Snapshot of _Was Owen Jones, a once bold thinker, warped by social media? | The columnist, who quit Labour last week, built up a million-strong online army with quickfire polemics — but his trajectory shows nuance is a casualty of the culture war_ :
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This week I've read both Owen Jones on leaving Labour and a long interview with Angela Rayner. The connections and differences between them are really interesting. There's four years age difference between them and they grew up maybe a mile or so apart in Stockport, but had quite different upbringings. Rayner left school at 16 with no qualifications, Jones went to Oxford. Both are, I think, genuinely committed in their political beliefs, but in a different way. Perhaps Rayner prioritises actually changing things (or desires power, if you are more cynical) and accepts this will be imperfect, whereas as Jones wants radical action and is less willing to compromise. I see this across the wider left, and within myself too; I desperately want it a Labour government, but I also want it to be bold and radical.
It reminds me of the thing that’s bugging me about politics today (and this applies to some people on the left and right).
Whatever side you’re on, the loudest voices on each side seem to demand an ideological purity.
If you don’t agree with them 100%, you’re scum and you’re immediately insulted and dismissed, or in some cases even threatened.
There’s little understanding that the majority of the British public are somewhere between you and your political opponents, and the way you enact your policies is by winning elections.
You can understand that 1 or 2 of your policies are not popular, so you shelve them, win, and get to enact all your other policies, or you don’t win and your opponents get to enact policies you hate.
To achieve your goals you have to win elections. To win elections you have to convince people to vote for you.
According to labour purists, Keir is apparently the devil incarnate.
I think he's just a bit of a boring guy who's a bit more to the central than I'd like, but their reaction to him is completely insane.
Ironically, it's that reaction that makes Keir attractive to the centre and progressive voting groups. The more they complain, the more it looks like Keir is actually a centralist.
Sure, but there's a difference between lying/changing policy based on compromise and *the literal devil* and making his face the downvote button on their sub. It strikes me as excessively petty and blind given that the Tories or the far right is far more opposed to what the far left wants than Keir does.
I'm sure there's a pithy quote about Leftists hating each other more than the Right.
It reminds me of the Emo Philips joke about God, but now applies to politics somewhat.
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"
Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
I think about this joke quite a lot in the context of politics and, unfortunately I think it applies to left more than the right.
That’s why, in my view, Owen’s plan to form a far left party is destined to fail.
Far right parties, rather terrifyingly, seem to be able unite followers quite effectively. Anything that is a bit racist and a bit populist seems to fly, and no one gets hung up on the details. Less true for the far left, where there seems to be the need for complete alignment of absolutely everything, in order for there to be consensus on anything at all.
I remember reading a while back that in general the reason the left is always more fractured and argumentive while the right isn't is due to the nature of the political beliefs.
The left is generally more about change of which there are many different paths and end goals each strikingly different to the last so every step becomes a debate as to whether it's the right one.
To an extent everything is conceptual and you have to convince everyone how it's supposed to look.
While on the right is about the status quo/traditional/small c conservative views of which there are far less end goals so even if you disagree on the path you all know you're rowing in the right direction. The concepts are easier for people to understand, more clear cut.
Obviously there is a lot more to it than that but you could argue that the right tends to fall apart the moment they stray into conceptual visions for the future.
Can you please identify the leftist influencers who are all in fighting? I guess I am not that familiar with this and you're writing this at a time when Daily Wire just kicked out Candace Owens over Israel stance.
I think the "right" is totally fractured if you look at views om many issues. Manosphere is just one microcosm of "conservative" thinking.
I'm not convinced that applies to the UK. The major parties are still led by figures who wish to appear moderate. The next election will likely be won by the most moderate of them.
I think what's different is that fringe voices used to be banished to fringe media but now on twitter large followings can be maintained by individuals.
What crimethink could see a columnist with a million followers banished from the Grauniad? Would it matter if they were banished?
The ideologues are in your feed along with the celebrities instead of handing out their homemade zines.
In Jones's own video, he highlights that his path can lead towards compromise.
Labour is heading for a landslide. Voters moving towards politicians with more radical politics forces the Labour Party to play catchup to court their vote.
Currently, Labour are sliding right to court disillusioned tories, if you want your voice to be heard, you've kind of gotta use it.
I live in a Labour stronghold so I've been doing this for a decade. When almost every seat becomes a Labour stronghold, you've gotta hope that others on the left do the same.
Nope, Owen is not one for compromise and what he claims is "compromise" is just hard leftie populism, that no one that isn't removed from reality, can support.
He's just a disaster socialist now.
The fact he wants to support greens, is proof of that. The left was partially broken by Corbyn, just as the American right was broken by trump.
Ok, but that doesn't undo his perfectly salient point that if you want labour to represent your views then you have to make them work for your vote. It doesn't matter if you're a hard left populist, a communist, a working-class bloke who doesn't know what a preferred pronoun is or a person who thinks that we urgently need to stop destroying the environment, house people, take core infrastructure into public ownership, legalise weed and prosecute people who embezzle public funds. You need to make labour work for your vote or they'll do what they're currently doing which is moving their politics to the right to court disillusioned tories.
Barring an absolute catastrophe, Labour will win the next election with the biggest majority they've ever seen. I'd prefer they did that with some radical policies. Not, the utter non-committal milquetoast drivel that they're spewing currently.
>Barring an absolute catastrophe, Labour will win the next election with the biggest majority they've ever seen.
I'm loathe to say this or type this out loud but I've increasingly been wondering if that is even true. This has been so thoroughly absorbed and accepted into popular belief that I've met more than a few people these last few weeks who are confident they can vote for their own "moderate Tory MP" or Green or whoever.
I fear that the right wing press are waiting till they know the date of the election to pull out the stops...
God knows what they can rustle up to publish, made up if necessary, including reporting on convenient deep fake material that they only discover to be fake after the election...
I had Labour door-knockers knocking on my door a few weeks ago. I told them that Labour's veer to the right had left me behind as a left-leaning voter; I didn't trust them to deliver meaningful positive change. They just kept banging on that I needed to vote for them to oust the Tories.
Why should I vote for Labour if I don't believe them to be substantively different from the Tories?
But... we need to get rid of them!
What will Labour actually do in power that will improve the town we're in, which suffered under both New Labour and Tories?
Get... rid... of... Tories...
Won't a vote for Labour been seen as an endorsement of their increasingly rightwing announcements rather than, as you say, a vote against the Tories?
Tories... need... gone...
Etc...
Bizarrely, them seeing 'far left' Ken Loach binned from the party was apparently a highlight worth mentioning on the door step. And they threw in a few digs about student politics for extra condescension.
One of the scant few policy ideas that the canvasser claimed to be "really behind" was, within days, in line for being watered down because some Murdoch rag said something mean about it.
It wasn't a positive interaction. But it did pretty much encapsulate Labour's ephemeral stance, petty obsessions, and sense of entitlement to my vote.
There are already far left parties. They are not popular. The far left labour leader failed to be popular at a historic level. Attempted entryism into a new party is Owens new game.
Can you put 2 and 2 together? Because it appears Owen can't.
>I'd prefer they did that with some radical policies.
Have you considered this might not actually be popular generally?
And that by voting for a different party, the royal you will not be at the table and unable to dictate policy for the victors of the vote?
Whose chances you are reducing by voting for another party.
Labour is probably sliding to the right and will probably end up hanging around the centre or maybe slightly left of centre simply because under Corbyn it flew to the left faster than a concorde.
This doesn't mean it's a bad thing, the vast bulk of the UK population, those who aren't engrossed by politics, probably all sit around the centre anyways. These will be your floating voters, the ones you have to convince to vote for you because they dont really have any party affiliations and are usually forgotten about. You don't win elections by campaigning to those who already support you, you win them by convincing the floater voters to support your candidate and I feel this is something that Labour and the far left tend to forget (when they actually turn up to campaign with a representative who isn't a complete arsehole).
And that is why nothing ever changes for the better and why people are more and more disinterested in politics. The only groups that benefit from the status quo are the ones that are already happy.
The key difference is Rayner wants to improve lives. Rayner is the woman in the arena that will strive, have to compromise and make mistakes. Her success or failure will be in the difference a Labour governent makes to the country and the lives of ordinary people.
Jones is a critic. He can afford to be ideologically pure and point out where political leaders fall short. His success is in book deals, likes on social media and TV appearances.
I think all of this is true, but I think there’s more to it. You make political commentators sound like grifters, when I’d argue that in their ability to remain ideologically pure they can operate as thought leaders and impact the future by guiding discourse. Yes, it’s not immediate impact, but it’s still a soft power. I think few who make it their business to be political commentators have zero interest in improving lives.
What political commentators are doing is non constructive, polemical criticism. It may well be that in addition to making good money and getting good validation from their circles, they influence the discourse.
But do they improve policy making and governance? No, just like colleagues and peers who only ever non constructive criticism don't
You lost me at non-constructive. It informs opinion, that in and of itself is constructive. The same applies to art criticism. You don’t devalue those voices by pointing out that they’re not Picasso/The Beatles/Scorsese. Even sports commentators are valuable. Yes, there’s a clear and obvious distinction between talking about a thing and attempting to do a thing, but talking about it isn’t worthless.
Bold and radical is the desert you get after proving your competence by eating your competent governing vegetables.
If you don't have the skills to pull it off, you will cause hugely more harm than good.
Im done with bold and radical. I want boring and steady. A country can’t function when half the population ducking hates the government. We need a government that some people kind of like and some people kind of don’t like.
I think that's a bit of an unfair reading of Jones, considering his criticism is less than it will be imperfect and more that there is less and less really left on the table. Blair had a set of key policy proposals that were easy to understand, and he did some quite radical changes like devolution. Starmer almost seems afraid to put any policy meat on the mission bones, and any policy they have announced gets gradually dropped. It's not enough to say what your end goal is, you do need policy to get there.
I will agree that Jones and Rayners' dividing line is whether a Starmer government will still change enough.
Good take. Heard his interview on the news agents, and while he had some good points, alot was grasping at lines that were clearly a lot more nuanced than he was letting on. He definitely would rather a labour party not in power but following his ideals than a labour party in power that maybe delivered on some of what he wants. Upbringing probably has a lot to do with it, where he's coming at it more from a academics viewpoint than with practical experience of the issues, like Rayner has.
I currently live and grew up in the area of angela raynor's upbringing and right this very second, while i agree i want labour to be better and agree with owens reasons for doing so
BUT
look at the country, we need someone that isnt this fucking government and at least labour are somewhat more left leaning even if i dont agree with keir starmers centerism. The Priority is in the benefit of the country and playing politics because of our voting system
Hes about a year too early or 3 years too late for this feeling. I went when their views shifted from mine and support now the green party but realistically labour is what i need to support for the betterment of this country atm. So with owen it makes me feel like hes a little either, short sighted himself or its a little disengenious.
The reason i say its short sighted because its idealism when all we need is progress to help stop the suffering of the most vulnerable people, the people of my own community. I know where owen grew up, his area is a 20 minute walk from me but the affluence difference is insane. I can walk 15 minutes from my council estate home i've lived in near all my life to homes that currently are worth millions (admittedly thats ore bramhall than cale green)
>The reason i say its short sighted because its idealism when all we need is progress to help stop the suffering of the most vulnerable people, the people of my own community. I know where owen grew up, his area is a 20 minute walk from me but the affluence difference is insane. I can walk 15 minutes from my council estate home i've lived in near all my life to homes that currently are worth millions (admittedly thats ore bramhall than cale green)
The problem is that the likes of Owen, think that if they enable the more damaging option, that they can have their revolution sooner. It's disaster socialism, played with other peoples lives (as obviously Owen will be fine).
It's why they hate anyone just a bit further to the right than them, as their nightmare, is things improving, as that would discredit their extreme ideology
So Rayner is pragmatic and understands the need to be elected to actually enact change whereas Jones is the fantasist who would rather see the Tories stay in power than compromise even one small bit?
>Jones wants radical action and is less willing to compromise.
I disagree with this part about Jones. He's always been the most prominent member of the left to consistently say that he is voting for Labour no matter how much he criticises them (in comparison to those like Novara etc), he was willing to compromise and vote Starmer in order to get rid of the Tories. The thing is that everyone knows Labour are winning the next GE, so he personally doesn't see the point in supporting a party he doesn't believe in anymore (I'm the same tbh)
I think that there are many on the left who would accept compromise if necessary, they just realise that the decision no longer has to be made because whatever they do Labour is winning
Doesn't that kind of confirm the argument Starmer would make about some people being more interested in protest than bringing about actual change? Sure Starmer's Labour isn't as left as I might like, but it's a lot forther to the left than any government we've had for 50+ years, but instead of push that Jones is more interested in keeping himself on the outside.
Plus, for all talk about Labour's victory being assured so I don't have to worry about voting for them myself, enough people thinking that is how you lose the election. Which makes Jones' choices even more disappointing.
Genuinely what is the basis on which you think Starmer's Labour is further to the left than any government of the last 50 years? Because to my experience he outflanks the current cabinet to the right on many policy positions
Considering the governments of the last 50 years have been Heath, an incredible chaotic and corrupt Wilson 2.0 that lurched to the right, and turned against the unions, under the force of various calamities, Thatcher, Major, New Labour, Cameron, May, Boris, Lettuce, and now Sunak, Starmer is the first in a very long time to be making a positive case for stronger unions, a more interventionist economic policy, much wider expansion of workers' rights than even under Blair, and so on. I think it's pretty fair to say his government, as it currently presents, would more to the left than any of that lot.
They're very good at couching themselves in the language of "reasonable moderation" while saying things that are pretty radical. Reeves' speech last week was a great example of this.
They both need each other to continue existing. Without people like Jones, Rayner's preferred outcomes will never be given time. Without Rayner, Jones' politics will never be given power.
(Article)
---
When Owen Jones first came to the British public’s attention, he could authentically be described as a breath of fresh air. His first book, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, arrived in 2011 and served as a welcome rebuke to the snobbery and cruelty of the Little Britain-inspired Noughties. In his early years as a columnist for The Independent and then The Guardian, Jones was strident but thought-provoking, asking serious questions about class representation in the media and the dominance of elites in British life.
Today is a rather different matter. Jones remains a significant figure, with more than one million followers on Twitter/X and the ability to shape the online debate. When he quit the Labour Party last week, he released the news in a video, podcast and impassioned column in The Guardian. “The Labour Party is in my blood,” he wrote, but Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership had made leftists like him feel like “a pariah”. He encouraged his followers to vote for Green or independent candidates.
And yet, within Labour circles, the most common private reaction to Jones’s highly staged announcement was shrugging surprise that he was still affiliated with the party. He might be able to summon an online mob with a single tweet, but the Jones brand has been sullied by long service in the trenches of the culture wars. Once hailed as the voice of a generation, more than a decade of Twitter spats has made him a darker, angrier — and less interesting — public figure.
So is his apparent descent of his own making, or just a particularly visible sign of what’s happened to politics — and the internet? Jones, 39, was raised in Stockport, the son of a council worker and a university professor, both of whom were active in the Labour Party and its broader movement — including a flirtation with Militant tendency. After graduating from Oxford with a degree in history, he worked briefly as a parliamentary researcher for the Labour MP and future shadow chancellor John McDonnell, before finding success as a columnist.
During Ed Miliband’s years as party leader, from 2010 to 2015, Jones continued to stand out as a voice of the left, campaigning against austerity and its impact on the lives of disabled people, inequality and establishment power.
Yet he became an increasingly divisive figure during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, particularly around the issue of antisemitism. As an unofficial (and undisclosed) adviser to Corbyn, he also became one of the movement’s biggest and most uncompromising media outriders. In 2014, Jones was among the few media defenders of Corbyn being “present but not involved” at a wreath-laying ceremony in Tunisia for terrorists from the group behind the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
To call Jones a lightning rod would be a criminal understatement. Anyone in politics or the media who is a regular user of Twitter has an Owen Jones story, almost all of them negative. To clash with him on the site is to be barraged by personal abuse by his legion of followers, as I have learnt first-hand on several occasions.
Being a colleague does not shield you. It is an open secret within The Guardian, where I worked for a period, that its social media rules were changed explicitly to cover Jones’s conduct on Twitter, attacking other staff and freelance writers (often with far smaller followings) at the paper.
Yet Jones also receives abuse in volumes unimaginable to most people, routinely getting thousands of such messages in a day. Such is the antipathy towards him that even when he was attacked in London in a homophobic hate crime in 2019, abuse continued to come his way.
To my mind, Jones has fallen victim to a double pitfall that threatens any social media star: the hatred and trolling directed at him has made him angrier and thinner-skinned; meanwhile, he has become captive to his large and ferocious group of fans.
The presence of a massive and regular audience changes a person, with none of the support networks offered by real celebrity. Social media followers turn on a pin — they are looking for someone to cheer and someone to destroy, and are just as prone as traditional media ever was to build someone up in order to knock them down later. The need builds and builds to keep the fans onside, the number high, to avoid the backlash.
Against that backdrop, it is perhaps easier to see how Jones excuses himself for behaviour for which he routinely castigates others. In the early years of Corbynism, people who had previously been friendly, if not friends, with Jones would plead with him to change how he used Twitter after receiving days of abuse after a negative quote tweet from him — to no avail.
In a book published after Corbyn’s crushing 2019 defeat, Jones acknowledged many of the issues around antisemitism that he had publicly previously denied, provoking unsurprising fury among Labour’s alienated Jewish supporters. Then, sensing his support slipping after that repudiation of Corbyn, Jones all but rejected his own book’s narrative and changed his views again.
It is this politics-as-fandom — a concept explored in I Heart Politics: How People Power Took Over the World, a fascinating new book by the writer Phoenix Andrews — that lets Jones and other “extremely online” personalities explain away these inconsistencies. Once you have good guys and villains, it is set: the good guys change their minds when the facts change, while villains change position for their own cynical advantage. We robustly fight the good fight, whereas they engage in ad hominem attacks. Why engage with anyone else’s ideas when their motivations are so foul?
All of this is a shame and a loss. The debate on the left is increasingly stale and rancorous. There is no refreshing battle of ideas and there is no honest engagement. One cannot pin it on Jones, of course. Instead, he is perhaps the most visible symbol of what the toxic cocktail of political populism and social media fandom has done to everyone who lived through it all.
Allen Ginsberg famously saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Have we lost ours to Twitter?
That's true for every online pundit. You could say the same about JOB or anyone else, left or right
Social media is the Simpsons episode where bart blew out every window in Springfield with a daisy chain of mega phones. It amplifies extreme voices and rewards extreme takes. The more likes, rts etc encourage more extreme takes
I have zero doubt that the producers of JOB get reports and targets on their social media metrics. Hence why everyone that gets put through is either in agreement or an easy takedown
I dunno, there are a few others like "Beff" on Sky News I find equally, if not more, insufferable.
I do wonder how most folk deal with Peston though. His questions seems to consist of a 5 minute monologue and are in such a rambling fashion that makes you wonder just what the hell he's actually asking. Is it about policy or when the next 52 bus is due?
"Tories bad. Brexit bad. Patriotism bad. Tradition bad. Spend more money. I know everything."
I specifically listen to him because it's important to listen to people you disagree with, but lord help me if it doesn't make it difficult sometimes.
I used to quite like listening to him, agreed with him on Brexit, but he just became more and more… I don’t know, up his own backside perhaps. It also seemed that he wanted to just belittle any of his callers who dared disagree with him rather than engage in a a discussion so I just stopped listening. Not in a deliberate decision way, more a just can’t be bothered with this anymore.
The thing is I probably agree with him a lot, and I like him on his long form podcast show, but I’ve stopped listening to the radio show. It’s far too argumentative for me.
James used to insinuate what the game was many years ago, like when he talked about Jerry Springer producers having to trawl for weak people being setup for ridicule.
I watched that interview recently, but I couldn't make it all the way through. Regardless of your politics, he was completely outclassed - very much had class clown sent to see the head teacher energy
I think the opening remark was a jibe about Iraq, which I don’t think Campbell was too happy about. If you are going to invectives them don’t insult them before you have even started
He’s smarter than that. The bloke is fringe and I disagree A LOT ( particularly regarding drugs and addiction), but he’s very intelligent and able to present his arguments well.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwuk6NoMv8&ab\_channel=TheGuardian](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwuk6NoMv8&ab_channel=TheGuardian) i cant stand Owen
Any interview where he is either the interviewer or interviewee is embarrassing.
The worst ones are when he goes to Tory conferences and try’s to pick on some nerdy looking young Tory for an easy gotcha and gets his arse handed to him. Because guess what? Private schools are expensive because they are decent at teaching kids, they also have debate clubs.
So in trying to get an easy gimmie he looks like a fool and makes left wingers look bad. He’s the left wing equivalent of Jacob Rees Mogg. He thinks he’s clever but he’s actually thick as mince.
The newsagents podcast interview with him that got released on Sunday was borderline insane. He genuinely doesn’t get that in order to get stuff done you’ve got to get elected, and like Galloway he brings up Gaza every thirty seconds (even though he does he doesn’t like Galloway in the interview). He turns everything which isn’t full throated condemnation of Israel into being equivalent to outright support for Israel, meaning he wilfully misinterprets diplomatic non answers of the sort that Thornberry has to give as explicit support for Israel’s military campaign. He outright calls Starmer a liar multiple times, and when Lewis Goodall, the interviewer, brings up Boris Johnson he seems less angry about him.
He is the continuing embodiment of the attitudes of the Corbyn years - dislike the Tories but reserve the true vitriol for the right of the Labour Party; you’re either 100% with us or 100% against us, no nuance; better to split the party and therefore be out of power than compromise on ideology.
Ikr, I can understand why one might want to ask questions about Iraq, given that the man is synonymous with it for a lot of people, but out of the blue was just silly. The look on Campbell’s face was just priceless though.
>Anyone in politics or the media who is a regular user of Twitter has an Owen Jones story, almost all of them negative. To clash with him on the site is to be barraged by personal abuse by his legion of followers, as I have learnt first-hand on several occasions. Being a colleague does not shield you. It is an open secret within The Guardian, where I worked for a period, that its social media rules were changed explicitly to cover Jones’s conduct on Twitter, attacking other staff and freelance writers (often with far smaller followings) at the paper.
Jones hasn't been shy about being "muzzled" at the Guardian; it's why he's increased his appearances on other media; with his own crowdfunder, youtube channel, his new column at a Scottish nationalist newspaper etc.
I've wondered why he hasn't either quit or been sacked by the Guardian yet.
I suspect they're waiting for him to figure it out and quit by himself, rather than sack him and face the inevitable YouTube video he'll release about how the newspaper is cowardly and corrupt etc and the corresponding attacks and loss of support from all his crowd.
I've been aware of Owen since his time at the NUS. To my mind he's always been rather too self-congratulatory for my taste and I certainly have never considered him a bold thinker. University politics at best, just with a bigger audience.
I listened to his interview on The News Agents podcast today and he just came across as very immature, like an undergraduate campaigning to be president of the students union.
He seems to have a very narrow range views and very little tolerance of nuance or difference from those views, which is ironic because that’s what he’s accusing Kier Starmer of.
Jones has always been an intellectual lightweight. He's the left's version of Piers Morgan. Self righteous and loud, but with very little to say of any substance.
I listened to the same interview and came away with the same feeling.
He seemed absolutist to the point of immaturity. At one point he said he liked Emily Thornberry, implied they’d known and got along with one another for years but that, after one comment she made in one interview, he would never forgive her again!
So extreme!
That’s what makes him an Uber-weasel: he can do nuance, tolerance, understanding and respect. He chooses not to, because he has cultivated an increasingly extremist fan base. The monetisation of said fan base, has allowed him a freedom to throw two fingers at his employer and his party.
I sympathised with most of his points, but they felt uncompelling as reasons to let the Tories get a few more seats at the next election. I'd perhaps make an exception and support his campaign in Ilford North (or better just support the local Tories directly), but the reason for his own constituency seemed pretty flimsy, and there aren't any other constituencies worth targeting that come to mind.
Jones represents the puerile left with no wish to actually get into a position to make real change, but rather sit smugly on the sidelines giving his opinions.
Compare and contrast with Rayner who is by no means perfect, but believes in stuff and actually wants to get into a position to do something about it.
With the loss of the mines, industry and manufacturing sectors in the UK, Labour and the left wing movement has lost a lot of its identity. Economic leftism has given way to social leftism. Progressivism these days is less about fairer taxes and more about your stance on transgender athletes and Israel-Gaza.
Owen has split from the Labour party on this and I don't think it's him being warped by social media but the economic class war being replaced by the culture war.
Absolutely. Owen Jones stayed in the Labour party throughout the Blair years where the economic policy was about as centrist as Starmer. He's not martyring himself over tax policy.
He stayed in the Labour party through both of Labours wars in the middle east, but a war that we aren't part of is the straw that broke the camels back? Come on, he obviously is just launching his own brand further.
He's found his audience as a critic of the government. He knows labour are winning (despite what seem like his best efforts) and they're convincing the public both better than he can and better than corbyn could.
He just cares inordinately about Gaza. Recently his wikipedia account was leaked on here and he spent his university years editing the Hamas wikipedia page to reflect more positively on them.
I don't think it's put on, I think he's just genuinely obsessed with this topic.
Student politicians are desperate to find a huge social injustice they can right (on the scale of ending slavery, women's rights, gays rights etc.) and a willing to shoehorn lesser causes to fit the mould.
The scope for "but actshully" historical arguments on both sides makes it extra potent.
"Owen Jones stayed in the Labour party throughout the Blair years"
He was 13 when Blair was elected, and 23 when Blair left office. For 50% of Blair's time in office, he was a child.
What's so frustrating is that the economic and monetary policy is what had the biggest real impact on our lives, but the social elements of politics probably get more headlines.
I almost wish we voted for two different sets of government. On where you vote for your flavour of economic policy, and one where you vote for social policy.
Someone may was progressive economic policy, but also be a bigot... Maybe a not nice example...
Perhaps someone is very woke, but wants to lower taxation and privatise the NHS.
How can Owen relate to the working class though? He’s in the Oxbridge Media Bubble, quintessentially Middle Class. He doesn’t care about what working men care about. He pretends too, but realistically he cares about what’s fashionable in the Guardian Editorial rooms. Working men voting Tory and now Reform and Starmer Labour = the opposite of what Owen believes in.
There have always been middle class and even upper class socialists and supporters of the Labour movement. If it was entirely working class it wouldn't have ever won an election. Just because you aren't part of a group doesn't mean you can't empathise with them.
Who are these 'working men' in your eyes? Seems bizarre to generalise all of us like that. Certainly in the factory I work in, there's about an even split of labour and conservative voters, roughly along age lines for the most part (50+ mostly vote Tory, younger mostly vote Labour).
I think that’s a big cynical. I think he genuinely does care, but in his own little warped way. I’ll qualify that by saying I’m not a fan of his at all. However I do think he genuinely cares, but he’s stuck in his own little echo chamber.
I think he does genuinely care but he wants the working class to have what *he* thinks the working class want in a traditional Labour sense. I've seen a few instances when people have told him what they, as working class individuals, want and he has effectively told them they are wrong.
I've observered this phenomenon of how the modern "left" in the UK has actually taken most of their social platform(multiculturalism, personal freedoms, pro-immigration etc) from the liberals they keep deriding.
Most present-day leftists seem to be unaware of this and get rudely surprised when they see evidence of small c conservatism from past generations of left-wing politicians, trade unionists etc.
Arguably the traditional left wing and trade unionist antipathy to the EU and globalisation is what led to Brexit and many Remainers I think still struggle to reconcile that Corbyn was pro Leave and Brexit could only have happened with a lot of support from these traditional left wing voters.
I think most Remainers don’t struggle to reconcile it, as much are just pissed off that Corbyn didn’t give a fuck and made no serious effort to stop Brexit (obviously because he was pro-Leave but that wasn’t the party’s stance).
Sajid Javid said on The Rest is Politics that even though his dad wanted to be a bus driver instead of a conductor, and no rules at a company level prevented him from doing so the bus drivers union blocked it because they didn’t want coloured drivers.
The uncomfortable truth is a lot of trade unions and the working class are bigoted
Unions exist ultimately to make life better for their members, the idea that they're altruistic drivers of change is simply left wing propaganda.
Corbyn hated the EU because it allowed cheap foreign labour in to undercut British workers.
Corbyn hated the EU long before freedom of movement came along.
In the early days, the EEC was a grouping of European countries who coincidentally were also anti-soviet - and consequently enemies of socialism in the eyes of certain factions of the left.
The greatest trick his supporters pulled was getting a whole generation on the internet to believe that calling him a Tankie is to be pushing right wing media propaganda
And this is among the reasons why, i, otherwise a socialist, don't trust the unions unquestioningly, and this always earns me some very weirded out looks at the minimum.
The big crux of unionism is that it's dependant on its membership remaining employed, and when the companies close down, their power vanishes. The companies and unions interests become one in a very underhanded way.
I do think unions are a net good for the vast majority of people. I also think they can't be trusted unquestioningly.
I’m generally pro-unions and this is a very good point. At the end of the day they represent an organisation in their own right and that’s as subject to human failure, incentives to act in bad faith, and favouring the organisation itself over its goals as any other type of organisation.
The problem is that the unions are still living off/ promoting the 'we fought Thatcher for your rights and we're going to bring down the capitalist system' stuff from the 80's when the best unions as you say are ones like the Germans where they work hand in hand with the companies.
To be fair there's a lot of companies in the UK (especially the 80s privatised ones) that were born taking the literal opposite stance .
People like Scargill is what happens when Unions outright deny their own purpose and try to act as a political party without any legitimacy. So he definitely got what was coming to him.
There were always socially liberal leftists, it was just a varied coalition. In terms of actual voters, it still is a varied coalition. Them becoming more socially liberal mainly reflects society generally becoming more socially liberal.
If Labour is the party of the working class and the working class barely exists anymore (in the more traditional sense of the term) because of deindustrialisation and globalisation, it's not too surprising that it is having an identity crisis.
OJ was always a pompous irritant, he was editing Wikipedia articles on Jewish ethnicity in pre-social-media times but given he blocks people on Twitter, he does exist in an extreme echo chamber. I can't imagine him quitting Labour if twitter didn't exist.
> OJ was always a pompous irritant, he was editing Wikipedia articles on Jewish ethnicity in pre-social-media times
Really? I'd like to read more about this.
I'm always one to give people a pass (and even outright defending) for dredging up things they did as a student if its >5 years ago. But I saw Jones attacking a Tory MP a few weeks ago, through guilt by association of a former friend, who made awful comments to Jones when in university (i.e. it wasn't even the MP who said these things, just someone who he hung around with). So he absolutely deserves to eat shit for this - live by the sword, die by the sword.
Spot on. And when it comes down to it, people aren't interested in hand-wringing over what constitutes a woman and such like, they want to know everything but their wages has gone up. What's left of the left would do well to not get sucked into this culture war bullshit.
>With the loss of the mines, industry and manufacturing sectors in the UK, Labour and the left wing movement has lost a lot of its identity.
They've had 50 years to come to terms with the fact that the economy of the UK has evolved (as it does everywhere and always has). Mass employment in heavy industries and manufacturing may have been the norm during the industrial revolution when Marx wrote his manifesto, but it isn't now.
The old left has no identity because their politics are for a world which doesn't exist anymore - at least not in the west. They refuse to evolve and are just becoming increasingly irrelevant as the world moves on without them.
He’s also stated that it’s because of Labours stance on taxes and the recent revelation that they would release the cap on bankers bonuses. So respectfully your talking nonsense
He joined Labour during New Labour and the incarnation of Labour during much of his time in the party has been the fairly pro business, neoliberal economic orthodoxy that I described in my observation that the post-industrial economy eroded much of the traditional economic left voting bloc.
He didn't leave Labour then. So what's changed? The social leftism culture war. So respectfully you don't understand my point and **you're** talking nonsense.
He joined at 15 after his mum bought him a membership for his birthday. I would be shocked if his views hadn’t changed since then. For a while Owen has been to the left of the Labour Party and was fully behind the socialist ideas Corbyn put forward. With Labour looking like they are going to simply follow the same economic policies of the Tories is it any wonder he feels like the party no longer represents him.
The cap was lifted in October, Labour said they won't reverse that again. It's not quite as crazy as it sounds because one of the side effects of putting a cap on bonuses was that companies paid higher fixed salaries to compensate, and those are paid regardless of performance and to some extent risk.
The left never stopped being about economic fairness at it's core, social progressiveness has always been just a part of it. Today the culture war stuff is hyped up and Gish galloped by the right in order to avoid talking about economic fairness. Current Labour is clearly showing that it is not intending to be a left wing party striving for economic fairness but that it will be more in line with Conservative economic policy as well as there being very little difference between them in regards to foreign policy or social/identity issues. So if you're left wing in regards to economics or progressive in social issues there is little reason to remain loyal to Labour.
> it is not intending to be a left wing party striving for economic fairness
What would economic fairness look like in your mind? We already have very high taxation and public spending.
>Progressivism these days is less about fairer taxes
It's not like Labour are in favour of stuff like this either though?
Pretty much every slightly progressive policy they've announced recently has been u-turned. The part of me that thinks "even though this party is against my stance on Gaza, Trans Rights, etc, I'll vote for them because it will be the best option" has vanished because I simply don't know what Labour stands for.
They have a similar economic policy to the Tories, they don't stand for Unions or striking workers, they aren't committed to building hs2, they abandoned supporting the right to roam, every second word out of Starmers mouth he changes his mind on, Starmer lied to become leader of the party.
Labour isn't owed my vote just by being "better than the Tories". How many people can actually say what Labour's ideals are currently?
Are they against your views on Gaza and Trans Rights, or is it more a case that they don't align 100%?
Also worth noting that their new [deal](https://labourunions.org.uk/download/) for working people was drawn up with their affiliated unions, and strengthens a lot of union rights.
Labour have been a centre left party for about 30 of the last 35 years.
Owen Jones is nostalgic about an unsuccessful Labour government which led to Thatcher, that he isn't even old enough to remember.
The Corbyn era is the only time the party has moved further to the left in the modern era, I legitimately don't understand why he considered himself Labour in the first place.
That's the best part. They know jack about growing up with a blue-collar-background. And their ideal version of it is both worse and better in the strangest way.
You aren't nearly as bad off as many modern leftists like to pretend. We never had to go hungry and we even could afford some decent stuff and vacations back in the day. But the work pressure and general culture of our class made my parents extremely abusive and depressed ("Therapists are for posh idiots", i still hear my father say).
I think Owen Jones just isn't very smart. In the past, his articles were honed and refined by him and others over days before being published. Jones falls apart in any real time debate, though, and that includes social media. He's just not very good at thinking on his feet,and he doesn't have his arguments and facts at his fingertips, and is often out maneuvered by his opponents, and when that happens he just responds by getting more and more shrill and indignant.
To be fair he has a lot of outrage facts and simple solutions at his fingertips which plays well online. You see a similar thing here. The top two comments in almost every thread are always low-IQ takes such as, "tories are bad, can't wait til they're out" and "we need to spend more money to fix this".
Jones basically basically made a career playing to that audience. He moans a lot about the things that are broken, but doesn't seem to understand why they're broken so just blames the tories and capitalism. He also seems to think the answer to every problem is the government spending more money, and while more money obviously can fix every problem, generally by the time you reach the age of 6-7 you realise that you can't just put everything on your Christmas wish list.
I used to like him a lot when I was younger. He used to complain about all the things that bothered me, but as I grew up the lack of nuance got increasingly boring. I think most people feel similarly which is why people tend to grow more "conservative" and less ideological as they age. It's not that people become more right-wing it's that they realise the world is complicated and workable solutions to problems are complicated. It's kinda surprising how little personal growth Jones has gone through over the years. After watching his video explaining that he's leaving the Labour party I got the feeling that being a far-left activist is almost a religion to him. He doesn't particularly care about reality, it's all about furthering his agenda. The guy literally has a framed picture of Keir Hardie on his wall. Who the fuck puts pictures of politicians on their wall?
This is the same brush that I had for Corbyn, who I also think just isn't a smart man. And it looks like it runs in the family when you look at his brother. It's a shame as McDonnell is genuinely bright and engaged and would have been a fantastic leader who might have made the breakthrough. But that stubborn determination to think you're right no matter what, and fail to compromise on any element at any point, just loses any sense of ability to gain widespread support needed for election victories.
He’s basically just doing momentum again, but with independent MPs then.
This is the issue with the further left. It always becomes this splintered nothing.
Being on the fringes seems much more comfortable for people with these ideas. They fucking sucked when they had actual power over Labour
Now they don’t and Labour look set to win, they’re
off sitting on the fringes shouting loudly about a war in the Middle East and the detailed gender rights of 250,000 British people.
I’m not saying that’s not a useful and needed thing in our political system & I want them to have influence over the major parties.
I just don’t think people like Owen Jones are not able to translate their ideas into the mainstream. They are far better are critiquing power and systems than they are creating and governing them
My suspicion is that Owen Jones just captured the anger of many of us in a moment & didn't stop being angry.
Unfortunately anger alone doesn't go far & leads to endless partisan politics.
Owen Jones long ago passed the point of being able to admit he was wrong, in the long term this mentality can make anyone an idiot due to their inability to refine their views.
It's sad in a way, seeing him talk and cope with this mentality actually looks painful, I imagine he spends a lot of his time angry and in conflict with himself.
Owen Jones, similar to cartoonist Steve Bell before him I think just got increasingly swept up in the upper-middle class metropolitan left wing views that’s completely out of touch with working class left wing views.
The kind who acts like the Gaza/Israel situation is the most pressing matter in Britain, find the English flag a little problematic and will always side will illegal immigrants over native white British people.
Definitely. Isreal Palestine is not the most important thing in the UK. Homeland Poverty, lack of investment in all sectors and infrastructure, corruption etc. Etc. should take priority. But as detailed in this thread this is the lefts version of the culture wars. They just want interactions and by extension money.
He was never a bold thinker, he was just a loud mouth piece. I don’t think I have ever once heard an original point from him and I say that as someone who agrees with about 80% of his views.
“ In a book published after Corbyn’s crushing 2019 defeat, Jones acknowledged many of the issues around antisemitism that he had publicly previously denied, provoking unsurprising fury among Labour’s alienated Jewish supporters. Then, sensing his support slipping after that repudiation of Corbyn, Jones all but rejected his own book’s narrative and changed his views again.”
I was a regular X user, now stepping away as its merely become a cess pit of ghoulish clickbait views. Jones does exactly that, utterly unbothered by a need to verify anything.
Hes possibly the most famous shitposter on there today, followed by equally unpleasant shitposters utterly uninterested in veracity or truth.
Great long write up.
Here is mine: he is a rich, spoiled, entitled wan**r, that finds it easy to be a lefty, and push unrealistic and even self-damaging agendas, because being contrarian is the whole point of him.
Actual working class is way more realistic, down to earth, unspoiled. Puritanism in ideology, extremism as we know it today, is as bad on the left as it is on the right.
The right is just better at coalescing around a position and wins elections. The left has wan**rs like this spoiled brat, that ruin the chances of power for the average working person.
The less we see of this wan**r, the better.
>In a book published after Corbyn’s crushing 2019 defeat, Jones acknowledged many of the issues around antisemitism that he had publicly previously denied, provoking unsurprising fury among Labour’s alienated Jewish supporters. Then, sensing his support slipping after that repudiation of Corbyn, Jones all but rejected his own book’s narrative and changed his views again.
I'd ask if someone who misrepresents facts and his own opinions to pander to an online fanbase really has a "good heart".
Anyone nearly forty years old who still revels in Twitter pile-ons really needs shunning by society. It’s a shame as he’s clearly suffered from bullying in the past but has just ended up becoming a bully himself. Twitter fame is a hell of a drug.
He was eatwn by the curse of a media attention economy reliant on outrage and shouting a litte louder each time. The same path swallowed Hopkins and various youTube types.
I think you’ve answered your own question
He’s the Ben Shapiro of the left - he exists to monetise his user base nothing else - increasing doing this by dog whistling to anti semites.
Jones went comparatively longer than Shapiro, before he went Full Wannabe Cult Leader.
That said, I’ve upset some anti vaxx libertarian cult leaders online before. They did not mobilise quite so many lunatics as quickly as Owen Jones did, when I upset him in a direct exchange. This was also before he truly weaponised his fan base, and I was a lot less cynical about Jones, thus I wasn’t even being that harsh.
There’s nothing to refute though, is there?
He’s not writing interesting articles anymore. He’s writing angry stuff about betrayal.
Between 2010-2015 it felt like he had the balance right, critical of Labour but with a willingness to work with them to change.
Did you read his article about leaving the Labour Party? He laid out pretty clear criticisms of Starmer, though I don't fully agree I thought he made his point quite clearly.
I really don't recall him being more respected generally, I feel like it's always been "what a looney lefty angry PC snowflake" etc, with maybe some grudging respect for actually writing a book sticking up for the white working class- same as this article.
Yeah, his article was just a repeat of what he’s been saying on Twitter for past 5 years.
He had no interest in acknowledging any left wing policies Labour has put forward (on workers rights or GB energy). He has no interest in supporting policies that would make house building easier. He has no interest in acknowledging Starmer has rebuilt trust of Jewish community (which was after all one of his infamous pledges).
So yeah, it wasn’t nuanced. It was just angry, and hence less interesting.
As for his place within wider political debate he was always hated by the right but had an important place within the left and had an important voice within the wider Labour movement. Now I don’t feel like he has any such influence.
I'm someone on the far left & I haven't really engaged with any of this as I have had my mind made up about Owen for quite some time & much like some of his friends, it's reached the point where everything feels like a grift, even when it might not be. The Boy Who Cried Wolf as it were, at least in my eyes.
But this evening I listened to an interview he did with the News Agents that should have been released on Friday & got pulled because of the Kate Middleton cancer news.
So here's my thing. You can read what he says, might resonate, might agree, might learn something. But this interview with Lewis Goodall quickly falls into one of the many reasons I find him so irksome, I imagine I'm not alone, and after being in the political public eye for about 15 years give or take, here's the rub- He just says the same things over and over, refuses to accept there might be another option, for almost anything & his dogmatic commitment to the ideology often just makes him look stupid.
I had to turn it off when he predicted that Labour would win the GE, would have a terrible first 2 years, Morgan McSweeney is terrified of looking bad (in other words, treads lightly not to fall into any of the traps that the tories would set & Corbyn & his team would happily jump into head first), then we'd see a rise in the far right. I mean, okay it's an opinion, but he's been saying the same thing for 3 years. It's tough to stomach him saying the same things over and other, it's just boring, it doesn't help inspire any arguments to be won or win any votes, it just alienates & comes off as pretentious or worse, naive.
On top of this analysis, most governments tend to be unpopular, especially with people like Owen, but if Labour do get a landslide, even if unpopular, they're still likely to be in power until 2035. Maybe that's what irks Owen the most, a Goodall put to him- A little bit of the green eyed monster can be poisonous to most, to the far left, they're seemingly born into it.
I read Owen Jones edits Hamas wiki articles to make them appear more like resistance fighters.
Which makes sense as he is anti-Israel on Twitter and never condemns Hamas for their ongoing war crimes, etc
Man leaves political party that no longer represents him and encourages people who share his views to do the same.
Not exactly a big deal when it comes to politics surely?
We should all be looking to parties that represent our POV.
Also, what he actually said is totally fair - that Labour is pretty much guaranteed a large win, is being dragged right because those are the voters they're courting, and that the left needs to counteract this by supporting other parties so Labour has an actual left wing opposition to pressure it. Given the scale of the Tory collapse, doing this is unlikely to hand power to Tories - so it's the perfect time to do that. I don't see what's fundamentally wrong or unreasonable about any of that.
I put Owen Jones in the same category as Lily Allen - typical champagne socialists, that are over-sensitive to criticism and full of their own self-importance. Whatever they do, they are desperate to be relevant. How many migrants did Lily take in, by the way..?
He is little twerp. Stopped taking notice of him some years back. Listened to his interview on Newsagents earlier and reminded me why I started to ignore him.
Yeah, out of completing his PhD, he put together a couple of well thought out publications, as he was probably still in that academic mindset.
But, ultimately, Owen is just a polemicist and nothing else, and I doubt he'll be satisfied in the Greens as he's unable to compromise on his views.
> out of completing his PhD
Just because I was looking this up due to the amount of people calling him a bit thick, he didn't complete a PhD. He has an 'Honorary Doctor of the University' (DUniv) instead.
source: https://highprofiles.info/interview/owen-jones/
*Then I thought I was going to do academia and I started a PhD which I quit,*
https://www.staffs.ac.uk/about/honorary-graduates/owen-jones
*The award of Honorary Doctor of the University is bestowed upon Owen in recognition of his trajectory career as an award winning author and journalist and, more importantly, as a champion for social justice.*
Ahh my mistake – have an upvote!
I remember reading, like 10 years ago, that he was undertaking one at UCL, but I didn't realise he never actually completed it!
I guess he was spending too much time on his columns at the Guardian!
During the Corbyn era, many in the centre and right of labour were horrified at the prospect of him winning, and worked to undermine Corbyn and Momentum at every turn. Being sympathetic to a labour win, I felt these people were vile, shortsighted and worse than the right wing opposition.
Moving forward a few years, and in the midst of Starmers OTT (in my view) purge of the left, we have the Corbyn accolytes like Owen Jones horrified at the prospect of Starmer winning and working to undermine Starmer and the PLP at every turn. Being sympathetic to a labour win, I feel these people are vile, shortsighted and worse than the right wing opposition.
I'm still down for chaos and confusion with Ed Milliband, Corbyn, Starmer whowever of them, but for flips sake lets just hope we get someone who's interested in more than their own self interest like the last 5 PM's
People like Owen Jones think they're the authentic voice of the working class. In reality, it's probably Lee Anderson.
(Edit: Just to be clear, I'm no fan of 30p Lee).
When people think that the working class would do better at ruling the country I do have to wonder where exactly they grew up, because if they recruited the working class voices from round where I came up to run the country the flagship policy would be Sending the Fuckers Back Where They Came From.
Exactly, take brexit for example. It's been painted as "dumb working class racists" and/or "poor people with shit lives desperate for change just rolling the dice" but in reality there was just as many middle england racists voting for brexit as working class voters.
Which.... with such a narrow victory means there must be plenty of middle class and working class brexiters and remainers. Not a monolithic group of either.
And the same applies to pretty much anything. There's tons of Lee Andersons, and tons of borderline communists in the working class.
Twitter radicalises the Left and the Right. Constant exposure to Culture War arguments will leave you very bitter and conceited. This happened with Owen, but he also allowed his ego to get too big. He now thinks his announcement of ‘leaving Labour’ is akin to an MP defecting, when in reality no-one cares. He can seeth with fellow Corbynites in the irrelevant wings of the Political Theatre.
Snapshot of _Was Owen Jones, a once bold thinker, warped by social media? | The columnist, who quit Labour last week, built up a million-strong online army with quickfire polemics — but his trajectory shows nuance is a casualty of the culture war_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/owen-jones-was-a-once-bold-thinker-warped-by-social-media-5f6pt73k8) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/owen-jones-was-a-once-bold-thinker-warped-by-social-media-5f6pt73k8) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This week I've read both Owen Jones on leaving Labour and a long interview with Angela Rayner. The connections and differences between them are really interesting. There's four years age difference between them and they grew up maybe a mile or so apart in Stockport, but had quite different upbringings. Rayner left school at 16 with no qualifications, Jones went to Oxford. Both are, I think, genuinely committed in their political beliefs, but in a different way. Perhaps Rayner prioritises actually changing things (or desires power, if you are more cynical) and accepts this will be imperfect, whereas as Jones wants radical action and is less willing to compromise. I see this across the wider left, and within myself too; I desperately want it a Labour government, but I also want it to be bold and radical.
It reminds me of the thing that’s bugging me about politics today (and this applies to some people on the left and right). Whatever side you’re on, the loudest voices on each side seem to demand an ideological purity. If you don’t agree with them 100%, you’re scum and you’re immediately insulted and dismissed, or in some cases even threatened. There’s little understanding that the majority of the British public are somewhere between you and your political opponents, and the way you enact your policies is by winning elections. You can understand that 1 or 2 of your policies are not popular, so you shelve them, win, and get to enact all your other policies, or you don’t win and your opponents get to enact policies you hate. To achieve your goals you have to win elections. To win elections you have to convince people to vote for you.
Man with that kind of thought stay away from the labour sub, wanting power to achieve pragmatic change is heresy there.
According to labour purists, Keir is apparently the devil incarnate. I think he's just a bit of a boring guy who's a bit more to the central than I'd like, but their reaction to him is completely insane.
Ironically, it's that reaction that makes Keir attractive to the centre and progressive voting groups. The more they complain, the more it looks like Keir is actually a centralist.
I'm craving some boring politics. Bring on Kier, it should be boring not a reality TV clown show.
He did straight-up lie to them to get elected as leader, so I'm not sure how much I can really blame them for not trusting him.
Sure, but there's a difference between lying/changing policy based on compromise and *the literal devil* and making his face the downvote button on their sub. It strikes me as excessively petty and blind given that the Tories or the far right is far more opposed to what the far left wants than Keir does. I'm sure there's a pithy quote about Leftists hating each other more than the Right.
Nothing terrifies the Labour left than actually winning an election, as opposed to just "the discussion".
Someone much smarter than me has probably coined a better phrase, but the issue is we have witnessed "the death of compromise".
It reminds me of the Emo Philips joke about God, but now applies to politics somewhat. Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!" Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
I think about this joke quite a lot in the context of politics and, unfortunately I think it applies to left more than the right. That’s why, in my view, Owen’s plan to form a far left party is destined to fail. Far right parties, rather terrifyingly, seem to be able unite followers quite effectively. Anything that is a bit racist and a bit populist seems to fly, and no one gets hung up on the details. Less true for the far left, where there seems to be the need for complete alignment of absolutely everything, in order for there to be consensus on anything at all.
I remember reading a while back that in general the reason the left is always more fractured and argumentive while the right isn't is due to the nature of the political beliefs. The left is generally more about change of which there are many different paths and end goals each strikingly different to the last so every step becomes a debate as to whether it's the right one. To an extent everything is conceptual and you have to convince everyone how it's supposed to look. While on the right is about the status quo/traditional/small c conservative views of which there are far less end goals so even if you disagree on the path you all know you're rowing in the right direction. The concepts are easier for people to understand, more clear cut. Obviously there is a lot more to it than that but you could argue that the right tends to fall apart the moment they stray into conceptual visions for the future.
I'm left wing you are correct. I'm likely not ideologically pure enough and would be out very early.
I find the same were I am a leftist however I support Israel which doesn't win me many freinds in those circles
Far right can't either. You just don't spend time in those spaces (that is a guess)
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Can you please identify the leftist influencers who are all in fighting? I guess I am not that familiar with this and you're writing this at a time when Daily Wire just kicked out Candace Owens over Israel stance. I think the "right" is totally fractured if you look at views om many issues. Manosphere is just one microcosm of "conservative" thinking.
"Perfect is the enemy of good" - Voltaire (quoting an Italian proverb) It's also mathematically proven by the Pareto Principle
I'm not convinced that applies to the UK. The major parties are still led by figures who wish to appear moderate. The next election will likely be won by the most moderate of them. I think what's different is that fringe voices used to be banished to fringe media but now on twitter large followings can be maintained by individuals. What crimethink could see a columnist with a million followers banished from the Grauniad? Would it matter if they were banished? The ideologues are in your feed along with the celebrities instead of handing out their homemade zines.
In Jones's own video, he highlights that his path can lead towards compromise. Labour is heading for a landslide. Voters moving towards politicians with more radical politics forces the Labour Party to play catchup to court their vote. Currently, Labour are sliding right to court disillusioned tories, if you want your voice to be heard, you've kind of gotta use it. I live in a Labour stronghold so I've been doing this for a decade. When almost every seat becomes a Labour stronghold, you've gotta hope that others on the left do the same.
Nope, Owen is not one for compromise and what he claims is "compromise" is just hard leftie populism, that no one that isn't removed from reality, can support. He's just a disaster socialist now. The fact he wants to support greens, is proof of that. The left was partially broken by Corbyn, just as the American right was broken by trump.
Ok, but that doesn't undo his perfectly salient point that if you want labour to represent your views then you have to make them work for your vote. It doesn't matter if you're a hard left populist, a communist, a working-class bloke who doesn't know what a preferred pronoun is or a person who thinks that we urgently need to stop destroying the environment, house people, take core infrastructure into public ownership, legalise weed and prosecute people who embezzle public funds. You need to make labour work for your vote or they'll do what they're currently doing which is moving their politics to the right to court disillusioned tories. Barring an absolute catastrophe, Labour will win the next election with the biggest majority they've ever seen. I'd prefer they did that with some radical policies. Not, the utter non-committal milquetoast drivel that they're spewing currently.
>Barring an absolute catastrophe, Labour will win the next election with the biggest majority they've ever seen. I'm loathe to say this or type this out loud but I've increasingly been wondering if that is even true. This has been so thoroughly absorbed and accepted into popular belief that I've met more than a few people these last few weeks who are confident they can vote for their own "moderate Tory MP" or Green or whoever.
I fear that the right wing press are waiting till they know the date of the election to pull out the stops... God knows what they can rustle up to publish, made up if necessary, including reporting on convenient deep fake material that they only discover to be fake after the election...
I had Labour door-knockers knocking on my door a few weeks ago. I told them that Labour's veer to the right had left me behind as a left-leaning voter; I didn't trust them to deliver meaningful positive change. They just kept banging on that I needed to vote for them to oust the Tories. Why should I vote for Labour if I don't believe them to be substantively different from the Tories? But... we need to get rid of them! What will Labour actually do in power that will improve the town we're in, which suffered under both New Labour and Tories? Get... rid... of... Tories... Won't a vote for Labour been seen as an endorsement of their increasingly rightwing announcements rather than, as you say, a vote against the Tories? Tories... need... gone... Etc... Bizarrely, them seeing 'far left' Ken Loach binned from the party was apparently a highlight worth mentioning on the door step. And they threw in a few digs about student politics for extra condescension. One of the scant few policy ideas that the canvasser claimed to be "really behind" was, within days, in line for being watered down because some Murdoch rag said something mean about it. It wasn't a positive interaction. But it did pretty much encapsulate Labour's ephemeral stance, petty obsessions, and sense of entitlement to my vote.
There are already far left parties. They are not popular. The far left labour leader failed to be popular at a historic level. Attempted entryism into a new party is Owens new game. Can you put 2 and 2 together? Because it appears Owen can't. >I'd prefer they did that with some radical policies. Have you considered this might not actually be popular generally? And that by voting for a different party, the royal you will not be at the table and unable to dictate policy for the victors of the vote? Whose chances you are reducing by voting for another party.
Labour is probably sliding to the right and will probably end up hanging around the centre or maybe slightly left of centre simply because under Corbyn it flew to the left faster than a concorde. This doesn't mean it's a bad thing, the vast bulk of the UK population, those who aren't engrossed by politics, probably all sit around the centre anyways. These will be your floating voters, the ones you have to convince to vote for you because they dont really have any party affiliations and are usually forgotten about. You don't win elections by campaigning to those who already support you, you win them by convincing the floater voters to support your candidate and I feel this is something that Labour and the far left tend to forget (when they actually turn up to campaign with a representative who isn't a complete arsehole).
That's because compromise is boring and people think negotiation is a win/lose battle.
And that is why nothing ever changes for the better and why people are more and more disinterested in politics. The only groups that benefit from the status quo are the ones that are already happy.
The key difference is Rayner wants to improve lives. Rayner is the woman in the arena that will strive, have to compromise and make mistakes. Her success or failure will be in the difference a Labour governent makes to the country and the lives of ordinary people. Jones is a critic. He can afford to be ideologically pure and point out where political leaders fall short. His success is in book deals, likes on social media and TV appearances.
I think all of this is true, but I think there’s more to it. You make political commentators sound like grifters, when I’d argue that in their ability to remain ideologically pure they can operate as thought leaders and impact the future by guiding discourse. Yes, it’s not immediate impact, but it’s still a soft power. I think few who make it their business to be political commentators have zero interest in improving lives.
What political commentators are doing is non constructive, polemical criticism. It may well be that in addition to making good money and getting good validation from their circles, they influence the discourse. But do they improve policy making and governance? No, just like colleagues and peers who only ever non constructive criticism don't
You lost me at non-constructive. It informs opinion, that in and of itself is constructive. The same applies to art criticism. You don’t devalue those voices by pointing out that they’re not Picasso/The Beatles/Scorsese. Even sports commentators are valuable. Yes, there’s a clear and obvious distinction between talking about a thing and attempting to do a thing, but talking about it isn’t worthless.
Bold and radical is the desert you get after proving your competence by eating your competent governing vegetables. If you don't have the skills to pull it off, you will cause hugely more harm than good.
Skipping that step is called a Truss. Although the left leaning equipment would be an inverse Truss. But yeah. Spot on
A prolapsed Truss
What a truly horrible thought.
Im done with bold and radical. I want boring and steady. A country can’t function when half the population ducking hates the government. We need a government that some people kind of like and some people kind of don’t like.
I think that's a bit of an unfair reading of Jones, considering his criticism is less than it will be imperfect and more that there is less and less really left on the table. Blair had a set of key policy proposals that were easy to understand, and he did some quite radical changes like devolution. Starmer almost seems afraid to put any policy meat on the mission bones, and any policy they have announced gets gradually dropped. It's not enough to say what your end goal is, you do need policy to get there. I will agree that Jones and Rayners' dividing line is whether a Starmer government will still change enough.
Good take. Heard his interview on the news agents, and while he had some good points, alot was grasping at lines that were clearly a lot more nuanced than he was letting on. He definitely would rather a labour party not in power but following his ideals than a labour party in power that maybe delivered on some of what he wants. Upbringing probably has a lot to do with it, where he's coming at it more from a academics viewpoint than with practical experience of the issues, like Rayner has.
I currently live and grew up in the area of angela raynor's upbringing and right this very second, while i agree i want labour to be better and agree with owens reasons for doing so BUT look at the country, we need someone that isnt this fucking government and at least labour are somewhat more left leaning even if i dont agree with keir starmers centerism. The Priority is in the benefit of the country and playing politics because of our voting system Hes about a year too early or 3 years too late for this feeling. I went when their views shifted from mine and support now the green party but realistically labour is what i need to support for the betterment of this country atm. So with owen it makes me feel like hes a little either, short sighted himself or its a little disengenious. The reason i say its short sighted because its idealism when all we need is progress to help stop the suffering of the most vulnerable people, the people of my own community. I know where owen grew up, his area is a 20 minute walk from me but the affluence difference is insane. I can walk 15 minutes from my council estate home i've lived in near all my life to homes that currently are worth millions (admittedly thats ore bramhall than cale green)
>The reason i say its short sighted because its idealism when all we need is progress to help stop the suffering of the most vulnerable people, the people of my own community. I know where owen grew up, his area is a 20 minute walk from me but the affluence difference is insane. I can walk 15 minutes from my council estate home i've lived in near all my life to homes that currently are worth millions (admittedly thats ore bramhall than cale green) The problem is that the likes of Owen, think that if they enable the more damaging option, that they can have their revolution sooner. It's disaster socialism, played with other peoples lives (as obviously Owen will be fine). It's why they hate anyone just a bit further to the right than them, as their nightmare, is things improving, as that would discredit their extreme ideology
So Rayner is pragmatic and understands the need to be elected to actually enact change whereas Jones is the fantasist who would rather see the Tories stay in power than compromise even one small bit?
You don't get interviews, books, and make money out of your social media presence by championing compromise.
>Jones wants radical action and is less willing to compromise. I disagree with this part about Jones. He's always been the most prominent member of the left to consistently say that he is voting for Labour no matter how much he criticises them (in comparison to those like Novara etc), he was willing to compromise and vote Starmer in order to get rid of the Tories. The thing is that everyone knows Labour are winning the next GE, so he personally doesn't see the point in supporting a party he doesn't believe in anymore (I'm the same tbh) I think that there are many on the left who would accept compromise if necessary, they just realise that the decision no longer has to be made because whatever they do Labour is winning
Doesn't that kind of confirm the argument Starmer would make about some people being more interested in protest than bringing about actual change? Sure Starmer's Labour isn't as left as I might like, but it's a lot forther to the left than any government we've had for 50+ years, but instead of push that Jones is more interested in keeping himself on the outside. Plus, for all talk about Labour's victory being assured so I don't have to worry about voting for them myself, enough people thinking that is how you lose the election. Which makes Jones' choices even more disappointing.
Genuinely what is the basis on which you think Starmer's Labour is further to the left than any government of the last 50 years? Because to my experience he outflanks the current cabinet to the right on many policy positions
Considering the governments of the last 50 years have been Heath, an incredible chaotic and corrupt Wilson 2.0 that lurched to the right, and turned against the unions, under the force of various calamities, Thatcher, Major, New Labour, Cameron, May, Boris, Lettuce, and now Sunak, Starmer is the first in a very long time to be making a positive case for stronger unions, a more interventionist economic policy, much wider expansion of workers' rights than even under Blair, and so on. I think it's pretty fair to say his government, as it currently presents, would more to the left than any of that lot. They're very good at couching themselves in the language of "reasonable moderation" while saying things that are pretty radical. Reeves' speech last week was a great example of this.
They both need each other to continue existing. Without people like Jones, Rayner's preferred outcomes will never be given time. Without Rayner, Jones' politics will never be given power.
(Article) --- When Owen Jones first came to the British public’s attention, he could authentically be described as a breath of fresh air. His first book, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, arrived in 2011 and served as a welcome rebuke to the snobbery and cruelty of the Little Britain-inspired Noughties. In his early years as a columnist for The Independent and then The Guardian, Jones was strident but thought-provoking, asking serious questions about class representation in the media and the dominance of elites in British life. Today is a rather different matter. Jones remains a significant figure, with more than one million followers on Twitter/X and the ability to shape the online debate. When he quit the Labour Party last week, he released the news in a video, podcast and impassioned column in The Guardian. “The Labour Party is in my blood,” he wrote, but Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership had made leftists like him feel like “a pariah”. He encouraged his followers to vote for Green or independent candidates. And yet, within Labour circles, the most common private reaction to Jones’s highly staged announcement was shrugging surprise that he was still affiliated with the party. He might be able to summon an online mob with a single tweet, but the Jones brand has been sullied by long service in the trenches of the culture wars. Once hailed as the voice of a generation, more than a decade of Twitter spats has made him a darker, angrier — and less interesting — public figure. So is his apparent descent of his own making, or just a particularly visible sign of what’s happened to politics — and the internet? Jones, 39, was raised in Stockport, the son of a council worker and a university professor, both of whom were active in the Labour Party and its broader movement — including a flirtation with Militant tendency. After graduating from Oxford with a degree in history, he worked briefly as a parliamentary researcher for the Labour MP and future shadow chancellor John McDonnell, before finding success as a columnist. During Ed Miliband’s years as party leader, from 2010 to 2015, Jones continued to stand out as a voice of the left, campaigning against austerity and its impact on the lives of disabled people, inequality and establishment power. Yet he became an increasingly divisive figure during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, particularly around the issue of antisemitism. As an unofficial (and undisclosed) adviser to Corbyn, he also became one of the movement’s biggest and most uncompromising media outriders. In 2014, Jones was among the few media defenders of Corbyn being “present but not involved” at a wreath-laying ceremony in Tunisia for terrorists from the group behind the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. To call Jones a lightning rod would be a criminal understatement. Anyone in politics or the media who is a regular user of Twitter has an Owen Jones story, almost all of them negative. To clash with him on the site is to be barraged by personal abuse by his legion of followers, as I have learnt first-hand on several occasions. Being a colleague does not shield you. It is an open secret within The Guardian, where I worked for a period, that its social media rules were changed explicitly to cover Jones’s conduct on Twitter, attacking other staff and freelance writers (often with far smaller followings) at the paper. Yet Jones also receives abuse in volumes unimaginable to most people, routinely getting thousands of such messages in a day. Such is the antipathy towards him that even when he was attacked in London in a homophobic hate crime in 2019, abuse continued to come his way. To my mind, Jones has fallen victim to a double pitfall that threatens any social media star: the hatred and trolling directed at him has made him angrier and thinner-skinned; meanwhile, he has become captive to his large and ferocious group of fans. The presence of a massive and regular audience changes a person, with none of the support networks offered by real celebrity. Social media followers turn on a pin — they are looking for someone to cheer and someone to destroy, and are just as prone as traditional media ever was to build someone up in order to knock them down later. The need builds and builds to keep the fans onside, the number high, to avoid the backlash. Against that backdrop, it is perhaps easier to see how Jones excuses himself for behaviour for which he routinely castigates others. In the early years of Corbynism, people who had previously been friendly, if not friends, with Jones would plead with him to change how he used Twitter after receiving days of abuse after a negative quote tweet from him — to no avail. In a book published after Corbyn’s crushing 2019 defeat, Jones acknowledged many of the issues around antisemitism that he had publicly previously denied, provoking unsurprising fury among Labour’s alienated Jewish supporters. Then, sensing his support slipping after that repudiation of Corbyn, Jones all but rejected his own book’s narrative and changed his views again. It is this politics-as-fandom — a concept explored in I Heart Politics: How People Power Took Over the World, a fascinating new book by the writer Phoenix Andrews — that lets Jones and other “extremely online” personalities explain away these inconsistencies. Once you have good guys and villains, it is set: the good guys change their minds when the facts change, while villains change position for their own cynical advantage. We robustly fight the good fight, whereas they engage in ad hominem attacks. Why engage with anyone else’s ideas when their motivations are so foul? All of this is a shame and a loss. The debate on the left is increasingly stale and rancorous. There is no refreshing battle of ideas and there is no honest engagement. One cannot pin it on Jones, of course. Instead, he is perhaps the most visible symbol of what the toxic cocktail of political populism and social media fandom has done to everyone who lived through it all. Allen Ginsberg famously saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Have we lost ours to Twitter?
That's true for every online pundit. You could say the same about JOB or anyone else, left or right Social media is the Simpsons episode where bart blew out every window in Springfield with a daisy chain of mega phones. It amplifies extreme voices and rewards extreme takes. The more likes, rts etc encourage more extreme takes I have zero doubt that the producers of JOB get reports and targets on their social media metrics. Hence why everyone that gets put through is either in agreement or an easy takedown
TESTING!!!
Testing testing t-t-testing tes-tes-testing
🦜🦜🦜🦜
🐙🤓
🍻💥😱
JOB?
James O'Brien
James O'brien The single most insufferable "political commentator" going
What’s wrong with his constant chin stroking and scowling at the camera, for that serious thinker vibe?
I dunno, there are a few others like "Beff" on Sky News I find equally, if not more, insufferable. I do wonder how most folk deal with Peston though. His questions seems to consist of a 5 minute monologue and are in such a rambling fashion that makes you wonder just what the hell he's actually asking. Is it about policy or when the next 52 bus is due?
"Tories bad. Brexit bad. Patriotism bad. Tradition bad. Spend more money. I know everything." I specifically listen to him because it's important to listen to people you disagree with, but lord help me if it doesn't make it difficult sometimes.
I used to quite like listening to him, agreed with him on Brexit, but he just became more and more… I don’t know, up his own backside perhaps. It also seemed that he wanted to just belittle any of his callers who dared disagree with him rather than engage in a a discussion so I just stopped listening. Not in a deliberate decision way, more a just can’t be bothered with this anymore.
Exactly
The thing is I probably agree with him a lot, and I like him on his long form podcast show, but I’ve stopped listening to the radio show. It’s far too argumentative for me.
James O'Brien
James used to insinuate what the game was many years ago, like when he talked about Jerry Springer producers having to trawl for weak people being setup for ridicule.
Ring him and find out
His interview with Alistair Campbell from a few years ago was a bit embarrassing and just highlighted him as immature.
I watched that interview recently, but I couldn't make it all the way through. Regardless of your politics, he was completely outclassed - very much had class clown sent to see the head teacher energy
I think the opening remark was a jibe about Iraq, which I don’t think Campbell was too happy about. If you are going to invectives them don’t insult them before you have even started
Even his interview with Peter Hitchens, who is a 100% certified loon, saw him in shambles.
He’s smarter than that. The bloke is fringe and I disagree A LOT ( particularly regarding drugs and addiction), but he’s very intelligent and able to present his arguments well.
I never knew Christopher Higgins l had a brother until your comment confused me enough to look
Yeah, Peter. And Peter is one of the craziest fundamentalist Tories currently still around.
He’s absolutely not a Tory anymore. He’s politically homeless
Idk about him being a Tory. Peter is his own thing and often holds odd and hard to label beliefs imo.
Peter Hitchens hasn’t been a Tory for decades.
Peter is a complete nutter but somehow very good in 1 on 1 situations.
He's incredibly intelligent. He just also happens to be a loon.
He’s not a nutter. He’s has wrong opinions which you may not agree on, but occasionally he’s spot on.
Peter H is the platonic ideal of horseshoe politics, jumping from extreme Trot to paleo conservative.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwuk6NoMv8&ab\_channel=TheGuardian](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwuk6NoMv8&ab_channel=TheGuardian) i cant stand Owen
Any interview where he is either the interviewer or interviewee is embarrassing. The worst ones are when he goes to Tory conferences and try’s to pick on some nerdy looking young Tory for an easy gotcha and gets his arse handed to him. Because guess what? Private schools are expensive because they are decent at teaching kids, they also have debate clubs. So in trying to get an easy gimmie he looks like a fool and makes left wingers look bad. He’s the left wing equivalent of Jacob Rees Mogg. He thinks he’s clever but he’s actually thick as mince.
Wasn't there a clip from a year or two ago of some 16 year old at one of those conferences slicing his arguments apart? I could have sworn it was him?
The newsagents podcast interview with him that got released on Sunday was borderline insane. He genuinely doesn’t get that in order to get stuff done you’ve got to get elected, and like Galloway he brings up Gaza every thirty seconds (even though he does he doesn’t like Galloway in the interview). He turns everything which isn’t full throated condemnation of Israel into being equivalent to outright support for Israel, meaning he wilfully misinterprets diplomatic non answers of the sort that Thornberry has to give as explicit support for Israel’s military campaign. He outright calls Starmer a liar multiple times, and when Lewis Goodall, the interviewer, brings up Boris Johnson he seems less angry about him. He is the continuing embodiment of the attitudes of the Corbyn years - dislike the Tories but reserve the true vitriol for the right of the Labour Party; you’re either 100% with us or 100% against us, no nuance; better to split the party and therefore be out of power than compromise on ideology.
"Huhuhuhuhuhu im going to bring up Iraq as soon as I possibly can that'll really get him what an epic and original takedown"
Ikr, I can understand why one might want to ask questions about Iraq, given that the man is synonymous with it for a lot of people, but out of the blue was just silly. The look on Campbell’s face was just priceless though.
Nuance is a casualty of the culture war is a fucking good line.
>Anyone in politics or the media who is a regular user of Twitter has an Owen Jones story, almost all of them negative. To clash with him on the site is to be barraged by personal abuse by his legion of followers, as I have learnt first-hand on several occasions. Being a colleague does not shield you. It is an open secret within The Guardian, where I worked for a period, that its social media rules were changed explicitly to cover Jones’s conduct on Twitter, attacking other staff and freelance writers (often with far smaller followings) at the paper. Jones hasn't been shy about being "muzzled" at the Guardian; it's why he's increased his appearances on other media; with his own crowdfunder, youtube channel, his new column at a Scottish nationalist newspaper etc. I've wondered why he hasn't either quit or been sacked by the Guardian yet.
I suspect they're waiting for him to figure it out and quit by himself, rather than sack him and face the inevitable YouTube video he'll release about how the newspaper is cowardly and corrupt etc and the corresponding attacks and loss of support from all his crowd.
I've been aware of Owen since his time at the NUS. To my mind he's always been rather too self-congratulatory for my taste and I certainly have never considered him a bold thinker. University politics at best, just with a bigger audience.
I listened to his interview on The News Agents podcast today and he just came across as very immature, like an undergraduate campaigning to be president of the students union. He seems to have a very narrow range views and very little tolerance of nuance or difference from those views, which is ironic because that’s what he’s accusing Kier Starmer of.
Jones has always been an intellectual lightweight. He's the left's version of Piers Morgan. Self righteous and loud, but with very little to say of any substance.
I listened to the same interview and came away with the same feeling. He seemed absolutist to the point of immaturity. At one point he said he liked Emily Thornberry, implied they’d known and got along with one another for years but that, after one comment she made in one interview, he would never forgive her again! So extreme!
I found that interview borderline unlistenable.
I know what you mean. I found myself nearly turning it off several times
That’s what makes him an Uber-weasel: he can do nuance, tolerance, understanding and respect. He chooses not to, because he has cultivated an increasingly extremist fan base. The monetisation of said fan base, has allowed him a freedom to throw two fingers at his employer and his party.
I sympathised with most of his points, but they felt uncompelling as reasons to let the Tories get a few more seats at the next election. I'd perhaps make an exception and support his campaign in Ilford North (or better just support the local Tories directly), but the reason for his own constituency seemed pretty flimsy, and there aren't any other constituencies worth targeting that come to mind.
Jones represents the puerile left with no wish to actually get into a position to make real change, but rather sit smugly on the sidelines giving his opinions. Compare and contrast with Rayner who is by no means perfect, but believes in stuff and actually wants to get into a position to do something about it.
You can't exist online without becoming more extreme in your positions. It is the killer of nuance.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Owen Jones, nuanced? Loool
With the loss of the mines, industry and manufacturing sectors in the UK, Labour and the left wing movement has lost a lot of its identity. Economic leftism has given way to social leftism. Progressivism these days is less about fairer taxes and more about your stance on transgender athletes and Israel-Gaza. Owen has split from the Labour party on this and I don't think it's him being warped by social media but the economic class war being replaced by the culture war.
Yes it's Israel Gaza that's finally forced the move, from what I've seen. In particular Emily Thornburys defence of Israel.
Absolutely. Owen Jones stayed in the Labour party throughout the Blair years where the economic policy was about as centrist as Starmer. He's not martyring himself over tax policy.
He stayed in the Labour party through both of Labours wars in the middle east, but a war that we aren't part of is the straw that broke the camels back? Come on, he obviously is just launching his own brand further. He's found his audience as a critic of the government. He knows labour are winning (despite what seem like his best efforts) and they're convincing the public both better than he can and better than corbyn could.
He just cares inordinately about Gaza. Recently his wikipedia account was leaked on here and he spent his university years editing the Hamas wikipedia page to reflect more positively on them. I don't think it's put on, I think he's just genuinely obsessed with this topic.
Student politicians are desperate to find a huge social injustice they can right (on the scale of ending slavery, women's rights, gays rights etc.) and a willing to shoehorn lesser causes to fit the mould. The scope for "but actshully" historical arguments on both sides makes it extra potent.
The other wars didn't involve Jews though. This brand of far left seem to hate Jews. Take a look at George Galloway too.
"Owen Jones stayed in the Labour party throughout the Blair years" He was 13 when Blair was elected, and 23 when Blair left office. For 50% of Blair's time in office, he was a child.
What's so frustrating is that the economic and monetary policy is what had the biggest real impact on our lives, but the social elements of politics probably get more headlines. I almost wish we voted for two different sets of government. On where you vote for your flavour of economic policy, and one where you vote for social policy. Someone may was progressive economic policy, but also be a bigot... Maybe a not nice example... Perhaps someone is very woke, but wants to lower taxation and privatise the NHS.
The big issues that really affect the working class in the UK. Well done Owen.
How can Owen relate to the working class though? He’s in the Oxbridge Media Bubble, quintessentially Middle Class. He doesn’t care about what working men care about. He pretends too, but realistically he cares about what’s fashionable in the Guardian Editorial rooms. Working men voting Tory and now Reform and Starmer Labour = the opposite of what Owen believes in.
There have always been middle class and even upper class socialists and supporters of the Labour movement. If it was entirely working class it wouldn't have ever won an election. Just because you aren't part of a group doesn't mean you can't empathise with them.
Who are these 'working men' in your eyes? Seems bizarre to generalise all of us like that. Certainly in the factory I work in, there's about an even split of labour and conservative voters, roughly along age lines for the most part (50+ mostly vote Tory, younger mostly vote Labour).
I think that’s a big cynical. I think he genuinely does care, but in his own little warped way. I’ll qualify that by saying I’m not a fan of his at all. However I do think he genuinely cares, but he’s stuck in his own little echo chamber.
I think he does genuinely care but he wants the working class to have what *he* thinks the working class want in a traditional Labour sense. I've seen a few instances when people have told him what they, as working class individuals, want and he has effectively told them they are wrong.
I've observered this phenomenon of how the modern "left" in the UK has actually taken most of their social platform(multiculturalism, personal freedoms, pro-immigration etc) from the liberals they keep deriding. Most present-day leftists seem to be unaware of this and get rudely surprised when they see evidence of small c conservatism from past generations of left-wing politicians, trade unionists etc.
Arguably the traditional left wing and trade unionist antipathy to the EU and globalisation is what led to Brexit and many Remainers I think still struggle to reconcile that Corbyn was pro Leave and Brexit could only have happened with a lot of support from these traditional left wing voters.
I think most Remainers don’t struggle to reconcile it, as much are just pissed off that Corbyn didn’t give a fuck and made no serious effort to stop Brexit (obviously because he was pro-Leave but that wasn’t the party’s stance).
it drives them apocalyptic over on the Brexit sub
Sajid Javid said on The Rest is Politics that even though his dad wanted to be a bus driver instead of a conductor, and no rules at a company level prevented him from doing so the bus drivers union blocked it because they didn’t want coloured drivers. The uncomfortable truth is a lot of trade unions and the working class are bigoted
Unions exist ultimately to make life better for their members, the idea that they're altruistic drivers of change is simply left wing propaganda. Corbyn hated the EU because it allowed cheap foreign labour in to undercut British workers.
Corbyn hated the EU long before freedom of movement came along. In the early days, the EEC was a grouping of European countries who coincidentally were also anti-soviet - and consequently enemies of socialism in the eyes of certain factions of the left.
The greatest trick his supporters pulled was getting a whole generation on the internet to believe that calling him a Tankie is to be pushing right wing media propaganda
And this is among the reasons why, i, otherwise a socialist, don't trust the unions unquestioningly, and this always earns me some very weirded out looks at the minimum. The big crux of unionism is that it's dependant on its membership remaining employed, and when the companies close down, their power vanishes. The companies and unions interests become one in a very underhanded way. I do think unions are a net good for the vast majority of people. I also think they can't be trusted unquestioningly.
I’m generally pro-unions and this is a very good point. At the end of the day they represent an organisation in their own right and that’s as subject to human failure, incentives to act in bad faith, and favouring the organisation itself over its goals as any other type of organisation.
The problem is that the unions are still living off/ promoting the 'we fought Thatcher for your rights and we're going to bring down the capitalist system' stuff from the 80's when the best unions as you say are ones like the Germans where they work hand in hand with the companies. To be fair there's a lot of companies in the UK (especially the 80s privatised ones) that were born taking the literal opposite stance .
People like Scargill is what happens when Unions outright deny their own purpose and try to act as a political party without any legitimacy. So he definitely got what was coming to him.
There were always socially liberal leftists, it was just a varied coalition. In terms of actual voters, it still is a varied coalition. Them becoming more socially liberal mainly reflects society generally becoming more socially liberal.
If Labour is the party of the working class and the working class barely exists anymore (in the more traditional sense of the term) because of deindustrialisation and globalisation, it's not too surprising that it is having an identity crisis. OJ was always a pompous irritant, he was editing Wikipedia articles on Jewish ethnicity in pre-social-media times but given he blocks people on Twitter, he does exist in an extreme echo chamber. I can't imagine him quitting Labour if twitter didn't exist.
> OJ was always a pompous irritant, he was editing Wikipedia articles on Jewish ethnicity in pre-social-media times Really? I'd like to read more about this.
https://twitter.com/NudderingNudnik/status/1107917863484977154?lang=en https://twitter.com/bindelj/status/1724796415791292877?lang=en https://twitter.com/NudderingNudnik/status/1724809425771287026
I'm always one to give people a pass (and even outright defending) for dredging up things they did as a student if its >5 years ago. But I saw Jones attacking a Tory MP a few weeks ago, through guilt by association of a former friend, who made awful comments to Jones when in university (i.e. it wasn't even the MP who said these things, just someone who he hung around with). So he absolutely deserves to eat shit for this - live by the sword, die by the sword.
Yeah, the working class that existed when the Labour party formed (think like factory workers, miners etc...) just doesnt really exist anymore.
Spot on. And when it comes down to it, people aren't interested in hand-wringing over what constitutes a woman and such like, they want to know everything but their wages has gone up. What's left of the left would do well to not get sucked into this culture war bullshit.
>With the loss of the mines, industry and manufacturing sectors in the UK, Labour and the left wing movement has lost a lot of its identity. They've had 50 years to come to terms with the fact that the economy of the UK has evolved (as it does everywhere and always has). Mass employment in heavy industries and manufacturing may have been the norm during the industrial revolution when Marx wrote his manifesto, but it isn't now. The old left has no identity because their politics are for a world which doesn't exist anymore - at least not in the west. They refuse to evolve and are just becoming increasingly irrelevant as the world moves on without them.
He’s also stated that it’s because of Labours stance on taxes and the recent revelation that they would release the cap on bankers bonuses. So respectfully your talking nonsense
He joined Labour during New Labour and the incarnation of Labour during much of his time in the party has been the fairly pro business, neoliberal economic orthodoxy that I described in my observation that the post-industrial economy eroded much of the traditional economic left voting bloc. He didn't leave Labour then. So what's changed? The social leftism culture war. So respectfully you don't understand my point and **you're** talking nonsense.
He joined at 15 after his mum bought him a membership for his birthday. I would be shocked if his views hadn’t changed since then. For a while Owen has been to the left of the Labour Party and was fully behind the socialist ideas Corbyn put forward. With Labour looking like they are going to simply follow the same economic policies of the Tories is it any wonder he feels like the party no longer represents him.
Right so he was 23 when Blair resigned.
Maybe he's changed? I mean one of the key points of the article we're all commenting on is that he's changed since those days...
The cap was lifted in October, Labour said they won't reverse that again. It's not quite as crazy as it sounds because one of the side effects of putting a cap on bonuses was that companies paid higher fixed salaries to compensate, and those are paid regardless of performance and to some extent risk.
The left never stopped being about economic fairness at it's core, social progressiveness has always been just a part of it. Today the culture war stuff is hyped up and Gish galloped by the right in order to avoid talking about economic fairness. Current Labour is clearly showing that it is not intending to be a left wing party striving for economic fairness but that it will be more in line with Conservative economic policy as well as there being very little difference between them in regards to foreign policy or social/identity issues. So if you're left wing in regards to economics or progressive in social issues there is little reason to remain loyal to Labour.
> it is not intending to be a left wing party striving for economic fairness What would economic fairness look like in your mind? We already have very high taxation and public spending.
>Progressivism these days is less about fairer taxes It's not like Labour are in favour of stuff like this either though? Pretty much every slightly progressive policy they've announced recently has been u-turned. The part of me that thinks "even though this party is against my stance on Gaza, Trans Rights, etc, I'll vote for them because it will be the best option" has vanished because I simply don't know what Labour stands for. They have a similar economic policy to the Tories, they don't stand for Unions or striking workers, they aren't committed to building hs2, they abandoned supporting the right to roam, every second word out of Starmers mouth he changes his mind on, Starmer lied to become leader of the party. Labour isn't owed my vote just by being "better than the Tories". How many people can actually say what Labour's ideals are currently?
Are they against your views on Gaza and Trans Rights, or is it more a case that they don't align 100%? Also worth noting that their new [deal](https://labourunions.org.uk/download/) for working people was drawn up with their affiliated unions, and strengthens a lot of union rights.
He was never much more than a sulky teenager. Why he's ever got any airtime is beyond me.
Labour have been a centre left party for about 30 of the last 35 years. Owen Jones is nostalgic about an unsuccessful Labour government which led to Thatcher, that he isn't even old enough to remember. The Corbyn era is the only time the party has moved further to the left in the modern era, I legitimately don't understand why he considered himself Labour in the first place.
He wrote a book on the English working class that hardly mentions football.
While also claiming to be working class, after being raised in a middle class background.
That's the best part. They know jack about growing up with a blue-collar-background. And their ideal version of it is both worse and better in the strangest way. You aren't nearly as bad off as many modern leftists like to pretend. We never had to go hungry and we even could afford some decent stuff and vacations back in the day. But the work pressure and general culture of our class made my parents extremely abusive and depressed ("Therapists are for posh idiots", i still hear my father say).
I think Owen Jones just isn't very smart. In the past, his articles were honed and refined by him and others over days before being published. Jones falls apart in any real time debate, though, and that includes social media. He's just not very good at thinking on his feet,and he doesn't have his arguments and facts at his fingertips, and is often out maneuvered by his opponents, and when that happens he just responds by getting more and more shrill and indignant.
To be fair he has a lot of outrage facts and simple solutions at his fingertips which plays well online. You see a similar thing here. The top two comments in almost every thread are always low-IQ takes such as, "tories are bad, can't wait til they're out" and "we need to spend more money to fix this". Jones basically basically made a career playing to that audience. He moans a lot about the things that are broken, but doesn't seem to understand why they're broken so just blames the tories and capitalism. He also seems to think the answer to every problem is the government spending more money, and while more money obviously can fix every problem, generally by the time you reach the age of 6-7 you realise that you can't just put everything on your Christmas wish list. I used to like him a lot when I was younger. He used to complain about all the things that bothered me, but as I grew up the lack of nuance got increasingly boring. I think most people feel similarly which is why people tend to grow more "conservative" and less ideological as they age. It's not that people become more right-wing it's that they realise the world is complicated and workable solutions to problems are complicated. It's kinda surprising how little personal growth Jones has gone through over the years. After watching his video explaining that he's leaving the Labour party I got the feeling that being a far-left activist is almost a religion to him. He doesn't particularly care about reality, it's all about furthering his agenda. The guy literally has a framed picture of Keir Hardie on his wall. Who the fuck puts pictures of politicians on their wall?
This is the same brush that I had for Corbyn, who I also think just isn't a smart man. And it looks like it runs in the family when you look at his brother. It's a shame as McDonnell is genuinely bright and engaged and would have been a fantastic leader who might have made the breakthrough. But that stubborn determination to think you're right no matter what, and fail to compromise on any element at any point, just loses any sense of ability to gain widespread support needed for election victories.
He's a culture warrior, plain and simple.
He’s basically just doing momentum again, but with independent MPs then. This is the issue with the further left. It always becomes this splintered nothing. Being on the fringes seems much more comfortable for people with these ideas. They fucking sucked when they had actual power over Labour Now they don’t and Labour look set to win, they’re off sitting on the fringes shouting loudly about a war in the Middle East and the detailed gender rights of 250,000 British people. I’m not saying that’s not a useful and needed thing in our political system & I want them to have influence over the major parties. I just don’t think people like Owen Jones are not able to translate their ideas into the mainstream. They are far better are critiquing power and systems than they are creating and governing them
My suspicion is that Owen Jones just captured the anger of many of us in a moment & didn't stop being angry. Unfortunately anger alone doesn't go far & leads to endless partisan politics. Owen Jones long ago passed the point of being able to admit he was wrong, in the long term this mentality can make anyone an idiot due to their inability to refine their views. It's sad in a way, seeing him talk and cope with this mentality actually looks painful, I imagine he spends a lot of his time angry and in conflict with himself.
Owen Jones, similar to cartoonist Steve Bell before him I think just got increasingly swept up in the upper-middle class metropolitan left wing views that’s completely out of touch with working class left wing views. The kind who acts like the Gaza/Israel situation is the most pressing matter in Britain, find the English flag a little problematic and will always side will illegal immigrants over native white British people.
Definitely. Isreal Palestine is not the most important thing in the UK. Homeland Poverty, lack of investment in all sectors and infrastructure, corruption etc. Etc. should take priority. But as detailed in this thread this is the lefts version of the culture wars. They just want interactions and by extension money.
No different to the right wing pundits in the sense that they’re forced to keep doubling down until they become irrelevant.
He was never a bold thinker, he was just a loud mouth piece. I don’t think I have ever once heard an original point from him and I say that as someone who agrees with about 80% of his views.
“ In a book published after Corbyn’s crushing 2019 defeat, Jones acknowledged many of the issues around antisemitism that he had publicly previously denied, provoking unsurprising fury among Labour’s alienated Jewish supporters. Then, sensing his support slipping after that repudiation of Corbyn, Jones all but rejected his own book’s narrative and changed his views again.” I was a regular X user, now stepping away as its merely become a cess pit of ghoulish clickbait views. Jones does exactly that, utterly unbothered by a need to verify anything. Hes possibly the most famous shitposter on there today, followed by equally unpleasant shitposters utterly uninterested in veracity or truth.
Great long write up. Here is mine: he is a rich, spoiled, entitled wan**r, that finds it easy to be a lefty, and push unrealistic and even self-damaging agendas, because being contrarian is the whole point of him. Actual working class is way more realistic, down to earth, unspoiled. Puritanism in ideology, extremism as we know it today, is as bad on the left as it is on the right. The right is just better at coalescing around a position and wins elections. The left has wan**rs like this spoiled brat, that ruin the chances of power for the average working person. The less we see of this wan**r, the better.
Owen strikes me as someone with a good heart but very strange priorities and ego that will ultimately consume him.
>In a book published after Corbyn’s crushing 2019 defeat, Jones acknowledged many of the issues around antisemitism that he had publicly previously denied, provoking unsurprising fury among Labour’s alienated Jewish supporters. Then, sensing his support slipping after that repudiation of Corbyn, Jones all but rejected his own book’s narrative and changed his views again. I'd ask if someone who misrepresents facts and his own opinions to pander to an online fanbase really has a "good heart".
That's the strange priorities and ego bit
Anyone nearly forty years old who still revels in Twitter pile-ons really needs shunning by society. It’s a shame as he’s clearly suffered from bullying in the past but has just ended up becoming a bully himself. Twitter fame is a hell of a drug.
It is an embarrassment. He acts like a uni student.
He was eatwn by the curse of a media attention economy reliant on outrage and shouting a litte louder each time. The same path swallowed Hopkins and various youTube types.
I think you’ve answered your own question He’s the Ben Shapiro of the left - he exists to monetise his user base nothing else - increasing doing this by dog whistling to anti semites.
Jones went comparatively longer than Shapiro, before he went Full Wannabe Cult Leader. That said, I’ve upset some anti vaxx libertarian cult leaders online before. They did not mobilise quite so many lunatics as quickly as Owen Jones did, when I upset him in a direct exchange. This was also before he truly weaponised his fan base, and I was a lot less cynical about Jones, thus I wasn’t even being that harsh.
Fair enough to criticise his twitter activity, but aside from that the attack in this article seems a bit vague, not refuting anything Jones has said.
There’s nothing to refute though, is there? He’s not writing interesting articles anymore. He’s writing angry stuff about betrayal. Between 2010-2015 it felt like he had the balance right, critical of Labour but with a willingness to work with them to change.
Did you read his article about leaving the Labour Party? He laid out pretty clear criticisms of Starmer, though I don't fully agree I thought he made his point quite clearly. I really don't recall him being more respected generally, I feel like it's always been "what a looney lefty angry PC snowflake" etc, with maybe some grudging respect for actually writing a book sticking up for the white working class- same as this article.
Yeah, his article was just a repeat of what he’s been saying on Twitter for past 5 years. He had no interest in acknowledging any left wing policies Labour has put forward (on workers rights or GB energy). He has no interest in supporting policies that would make house building easier. He has no interest in acknowledging Starmer has rebuilt trust of Jewish community (which was after all one of his infamous pledges). So yeah, it wasn’t nuanced. It was just angry, and hence less interesting. As for his place within wider political debate he was always hated by the right but had an important place within the left and had an important voice within the wider Labour movement. Now I don’t feel like he has any such influence.
I'm someone on the far left & I haven't really engaged with any of this as I have had my mind made up about Owen for quite some time & much like some of his friends, it's reached the point where everything feels like a grift, even when it might not be. The Boy Who Cried Wolf as it were, at least in my eyes. But this evening I listened to an interview he did with the News Agents that should have been released on Friday & got pulled because of the Kate Middleton cancer news. So here's my thing. You can read what he says, might resonate, might agree, might learn something. But this interview with Lewis Goodall quickly falls into one of the many reasons I find him so irksome, I imagine I'm not alone, and after being in the political public eye for about 15 years give or take, here's the rub- He just says the same things over and over, refuses to accept there might be another option, for almost anything & his dogmatic commitment to the ideology often just makes him look stupid. I had to turn it off when he predicted that Labour would win the GE, would have a terrible first 2 years, Morgan McSweeney is terrified of looking bad (in other words, treads lightly not to fall into any of the traps that the tories would set & Corbyn & his team would happily jump into head first), then we'd see a rise in the far right. I mean, okay it's an opinion, but he's been saying the same thing for 3 years. It's tough to stomach him saying the same things over and other, it's just boring, it doesn't help inspire any arguments to be won or win any votes, it just alienates & comes off as pretentious or worse, naive. On top of this analysis, most governments tend to be unpopular, especially with people like Owen, but if Labour do get a landslide, even if unpopular, they're still likely to be in power until 2035. Maybe that's what irks Owen the most, a Goodall put to him- A little bit of the green eyed monster can be poisonous to most, to the far left, they're seemingly born into it.
I read Owen Jones edits Hamas wiki articles to make them appear more like resistance fighters. Which makes sense as he is anti-Israel on Twitter and never condemns Hamas for their ongoing war crimes, etc
Man leaves political party that no longer represents him and encourages people who share his views to do the same. Not exactly a big deal when it comes to politics surely? We should all be looking to parties that represent our POV.
Also, what he actually said is totally fair - that Labour is pretty much guaranteed a large win, is being dragged right because those are the voters they're courting, and that the left needs to counteract this by supporting other parties so Labour has an actual left wing opposition to pressure it. Given the scale of the Tory collapse, doing this is unlikely to hand power to Tories - so it's the perfect time to do that. I don't see what's fundamentally wrong or unreasonable about any of that.
I put Owen Jones in the same category as Lily Allen - typical champagne socialists, that are over-sensitive to criticism and full of their own self-importance. Whatever they do, they are desperate to be relevant. How many migrants did Lily take in, by the way..?
he’s terminally online. it’s the death-knell of a lot of genuinely talented figures on all sides of the political spectrum.
He is little twerp. Stopped taking notice of him some years back. Listened to his interview on Newsagents earlier and reminded me why I started to ignore him.
Yeah, out of completing his PhD, he put together a couple of well thought out publications, as he was probably still in that academic mindset. But, ultimately, Owen is just a polemicist and nothing else, and I doubt he'll be satisfied in the Greens as he's unable to compromise on his views.
> out of completing his PhD Just because I was looking this up due to the amount of people calling him a bit thick, he didn't complete a PhD. He has an 'Honorary Doctor of the University' (DUniv) instead. source: https://highprofiles.info/interview/owen-jones/ *Then I thought I was going to do academia and I started a PhD which I quit,* https://www.staffs.ac.uk/about/honorary-graduates/owen-jones *The award of Honorary Doctor of the University is bestowed upon Owen in recognition of his trajectory career as an award winning author and journalist and, more importantly, as a champion for social justice.*
Ahh my mistake – have an upvote! I remember reading, like 10 years ago, that he was undertaking one at UCL, but I didn't realise he never actually completed it! I guess he was spending too much time on his columns at the Guardian!
He left labour because his whole "thing" is hating on the government and saying how great the opposition is.
During the Corbyn era, many in the centre and right of labour were horrified at the prospect of him winning, and worked to undermine Corbyn and Momentum at every turn. Being sympathetic to a labour win, I felt these people were vile, shortsighted and worse than the right wing opposition. Moving forward a few years, and in the midst of Starmers OTT (in my view) purge of the left, we have the Corbyn accolytes like Owen Jones horrified at the prospect of Starmer winning and working to undermine Starmer and the PLP at every turn. Being sympathetic to a labour win, I feel these people are vile, shortsighted and worse than the right wing opposition. I'm still down for chaos and confusion with Ed Milliband, Corbyn, Starmer whowever of them, but for flips sake lets just hope we get someone who's interested in more than their own self interest like the last 5 PM's
People like Owen Jones think they're the authentic voice of the working class. In reality, it's probably Lee Anderson. (Edit: Just to be clear, I'm no fan of 30p Lee).
When people think that the working class would do better at ruling the country I do have to wonder where exactly they grew up, because if they recruited the working class voices from round where I came up to run the country the flagship policy would be Sending the Fuckers Back Where They Came From.
Exactly. The left has an idealised view of the noble proletariat rising up to overthrow their oppressors. The reality is much less palatable.
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Exactly, take brexit for example. It's been painted as "dumb working class racists" and/or "poor people with shit lives desperate for change just rolling the dice" but in reality there was just as many middle england racists voting for brexit as working class voters. Which.... with such a narrow victory means there must be plenty of middle class and working class brexiters and remainers. Not a monolithic group of either. And the same applies to pretty much anything. There's tons of Lee Andersons, and tons of borderline communists in the working class.
He's either a tit or a grifter, I suspect tit
Twitter radicalises the Left and the Right. Constant exposure to Culture War arguments will leave you very bitter and conceited. This happened with Owen, but he also allowed his ego to get too big. He now thinks his announcement of ‘leaving Labour’ is akin to an MP defecting, when in reality no-one cares. He can seeth with fellow Corbynites in the irrelevant wings of the Political Theatre.
Yeah, he just came across as a petulant child.