Talking Tripe
I watched BBC's Question Time last week as a young woman, Cat Boyd, made a complete fool of herself by revealing that she had failed to vote in the great EU referendum.
"Technically, I was out of the country" explained Cat to a live TV audience, as if she had never heard of postal or proxy voting in the most significant political event of recent years.
At the time I thought this was just a one-off, but here is Cat again in the pages of The National cheerfully extolling the virtues of living in Cuba's one-party state under what she clearly regards as a 'benevolent' dictatorship.
Strange that a 'socialist' should espouse such nonsense, but for a more sober and balanced view of Castro's Cuba read the following article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian and Sean O'Grady in The Independent.
Apparently, Cat studied politics at university and stood for election to the Scottish Parliament in 2016, but managed to win just 1% of the vote in Glasgow as a RISE candidate.
I can't say I'm at all surprised because this is the kind of reheated 'leftist' claptrap that you'd expect to hear from Jeremy Corbyn or his cheerleader-in-chief, Unite's Len McCluskey.
"Technically, I was out of the country" explained Cat to a live TV audience, as if she had never heard of postal or proxy voting in the most significant political event of recent years.
At the time I thought this was just a one-off, but here is Cat again in the pages of The National cheerfully extolling the virtues of living in Cuba's one-party state under what she clearly regards as a 'benevolent' dictatorship.
Strange that a 'socialist' should espouse such nonsense, but for a more sober and balanced view of Castro's Cuba read the following article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian and Sean O'Grady in The Independent.
Apparently, Cat studied politics at university and stood for election to the Scottish Parliament in 2016, but managed to win just 1% of the vote in Glasgow as a RISE candidate.
I can't say I'm at all surprised because this is the kind of reheated 'leftist' claptrap that you'd expect to hear from Jeremy Corbyn or his cheerleader-in-chief, Unite's Len McCluskey.
Forget Fidel Castro’s policies. What matters is that he was a dictator
We need not agonise over whether Cuba’s former leader was a hero or villain. His rule was an insult to the principles of the left
‘We cannot afford to argue the toss about dictators, parse the difference between the really bad ones and the less bad ones who looked cute in a beret.’ Fidel Castro poses with Saddam Hussein. Photograph: Getty Images
The death of Fidel Castro brings a tide of anti-travelogues, memories of a crumbling Havana and a degraded people from holidays that realistically can’t have been that bad, otherwise any reasonable person would have cut them short. Prostitution was rife among women and men; there was nothing to buy except black beans and odd socks; and voting, assembling, entering the lobby of a tourist hotel and being homosexual were all proscribed. The life of this 90-year-old is nothing to celebrate; the fact of his death makes it all the more urgent to speak ill of him. And the litany of his abuses is laid down, not really in the service of historical accuracy, but more as a challenge to the left: a dare to lefties, especially those in the baby-boomer generation, to mourn Castro as their hero.
It is a challenge they are unable to pass up. Jeremy Corbyn spoke rather obliquely of Castro as a “massive figure in the history of the whole planet”. It was a fudge and a tautology – anyone whom history remembers is a massive figure in history – but he chose a side eventually, praising Castro’s “heroism”, “for all his flaws”. Ken Livingstone sailed straight for the choppiest waters. Livingstone approaches history like a toddler with a cattle prod, and one can only brace for the needless shock of insult. He delivered: “Initially he wasn’t very good on lesbian and gay rights, but the key things that mattered was that people had a good education, good healthcare and wealth was evenly distributed.” By “initially”, he means “for the first two decades of his rule”; by “not very good”, he means “incarcerated homosexuals in labour camps”; but sure, let’s not get aerated about it. It’s not as if it were a key thing that mattered.
I went to Cuba in the 90s, and the poverty – or, to put it more precisely from the observable data of the tourist, the abject lack of stuff – was unignorable. The museum proudly displaying the shirt in which Che Guevara was fatally shot didn’t look terribly different from the window of Havana’s largest clothes shop, a couple of threadbare shirts stapled to the wall at jaunty angles.
The death of Fidel Castro brings a tide of anti-travelogues, memories of a crumbling Havana and a degraded people from holidays that realistically can’t have been that bad, otherwise any reasonable person would have cut them short. Prostitution was rife among women and men; there was nothing to buy except black beans and odd socks; and voting, assembling, entering the lobby of a tourist hotel and being homosexual were all proscribed. The life of this 90-year-old is nothing to celebrate; the fact of his death makes it all the more urgent to speak ill of him. And the litany of his abuses is laid down, not really in the service of historical accuracy, but more as a challenge to the left: a dare to lefties, especially those in the baby-boomer generation, to mourn Castro as their hero.
It is a challenge they are unable to pass up. Jeremy Corbyn spoke rather obliquely of Castro as a “massive figure in the history of the whole planet”. It was a fudge and a tautology – anyone whom history remembers is a massive figure in history – but he chose a side eventually, praising Castro’s “heroism”, “for all his flaws”. Ken Livingstone sailed straight for the choppiest waters. Livingstone approaches history like a toddler with a cattle prod, and one can only brace for the needless shock of insult. He delivered: “Initially he wasn’t very good on lesbian and gay rights, but the key things that mattered was that people had a good education, good healthcare and wealth was evenly distributed.” By “initially”, he means “for the first two decades of his rule”; by “not very good”, he means “incarcerated homosexuals in labour camps”; but sure, let’s not get aerated about it. It’s not as if it were a key thing that mattered.
I went to Cuba in the 90s, and the poverty – or, to put it more precisely from the observable data of the tourist, the abject lack of stuff – was unignorable. The museum proudly displaying the shirt in which Che Guevara was fatally shot didn’t look terribly different from the window of Havana’s largest clothes shop, a couple of threadbare shirts stapled to the wall at jaunty angles.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/fidel-castro-death-cuba-us-communist-hero-capitalism-british-left-a7440796.html
Why does the British left still worship Fidel Castro as a hero?
Castro was an enemy of a free press and free trade unionism. So what if he made the trains run on time?
By Sean O'Grady - The Independent
Fidel Castro survived numerous assassination attempts Paul Faith/PA Wire
Why do so many on the left feel so sentimental about Castro? I once attended the annual conference of the National Union of Journalists. One of the many (hundreds) of policy motions placed before we delegates was, to paraphrase, a declaration that Cuba is a socialist paradise defying American imperialism and capitalism, and a call from the NUJ to the US to drop its inhumane sanctions. Naturally, our call went unreported anywhere in the British or international media. Not so much as a news-in-brief.
Well, it seemed very odd to me, and entirely, and poignantly, symbolic of the gullible and confused attitude of the British left to dear old Fidel. For here was a man being feted, and not unusually, as a hero by a roomful of liberal, progressive journalists, but who oppressed journalists in his own one-party state. The very people who lazily raised their hands to support the annual NUJ "Hands off Cuba" motion would never be allowed to write the sort of free-wheeling, opinionated, satirical or investigative articles that are commonplace in Britain if they happened to be working in Havana.
