Sammy Peas

🚨 MASSIVE AIR BRIDGE: UK TO MIDDLE EAST 🚨 ​At least 16 USAF C-17A Globemasters are conducting a high-tempo airlift from the UK to U.S. bases in the Middle East. 🇬🇧✈️🌍 ​These heavy lifters are moving troops, armored vehicles, and critical gear as the regional buildup reaches its highest level in decades. 🪖🛡️📦 ​#BreakingNews #USAF #MilitaryAirlift #C17

Yesterday in the @guardian its veteran journalist @pollytoynbee wrote an article that strongly advocated for Margaret Hodge to be appointed as the new Chair of @Ofcom. The job will soon be given either to Hodge or the Tory MP and former Attorney General Sir Jeremy Wright KC. Toynbee’s article was her usual masterclass in blinding the reader in the headlights of her impressive accumulation of information and knowledge. The main target of her article is @GBNEWS who she accuses of ‘breaking the rules about accuracy and impartiality.’ This is the same Polly Toynbee who, with her colleagues at the @guardian, was found by the Media Reform Coalition/Birkbeck University to have produced a ‘“disinformation paradigm”’ in the articles they published about antisemitism in The @UKLabour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. In layman’s terms that’s a pack of lies. Toynbee doesn’t spend much time on Jeremy Wright but exalts Hodge at every opportunity. Polly Toynbee once described Hodge as a ‘hero’ and lists the qualities that she believes Hodge possesses that will be much needed in this challenging post: ‘exceptional bravery,’ ‘fearless and tough,’ and one who possesses the ‘sharpest political teeth.’ Interestingly, Toynbee airbrushes so much of Hodge’s past and her present affiliations and allegiances that surely present conflicts of interest in her being appointed to the post at all. Hodge is currently the leading light and figurehead in two lobby organisations embedded in The Labour Party and UK government - Labour Friends of Israel and The @JewishLabour Movement. Hodge and her organisations have been accused of working to silence and suppress legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and actions and to shut down support for the Palestinian people. Under Corbyn’s leadership, Hodge’s behaviour was confrontational, intimidating, inflammatory and aggressively factional. She has admitted to having worked every day, alongside her close friend Peter Mandelson, to doing everything she could to take down Corbyn’s leadership. Is this the kind of behaviour that’s really needed at @Ofcom? Toynbee describes Hodge as having the ‘sharpest political teeth’ and, indeed, her savaging of Corbyn was and remains absolutely brutal - the bullying and foul-mouthed abuse she subjected @jeremycorbyn to in the Commons chamber in 2018 a telling example of her behaviour at that time. No scrutiny whatsoever is given to Hodge’s controversial past. Toynbee mentions the safety of children on-line but there is a historical record of Hodge at Islington Council giving scant regard for the safety and welfare of children. In 2003, Hodge was asked to apologise for the victims of child abuse ignored during her time as leader of Islington Council. There is also Hodge’s links to Apartheid South Africa. In Toynbee’s article, Margaret Hodge is praised as a defender of free speech. This would surely be questioned by anyone who has followed Hodge and her organisations’ clampdown on free speech. And at this critical and sensitive time in the Israel-Palestine conflict, is it wise that a zealous defender of Israel such as Margaret Hodge should be regulating the British media’s coverage of that conflict? And finally back to Polly Toynbee. It is my honest belief that the genteel Polly Toynbee has pulled the wool over people’s eyes for years in respect of her true political and class allegiances. In her article she claims that the ‘mainly right wing press has always dominated British life and politics.’ With her customary sleight of hand and conjuring skills, she gives the impression that she’s outside of that concentrated right wing elite. What Corbyn’s leadership exposed however is that Polly Toynbee, @PippaCrerar Jonathan @Freedland and the rest of The @guardian journalists were as much a part of that ‘mainly right wing press’ shiver of sharks as any of the @DailyMail hacks fanatically declaring - ‘Labour must KILL vampire Jezza’. Polly’s propaganda.