Guido has not awarded an Order of the OTT for a while. This entry however, up on the New Statesman website this morning, was just too good to pass up:
Readers can have one guess who the author is…
Laurie Penny’s steaming hot take goes on to suggest that an intoxicated David Cameron’s alleged porcine molestation is somehow symbolic of the class struggle power dynamic, her psycho-analysis concluding that the future Prime Minister’s penetrated pig is a metaphor for the country he would go on to run:
“Power and money are accessed through the back door, or, as it may be, the pig’s mouth, and as with any kink, the eroticism isn’t about the act, but about what the act symbolises. It’s about humiliation, about control, about power play. What might the young swain have been thinking as he unzipped? What went through his head? If you ask me, I’ll bet he was thinking: Soon. Someday soon, I will do this to the whole bloody country.”
Talk about hamming it up…
The Guardian and New Statesman have uncovered the true cause of the migrant crisis. Nope, forget war, ISIS and Assad, it’s… climate change!
A piece in this week’s Staggers – which has received a robust response from critics – evokes the image of 3 year old Aylan Kurdi to crudely warn that failure to reach an agreement at the upcoming Paris climate summit will lead to “many more bodies being washed up on our beaches”:
“That image, which few of us will ever completely erase from our mind, will no doubt prompt David Cameron to make a renewed gesture… In Paris this December the world will try to reach agreement on combating the dangerous climate change that Syria and North Africa are already experiencing. Without agreement there, we in the rich world will have to get used to our trains being disrupted, our borders controls being breached and many more bodies being washed up on our beaches.”
Today the Guardian join in, publishing an editorial by Friends of the Earth CEO Craig Bennett, also using the picture to claim things will get worse if we fail to tackle climate change:
“We’re all human, and so it’s perhaps not surprising that it takes a single photograph and an individual’s story to shake a society, all too belatedly, into glimpsing at one horrific aspect of Europe’s refugee crisis and demanding action…. People from across the political spectrum have come together in the last week to demand a much stronger response from David Cameron to the refugee crisis, and rightly so. But if the government continues to move backwards on climate change, then we should get ready for a much bigger refugee crisis before very long.”
Stay classy…
Owen Jones, 4 May 2015: “Russell Brand has endorsed Labour – and the Tories should be worried.”
Owen Jones, 4 August 2015: “The Right are mocking Jeremy Corbyn because they fear him.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…
Labour have announced which news organisations have been invited to chair each of their regional leadership hustings, which are taking place in addition to the ones on TV and radio:
Anushka Asthana, Sky News
David Clegg, Daily Record
Matthew d’Ancona, The Guardian
Isabel Hardman, The Spectator
Gaby Hinsliff, Political Editor, Grazia
Chris Lloyd, Northern Echo
Mary Riddell, Daily Telegraph
Tim Shipman, The Sunday Times
Jim Waterson, Buzzfeed UK
Paul Waugh, HuffingtonPost UK
The Speccie and the Telegraph get one each, even Buzzfeed are on the list. Yet the New Statesman, Labour’s in house magazine, are nowhere to be seen. Was it something they said?
Labour's Jamie Reed has nominated Andy Burnham for the leadership – meaning every member of the shadow health team has done so.
— George Eaton (@georgeeaton) June 10, 2015
Great insight there from ‘Miliband’s favourite journalist’.
Liz Kendall remains a Shadow Health Minister while she runs against Burnham…
“His five years as opposition leader have revealed severe limitations and strategic weaknesses. He has never succeeded in inspiring the electorate and has struggled to define himself. His narrow rhetorical and ideological focus on political economy has left him unable to reach the aspirational voters required to build a broad electoral coalition (see Jason Cowley’s report on Harlow in this week’s issue). Finally, even after the SNP’s victory in the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, which we predicted, he remained complacent over Labour’s decline in Scotland, where he is even less popular than David Cameron. It is the surge in support for the SNP, which has positioned itself to the left of Labour, that has definitively ended Mr Miliband’s hopes of winning an absolute majority. Should he become prime minister, he will now almost certainly be reliant on the support of a large nationalist bloc to govern.”
This from the magazine that sacked Dan Hodges for being too anti-Ed…
