Scum-watch: Shameless red-baiting.
Ignoring the sentimental trash about a butterfly coincidentally landing on Kate McCann on the front page, today's Scum goes out of its way to scaremonger about the Labour deputy leadership candidates daring to speak freely during the hustings on Newsnight and elsewhere of late.
GORDON Brown last night warned the Labour deputy PM rivals against lurching to the Left.
All six candidates favour handing more power to the unions — and some want higher taxes.
Oh god - higher taxes?! Those crazy fiends! It soon all becomes clear quite why they're setting out to smear the candidates for daring to speak their minds for a change:
Tony Blair fears Labour will swing back to the Left once he goes — and the last few weeks have seen challengers appealing to union dinosaurs.
Well, if Blair fears it then the Scum has to at least try and make it look like it's so. George Pascoe-Watson, the piss-poor political editor, has even gone to the trouble of making a list of all those "Lefty policies".
The tragedy of the Sun's hatred of the left is that it has always been at the expense of its working class readership. Most of those on the minimum wage reading the statements from the candidates, especially about the City uber-rich paying themselves their obscene bonuses, are more than likely to find themselves in agreement. The real surprise about the list is in fact how moderate it is: where's the left-wing idiocy about setting limits on private sector provision in the NHS when there's no evidence that it either provides a cheaper or a better service? The anger about Hilary Benn's comments on socialist values should be that the last ten years have been absent of them, and that it's taken Blair's hegemony to be lifted for it even to be suggested that there might be something admirable about them. The Scum often likes to complain about political correctness that makes certain words or views taboo, yet it's had more than a hand in making the "s" word into something that it isn't and never has been.
The leader itself brings out those old bogeymen that it delighted in smearing time and again, which also insults NHS staff and attacks university lecturers for suggesting that amazingly enough, most students are radicalised about something:
GORDON Brown says the next deputy Labour leader can’t count on becoming his Deputy PM.
Thank goodness for that.
Jon Cruddas for one has said he doesn't want to be deputy prime minister. Besides, isn't this the same Scum which loathes Prescott with a vehemence it usually reserves for paedophiles? Surely anyone would be an improvement on him?
It’s been like watching All Our Yesterdays as candidates strutted their stuff this week.
All six men and women promised more power to the party and a greater say for union paymasters.
Gosh, giving the party members a say in party policy? That might be too near democracy for a newspaper that's been given more of a role in Labour's thinking than the members themselves have.
They were falling over themselves to apologise for the Blair blunders that gave them 10 years unbridled power.
Because the country obviously wants the same obstinacy that the Blair years has given us to continue, doesn't it?
So it was a relief to hear the PM-in-waiting put them right.
“There will be no retreat to the narrow politics or the failed policies of the past,” he said.
Phew! Just for a moment, we glimpsed the ghosts of Red Robbo and Arthur Scargill queueing for beer and sandwiches at Number Ten.
Quite. Give us Hazel Blears over those two any day.
Labels: Labour deputy leadership contest, Scum-watch, Sun-watch
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