In praise of Jeremy Corbyn - a rap of love from Craft-D - Letter to Corbyn
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| The man himself - on the campaign trail in 2017 - scaring the forces of wealth and power |
Craft-D's 'Letter to Corbyn' - November 2020
Yesterday, I posted a blog-post about the present failings in the Tory government. Today, courtesy of SKWAWKBOX, some insights into what is going wrong on the Opposition benches.
First, from my socialist perspective and that of others, the most pressing problem remains this. The leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, appears to have won the leadership contest earlier this year under false premises. He declared that he would provide a new and professional face to take the socialist message of Jeremy Corbyn forward in a more successful way. That he has patently failed to do. Indeed, he has orchestrated the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party. And we are expected to trust a man who behaves in such a way?
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| A shared power stance from earlier this year, pre-pandemic lockdown and the results of the leadership election in early April |
Now, some evidence of the loss of members due to this shift away from the socialist message and the
Where do we start?
My first failing to record has to be that the Conservative Party has not yet taken its present leader, Boris Johnson, to one side and told him, in the name of decency, to go. I do believe it will happen one day. The sooner the better. The leader's special advisor, Dominic Cummings, appeared this week to have walked out of his Downing Street role. I am suspicious. Smoke and mirrors. These two - Johnson and Cummings - are an item. One day, both should face charges of corporate manslaughter for their actions and inactions when faced with the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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| Cummings and Johnson - a political item? |
'A chart published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has exposed the dishonesty of Tory claims that
I'll start this blog-post with what for some of you may be a familiar appeal. Please - if you have come to value my writing and would like to support my bid to secure publication for my pandemic journal: 'Dying to Know' - do press the blue Follow button on this blog-post. You will find it at the top on the right-hand side but only when you have a full website screen in front of you using a laptop computer. It seems it is not visible when you are in phone mode.
I will be honest. No one has pressed the button to identify themselves as a Follower in the last 24 hours. It would be cool if I could get to 20 such Followers by the start of Lockdown on 5 November.
Following on from my blogpost yesterday which has already had six positive responses, here is a short one today that provides you with the findings of a YouGov survey on this question of keeping schools open during the next lockdown that begins next Thursday, 5 November 2020.
Here's a link to yesterday's post, if you missed it:
https://robdonovan.blogspot.com/2020/11/johnson-cummings-and-starmer-bad-mad-or.html
Once again I am sharing a SKWAWKBOX posting. They are such an important source of sanity in this political maelstrom.
(SKWAWKBOX - 3 November 2020)
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| At what cost? |
A YouGov poll that asked English voters whether they want schools open or closed during the government's 'fire-break' national lockdown carries a stark message for Labour leader Keir Starmer.
People across the nation believe that schools should be closed - hardly surprising when they represent one
I'll start this blog-post with what for some of you may be a familiar appeal. Please - if you have come to value my writing and would like to support my bid to secure publication for my pandemic journal: 'Dying to Know' - do press the blue Follow button on this blog-post. You will find it at the top on the right-hand side but only when you have a full website screen in front of you using a laptop computer. It seems it is not visible when you are in phone mode.
Here, in this blogpost, you can read the evidence that seems to me incontrovertible. Schools must be shut in the same way as they were in the first lockdown.
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| Open at our peril! |
Schools are engine room of exponential increase. No measures excluding them can suppress second wave
'New Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show that 100,000
schoolchildren are currently
infected with the coronavirus.
More than that, those figures again
prove that schools are fuelling the second wave
of the pandemic.
The ONS calculates that the children are part of the more than
336,000 people in England have the virus. But while schoolchildren represent
20% of England's population, they are 30%
of those currently infected.
The virus is spreading more in schools than anywhere else - and
the government is fully aware of this, because their own SAGE scientists have repeatedly told them so.
Any measures to suppress the virus are a sham if they do not include re-closing schools. The Tories must
I'll start this blog-post with what for some of you may be a familiar appeal. Please - if you have come to value my writing and would like to support my bid to secure publication for my pandemic journal: 'Dying to Know' - do press the blue Follow button on this blog-post. You will find it at the top on the right-hand side but only when you have a full website screen in front of you using a laptop computer. It seems it is not visible when you are in phone mode.
Owen Jones's history of the Labour movement under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn - 'This Land - The Story of a Movement' - was published on 24 September this year. Jones is a writer and socialist, an historian by training. We share these three strands. Today, I finished my reading of Owen's 319 pages and now in this blogpost I share my responses to the questions I was asking myself as I turned the pages.
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| Jeremy Corbyn, wearing a tie and badge in commemoration of the Grenfell victims |
Was I learning anything that I did not know before? Undoubtedly, yes. And has it made a difference to the way I view and understand the phenomenon of Jeremy Corbyn and what I will call 'Corbynism', a
This blog-post follows the by now familiar pattern - each month I recycle the contents of that month's Mailchimp author's newsletter in a blog-post. Here is the October edition below.
First, though, an appeal: as you started reading, you will have noticed perhaps on the top right-hand-side of the page a blue Follow button. If you were to press this, you would make me - as an author endeavoring (American spelling) to secure publication for my pandemic journal - a very happy man. It's free; no hidden catches. Read on to find out the reasons why this is important to me.
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| The view shortly after turning at the summit of the Little Trevalgan hill on my running circuit |
