En Passant

I thought I would include some of my unpublished Canberra Times’ letters to show the degeneration of the newspaper from the Fyshwick Pravda (always an overstated claim by hyperventilating conservative politicians) to a liberal’s version of The Australian.  Of course it is not just the refusal to publish my letters. That is but a symptom of a greater disease – both the narrowing down of opinion in the paper  and a stampede to the right reflected in its conversion to tabloid form and much tabloid content, or  regurgitated Age and Sydney Morning Herald articles.

Muslims are not the cause of growing inequality, falling real wages and the increasing precarity of employment. Neither are priests, or refugees, or Aborigines, or Asians, or blacks. [Fill in your favourite target for bigotry here.] This means that, as Jeremy Corbyn, the next Prime Minister of the UK has done and is doing, the task of the left is to explain that it is the economic system which produces these outcomes. We can and must offer hope of a better world to those who in the absence of any left wing alternative might be tempted by the siren song of racism or Islamophobia or violence.