The refusal of Your Party (YP) conference organisers to give press access to a number of popular independent left news sites has sparked outrage among snubbed sites and their readers. And it’s with good reason given many of those sites were at the forefront of efforts to protect and promote Corbyn and the left during the Islington North MP’s tenure as Labour leader. The Canary has been accredited and will be reporting from the event when it starts on Saturday.
But YP has rubbed salt into those wounds by giving press places to the hard-right press that not only relentlessly attacked Corbyn and twisted every issue to smear him, his allies and his supporters, but are still promoting hate.
Bizarre Your Party press tactics
One of the rejected sites, the World Socialist Website (WSWS), has noted:
While blocking the WSWS, Your Party officials have made space for the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, two of Britain’s leading right-wing tabloids. Both newspapers confirmed Your Party has accredited their reporters. During the 1930s, workers dubbed Viscount Rothermere’s newspaper The Daily Heil due to its support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The Express promotes the most vile and fascistic forms of anti-immigrant racism.
Skwawkbox understands that the BBC and the Guardian – which were as bad as any right-wing rag in their promotion of the Labour antisemitism scam – have also been given media passes. So far, there is no indication that the serial smear-fest Jewish Chronicle has one, but who knows?
The excuse given to rejected organisations and journalists has been that space is limited. But, that’s very much a ludicrous excuse. The conference is taking place in an auditorium capable of holding almost 11,000 people. Half a dozen more left-wing journalists, all of whom would be broadly supportive of YP, or at least of the need for a new left party, would make no meaningful difference. And, it would make no difference at all, of course, if the hard-right and liberal rags that will only be looking for opportunities to sneer were excluded.
Lessons from 2019
But the worst aspect of the latest farce is that it shows that those around Corbyn making these decisions have learned nothing at all from the mistakes of 2015-19. During Corbyn’s tenure as leader they gave access to the mainstream rags, presumably in the hope of receiving favourable coverage that was – obviously – never going to come.
That failure or refusal to learn has already been on show in the various briefings to the same hostile press and journalists during the factional and territorial fighting for control that has horrified would-be supporters. Even in the first couple of days, the only relatively peaceful period, launch videos, interviews, and briefings were given to those who helped sabotage the first ‘Corbyn project’, with a launch article in the Guardian and Corbyn himself giving his first interview on the topic to Owen Jones, who turned on him repeatedly as Labour leader.
The corporate media hacks at the conference will only be looking for what they can write to undermine and ridicule. Even if an Express reader exists that has any inclination to give Corbyn a fair hearing, they won’t read anything helpful in that publication or others like it.
The old cliché about insanity being to do the same thing and expecting a different result clearly applies, but another is even better: those who won’t learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them. Sadly those around Corbyn with their hands on the conference controls seem to have learned nothing and be repeating everything.
Featured image via the Canary
