 We're all used to Britain's extreme centrists making every one of the world's ills about Jeremy Corbyn. But this weekend, former Labour MP and now crossbench member of the House of Lords Ian Austin took the tradition to levels which can only be described as ridiculous. He wrote an article in The Sun, headlined, could Congress attack happen in Britain? It could, with our lefty mob. Now in the piece he asks, what is the difference between Trump using conspiracy theories to claim the election result was stolen and the hard left betrayal myth that claims Corbyn almost won in 2017 but was cheated out of victory by sabotage by moderate MPs and Labour staff. Now this was printed in The Sun newspaper, but they're not normally people who print high quality journalism. You might not be surprised to see that they printed something again that's not high quality journalism. If you need it spelled out, why the fact that many Jeremy Corbyn supporters ourselves included, there was some sabotage of in the Labour Party trying to stop him winning the 2017 election and Donald Trump saying fraud stopped him winning the 2019 election. Two big reasons. One, so there is no evidence whatsoever to support Donald Trump's claim that fraud meant he lost the election. None whatsoever. There's actually quite a lot of hard evidence that people within Labour Party HQ attempted to undermine Labour's electoral chances or at least were very happy or happy too. They were disappointed when Labour did well and they were very, very willing to act against the wishes of the democratically elected leader. There's hard evidence for that. You can watch our shows on the Labour leaks. More important though, and this is where I think the comparison is just so ridiculous that I can't believe someone who was once taken seriously, still is taken seriously by many extreme centrists, could think this was a sensible thing to write, is that Donald Trump's claim about fraud has been used as a justification to try and overthrow the state and to overthrow the results of a democratic election. I haven't spoken to a single Corbyn Easter who said, because there were some staffers in the Labour Party HQ who tried to undermine Labour's electoral chances and because there were some MPs who were constantly attacking Jeremy Corbyn, we need to overthrow the state and annul the 2017 general election results. This comparison does not work. Why does this all matter? This is just a has-been crank, someone who always attacks Jeremy Corbyn, who this time around is again attacking Jeremy Corbyn. Now the answer is, because this guy was taken very seriously and not just by people on the Labour right, it wasn't just by progress boosting this guy, it was also our national broadcast, or it was also all of our media establishments who, and this is according to a Loughborough study into the media environment in the general election that was shared by Tom Mills, friend of the show, sociologist, which showed that Ian Austin was actually the 11th most prominent politician in the entire mainstream media's coverage of the 2019 general election, the 11th most prominent politician. This is someone who members of the British public heard from all the time and it's someone who thinks it's sensible to compare people saying, maybe we need a bit more transparency in the organisation of one of Britain's major parties to people who want to violently overthrow the state. To remind you about Ian Austin's role in the 2019 general election campaign, here he is being given a headline slot on Radio 4's Today Show. The country faces a big choice. There's only two people who can be prime minister on December the 13th, Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson, and I think Jeremy Corbyn is completely unfit to lead our country, completely unfit to lead the Labour Party. And after 34 years of showing the Labour Party as a teenager, I worked for the Labour Party. You know, in my 30s I was a government advisor, in my 40s I was an MP and a minister, but so it's really come to something when I tell decent traditional patriotic Labour voters that they should be voting for Boris Johnson at this election. I can't believe he's come to this, but that's where we are. It's really come to something when me, someone who passionately hates Jeremy Corbyn and the left wing of the Labour Party, so much that I can't see the difference between them and far-right people with holocaust slogans on their jumpers breaking in to the Capitol building because they've bought into some lie that the election was stolen because of bits inside machines in Georgia. You know, you hate Jeremy Corbyn so much you think he's like Trump, yet the BBC took you seriously when you said, oh, it's a really difficult decision for me to make. It's so difficult for me to tell people to vote for someone other than Jeremy Corbyn because I'm so committed to the Labour Party. He's a fraud, he's clearly a fraud and I would hope that there are some people, you know, within the the higher echelons of the BBC who are questioning, why did we give this guy such high prominence during this general election when clearly he's not really motivated by some desire to get a healthy good government for patriotic Britain's bit of an odd phrase in itself. He's not someone who this was it wasn't a difficult decision for him to tell people not to vote for Jeremy Corbyn. He passionately hates him so irrationally, so in such a deranged manner that he'd make this comparison now they should hang their heads in shame. Ash, you know these media inside is better than I do. Will there be anyone in the top echelons of the BBC who are questioning how much prominence they gave this guy? No, just a really straightforward answer. No, and that's because I don't think you can ever overestimate the degree to which both the venality and idiocy permeates the kind of heart of our broadcasting establishments. People like easy stories, you know, consumable storylines, and Ian Austin was a packaged storyline, which is, you know, a labor man through and through and was forced to make the hardest decision of his life to take down his most loathed political opponent. But it's a compelling storyline and so people were willing to just absolutely eat that up. And there is very little reflection in these kind of broadcasting circles about whether or not something that they'd done before was the right thing to do, right? I've never really seen a reckoning that wasn't forced by, you know, either, you know, the Leveson Inquiry or, you know, complaints being upheld by a press or broadcast regulator. So that's that kind of reflexiveness that you're talking about just doesn't exist within our media establishment. It really doesn't. And I think that you've also got the fact that there is an alignment of interests to make sure that the left goes down with Jeremy Corbyn, right? That, you know, he's the Titanic and we're all, you know, the passengers who are in third class, you know, sinking below the line. And it's an interest which is shared by multiple actors. One is that you've got, you know, those kind of agrocentrists who were more threatened in lots of ways by an emergent and renewed left than they were by a nationalist and increasingly authoritarian right. Because if you're an agrocentrist and you are used to your spot in the media or your job in the Labour Party, a new leadership of the Labour Party, a new set of blood in the Labour Party, is much more of a direct threat to your job than another five years of Tory government, right? So you've got one set of interests that you've got an ideological interest, which is shared between, you know, the kind of agrocentre, not the entirety of the centre, there's some very, very, you know, kind of, you know, genial centrist out there, but the agrocentre and, you know, the populist right, which is redraw the boundary of reasonable opinion so that it excludes the left. The centrist wants to do that because it means that there as far as you can go and the right wants to do that because it's part of an ever moving, great moving right show in the words of Stuart Hall. And in Austin is still someone who can play a compelling role in that. He can be the patriotic, decent Labour man who is speaking to a dedicated Labour audience of some readers and can kind of continue this bit of political theatre, which until there is a significant challenge mounted to it in the establishment media by a dissenting voice, an alternative voice, that other story is never going to be told. And I think that because of this kind of, you know, attempt to realign reasonable opinion, so it's to the left's detriment, you're not going to necessarily see that being staged, right? You're not going to see Ian Austin placed in a circumstance where he is going to be challenged in such a robust way. I think that was more likely in 2019, you know, you'd get some, you know, poor fucker from momentum or something being hauled up so they can have strips of, you know, just strips torn off of them. But I don't think that that's going to happen now, but you will see that story repeated and repeated. It's not exactly, you know, I'm not saying anything which is particularly optimistic, I guess. And I suppose the only thing to be hoped for about is that you have this huge generational chasm in terms of voting behaviour and also media consumption. You know, you have an ageing broadcast audience, you have an ageing print media audience. So where Ian Austin is making his pitch is not where, you know, 2024, 2029, you know, those sets of voters, you know, increasingly young voters are going to be. And I think that you are going to see a, you know, long term, you know, kind of counterweight emerge of young voters who really don't see their material interests and social values being reflected back to them in the establishment media. And that will take a kind of political form as well as just changed viewing and reading habits. But I don't think you're going to see Ian Austin singing a different tune now, not when it's had him, you know, rewarded quite so well. I don't think that he'd have gotten a seat in the House of Lords were it not for his service to the Conservative Party.