This weekend, Owen Jones appeared on Celebrity Pointless – an appearance that really stretched the definition of the former word by relying on an abundance of the latter – only to give one of the worst answers of the round and subsequently get eliminated first. For such a pro-European his German needs a lot of work…

Caroline Lucas managed to achieve the remarkable feat of uniting right and left against her with the daftest proposal of silly season so far for an all-woman (and all-white) emergency ‘cabinet of national unity’ to take over and block no deal, “because women have shown they can bring a different perspective to crises, are able to reach out to those they disagree with and cooperate to find solutions”. Just women Caroline likes though, not women like Priti Patel, Liz Truss, Gisela Stuart, or apparently Diane Abbott.

Corbynistas who used to go dewy-eyed at the mere mention of Lucas have now been rapidly unpersoning her. Guido has rounded up some of the more enjoyable reactions…

Diane Abbott herself shut down the idea with an uncharacteristically sensible response. Thornberry, who was approached by Lucas to the fury of the Corbynistas, also poured cold water on it:

However it was Ellie Mae O’Hagan who saved the best till last, identifying the true enemy: centrism. Corbynistia has always been at war with Lucasia…

Lucas’s latest idea is never going to fly, as Guido has already noted, wild fantasising about ‘national unity’ PMs is this year’s silly season activity of choice. However there is a school of thought that by deliberately putting out an obviously daft idea and getting everyone talking about it, Lucas is helping to shift the Overton Window to make a ‘national unity’ Government under someone less bonkers seem more reasonable. Guido won’t be holding his breath…

Owen Jones has spent time tweeting his shock and horror at the fact that the pound has depreciated today. But that hasn’t always been his view. In his breakout book ‘Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class’ Jones argued that a strong pound was to blame “above all” else for the decimation of manufacturing in this country.

“But above all it was allowing the value of the pound to soar that did for industry, making its exports far more expensive than overseas competitors.”

He’s changed his tune. Convenient… 

Fair play to OJ for putting the full video up on his ‘gram. Not sure his over-earnest followers will find it such a laughing matter…

Corbyn’s outriders have been coming up with boringly predictable excuses for dodging their media appearances this morning, from Owen Jones ducking a Today Programme grilling after he “discovered my phone’s alarm no longer works” to Aaron Bastani who “missed his train” on the way to Politics Live. Luckily the unflappable Dawn Foster was on hand to step in for both of them…

'These miserable bad people'

As journalists question @jeremycorbyn on anti-Semitism in the @UKLabour party, a lady starts shouting in Spanish as she escorts him to his car https://t.co/p8u9BINrFB pic.twitter.com/ShmkA3z1ni

— ITV News (@itvnews) July 11, 2019

Now the Absolute Boy himself has shown them all how it’s done with this impressively original ruse to avoid the press pack outside his house this morning, sending a woman out ahead of him loudly speaking in Spanish and waving her arms around until he’s safely in his car. ¡Muy bien!

UPDATE: ITV have now translated the video. She seems to think it’s all a media witch hunt too…

Last week Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced he was appointing Amal Clooney as the UK’s envoy on media freedom. Today Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright has put out a government White Paper on ‘Online Harms’ which includes proposals for a regulator which will have the power to ban the websites of non-compliant companies from being accessed in the UK at all. Someone tell Amal quick!

You would think that the likes of Facebook and Twitter would be up in arms – they are not because as Dom Hallas, Executive Director of The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec), says

“Everyone, including British startups, shares the goal of a safer internet – but these plans will entrench the tech giants, not punish them. The vast scope of the proposals means they cover not just social media but virtually the entire internet – from file sharing to newspaper comment sections. Those most impacted will not be the tech giants the Government claims they are targeting, but everyone else. It will benefit the largest platforms with the resources and legal might to comply – and restrict the ability of Britissh startups to compete fairly. There is a reason that Mark Zuckerberg has called for more regulation. It is in Facebook’s business interest.”

86% of UK investors surveyed by Coadec say that proposals claiming to tackle tech giants could lead to poor outcomes that inadvertently damage tech startups and hamper competition. As with the GDPR and we are likely to see with the Copyright Directive, the tech giants are in fact best placed to absorb wide-ranging regulation. There is a real risk of the global platforms getting bigger and British startups suffering.

There is also a risk that a future Corbyn govenment will use the legislation against political opponents. When you see the likes of Owen Jones being applauded for describing the Spectator, Sun, Mail, Telegraph, Express and of course Guido, as “spreading hate”, you can easily imagine the legislation being used by a Corbyn government to close down dissident media. This is a dangerous path being foolishly and short-sightedly cheered on by newspapers who think it will scupper the global platforms who are eating into their advertising revenue.

See: Coadec report with the survey data referred to can be found in full here.