How to write an Owen Jones column: a step by step guide
As part of Left Foot Forward’s ongoing ‘how to’ series, this week we take a look at the Bennite left’s brightest young star, Owen Jones.
Jones has made a name for himself on the back of his 2011 book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, and writes a weekly column for theIndependent.
Each Monday Owen informs theIndependent’s readership in impassioned tones of the injustices of austerity. Unless every “hard working person” comes together under the banner of the “People’s Assembly”, Jones likes to warn, “our futures and those of our children are at risk”.
Here then, dear reader, is our blueprint for writing your very own Owen Jones column.
1. Everything wrong with Britain is due to ‘the cuts’
As every right-minded person knows, the reason Labour isn’t riding high in the polls right now is due to its lack of enthusiasm for the policies contained in Michael Foot’s 1983 election manifesto. State ownership is brilliant and the only reason the Labour Party hasn’t re-adopted a punitively high rate of taxation is because of a “Blairite coup”.
“Britons have endured a three-decade-long experiment of selling off our utilities and public services. After a fair run, the cheerleaders of free market extremism must now accept that they have failed to win the support or consent of the British people…The truth is the free market extremism pushed by the biggest party in Britain – the neo-liberal centre of Blairites, Cameroon Tories and Orange Book Lib Dems – is riddled with hypocrisy” – July 2013, Independent.
2. Every international problem is ours or America’s fault. Everything bad in the world is ‘blowback’ for something ‘we’ have done
In an inversion of the Eurocentrism of old, whereas in the past every leap of progress made by humanity was down to the West, nowadays everything is to be blamed on the West. Upon encountering an atrocity unrelated to something the West has done, in your piece you should swerve around it by citing “Blair’s illegal wars” or posing the question “but what about George W Bush?” at the end of every sentence.
“…the Libyan war was seen as a success, too; and here we are now engaging with its catastrophic blowback. In Afghanistan, Western forces remain engaged in a never-ending war which has already helped destabilised Pakistan, leading to drone attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians and unleashed further chaos. The price of Western interventions may often be ignored by our media, but it is still paid nonetheless.” – January 2013, the Independent.
3. Play down the threat from Islamic extremism
For you the most malign forces in the world are the British and American establishments, therefore anything which contradicts this must be played down. The English Defence League also provide a brilliant foil for not having to talk about people who behead ‘infidels’ – a cartoonish outfit of violent thugs in football shirts who slot comfortably in to the list of stereotypical baddies.
In your piece refer to every pitched stand-off with white racists (separated from you by a police cordon of course) as a reenactment of Cable Street. Don’t worry about Islamic extremists. They tend only to do harm to people in far away places, anyway. And of course, they probably throw acid into the faces of unveiled women because they are humanitarians who are angry about war.
“Blairite MP Tom Harris notes that, while I am on record for calling for Britons to stand united against the EDL, there was “no similar exhortation…to stand firm against Islamism”…But the truth is that violent political Islamism – abhorrent though it certainly is – is a fringe view among Britain’s small Muslim minority, however much fury has been caused by disastrous foreign wars.” – June 2013, the Independent.
4. Blame the failures of the far-left on bad communication, rather than unpopular policies
The fact that the public has been willing to elect only one Labour prime minister in almost 40 years should always be laid at the door of our “stifling political consensus”. Don’t worry that this “consensus” is in reality little more than the convergence of political parties around ideas which are popular with the electorate. A trifling concern, as they say.
In this vein, use words like “betrayal”, “shibboleth”, “neo-liberal agenda” and “free market extremism” to give readers the sense of “a class war against the poor by the rich”. A working class person somewhere might, after all, be reading.
“A Labour Party worthy of the name: it must be fought for. But that is going to be a long haul, and the suffocating political consensus must be fought now. With the Labour leadership abdicating their responsibilities, we need a broad movement that can confidently and unreservedly challenge Tory attacks. That’s why I’m throwing all my energy into building the People’s Assembly.” – March 2013, the Independent.
5. Exalt demagogues – so long as they are nominally left-wing
To paraphrase Robert Conquest, your argument should run along these lines:
There is much injustice under capitalism; socialism will end this injustice; therefore anything that furthers socialism is to be supported, including any amount of oppression.
Injustices are also quite easy to ignore when they take place thousands of miles from home. After all, elections = democracy, right?
“He [Hugo Chavez] demonstrated that it is possible to resist the neo-liberal dogma that holds sway over much of humanity. He will be mourned by millions of Venezuelans – and understandably so.” March 2013, theIndependent.“He [George Galloway] has made apparently sympathetic remarks about brutal dictators (although, unlike some of his detractors, he hasn’t sold them arms, funded them or even been paid by them).” February 2013, theIndependent.
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