She said it said shut the fuck up, cunt when it really said, as is clearly visible in the video, “shut the fuck up, terf”. And terf is not a slur, not an insult.

So first she lied about terf being a slur, when it in fact was coined by trans exclusionary radical feminists as a neutral description of themselves, then she lied about the actual “slur” on the image. It’s not the only time she lies. She talks about Sonic Fox’s original video as if it’s actual violence against actual women instead of him playing a video game death scene. (Incidently, terfs on twitter are currently busy slandering him by claiming all instances in which he playing a male character in Mortal Kombat hitting a female character are examples of misogynistic violence…) She also pretends that the person supposedly targeted by Sonic Fox and others is some ordinary woman rather than the deputy editor of the New Statesman. Three lies found with just a cursory glance at the video.

So why is a member of parliament trying to gin up non-existing problems of non-violence against not actually women, but video game characters, but completely ignoring actually existing violence against actually existing women, against trans women? Is Cherry a transphobe herself or just an useful idiot?

At least the creator of the picture could laugh at all this.

Why blame Corbyn for Brexit?

Because it’s easy and you don’t have to think about actually fixing Brexit or convincing Tory rebels to not vote Tory if you can just pin the blame on somebody you already dislike anyway. And boy does Continuity Remain hate Jeremy Corbyn. Unsurprisingly, as the most visible remainers tend to be the sort of people who think everything would be all right if the UK just got back to how it was on 22 June 2016. The crux of the matter is that Brexit is the result of internal Tory politics and can never be turned back or even done properly with them in power. Yet Continuity Remain remains fixated on Labour and Corbyn. Case in point:

Yawn. Nah sweetie, St Jeremy whipping his MPs to support the government means he shares the blameg

To be fair, Sunny Singh isn’t anywhere near as bad as Jo Maugham, who is basically a Tory who uses Brexit as an excuse to put the boot into Labour, but she comes closes. And I thought it would be interesting to look at how she uses Corbyn imposing a three line whip on the Article 50 notification vote to justify her focus on Labour/Corbyn. It’s the clearest Continuity Remain has come to articulating why Corbyn could’ve stopped Brexit, or is to blame for it. The idea that Corbyn, if only he opposed properly and had instructed his MPs to vote no on any Brexit vote would’ve prevented it is of course a fallacy, but it’s a good idea to investigate why this is. Other than that the Tories are in power and hence it’s on them, but that’s apparantly not enough for Sigh and other remainers.

So let’s go back to that vote, in January 2017 and what the context is when it tooks place. As you know, Bob, the EU membership referendum took place on 23 June 2016, with all major political parties campaigning for Remain, but various prominent Tories campaigning for Leave, which narrowly won. Prime minister Cameron immediately said “not it” and Theresa May won the subsequent leadership election. At the time of the referendum and the subsequent Article 50 vote in January 2017, the Tories had an absolute majority in Parliament. Jeremy Corbyn had to face a leadership challenge in September 2016 which he won handily, increasing his share of the vote even, but with a substantial part of the parliamentary Labour Party disloyal to his leadership. Both before and after the referendum, all political parties said they would accept the results of the referendum.

So could Labour have stopped the withdrawal from the EU?

No.

Even of Corbyn had whipped his party to vote against Brexit, everybody had followed the whip and the other opposition parties in Parliament had done the same –ignoring the fact that Sinn Féin doesn’t even sit– the Tories still would’ve won the vote because the Tories had an absolute majority in Parliament. No escape looking for Tory rebels either; in the actual vote only Kenneth Clarke voted against his party. So it wouldn’t have stopped Brexit, but what would be the consequences had Corbyn voted against?

So Corbyn had won re-election as Laboru leader, but was still in a weak position; perhaps there would be another challenge? Even without this, Theresa May was confident enough to call for a new election after the withdrawal notification had been sent to the EU. Polls looked good for the Tories, with Labour looking in disarray and the LibDems having been obliterated in the previous elections. In the end this proved to be a rare mistake on the part of Theresa May, as Labour bounced back thanks to Corbyn and Momentum, gained thirty seats and destroyed the Tory majority, leaving them dependent on the DUP. But you can imagine what would’ve happened if Labour had voted against Brexit.

Because of course a fair chunk of Labour voters were also Leave voters and had Labour “betrayed” them by rejecting the result of the referendum and voted against leaving the EU, they would not vote for them again. Consider also the hostile media environment for Labour and how much worse it would’ve been. Labour would lose the election, the Tories would’ve won an unassailable majority, Corbyn would be gone as leader and we would’ve had to depend on Owen bloody Smith to lead the opposition. That surely would’ve made everything better, regurgitated Blairism to inspire the kids.

Corbyn and Labour were right to respect the outcome of the referendum, just on basic democratic grounds. Nothing erodes trust in democracy more than calling and then ignoring a referendum. You can argue the wisdom of calling for one — and it’s clear this was something Cameron only did to placate Euroskeptic Tory MPs–, but once it’s there you need to respect the outcome.

But Corbyn also realises that the more important problem is to get the Tories out of power, because without doing so nothing can improve and you certainly can’t stop Brexit. Furthermore, just getting back to 22 June 2016 isn’t good enough: everything that Brexit is supposed to cause was already happening because the Tories are in power. Hollowing out of the NHS and social security to the tune of a 100,000 people with disabilities having died as a result, selling of the country to the Americans and dodgy Middle Eastern or Russian business men, all of this was going on before Brexit too.

But for those Remainers more worried about not being able to take the Eurostar to Paris anymore this sort of consideration is foreign. They want to stop Brexit but don’t want Labour in power either, hence the pretence that Corbyn alone is to blame for Brexit and the ritual condemnation of him everything something new and awful about Brexit is revealed. Because doing anything constructive might drive the Tories out of power and we can’t have that.

Poke in a pig

David Cameron with pig

This really is the most hilarious news: David Cameron allegedly fucked a pig’s snout during a ruggers initiation. Cue a veritable barrage of pig jokes and puns on Twitter. But as Rob Fahey explains, it’s more than just silly fun: such hazing rituals are a means for the ruling classes to control themselves:

The ritualised, sexually grotesque nature of Cameron’s initiation sets it apart somewhat, of course; but what’s also different about this kind of ritual in elite circles is the calculation behind it, the power and control it affords, and the self-perpetuating network of influence it creates. Consider this scenario; at elite institutions, those earmarked – by wealth, by title, by connections – for future leadership roles are forced, as impressionable young people, to carry out humiliating acts in order to gain acceptance by an in-group. That same in-group will, over the course of their lives, help advance their career massively in ways both overt and covert; membership of that group essentially secures their success in life. The cost of entry, paid by all members of the group, is participation in humiliating acts; acts which will forever wed them to the group, because should they later act in a way contrary to the group’s interests or desires, their “indiscretions” can be brought back to destroy their careers or personal lives.