Owen Knows

The other day Andrew Neil had a pop at Owen Jones, the pipsqueak polemicist. Unlike everybody else Neil probably won’t get blocked; Owen earns far too much from being ridiculed on air by the master to cut off his nose like that. But after a few years of everybody saying “Oh bless, the wunderkind is saying complicated stuff on the tellybox” even the left is starting to get fed up of him.

He does still have fans, of course, but then delusion runs strong in the more gullible sectors of the general population. But nobody deserves the endorsement of a proven liar: Mehdi Hasan tweeted on Sunday that “@OwenJones84 has more intelligence and integrity in his fingernail than most of his British media critics put together”; this on a typically whiny thread about his journalistic expertise. So I imagine it rankled when Jennifer Williams at the Manchester Evening News questioned his actual credentials. Hey, if the left can denounce Katie Hopkins, who has written for many fine organs as not-a-journalist... sauce for the gander.

But then if the left has ever been supreme at anything, it has to be hypocrisy. Yes, we are all guilty of it, but people like Jonesy take it to a whole new level, Denouncing anybody who dares mention uncontrolled, mass immigration in a negative way as indulging in ‘dog-whistle’ politics, Jones and his bedfellows whip up their flock into a frenzy of outrage via a knee-jerk necessity to invoke the spectre of Nazis rising from the past to sweep across Europe and bring darkness to the land.

To OJ the BBC is a tool of the ‘hard right’ ‘cruel Tory’ establishment, denying left wing voices and trampling on free speech. Owen, who is never off the box, blocks anybody on Twitter who disagrees with him, then uses his many media appearances to simply tell lies. Of course, they’re not lies to him, in much the same away as fire and brimstone preachers must either believe every image of hell and damnation they foretell or else be barking mad... or malevolently duplicitous.

But Owen does it from a self-identified position of loveliness. By sounding reasonable - we should be fairer, we should be kinder – look at me, see how kind I am... I’m adorable! How could I possibly advocate harm to anybody? But them; they are the enemy and as much as we abhor their methods – look at them, the far right, just look at them with their... their... tattoos, and their... their jobs! To the left the ends have always justified the means, but to assuage their dissonance they tell themselves they must resort to using what they believe the right’s methods against them because nothing else will work.

But when we slaughter, we do it in the name of kindness. Did you know that Jeremy Corbyn’s middle name is kindness? Well it is, and if that doesn’t tell you something... I’ll find something which will. And this, of course, is Squealer’s job, to make the message fit the events, to make words written after the fact appear to predict the fact; to re-purpose outright lies as inviolable truths. A famous person in history – and one whom Jones would denounce – used exactly the same tactics Owen uses every day.

The political compass of Owen Jones

Here is Owen – Goebbels – Jones performing to the gallery and attacking Frank Field in the Guardian. Really, Owen? Frank Field is now a Tory? In his final paragraph he kindly, gently absolves Momentum from any part in a forthcoming general election defeat for Labour. It’s the media, he says; the media is against us. We are the victims; we are the good guys. Yes, Owen, you keep telling yourself that.