Mick Hartley

A powerful piece from David Aaronovitch in the Times (£) – Like Castro and Trump, Labour’s inner circle doesn’t just believe in ignoring the media, but in trying to trash it:

Some compliments are unwittingly double-edged. Take for example this from last December: “Fidel Castro was a giant. A man of ideas. A man of action . . . A man who demanded that, as a matter of principle, after he died, no monuments and no roads in Cuba would be named after him.” If the elegist in this case, shadow justice secretary Richard Burgon, wondered how someone could make such a demand on posterity without fear of being disobeyed, he didn’t say so. But then reflection is one thing and action is another.

Mr Burgon, who is a man of alarming eyebrows and a mallet-like delivery, is a member of the leader of the opposition’s inner circle. And on Tuesday he appeared on the Radio 4 Today programme, as part of its coverage of the TUC conference and the related stories concerning the public sector pay cap.

He followed the leader of the Unite union, Len McCluskey. Mr McCluskey, also something of an inner-circle man, had been saying interesting things. He had repeated his suggestion that the law would not deter his members from taking industrial action, had defended his talk of “traitors” within the Labour Party who wanted to undermine Mr Corbyn, and reiterated his belief that the election of a female joint-deputy leader for Labour would be a good idea. It is pretty well understood that, as things stand, this change would be a way of getting an extra Corbynite round the table of Labour’s National Executive Committee.

The presenter, John Humphrys, framed his interview around Mr Burgon’s (and therefore Labour’s) response to Mr McCluskey’s propositions. I have heard many such interviews and so have you. It’s a legitimate line of questioning, and it usually, but not always, results in evasion. Evasion that the interviewee attempts to disguise.

This was different. Different enough to be worth commenting on. Because Mr Burgon made no attempt either to answer, or to evade, any of the questions. In his view they were the wrong questions, they were not the questions that the people he cared about were interested in.

It wasn’t just Mr Burgon’s obdurate refusal that struck me. It was his contempt. He did not care what he was being asked, because he had respect neither for the question nor the questioner. This process was rigged against him and he would make his appeal to a different authority altogether. The shadow justice minister refused to recognise the authority of the court….

If you want a revolution and you don’t want too many awkward questions asked about it, you don’t just ignore what you call the conventional media. You try to destroy its reputation. In fact you must make your battle against it one of the centrepieces of your struggle. Fidel knew this. I think Richard Burgon understands it. And a continent away, by what turns out to be no irony at all, Donald Trump is busy doing it.

Update: on the subject of Richard Burgon, see this.