I've worked in the media for 30 years I know that the hostility to labour leaders
who want to change things is what lies behind all of this.
if there was a Labour leader who said "that's fine guys, keep your profits,
keep your carbon burning fracking industry, the press would leave them alone.
There's a kind of inbuilt bias towards the status quo because many people in that
industry come from better-off families. I joined Newsnight in 2001.
I wasn't asked "do I ski?" I was asked "where do I ski?"
I've never touched a ski and I'm not just talking about the BBC.
If you look who writes for The Sun and The Mail and The Express,
all the people who write in baby language
down to working-class people, they're all highly educated at Oxford.
So what is it? It's a machine for telling lies.
Now it's not just, that sometimes it tells the truth
but at election time that's what it become.
In this election, already, before they've produced a single policy themselves
the Conservatives are producing a lie a day about Labour
and I predict towards the end of this election this will become very, very vicious.
It will be targeted at migrants, it will be targeted at you the progressive people,
you will be called terrorists for supporting Jeremy Corbyn.
In the 1920s when Labour was in power and held an election
MI5 faked a document called the Zinoviev letter that said:
"From the Communists to the Labour Prime Minister
Hooray Labour Prime Minister let's get on with building communism in Britain.
It's what we call a Red Scare.
It was printed on the front of the Daily Mail on Election Day and it swung the election.
I expect there to be one Zinoviev letter scale lie per day in the last seven days in this election.
You've just gotta get your heads around the fact of why? We are on the point of decisive progress.
Of leaving behind the crap of starving children,
of crumbling public infrastructure, we're on the point of change, real change.
When I was a BBC journalist Gordon Brown took over,
I noticed then that as soon as there wasn't somebody in power like Blair,
who was completely sold on the priorities of the rich and the warmongers,
what happened is that the media switched gear: all they wanted to do
was attack Gordon Brown. They used to say and they used to repeat this vile slanders:
that he was mad, that he was depressed, that he was a psychopath.
So Gordon Brown, you know, Psychopath. Then it was Ed Miliband's turn.
Ed Miliband, middle-of-the-road, centrist-left politician, a decent guy,
they focused on his dad who was a Jewish academic and they said "Ed Miliband's dad hated Britain.'
They painted Ed Miliband as a weirdo eating his bacon sandwich.
Gordon Brown's a psychopath, Miliband's a weirdo and now it's Corbyn's a racist
or Corbyn's a terrorist, Corbyn's is a Czech spy all the lies they come out with.
What we need is for the managers of the big broadcasters, BBC, Sky, ITN, to actually
have the courage to allow their journalists to call out lies and if they don't
you should call them out. We are our own media.
The other side is spreading disinformation through their networks, stigmatising campaigners.
We're not going to do the same thing from the left, we are fighting to defend democracy,
you don't defend democracy by imitating the people who are on a smash democracy.
The way we're going to win this election is to listen to the anger that comes at us on the doorstep.
and understand where it comes from but then tell a better story.
It's about telling a story of what kind of country this could become
and what kind of people we could become if we were just empowering our own potential
and not constantly having to struggle from day to day with debt,
with mortgage payments, with you know for some people food banks.
We could become a really brilliant society and a country
and that message of hope has to be got out.
You get in the back of the taxi, some racist guy, you ignore them.
You're in a kebab queue late at night, 12 o'clock, some racist guy
or some who says "Corbyn this, Corbyn that" you ignore them.
This time in history is the time to stand up for who we. Be proud to be Progressive.
That's where the combined strength of the Tory lie machine
and the media's inability to deal with it, that's what it's designed to create:
a position where we're too scared to talk, too scared to put a poster in the window.
Be the opposite, be proud, be confident and the face-to-face discussions that we have now,
whether we win or lose, will lay a basis for the long-term transformation of this country
and I think we can win but if we win what happens? The bank's attack us.
Well, that's the time we need all those people you talk to
in the school gate, in the kebab queue, on the bus, we need them on the streets.
So the face-to-face discussions we have know are a huge investment
for making the Labour government deliver what we all know it can deliver.
I'm Paul Mason, if you can please support Double Down News by donating money.
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