Shadow chancellor John McDonnell thinks spitting can be legitimate form of protest

John McDonnell, November 2011 by Transition Heathrow

Anti-austerity protestors who gobbed on journalists at the recent Tory conference were condemned by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn quickly after it had happened.

A spokesman for Corby said: “Jeremy strongly agrees with [Trades Union Congress general secretary] Frances O’Grady, what has happened is inexcusable and journalists must be able to do their jobs.”

Yet footage has emerged that suggests not everyone in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet agrees that spitting can never be used as a form of protest, with shadow chancellor John McDonnell addressing an anti-austerity rally in April 2011 as follows:

“I always give the example of P&O, when I worked for RMT as well. In the P&O dispute we had some real difficulties and all the rest of it. People said: ‘Well, we lost.’ But the strike was difficult and the struggle went on.

There was one woman in all of that said: ‘I don’t care just we have to keep our heads up high and if we go back, we go back.’[Then] she said: ‘But I make the manager’s tea, and I spit in it everyday.’”

McDonnell went on to justify such “direct action” by saying it builds up a “climate of dissent” that could “bring this [coalition] government down”:

“And it’s that form of we’re not taking it any more, and we’re going to give it back, [that] I think builds up a climate of opinion, a climate of dissent. Which I actually think, when combined with industrial action, will produce a tipping point that will force this government out of office, and that’s got to be our objective.”

“This isn’t about mild-mannered debates or anything like that – we’re winning the argument. This isn’t about just tokenistic demonstrations. This is absolute determination that we’ve got to bring this government down.

McDonnell is presumably referring to the dispute between the National Union of Seamen (NUS) and the shipping company P&O in the late 80s, a history of which can be found in this document.

A considerable photo gallery of the strike can also be seen on the photographer Mik Critchlow’s website.

Image Credit – John McDonnell, November 2011 by Transition Heathrow

Isabel Oakeshott: I could have slipped piggate into the Sunday Times

Election UK, April 2010 by Alex Brown

Isabel Oakeshott, the co-author of the Call Me Dave biography of David Cameron that broke the infamous piggate story, has claimed she could have smuggled it into a Sunday Times diary so long as it was shrouded in euphemism.

Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, the former political editor rebuffed claims that nobody on Fleet Street would have let her run the story with only one source, saying:

“Would I have got that story into The Sunday Times? Well, I reckon it probably could have been a diary story, expressed much more euphemistically.”

However, given how the original claim was phrased by Oakeshott and her fellow biographer Ashcroft it is hard to see how it could have been more delicately phrased:

A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig. His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal’s mouth.”

Her suggestion that books require lower standards of proof than newspapers is also somewhat dubious, and given her experience as a journalist she must have known that Fleet Street would grab hold of the tale and run with it. She said:

“I think [the question about burden of proof] rests on a really false premise, which is that things that are written in books need to have the same standard — if you like to use that word — as things that are written in newspapers.”

She did, however, stand by her source, a Tory MP and Oxford University contemporary of Cameron:

“It’s my judgment that the MP was not making it up, although I accept there was a possibility he could have been slightly deranged.”

Oakeshott went on to say that she did not consider the claim an “allegation”, which may say something about her own, er, habits or the low expectations we have of politicians:

“In no way did we conceive of it as any kind of allegation against Cameron. I, frankly, don’t care what he did when he was drunk in university dining societies.”

This story was originally reported in the Sun.

Image Credit – Election UK, April 2010 by Alex Brown

What you should know about Westminster’s Vote Leave, the rival to Leave.EU

Vote Leave screencap, October 2015

For the past few months there have been agitations from the “anti-establishment” eurosceptics about the emergence of a Westminster alternative to the Leave.EU coalition.

And on Thursday night Vote Leave officially launched with a slickly cut campaign video and the backing of MPs from Ukip, Labour and the Conservatives (the Lib Dem members being europhiles):

https://youtu.be/0tItgGcWVHw

That list of MPs includes Steve Baker (Conservative), Douglas Carswell (Ukip), Kate Hoey (Labour). Kelvin Hopkins (Labour), Bernard Jenkin (C), Owen Paterson (C), and Graham Stringer (Labour).

Prominent donors backing the campaign include the likes of Tory donor Peter Cruddas, Labour donor John Mills, and Ukip donor Stuart Wheeler, who has gifted the fringe party some £700,000 over the last five years.

All of this is the work of Matthew Elliott, founder of pressure group the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the man behind the No2AV campaign that thoroughly trounced attempts to reform Britain’s voting system in 2011.

His other group, Business for Britain, was recently hedging its bets on the European question, claiming that it was waiting for prime minister David Cameron’s negotiations to finish before it made a decision to setup Vote Leave.

Indeed in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today show, Jon Moynihan of Vote Leave said of the changes his group wanted:

“We’ve now reluctantly come to the conclusion that those changes are not going to take place…what we want to achieve is a common market, not a political union.”

Neither group has chosen to include Ukip leader Nigel Farage as their champion, many fearing that he is too divisive a figure and that he might scare off potential leavers in the debate.

Ultimately only one side will be chosen as the main campaign group for leaving the EU, giving it access to greater funding.

An ICM poll cited in Vote Leave’s press release has 44 percent opting to leave compared to 39 percent opting to stay, the “leave” side having only gained the upper hand in recent months.

Image Credit – Vote Leave screenshot, October 2015

Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin explain casting Fassbender, historical inaccuracies and three act structure in Steve Jobs biopic

Danny Boyle, Toronto International Film Festival, September 2008 by Gordon Correll

Tying in with Friday’s US release of the biopic Steve Jobs, the folks at the Verge have put out an interview with its director Danny Boyle and writer Aaron Sorkin, talking about the decision to focus on three product launches in Jobs’ life, casting the non-lookalike Michael Fassbender, and historical inaccuracies in the film.

Many of the family and friends of Steve Jobs have criticised and even reportedly attempted to scupper the film because of Jobs’ record as a bit of an arsehole – so from the filmmakers’ perspective this acts as a time to explain their approach to capturing the technologist’s life.

Image Credit – Danny Boyle, Toronto International Film Festival, September 2008 by Gordon Correll

If the Steve Jobs film portrays him as an arsehole, that’s because he was

Steve Jobs, at WWDC 2007, by Ben Stanfield

When biographers probe the life of a celebrated figure the family will always wonder just how much of the bad stuff is going to hit the presses.

As such Steve Jobs, a biopic of one half of Apple’s founding team, was always going to cause trouble given the well-chronicled nastiness of one of the pioneers of consumer electronics.

Even before the film started shooting Laurene Powell Jobs, a critic of Walter Isaacson’s biography which forms the basis of the film, was reportedly lobbying film companies and movie stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale not to back or appear in it.

Then as its release approached Apple’s current chief executive Tim Cook dismissed Steve Jobs and the documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine as “opportunistic”, though he hasn’t seen either of the films.

https://youtu.be/7Yap6WKKin8

And more recently Jony Ive, designer of many of Apple’s greatest hits, saw fit to divulge his opinions on the matter despite not seeing Steve Jobs, branding the movie “ridiculous” and complaining it ignored the “context” in which Jobs was operating.

“There are sons and daughters and widows and very close friends who are completely bemused and completely upset,” he added. “I’m sorry to sound a bit grumpy about it but I find it ever so sad.”

The trouble with these comments, aside from the fact they come from people who haven’t even seen the film in question, is that they ignore that Jobs was a man who denied he fathered a child with his childhood sweetheart Chrisann Brennan, forcing her to raise their daughter Lisa with only limited financial support from him for several years.

They also skirt over the fact he was often abusive and unreasonable to colleagues, and rude to hotel and restaurant staff, the kind of people who were obliged to be pleasant to him despite his misbehaviour.

Some of this is shown in the biopic, and indeed Ive himself once explained these flashes of temper to the biographer Isaacson:

“I once asked him [Jobs] why he gets so mad about stuff. He said: ‘But I don’t stay mad.’ He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn’t stay with him at all. But, there are other times, I think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody.

“And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that.”

This view is backed up by Steve Wozniak, the other more technically gifted half of Apple’s founding team and a consultant on the film. He was asked by the Beeb what he felt the film showed well in terms of Jobs’ personality:

“It deals with what we are all very familiar with – a lot of his negativism. This comes about less with him doing negative things to other people, and more him just sort of standing [there] and not caring as much about others as himself, and not being able to have feelings very much.”

He added that whilst the film did not portray what historically happened in the events it covers, “it really conveys what Steve Jobs was really like inside… and what it was like to be around him.”

If you wanted to be generous about all this you would point to Jobs’ difficult upbringing. And nobody is denying that the techie later reconciled things with his daughter Lisa, or that he did not have a nicer side to him.

But whilst the family will no doubt prefer to remember the more generous side of Jobs, history should not be so kind. It is important people remember that even the most celebrated men can be bastards, and Jobs was undoubtedly one of them.

Image Credit – Steve Jobs, at WWDC 2007, by Ben Stanfield