Loach launches damning attack on Guardian’s reporting of Labour Party; Guardian ‘doctors’ it
Pointing the finger: Ken Loach accused The Guardian of undermining the Labour Party’s leadership – so The Guardian changed the meaning of his letter.
Draw your own conclusions from this.
It seems I, Daniel Blake director Ken Loach was more incensed even than This Writer at The Guardian‘s continued support for that wing of the Labour Party that lays claim to the word “moderate” while pursuing policies that can only be described as strongly right-wing, in the context of the party and its history.
His letter, in response to the story I mentioned in this article, is below:
Wonder why the @guardian chose to omit the first and last lines from their publication… pic.twitter.com/obQcYmznky
— Ken Loach & Sixteen Films (@KenLoachSixteen) December 27, 2016
From what he says in his tweet, it seems The Guardian chose to censor – I don’t have to be as diplomatic as Mr Loach – the most damning lines in the letter.
This action changes the tone of the entire letter – from one that criticises the newspaper to an attack on the right-wing Labour MPs it has been supporting.
‘Doctoring’ quotations is one of the cardinal sins of journalism – even more so, when the meaning of an entire letter is changed.
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Part time Torys. They just be be tray there own party and they are the fool being used by the torys, It is a shame that i think they known what they are doing, Sorry they want locking up but they still want wages that what makes me sick.
A newspaper is a public trust, and we will suffer as a society without them. It is not the Internet that has killed them. It is their own greed, it is their own stupidity, and it is capitalism that has taken our daily newspapers from us.
Michael Moore
I doubt anyone would suffer if the Daily Mail shut down.
The latest ICM poll has Labour 14 points behind the Tories and Labour has always been AT LEAST 7 points behind the Conservatives since August. The question has to be: Would it be better to have a “moderate” centrist Labour party which has the potential to win a general election or what we’ve got now, i.e., a party led by people that do not have the broad appeal necessary, even though wreathed in laurel and lionised by much of the party membership, to ever win power and form a government? Personally I’d rather have any kind of Labour government than a Conservative administration.
What say you, Mike?
No, the question would be: Why would anybody pay attention to the opinion polls that have been consistently wrong for the past two years at least?
Why are you hiding behind a fake name, Paul Tolstrup?
The polls have been wrong but not so wildly wrong as to be double digit wrong: they have been wrong but only a bit outside of the calculated margins of error.
As to why I’m using a fake name, Mike, it’s because any chance of my comments appearing disappears when submitted under my real name since critical comments directed towards Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes and disciples, on this blog, seems tantamount to blasphemy and so gets them redacted as a result. The metaphorical blue-pencil forces apostates and doubting Thomases like me to wear masks and use aliases.
I can always see when someone is using a fake name, Paul.
I don’t censor people for having opposing views – although I do trash comments that repeatedly make false claims after those claims have been disproved, and I won’t have bad language or bad behaviour towards others here.
It occurs to me that your claim that I do censor comments that oppose Mr Corbyn – using derogatory language about his supporters, I notice – may be politically-motivated. I’ll happily publish any criticism that is justified, but will do my best to expose any that is not.
So, really, if you want your criticisms to appear here, you need to pull your socks up and find something worthwhile to say. If you did a bit of research, rather than posting a lot of knee-jerk reactions against someone who – let’s be honest – you simply don’t like, you might find he’s really doing a good job.
It doesn’t really matter what I think really, Mike, or whether I could be receptive to Corbyn’s message and be persuaded to give him a chance. In point of fact I don’t mind Jeremy Corbyn and am not far politically from many of his stances and will be voting Labour, as I always vote Labour, in the 2020 genera election. The problem is that Labour can’t win power unless it wins much more support from people who didn’t vote Labour last time and, so far, in this signally vital respect, Mr Corbyn seems to be falling down badly, even amongst significant numbers of people who did vote Labour in 2015.
Bluntly: There is no sign that Labour is cutting through and no reason to see why the party should start making much headway in the foreseeable future unless something truly disastrous happens under the Tories. Personally I would prefer Labour to be winning support because more and more people switch to Labour because its message is good rather than because the Conservative’s appeal dwindles.
Better to be first choice than the least worst in my opinion.
I disagree with you. There are indeed signs that Labour is “cutting through” and plenty of reason to expect the party to continue making headway in the future.
There is a reason Labour now has more than 630,000 members, increasing every day.
Labour’s message is indeed good.
I think your problem, more than anything else, is that you can’t actually hear Labour’s message because of all the noise from Tories and their supporters in the mass media, trying to shout it down.
I hope you’re right, I really do, because I so much want to see the Conservatives neutered and gone. And yet I cannot find it in my heart or mind to believe so, not by a long chalk, especially if a sanitised Liberal Democrat party get reprised as a attractor for protest votes as the most pro-European political party in the UK.
In three and a half years, or so, we’ll know.
Your concern about the Liberal Democrats is justified.
We all need to keep reminding everybody that they are a right-wing party that merrily supported the Tories in their persecution of the poor for five long years before suddenly rediscovering their morals when the Tories didn’t need them any more.
In my edition of the Guardian the first line, “Does your determination……..” was omitted but the last line, “This bunch of political losers …..” was printed. Being in Lancashire I think we get a northern version of the Guardian; would that account for why the last line was present in some editions but not others? Either way, it’s very disappointing the letter was edited like this.