MSM scrape barrel to attack Greens’ Makerfield candidate

Yesterday, Skwawkbox predicted that the ‘mainstream’ media (MSM) and Israel lobby would struggle to find anything to use against new Green party Makerfield by-election candidate Sarah Wakefield. It wasn’t a compliment. But Wakefield’s apparent silence on important issues like Gaza means that the ‘MSM’ is, as predicted, scraping right through the bottom of the barrel.

So far, it’s had to pick on the blandest things imaginable — like wanting fairer farming. Their narrative of the Green Party is as dull as it is revealing.

MSM panic at “decolonising” pledges

The Murdoch Times has dedicated a whole, quite lengthy article and two reporters to produce a hit piece on Wakefield’s wish to “decolonise farming”. Presumably the hoped-for outcome is that Makerfield voters will not bother to check what this means and will conclude Wakefield is ‘woke’.

But she explained what it means. The Times even has to quote her — but only after quite a few paragraphs of putting “decolonial” and “decolonised” in speech marks as though it’s self-evidently whacky. And it turns out to be nothing wild or ‘out there.’ Or even really hers. The food charity the Green party candidate runs shared a report by someone else, US “activist” Caroline Sumlin. She wrote that:

To decolonise food is to rethink our relationship with it and take a fairer, more connected, holistic approach.

GREEN CANDIDATE WANTS FAIRER FOOD wouldn’t make the right kind of moral-panic headline. But it would be a lot more accurate. And fair. But it seems the Murdoch press doesn’t often trouble itself too much with such things.

Maternity leave?!

But if the Times went through the barrel bottom, the Mail decided to turn mole and dig a tunnel for itself. The right-wing rag’s horrified headline blared that “disgruntled” Green party supporters are actually campaigning for Labour candidate Andy Burnham. Because, you see, Wakefield is… drum roll… on maternity leave. In other words, she recently had a baby and is doing what she’s legally entitled to. How dare she? The drivel was written by a woman, shamefully.

The Mail might not have realised we’re well into the twenty-first century. It’s certainly fighting tooth and nail to try to drag us back to the good old days of the birch and hanging. But these days MPs can even breast feed – dun dan dah! – in the Commons chamber. And Green party supporters don’t get “disgruntled” at the thought of a woman helping the human species. Not even if she takes maternity leave. And they certainly don’t go campaigning for the enemy over it.

Skwawkbox took an impromptu poll of the likelihood of the Mail’s claim being accurate. These were the results:

And even the ‘fail’ can’t sustain the horror much beyond the headline. It turns out that if any Greens are “disgruntled” at all, it has nothing to do with Wakefield’s pregnancy. Instead, supposedly some Greens don’t want the party to run in the by-election at all, in case Reform wins.

If that’s true, maybe some of them haven’t quite thought through how little Burnham intends to change anything compared to the awful Keir Starmer.

Having voiced no discoverable opinion on Israel’s genocide, occupation, mass murder, land theft, warmongering and torture is not exactly a selling point. But it is kind of amusing watching the right (of all rosette colours) and its media embarrassing themselves in their scrabble for something to attack her with.

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