Demonstration Outside Brighton Hospital in Protest at the Lack of Personal Protective Equipment and Intimidation of Hospital Workers by the Management

The GMB says members working at  the Sussex County Hospital were told to get back to work after expressing concerns about a lack of PPE

Has there ever been such a useless Labour leader?

Yesterday was Workers’ Memorial Day although you would be forgiven for not realising it since the trade union movement did little to publicise it.

Only the BBC could have a headline ‘Coronavirus: Boris Johnson's return to work 'a boost for the country'. This pathetic sub-Churchillian rhetoric from the BBC is what we have come to expect. The idea that this bunterish character will boos anyone is an absurdity. 

It is only slightly mitigated by Monday's Panorama on the Government's failing to order or stock PPE and ventillators. As the death toll is revised upwards to nearly 25,000 what is surprising is the complete uselessness of the new ‘leader’ of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer. He has literally said nothing and it is the Tory press who have held the government to account.

Ian Duncan-Smith, when he was the short-lived leader of the Tory Party was known as the ‘Quiet Man’. Starmer’s name should be the Invisible Man. We have a government whose policies have literally killed thousands of people yet the Labour Right demonstrate their utter uselessness. They have nothing to say.

A few of the health workers who have paid for the Government's cuts to the NHS with their life

The Opposition to the Tory Government is no longer on the Labour front bench it resides in the Sunday Times and even Panorama. The government has responded to criticism by banning the Sunday Times from asking questions at its briefings and asking the Observer to rewrite an unfavourable headline!

The demonstration we held is particularly relevant at this time given the huge number of workers who have died from Coronavirus whilst working to help others.  Over a week ago the Guardian reported that 100 NHS workers had died. Sky News now reports that thanks to the murderous incompetence and criminal negligence of this government, ‘Dozens more deaths are reported to have taken place, but have not yet been confirmed.’

This is in addition to over 20 Transport for London workers reported to have died two weeks ago. There are no doubt hundreds of care workers who have also paid the price of Boris Johnson’s ‘herd immunity’ (or culling of the elderly) strategy.

“Get back to work … you can acquire Covid anywhere”.  – hospital staff shocked by manager’s coronavirus response [Manager to staff at Brighton’s Royal Sussex County Hospital]

This was why a group of us in Brighton and Hove Trades Union Council decided to hold a demonstration, whilst socially distancing, outside Brighton’s Royal Sussex County Hospital.

Despite there only being 6 of us the reception from both workers and medical staff at the hospital, as well as bus drivers and others passing by was extremely warm. The lies and deceptions of this government are clear for all to see.

When challenged by workers at the hospital’s Acute Admissions Unit and the infection control team, the response of the management included:

“You can acquire Covid anywhere besides our workplace, like the supermarket for instance, and let’s face it, most of us will get it anyway, so get on with it or ask your manager to be re-deployed.”

© Rachael House.

GMB regional organiser Gary Palmer said:

“I really struggle with understanding this blatant disregard of the safety of those staff at the coal face of the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Our members are told to re-use disposable visors and even hand over them to the next shift. Staff are told that even single use surgical masks must be used or worn for the whole day unless they get wet.

“The Trust has a duty as an employer to keep all their staff safe and protected, and not be the sole arbiter of who gets to go home from work safely and who does not.  In this, they are clearly failing.

“GMB members within the assessment unit and other clinical areas are telling us that lots of the staff are in self-isolation, having tested positive for Covid-19.  Some have even been admitted to hospital and unfortunately a number of frontline NHS staff have even ended up in intensive care, being intubated.

“I’m sure the Trust would never risk a patient’s life by administering out of date medicines, yet they are happy to put frontline staff at risk by fobbing them off with five-year-old, out-of-date, substandard equipment that had been forgotten about in a cupboard somewhere!

“Staff are very deliberately being made to feel guilty for raising concerns over safety and asking for better PPE, by a management team who are telling them that it will be their fault if the Trust runs out of higher-spec PPE in areas that need it the most, like ITU.

 “BSUH must stop risking the most valuable resource we have in the fight against Covid-19.”

This attitude to workers’ safety is as unacceptable as it is predictable. The government has miserably failed in its duty to ensure that there were adequate stocks of PPE and ventilaors in reserve in case of a pandemic. It was not as if they didn’t know. In 2016 there was a mock exercise Cygnus in case there was a pandemic. The shortages were noted then and recommendations made. What happened? The Report was buried. Austerity trumped safety concerns with the results all around us.

Even now we are exporting millions of items of PPE at the very same time that there is a massive shortage in hospitals, care homes. Yet the reaction of the official labour movement has been worse than pathetic.

Post-Corbyn the Labour leadership is frightened to be seen to be anti-Tory even though the public mood is changing fast. Labour's 'moderates' have proved themselves to be no better than the Tories.

The TUC statement is equally pathetic. Instead of calling for a work stoppage on Workers Memorial Day it tells members that ‘The initiative is supported by the government, and reps may wish to request employers mark it, by asking the workforce to cease work for one minute at 11am.’ Request? This should be a demand not a request. 

The forelock tugging, cap doffing knights of the TUC have long ago given up ideas such as class struggle. It is time they and Labour’s invisible leader were reminded that trade unions didn’t develop by asking the bosses permission.

Tony Greenstein

The Orwellian World of the Guardian/Observer - How Lies Become the Established Truth

According to The Observer it is an Established Fact that John Ware’s Panorama Programme 'Is Labour Antisemitic' is ‘Damning’

One of the nastiest Blairites who presided over a racist immigration policy is nonetheless concerned about 'antisemitism'

According to today’s Observer, in a report over the justifiable expulsion of Lady Hilary Armstrong, for signing the Lord’s letter attacking Jeremy Corbyn for ‘anti-Semitism’, John Ware’s hatchet job of a Panorama Report is described as ‘damning’.

These propaganda techniques are taken from the book of Goebbels.  Repeat a lie long enough, ignore any criticism to the contrary, and hey presto any lie becomes the established truth.

I have sent a letter to the Observer, but in the present climate its chances of being printed are about minus zero!

Presumably Mark Townsend  didn’t consult my article asking a mere 106 questions on this hatchet job. He could though have used his brain (these days unlikely for a paper that censors Steve Bell for an ‘anti-Semitic trope’.

Below is the letter I sent to the Observer.

Tony Greenstein

John Ware has a long history of racist and Islamaphobic comments - he believes Islamaphobia is 'reactive' unlike 'irrational' antisemitism

Letters Editor

The Observer

Kings Place,

90 York Way

London N1 9GU 

Dear Sir/Madam,

Your report on Hilary Armstrong’s expulsion from the Labour Party [Hilary Armstrong 'very sad' over vote to expel her from Labour party, July 21] is a good example of how a lie becomes an established fact through repetition.

You refer to ‘a damning report by the BBC’s Panorama programme into the party’s handling of allegations of antisemitism.’

There was nothing at all damning in this crude hatchet job by John Ware. Leaving aside Ware’s own damning record of Islamaphobia even the Observer cannot fail to have noticed that not one of the Labour Party ‘victims’ of anti-Semitism were captioned. All of them were close colleagues, officers of the Jewish Labour Movement, a small pro-Zionist group.

It is noteworthy surely that there were no interviews with the many Jewish members of the Labour Party who are not Zionist or who do not subscribe to the fable that the Labour Party is an anti-Semitic party.

The testimony of the so-called whistleblowers concealed more than it revealed. None of them were asked about the thousands of suspensions of Labour Party members whose only crime was that they were supporters of Jeremy Corbyn.  In a parliamentary or local election that would be called for what it is, gerrymandering.

If this  programme had been broadcast in any other country it would have been called out for what it is. A piece of propaganda.

Yours faithfully,

Tony Greenstein

Rachel Cooke: Never Underestimate the Stupidity of a Guardian Journalist – Jewish Chronicle Letter of the Week

Open Letter to a Racist - Jon Lansman – Bahrain Picket – Tommy Robinson Video

 

Sometimes you wonder if there is a Stupidity Test that Guardian journalists have to pass before they are admitted into Kath Viner’s paradise. I mention this because in her interview with Ken Livingstone in last week’s Observer, Rachel Cooke asked ‘if some Labour activists don’t wilfully and perniciously conflate Judaism and Zionism’.  

The Guardian's Hapless Rachel Cooke

It’s the kind of remark that makes you want to tear your hair out. Where has this fool been? There has been a 3 year campaign by supporters of Israel to conflate anti-Zionism, the Israeli state and anti-Semitism. The summer of 2018 was taken up with the effort by Zionists and their media claque to impose the bogus IHRA misdefinition on the Labour Party, a ‘definition’ which conflates criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism, such that 7 of its 11 examples relate to Israel not Jews. Don't words have any meaning for these people?

In an article Labour's new guidelines show it is institutionally antisemitic the Jewish Chronicle’s tabloid editor Stephen Pollard, Dirty Desmond’s old mate, complained that Labour had refused to adopt the IHRA in toto.

 ‘instead of adopting the definition as agreed by all these bodies, Labour has excised the parts which relate to Israel and how criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.’

Leave aside that all the best anti-Semites, from Christian Zionist Steve Bannon to Viktor Orban admire Israel because Zionist ethno-nationalism is precisely what they would like to emulate, it is should be obvious that the strategy of Israel’s supporters is to perpetuate the lie that anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism. This is the accepted media narrative. 

Journalist fools like Rachel Cooke seem oblivious to the increasingly overt racism in Israel - what was submerged before is now coming into the open

What is it about this that idiots like Rachel Cooke do not understand?   Rachel Cooke is however only one example of the degeneration of the Guardian/Observer (there was a time when the two papers were separate).

I sent a letter to The Observer, but unsurprisingly it was not printed, as is the case with nearly all anti-Zionist correspondence these days. I copy it below.  Please distribute because this is an example of how the Letters page of the Guardian, the last area which was free of Jonathan Freedland’s baleful influence has now fallen victim to Zionism’s gatekeepers.

Sunday, 23 June 2019

Letters Editor

The Observer

Kings Place,

90 York Way

London N1 9GU 

In an otherwise interesting interview with Ken Livingstone, Rachel Cooke asks ‘if some Labour activists don’t wilfully and perniciously conflate Judaism and Zionism.’

Ms Cooke’s question is indicative of the confusion caused by the false anti-Semitism campaign by Zionists and supporters of Israel. It is truly Orwellian.

It is not Labour activists who conflate Judaism and Zionism but the Zionist movement and its supporters.  Where has Ms Cooke been these past 3 years?

There was a concerted campaign by the Zionist lobby to get the Labour Party to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance misdefinition of anti-Semitism, which equated criticism of the State of Israel with ‘anti-Semitism’.

No less than the Chief Rabbi stated in an interview with the Telegraph (3 May 2016) that ‘One can no more separate it [Zionism]from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.’

This conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is the basis of the false equation between Judaism and Zionism.

I just hope that in future the Observer’s interviewers are better briefed.

Yours faithfully,

Tony Greenstein 

The Jewish Chronicle’s Letter of the Week from Maurice Herson

Perhaps the Jewish Chronicle’s tabloid editor, Stephen Pollard, has been laid low with a bug.  This week there was the first decent letter for some time in the JC from a Maurice Herson from Oxford who spoke of the ‘JC's relentless hate campaign against Jeremy Corbyn.’

 I can’t imagine where he got that one!  Certainly not from Jon Lansman!

Lansman at the Palestine session of the Arise conference yesterday - looking bored and full of contempt for those there

Open Letter to Momentum’s Racist Leader

Lansman was spotted at the Palestine session at Arise yesterday – looking bored

I blogged a few days ago about the treacherous role that Jon Lansman has played inside the Labour Party in giving aid and comfort to the false allegations of anti-Semitism against supporters of Palestine. 

His latest attack, on Jewish Voice for Labour, which is reported in this week’s Jewish Chronicle boils down to the assertion that ‘that neither the vast majority of individual members of JVL nor the organisation itself can really be said to be part of the Jewish community."

You probably didn't hear of the letter from 34 Haredi Rabbis defending Corbyn last year - that's because the mainstream media didn't cover it

Leaving aside the fact that there is no single Jewish community - the Board of Deputies represents a minority of British Jews – neither the Ultra Orthodox nor secular Jews come under their wing – the question is so what?

Lansman in the pink shirt

The organised, synagogue going, mainly Zionist Jewish community is a thoroughly reactionary one that has voted Tory for 50+ years. In so far as they support the State of Israel that is or should be a matter of shame.

This is an Israel which only last week saw dozens of residents in Afula, including the Mayor and Deputy Mayor, demonstrating against the sale of a house to an Arab. This is the state which has supplied weaponry to virtually every racist and genocidal regime in the world, from South Africa to Burma to Guatemala.

It is not for nothing that Israel’s best friends include leaders such as Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Philippines Duterte – fascist and anti-Semites all.

What the JLM call their 'sister party' the Israeli Labour Party supports Netanyahu's attempt to deport Israel's 40,000 Black African refugees

Lansman played a particularly iniquitous role in the witchhunting of Jackie Walker, deposing her, with the support of the Alliance for Workers Liberty, as Vice-Chair of Momentum. Lansman has helped the Jewish Labour Movement witch-hunt of anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians despite them passing a motion of no confidence in Corbyn at their last conference.  

Signs in Nazi Germany saying 'Jews not wanted' have a familiar ring in Afula

It is difficult to know how anyone who calls themselves a socialist today can find anything progressive in the State of Israel. There was a time when I was growing up when people hadn’t heard of the Naqba.  We believed that the Arabs really had left voluntarily in order that the Arab armies could enter Israel. We believed that Kibbutzim were islands of socialism in the Middle East where equality ruled, not realising that they employed cheap Arab and Misrahi/Oriental Jewish labour and were racially exclusive Jewish only institutions.

It was only later that we learnt that the best friend of Israel was Apartheid South Africa whom it transferred nuclear technology to and invested heavily in.  That this was the position not just of the Israeli Labour Party but of Mapam, to its left, too.

During the 1980’s we learnt that even as Argentina was murdering Jews because they were Jews as part of its wider massacre of leftists Israel was Argentina’s main arms supplier.  Even worse it became clear that the refuge against anti-Semitism that Israel proudly claims to be didn’t apply to leftist Argentina Jews who were the ‘wrong sort of Jews.’

We also learnt that from El Salvador to Guatemala Israel was involved in training the death squads and active in training those in Guatemala who perpetrated the genocide of the Mayan Indians.  Just as Israel today is the arms supplier of last resort to the Burmese regime in its genocide of the Rohinga people.

This is to completely omit Israel’s repression of the Palestinians and its permanent military occupation of Palestinian land and its creation of an ethno-nationalist Jewish state which is the envy of every fascist and neo-Nazi from Steve Bannon to Viktor Orban and Tommy Robinson.  Indeed the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right, Richard Spencer, describes himself as a White Zionist.

The only justification that Lansman has for his demonization of Jewish anti-Zionists and JVL in particular is that the majority of the Jewish community in this country supports Israel.

If this were true that most Jews in this country supported what Israel is doing and understands what a Jewish State really means then this would be a matter of shame. It would mean that Jews in this country were now on the side of the racists and imperialists.  To some extent this is obviously true.  Most Jews vote Tory and have voted Tory for over half a century.

However there are a considerable number of Jews who reject Zionism and what Israel does.  According to the most recent and authoritative survey in 2015 The Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel the number of Jews who identify as Zionists today is 59%, a drop of 13% in 5 years.

The fact is that Lansman identifies with the reactionary majority of British Jews because they are Jews. Such a position is clearly a racist. If the left in the Labour Party has any self-respect then Lansman will be removed from his position in Momentum.  Those who give him legitimacy are giving legitimacy to the movement to overthrow Corbyn.

Anyone one who has doubts about the sincerity of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign should ask themselves one question – if the campaign was genuine and anti-Semitism was a real problem in the Labour Party why would all the Tory press, from the Sun to the Telegraph, support it?  Why should newspapers who have employed Katie Hopkins and who now back Boris Johnson, be so concerned with anti-Semitism?

Open Letter to Lansman

Dear Mr Lansman,

I read with interest your attack on Jewish Voice for Labour in the Jewish Chronicle. Let me the first to congratulate you on your choice of target as well as your exquisite sense of timing. 

After all it makes sense for Momentum's fuhrer (or is it caudillo?) to attack a pro-Corbyn Jewish group in the Labour Party. Just as it makes sense for you to give your support to the Jewish Labour Movement which recently passed, almost unanimously, a vote of no confidence in Corbyn.

All of this as part of the 'fight against anti-Semitism' as defined by the IHRA definition of antisemitism which says that all except the most anodyne criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

If you read my blog below you will see how the residents of Afula in Israel define Zionism and a Jewish state, by demonstrating against the sale of a house to an Arab.  Some people might compare this to what happened in Germany in 1938 but we both know that such a comparison is antisemitic.

Of course the majority Jewish community in this country supports a Jewish state and therefore they support this and all the other more covert measures of segregation in Israel and it is with those that you identify.

Some people would call this racism but racists call it 'Jewish identity'.  It's all part of what is now called Generation Identity. 

Your attack on Jews who oppose Zionism and the Israeli state is akin to the attacks that used to be made on Whites who opposed Apartheid in South Africa. Presumably if you had been in South Africa you would accused them of not being part of the majority White community?

Not only are you unaccountable to anyone, having launched a coup 3 years ago to destroy democracy in Momentum but it is clear you have no shame either.

Regards

Tony Greenstein

Previous picket of Bahraini picket calling for the freeing of a gaoled academic

ALERT 25 JUNE 2019 - PROTEST BAHRAIN 'DEAL OF THE CENTURY' CONFERENCE - PALESTINE IS NOT FOR SALE!

The first phase of the plan, hatched by Israel and Trump, to end any future Palestinian freedom will be tabled this week in Bahrain, hosted by the Khalifa dictatorship and supported by fellow servile Arab dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Inminds chair Abbas Ali said 

"The plan is to, on the one hand, try to squeeze the Palestinian people into submission, with the ongoing slow genocide in Gaza and enforced hardships in the West Bank; with the cutting of all funding to UNRWA; denying the Palestinians the right to their capital Al Quds; legitimizing the theft of the Syrian Golan Heights and giving the green light to similarly annexing the West Bank to Israel with the threat of ethnically cleaning its Palestinian population first.  And then on the other hand, to offer bribes, paid for by MBS and MBZ, to the corrupt PA leadership to accept the deal, selling Jerusalem to the Zionists, and denying the Palestinian people their homeland. The deal stinks so bad that even the normally purchasable PA has rejected it. So without even a token Palestinian presence, the conference aims to determine the future of Palestine. Please join us to condemn this farce, and those participating, and hosting it. Our message is simple - Palestine is not for sale!"

When:
3pm Tuesday 25th June 2019
Where:
Bahrain Embassy in London
30 Belgrave Square
London SW1X 8QB.
Nearest Tube: Hyde Park Corner, Victoria

Will Nick Cohen, the Guardian’s Hapless Islamaphobe, Ever Get Something Right?

When Nick Cohen Makes a Prediction It’s Safe to Assume the Opposite Will Happen!

If there’s one thing that I won’t forgive Nick Cohen for it’s forcing me to defend Jon Lansman, Momentum’s owner and dictator. Yet that is the position that he put me in on 18^th August 2018 when The Spectator printed my letter defending Lansman against charges that he hadn’t pursued my expulsion from Momentum!

Two weeks previously, Cohen wrote It’s not easy being a Corbynista Jew – just ask Jon Lansman, subtitled ‘Follow the pathetic example of Jon Lansman’.  Nick Cohen is nothing if not subtle. Rapier style wit is not his style. It could be called sledgehammer journalism.

But first let me digress. There was a time, at the beginning of the Blair government, when Nick Cohen was a decent journalist. I even looked forward to reading his column in The Observer. No one was a more indefatiguable defender of asylum seekers from the depredations of a racist New Labour government than Cohen. Cohen was a mainstream Tribune style journalist.

Letter to the Spectator refuting a few of Nick Cohen's habitual errors

Then something happened. As with Christopher Hitchens it was 9/11 and then the war with Iraq.  From being a left-wing journalist Cohen became transformed into an anti-Muslim bigot. No one, not even David Aaronovitch, banged the war drum more assiduously than Cohen. He did it, he said, in support of his anti-Baathist Iraqi friends, seemingly oblivious to the hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq, the murderous rampages of American troops, the torture centres and the deliberate policy of setting Shi’ites against Sunnis with all the devastatingly sectarian consequences that followed. To Cohen Iraq was a holy war and unlike Aaronovitch he never publicly recanted (Aaro promised to eat his hat, although to my knowledge this never happened).

Let us just say Cohen lacks a certain self-awareness

Instead Cohen became one of the authors and founders of the short-lived Euston Manifesto group of neo-cons and imperialists. For him opposition to war meant you were inextricably intertwined with Islamic fundamentalism and inherently anti-Semitic. Naturally when Jeremy Corbyn came along Cohen joined the rest of the chorus at the Guardian/Observer in his ceaseless attacks on Labour’s most radical and left-wing leader ever. Nothing was too dirty or discredited to attack Corbyn with but it is nonetheless worth remembering that once upon a time Nick Cohen was a decent and genuine journalist.

Today Cohen operates under the pseudonym of ratbiter at Private Eye, acting as a conduit for whatever misinformation about the Left that the Right supplies him with. It is an appropriate name as his journalism, if that’s the right word, is certainly verminous. In this capacity he has written a series of attacks on Momentum’s Left in Brighton and in particular on my friend and comrade Greg Hadfield.

His article ‘Meet the New Nasty Party’ in the 20^th April edition is replete with mistakes and distortions. Apart from the almost obligatory attack on Greg, who uncovered a £100,000 slush fund run in secret by a right-wing Labour Councillor Leslie Hamilton, which has only just been passed over to the Labour Party, Cohen suggested that I had subjected Cllr. ‘Poison’ Penn to such a severe degree of harassment that she had to call in the Police.

Well it’s true that she made at least two complaints to the Police but it’s also true to say that the Police refused to act on either complaint and made it clear to me that they don’t consider the cut and thrust of political debate as harassment. But for Cohen an allegation is ipso facto a fact. Only the fact that I am already suing the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism for libel and I have the Jewish Chronicle and a certain unnamed councillor in my sights has prevented me adding Lord Gnome to the list of worthy recipients of a libel writ!

As befits a good socialist, not only does Nick Cohen write in Private Eye but he is a columnist at that well known socialist weekly The Spectator. And there it was that he attacked poor Lansman for not doing enough in the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’. Cohen starts off his column with the brainless comment that ‘being a Jew on the Corbyn left is soul crushing.’

One is tempted to ask Cohen how he would know since he is neither a Jew (despite his name) nor on the Left. This is despite two articles, 7 years apart, from Cohen threatening to become one! Hatred is turning me into a Jew, (12.2.09.) Why I’m becoming a Jew and why you should, too (19.3.16.) It’s called doing a Maureen Lipman after the Zionist actress who managed to be converted into a Tory twice in four years.

It would be churlish to explain all Cohen’s lies, errors and and twisting of the truth. For example in his allegation that Christine Shawcroft supported a Labour candidate who posted a Facebook article calling the Holocaust a hoax.  In fact Christine, when she supported Alan Bull, was unaware of his comments and although Bull publicised a Holocaust denial article he didn’t personally endorse it.

In a paragraph describing Lansman’s attitude to me Cohen states:

Even when activists are expelled from Labour for their foul conduct, they are not expelled from Momentum. Labour kicked out Tony Greenstein after he called Labour members ‘Zios’, ‘Janus-faced whores’ and supporters of ‘Israeli child abuse’. Lansman wanted to expel Greenstein from Momentum but lacked the political courage to do so. He backed off because Greenstein ‘will make a big deal of’ the process, ‘possibly including lawyers’.

There are more errors than sentences:

i.                   I called Zionists ‘zios’ not Labour members, ‘Zio’ being short for Zionist like Commie is short for Communist.

ii.                 I didn’t call Labour members ‘Janus faced whores’ but I quoted another member who called Owen Jones a ‘Janus faced whore who bore the impression of the last person who sat on him’! Perfectly accurate!

iii.              Nor did I call Labour members supporters of ‘Israeli child abuse’ I called one Labour member, Louise Ellman MP this because she defended the well documented Israeli military’s treatment of children in a parliamentary debate on child prisoners on 6^th January 2016.

What is completely untrue is Cohen’s assertion that Lansman lacked the ‘political courage’ to expel me from Momentum because of the threat I would resort to law.  In fact, as the email I reproduce here shows, Lansman was intent on expelling me but was worried about legal action which was why he was forced to grant me a hearing (which he had initially opposed). Lansman said:

We do have to get rid of Greenstein but I am a bit concerned by the process which he will make a big deal out of possibly including lawyers

In other words it was a straightforward lie by Cohen to say that Lansman lacked the ‘political courage’ to expel me.  Indeed I was expelled by a panel which included Socialist Action’s Carole Turner and Sam Tarry of the TSSA.

I was forced therefore , against my better judgement, into having to defend  Momentum’s fuhrer Jon Lansman from his even more right-wing detractor, Nick Cohen!

Given articles as disastrous as the one above it is difficult to know what the Guardian/Observer sees in Cohen apart from his venomous anti-Corbynism

However this was not the only instance of Cohen getting anything wrong.  His article on March 19^th 2017, just before last year’s General Election, Don’t tell me you weren’t warned about Corbyn stands as a monument not only to Nick Cohen’s lethal combination of stupidity, arrogance and malevolence but to the Guardian’s vitriolic campaign against Corbyn.  Cohen wrote:

On current polling, Labour will get around a quarter of the vote. Imagine, though, how the Labour party will fare in an election campaign when its leaders are Corbyn, John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry and Diane Abbott, and its second XI consists of Clive Lewis, Angela Rayner, Richard Burgon and Rebecca Long-Bailey. The Tories have gone easy on Corbyn and his comrades to date for the transparently obvious reason that they want to keep them in charge of Labour.

In an election, they would tear them to pieces. They will expose the far left’s record of excusing the imperialism of Vladimir Putin’s gangster state , the oppressors of women and murderers of gays in Iran, the IRA, and every variety of inquisitorial and homicidal Islamist movement, while presenting itself with hypocritical piety as a moral force. Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it.

The Guardian has literally run hundreds of articles from its vacuous pundits attacking Corbyn. See my A Friendly Question or Two to Jonathan Freedland - Does the Guardian have a Death Wish?

Contrast Cohen’s forecasts with those of this blog. Almost alone amongst the political commentators I predicted that Corbyn would defy the pundits in Labour Can Win if Corbyn is Bold . On April 20 2017, I wrote, with the polls showing the Tories lead as over 20%

… it was Harold Wilson who said that a week is a long time in politics. Seven weeks is a political eternity. Theresa May has taken a gamble that her 21% lead will hold. It is a gamble that she may yet come to regret.

There is only one direction that her lead can go, and that is down. Once her lead falls, then a snowball effect can take over. What is essential is that Labour marks out the key areas on which it is going to base its appeal. The danger is that Corbyn is going to continue with his ‘strategy’ of appeasing the right and appealing to all good men and women. If so that will be a recipe for disaster ...

Theresa May is a cautious conservative. She is literally the product of her background - a conservative vicar’s daughter. Reactionary, parochial and small-minded, she is a bigot for all seasons. What doesn’t help is that she is both wooden and unoriginal. The danger is that Corbyn tries to emulate her.

On June 3, five days before the election, when all the polls were predicting that May’s lead was widening, I wrote another post, General Election - Is Labour on the threshold of victory?

My initial predictions, that there would or could be a hung parliament were based on my assessment of the situation. This is still quite possible, as the Tories are widely detested for their attacks on the working poor, people on benefits and the continuous privatisation of the NHS. They are seen as the party of a vicious class rule, which is what austerity is about.

That does not, however, mean that the Tories will necessarily be defeated. People do not vote in line with their class interests. The whole purpose of the patriotic card, used by a succession of ruling class scoundrels from Pitt to May, is to blind people to their real interests ... The Tory press, of course, is doing its best to foster illusions in Strong and Stable.

.... The Lib Dems are not going to gain enough seats to prop up another Tory coalition ... By ruling out any form of pact with Labour under Corbyn, the Lib Dems have guaranteed their own irrelevance.

We could be in for a period of political instability such as we have not known for 40 years ... A Tory government is still possible if it cobbles together a coalition of the Lib Dems and the Ulster Unionists-DUP. Even a majority Tory government cannot be ruled out.

In the wake of this I made an offer to the Guardian. I would replace Nick Cohen and Owen Jones for only half their salary.  Surprisingly my offer was rejected!

 Tony Greenstein