Did anyone else just hear Owen Jones on the Today programme?

[BoogleMcGroogle]

His whingy-rants are bad enough in The Guardian (but at least you can then turn to a therapeutic Nigel Slater recipe). But being stuck in the car, having to hear the confused vitriol coming out of his mouth was painful.

I don't know what I was most shocked by, his blinkered intolerance, his horrible rudeness or the fact that he evidently considers his vicious ramblings to be of interest to the radio-going public.This man, as I understand it, is a bit of a poster-boy for Momentum and the Labour leadership. If this is the tone of that movement, illiberal, intolerant, incoherent, then I think that Blair's point has been made. Not only are Labour now unelectable and unable to provide rational opposition at a time when we need it most, the direction the party has taken is frightening.

On the positive side, if Chuka Ummuna, Jo Swinson and a few other progressive and clever folk would like to establish a socially and economically liberal social democratic party in this country, I'll happily make the tea.

Ooh, glad I missed him!
Can't stand his chops. He doesn't have one redeeming feature, as far as I'm concerned.
Sick of Labour, sad at what the Guardian has become and politically homeless so I'm with you - we need a new collective of grown ups in politics.
You make the tea, I'll bring the biscuits

"Chuka Ummuna, Jo Swinson and a few other progressive and clever folk would like to establish a socially and economically liberal social democratic party in this country, I'll happily make the tea."

I'd happily laugh them off into the wilderness.....

His apparent 'all out war' on anti semitism seems to be going well.

Threewheeler almost everyone I know is politically homeless at the moment. Apart from a couple of Facebook friends, who seems to have drunk the radical left or reactionary right Kool-Aid. But normal, tolerant, sensible folk, who just want to do their job, raise their family and live in a country that's fundamentally kind have nowhere to go. And our friends who are Jewish are actually frightened, and they are not wrong to be. WTF happened to this place???

He will have been on R4 because they are lining him up for a parliamentary seat.
Please dont shoot the messenger

No, thank goodness. That awful little twerp has nothing to say that I want to hear.

Birds I thought that was perhaps the case. Labour lose Frank Field and gain Owen Jones. Christ on a bike....

I did enjoy Nick Robinson's parting 'cheery bye'. I like Nick Robinson very much.

Owen Jones spent a lot of his time at Oxford University, editing the Wikipedia entry on Israel. And not in a complimentary way.

twitter.com/nudderingnudnik/status/987090447427391488?lang=en

He wrote the "notion of Jewish ethnicity is a lie".

So his all-out-war on anti-Semitism is a new tack.

I didn't hear it but I can imagine. He's dreadful. Awful, awful petulant teenage-man.

I used to be a Labour voter but cannot bear their lurch to the left and the cult-like adoration of people like Corbyn. The man's a joke and until the lefties wake up and realise that, they're unlectable.

I do think that there is most definitely space for a socially liberal, economically slightly conservative centrist policy. It's happened before when the SDP split from Labour under the Gang of Four. I really hope there's plotting at a senior level in the party by the moderates like Umunna and Yvette Cooper. I also think that at a time when the Conservatives seem to be lurching to the right, that there's appetite from more centrist Tories to form a new centrist party too.

As for Jo - she's my MP and a committed LibDem. I would imagine that she'd welcome with open arms any defectors from Labour and the Conservatives, but wouldn't be up for leaving. However, boundary reform in this part of the world means her constituency will effectively disappear at the next general election so you never know.

Aww, Little Owen.

Poljkerris I think that you are right, that it would be difficult for commited LibDems to 'defect' and it's hard for those who have been in other parties for generations to join another long-established party, the core beliefs of which might not entirely chime with their own, the challenge is finding some way to accommodate this. But the centre ground is a broad church. I'm a Lib Dem member but would happily support a centre left or centre right candidate in preference to reactionaries from either side, who appear to be power-grabbing at the moment.

I also dislike this personality-cult enormously. It's very un-British and makes me feel decidedly squirmy. Notwithstanding the fact, that if you are intent on establishing a personality cult, surely you'd go for a leader with a little more, um, personality.

Popchyk
That list of his Wiki edits says it all - his self-appointed field of expertise. He doesn't do nuance does he, but then he'll do a complete 360 swerve if it furthers his career!
He really is a self-serving, duplicitous, arrogant, obnoxious worm.
Makes sense that a political career beckons.
He'll be insufferable.

BoogleMcGroogle
Same here, never known so many people to be so confused and disillusioned about the state of things. I wonder where we'll be in 5 years. Change has to come but I can't envisage what it might look like.
Desperately need a party to come and take the left-middle ground but there are few reasonable politicians still standing who are willing to speak out. The penalties for not toeing party lines and sticking to the chosen ideology are so high now, once the social media armies kick in.
Labour are a dangerous mess.
Corbyn lacks any conviction in his denial of anti-semitism within the party, seems quite clear where he stands on it.
And if Labour can treat women so badly for asking sensible questions about sex-based rights, I feel there's no hope for at least 52% of the population that they will be a decent opposition, let alone government.

In the old days, angst ridden angry teenage boys were thankfully contained to their bedrooms to rant or wank. Nowadays we are blessed to have them all over social media and getting jobs (for which they aren’t qualified) on national newspapers. Something’s gone wrong.

I think what happened to the Gang of Four deters most politicians. Although they by no means failed (Baroness Williams has had a huge influence), the Social Democratic movement in the UK never really took off. But if this systematic deselection of moderate Labour MP's goes ahead, what's stopping them? if they are not able to stand on a Labour platform, they have nothing to lose. And from what I read in last week's New Statesman article, there are some pretty significant donors willing to back moderate parliamentary candidates. If the Lib Dems agreed not to stand against ex-Labour and Tory moderates, either standing as independents or in a new centrist party and vice versa (cos, frankly, Zack Godsmith is another one who can get his coat), they could do quite well, at least preventing a Tory or Labour majority.

See, I've got it all planned out, and I'm only the tea lady.

Owen Jones committed the cardinal sin of dissing Dear Leader. Having been all over Corbyn at the beginning, after we lost Copeland? the disastrous Local Election results?, he wrote an article suggesting Labour might do better under a different leader. Heresy.

Then the wind changed and 'Oooh Jeremy Corbyn' took off and poor Owen was out in the cold, doors were slammed in his face, bad news for a political journalist. Since then he's been grovelling like crazy, making a ridiculous fool of himself in his desperation to be taken back into the fold.

He and Chris Williamson, who has also had wobbles in the past, are falling over themselves to be Lefter Than Thou. Every time they appear on TV or radio they lose us thousands of votes, but it's not the voters they are trying to convince but the Corbyn cabal who are running things.

Tragic.

Thymeout it's tragic indeed. There seems to be a fundamental failure to understand that, while the majority of Labour MP's do not represent the views of the majority of Labour members at the moment, they do represent the views of their constituents. Because, thank the Lord, most people in this country do not hold extreme political views. And, while I suspect some of the keener Momentum activists would prefer this not to be a case, we live in a parliamentary democracy.

I feel bad for those Labour members who feel driven out. Many have a history with the Labour movement which goes back several generations (and a not insignificant number of them are Jewish). I imagine it's pretty heartbreaking.

It really is astonishing.
But in many ways it's Blair who broke things for Labour too.
He opened to the door to this shambles by cheating and leaving so many loyal voters out in the cold.

You wouldn't be believed if you wrote down the last 10 years of politics in the UK.

I do find Owen both ridiculous and irritating but also terrifying.

They are a dangerous subversive toxic movement. I fear them as much as I would if alt right had a club right now.
Bad bad news.

Jones is desperate for a couple of victims for his show trial and he is on a self-righteous mission to find them.

He needs to pin anti-Semitism on just a couple of bad apples in the Labour Party. Anybody will do (but preferably someone who has criticised Corbyn and Jones in the past, or worse, a Blairite) and they must be identified and publicly humiliated and harassed in the glare of the media spotlight. A show trial and then expelled.

Then Jones will claim that he's rooted out anti-Semitism from the Party, with him cast as the hero of the hour.

He is so transparent.