Rob Watson of the BBC, laughing, smears Jeremy Corbyn as “hard left”.
Guyon Espiner snickers supportively, fails to ask him to explain his allegation.
Morning Report, RNZ National, Thursday 21 Feb. 2019
Guyon Espiner snickers supportively, fails to ask him to explain his allegation.
Morning Report, RNZ National, Thursday 21 Feb. 2019
Shortly before the 8 a.m. news, it’s time for the once-over-lightly on British politics. The correspondent is, as usual, “Rob Watson from the BBC” who, after laughingly noting that British politics is “anything BUT boring now”, gravely informs Guyon Espiner that since 2015 British politics has been hit with two bombs: the first was the election of Jeremy Corbyn “who took the Labour Party to the hard left”, and Brexit.
Espiner is so busy chuckling that he actually forgets to do his job, which is (presumably) to ask intelligent questions and demand some clarification or substantiation if a correspondent makes a contentious and incendiary statement. And having someone like Watson, with his clubby, plummy Oxbridge accent sneeringly dismiss Corbyn as “hard left” is extremely contentious and incendiary. All of Corbyn’s positions on all sorts of things from taxation to investment in infrastructure and industry to rational, fair, and sane foreign policy, are pretty much the same as the vast majority of British people.
One encouraging feature of an otherwise forgettable and wasted couple of minutes was the fact that all of the discussion concerned Corbyn’s attitudes and actions toward the Brexit catastrophe. Watson, who is quite happy to smear Corbyn as “hard left”, is nevertheless enough of a professional journalist not to indulge imbecilic fantasies. He never once mentioned the ridiculous “anti-Semitism” canard bruited so unconvincingly by Luciana Berger and her hapless, soon to be forgotten followers.
