Earlier this year, the Chancellor of the Exchequer used Treasury Questions to take a swipe at Paul Mason. Osborne described the former Channel 4 economics editor as a ‘revolutionary Marxist’. Mason responded by denying the claim in a blog post, even though he is a former member of the Trotskyist Workers’ Power group.
Happily Mason had a chance to take a trip down memory lane on today’s Daily Politics. Producers dug up an old video of Mason from his revolutionary Marxist days. They then brought on his former hard-left comrade Peter Taaffe, the general secretary of the Socialist party. Mason explained why he is now a reformed revolutionary:
PM: I’m not one now. That’s what, Thatcher had destroyed the miners, we had extra judicial force used against working class people. There were riots on the street, you know we were fighting a battle for the survival of working class communities that we lost, which I am terribly sorry about. We were right to fight it.
JC: So, why aren’t you still fighting it?
PM: Because the world that’s emerged is, first of all, different. The global economy, the possibilities. What ordinary people want is an area of self control within capitalism, within the system. That’s what people like Nye Bevan fought for. That’s what I would fight for now.
Taaffe said it was regrettable that Mason had changed his position. He then went on to reveal why Corbyn is ‘trapped behind enemy lines:
PT: We support Corbyn, we would like to be part of his project, but Jeremy Corbyn is unfortunately trapped behind enemy lines.
PM: Who’s the enemy?
PT: Well some of them are the Blairites. They don’t want what Jeremy Corbyn represents, Paul knows this. It’s two parties in one in the Labour party. We have the Jeremy Corbyn party and we have the old discredited remnants of the Blairites.
Vive la Revolution!
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