Mick Hartley

Julie Bindel in the Spectator on The rank hypocrisy of Russell Brand’s left-wing defenders:

Women on the political left have spent donkey’s years arguing that sexism and inequality in relation to men cannot be postponed until after the ‘revolution’.  In part, it was men and their macho quest for class war that enabled Russell Brand to operate in plain sight for so long. We all knew who Brand was, because he told us. Gross misogyny and an obvious messiah complex notwithstanding, the left was quite prepared to treat him as a useful idiot in a bid to lure disaffected young voters.

Take the socialist activist Owen Jones. During the 2015 election campaign, he argued that Brand offered Ed Miliband the best route to young voters, suggesting that the then Labour leader was to be commended for being brave enough to share a platform with him. While conceding Brand’s problematic attitude towards women, Jones still insisted that Russell Brand mattered: the politics outweighed the misogyny….

Brand, readers were informed, had ‘acknowledged his own problematic attitude towards women but still need[ed] to work on it’. In a cringeworthy endorsement for Jones’ book, Brand even compared him to George Orwell, and when Jones returned the favour with his own endorsement (‘Funny, full of charm, and engaging’) his words went on the front cover….

Leftist enablers already knew who Russell Brand was. Six years before Jones’ simpering performance on stage at the Guardian Live event, Brand, along with Jonathan Ross, had left obscene messages for actor Andrew Sachs in which he boasted about a sexual encounter with Sachs’s granddaughter. To this pair of male broadcasters, sexual humiliation and the bullying of an elderly man were fair game for the purpose of entertainment.

In 2014, the environmental journalist and left-wing campaigner George Monbiot (who fancies himself a bit more righteous than thou) described Brand as ‘the best thing that has happened to the left in years’. Over the weekend, Monbiot apologised for nominating Brand as a ‘hero’, saying he ‘should have read the signs better’.

Sexism on the left has a long and shameful history on both sides of the Atlantic. One Berkeley anti-war leader said of feminists in 1969, ‘Let them eat cock’. At Students for a Democratic Society meetings, ‘brothers’ reported their unique dreams for utopia; these included ‘free grass, free food, free women and free clothes’.

Or, as leading Black Panther Stokely Carmichael put it, “the position of women in the movement should be prone”.

For generations, women on the socialist left have been told, one way or another, that their liberation will follow the great struggle. First comes the class war; capitalism must be overthrown and the establishment defeated. Only then, perhaps, will anyone get around to thinking about the women. Brand’s political career was like a rock and roll version of the tired old socialist trope. The anti-capitalist rhetoric he spun even as he was accruing great personal wealth won him admirers among people who regarded themselves as champions of the oppressed. But his public persona was that of a sexual predator.