This is a brilliant political post.
As with every single thing in my life, I can relate this back to how professional wrestling works because I'm a childish saddo. Anyway, in wrestling many people wonder how they can generate so much emotion from a crowd who are watching a very obviously pre-determined and fake event that looks a bit silly. This is because of a psychological effect known as "the suspension of disbelief" - it's how films work too, they get you to "tune out" your brain and just become invested in the narrative that they're selling you and in return you get to feel an emotion. To achieve this suspension of disbelief in a live action event such as wrestling is very often difficult but it's a billion dollar 200 year old industry so they've picked up some tricks along the way. The best one is the idea of 5 truths. This refers to a storytelling technique where one of the wrestlers tells you 5 different things. The first three of those things are things that you intimately known to be true as they're self evident. The fourth one is something that you WANT to be true but is probably not. The fifth is something that is a very obvious lie. However it's called the 5 truths because people will suspend their disbelief after hearing the first three to accept the fourth and will accept the fifth dishonest thing because you've already told them four things they know or think to be a self evident truth.
Let me demonstrate the technique:
Man United were the first football club to float themselves on the stock market. This gave them a much larger revenue than everybody else which led to their dominance on the pitch. When Man City were taken over, this challenged that dominance and they wrote to the FA in order to to get City looked into. In reality they were scared of City and could see how it would challenge their dominance on and off the pitch, leading them to try and use their political clout to stop the City train. At this time, David Gill was appointed to senior positions in UEFA and the European Club Association and put in charge of the FFP ethics which he found City guilty of and handed them the largest fine in the history of football - a direct assault on his former club's main rivals.
Easy huh? The first three sentences are absolutely, undeniably true. The fourth is something that sounds like it might be true but the reader will accept it because they WANT it to be true. The last is bollocks but I've already told you 4 true sentences in the narrative so as long as I can connect it to the 5th then you'll accept that. If I started with the sentence that David Gill was appointed to UEFA not because of Platini politiking but because this multinational organisation "hated City", you'd think I was a small minded lunatic. But you got sucked into the emotion of the paragraph and invested into it in order to feel the emotion that was paid out - probably a form of righteousness.
The above does this too. It starts with things you know to be true - "bloody bankers" and that sort of stuff. It tells you that Corbyn is disliked by the Tories and some Labour. Then (too early by the way, it needed an extra sentence before this or not be so forthright conspiratorial), it starts talking about Murdoch's influence. Though the tone jumped the gun, those are 3 things that we all pretty much know to be true. People DID blame bankers, Corbyn IS disliked by some MPs and Murdoch DOES have influence in the press.
Then it jumps to the "truth that's not true but people WANT to be true" thing when it talks about how people who don't like Corbyn are somehow less insightful than a Corbyn voter; a PR mouthpiece of the Establishment. A Guardian of the status quo. This confirms the revolutionary nature of the Corbyn fan which is a tag they fellates their ego and something they enjoy. It's not true of course, but being the only people awake in a world of the sleeping is a seductive image.
Then it jumps to the 5th "truth" which is just a mad lie/conspiracy nonsense. Here they try to link a bunch of billionaires into a grand anti-Corbyn Establishment conspiracy, they attempt to project a Christ-like mythology onto Corbyn (he doesn't lie, no ambitions, man of the people, feeds the poor, etc), and ends with a statement about the joining of society.
It's selling emotion - that of revolution, of compassion and a Wolfie Smith like smash the state liberation of morals and in our society that glorifies the heroic revolutionaries in sport, science, engineering and indeed politics, who doesn't want to be part of that? As a firm leftie myself I see people driven by these emotions all the time in meetings, they want to feel like they're making a great and historic change to the world - it's actually our biggest logical and logistical error, it's more useful and better for us to make thousands of tiny changes making the world better than one big one but everybody loves the Hero's Journey roundabout.
Unfortunately when you start examining the claims involved you can see it for what it is - a nicely put together speech relying on rhetorical tricks and cliched slogans to attempt to revolutionise a people who are crying out for some sort of real political revolution. The problem as ever that just because you're desperate to get the train home to Manchester doesn't mean you're going to jump on the first train at Euston that you see and hope it goes there. People want a political revolution in the form that they want, not just any old revolution.
