Friday, 23 September 2016

TV Review: The Overt Democratic Pink Scare

Those pesky commie pinko swines are up to their old tricks again.  Looks like another job for the Investigative Journalist Superheroes from Channel 4…
Thank God we’ve got them on the case, keeping the world safe from grassroots, working-class political organising.  Or we’d be in real trouble.
Their latest brilliant expose came in the Dispatches programme on Monday night, which effectively dissected the underhand tactics used by Labour Party members to control the party by making it more democratic and responsive to members.  A typical totalitarian extreme left plot, involving public meetings and reasoned argument.
The Labour Party, having long ago fought the battle with the Loony Left, now shudders as the spectre looms large at the fringes of the party.  In fact, they loom so large on the fringes that they support the leader of the party himself.  An enemy within, you might say. 
This enemy within is the “Trotskyist”, “entryist” (no, I’m not sure what that means either, but it was used as a slur and repeated several times, so I understand what it was meant to mean) Momentum group.  Momentum is a gaggle of gnarled, grizzled, hard left benefit claimants who want to smash the capitalist state, while leaving their local dole office intact.  (Except the ones that are teachers, or something.)  These are the people who simply cannot accept that Mrs Thatcher won the argument and that Socialism is as old-fashioned as it is dangerous. They are the fabled Reds Under The Bed of cold war-era America, and they represent the single biggest threat to democracy ever.
This episode of Dispatches featured Neil Kinnock, who you might remember from his spectacular reforms to the Labour Party, which resulted in a stunning two-election losses to a deeply divisive, unpopular incumbent.  In fact, Kinnock is the longest-serving leader of the opposition in British political history; an achievement for which he was granted a baronetcy for services to Labour election losses, ascending to take his place among those who bravely attempt to avoid any Labour election wins ever occurring again.  (It is rumoured that many current Labour MPs can look forward to similar awards in the New Years’ Honours List.)
Kinnock was naturally horrified by the thought of a Labour election win, as all right-minded people should be.  He was also disgusted by the thought of Socialists in the Labour Party, having spent years trying to get rid of them during his double-election-losing term as party leader.  Despite the effects of his historic tenure, Kinnock is still committed to a strategy of beating the Conservatives by being more like the Conservatives in every way – thank God.  Such realism has been sorely missing from Labour since Corbyn took the throne.
Kinnock is such a realist, in fact, he understands the Labour Party’s position in British parliamentary terms, an entity existing only to add a veneer of democratic legitimacy to the rule of our social betters.  As such, Kinnock was an unqualified success.  I still don’t know how he managed to lose the 1992 election, but what an historic achievement! A winner’s loser, you might say. 
This latest Dispatches investigation follows on from Channel 4’s most important documentary about nothing, Isis: The British Women Supporters Unveiled, which was ingenious – the programme title was literally true, in that undercover filming showed Muslim women unveiled.  It also managed to generate, from an entire year’s worth of secret filming, a series of vague allegations and circumstantial evidence – thereby undermining the sensationalist title.  Any tabloid sub-editor would have been happy with the headline; and the consistency of tone in Channel 4 documentaries is impressive. 
The new Dispatches programme on Momentum could not have been more timely; with Syria on fire, the USA tearing itself apart, Russia using its increasing dominance to threaten its neighbours, the two in open hostility; the government in disarray over Brexit; the decline in living standards; and with the Conservative Party’s alleged electoral crimes, this was the perfect time to make a mainstream documentary about a broad political campaigning organisation based on nudges, winks, unsubstantiated allegations, secretly filmed public meetings and a politician making a joke in a lift. 
One of the brilliant things this documentary will do is send up the Trots by playing into their “mainstream media hates us” conspiracy theories in a deliciously deft double-bluff – giving them enough rope to hang themselves with.  Watch them scream and whine about corporate media bias while the adults do the real work.  Enjoy, Comrades!
Jeremy Corbyn’s shock leadership election win has upset the natural balance of British Parliamentary politics.  The pinko stalking horse for the Red Horde, despite posing as a decent, normal man, with normal scruffy clothes, represents a threat to the order that has sustained our formal democracy for decades – a democratic order which must be kept safe from the stampeding hooves of the bewildered herd. 

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