Owen "Squealer" Jones

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Re: Owen "Squealer" Jones

By The Weeping Angel
-  Sun Mar 24, 2024 9:05 pm #64835
A fascinating article on Jones from James Ball

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fb28 ... 8cbc1dd33b
When Owen Jones first came to the British public’s attention, he could authentically be described as a breath of fresh air. His first book, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, arrived in 2011 and served as a welcome rebuke to the snobbery and cruelty of the Little Britain-inspired Noughties. In his early years as a columnist for The Independent and then The Guardian, Jones was strident but thought-provoking, asking serious questions about class representation in the media and the dominance of elites in British life.

Today is a rather different matter. Jones remains a significant figure, with more than one million followers on Twitter/X and the ability to shape the online debate. When he quit the Labour Party last week, he released the news in a video, podcast and impassioned column in The Guardian. “The Labour Party is in my blood,” he wrote, but Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership had made leftists like him feel like “a pariah”. He encouraged his followers to vote for Green or independent candidates.

And yet, within Labour circles, the most common private reaction to Jones’s highly staged announcement was shrugging surprise that he was still affiliated with the party. He might be able to summon an online mob with a single tweet, but the Jones brand has been sullied by long service in the trenches of the culture wars. Once hailed as the voice of a generation, more than a decade of Twitter spats has made him a darker, angrier — and less interesting — public figure.

So is his apparent descent of his own making, or just a particularly visible sign of what’s happened to politics — and the internet? Jones, 39, was raised in Stockport, the son of a council worker and a university professor, both of whom were active in the Labour Party and its broader movement — including a flirtation with Militant tendency. After graduating from Oxford with a degree in history, he worked briefly as a parliamentary researcher for the Labour MP and future shadow chancellor John McDonnell, before finding success as a columnist.
During Ed Miliband’s years as party leader, from 2010 to 2015, Jones continued to stand out as a voice of the left, campaigning against austerity and its impact on the lives of disabled people, inequality and establishment power.

Yet he became an increasingly divisive figure during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, particularly around the issue of antisemitism. As an unofficial (and undisclosed) adviser to Corbyn, he also became one of the movement’s biggest and most uncompromising media outriders. In 2014, Jones was among the few media defenders of Corbyn being “present but not involved” at a wreath-laying ceremony in Tunisia for terrorists from the group behind the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

To call Jones a lightning rod would be a criminal understatement. Anyone in politics or the media who is a regular user of Twitter has an Owen Jones story, almost all of them negative. To clash with him on the site is to be barraged by personal abuse by his legion of followers, as I have learnt first-hand on several occasions.

Being a colleague does not shield you. It is an open secret within The Guardian, where I worked for a period, that its social media rules were changed explicitly to cover Jones’s conduct on Twitter, attacking other staff and freelance writers (often with far smaller followings) at the paper.

Yet Jones also receives abuse in volumes unimaginable to most people, routinely getting thousands of such messages in a day. Such is the antipathy towards him that even when he was attacked in London in a homophobic hate crime in 2019, abuse continued to come his way.

To my mind, Jones has fallen victim to a double pitfall that threatens any social media star: the hatred and trolling directed at him has made him angrier and thinner-skinned; meanwhile, he has become captive to his large and ferocious group of fans.

The presence of a massive and regular audience changes a person, with none of the support networks offered by real celebrity. Social media followers turn on a pin — they are looking for someone to cheer and someone to destroy, and are just as prone as traditional media ever was to build someone up in order to knock them down later. The need builds and builds to keep the fans onside, the number high, to avoid the backlash.

Against that backdrop, it is perhaps easier to see how Jones excuses himself for behaviour for which he routinely castigates others. In the early years of Corbynism, people who had previously been friendly, if not friends, with Jones would plead with him to change how he used Twitter after receiving days of abuse after a negative quote tweet from him — to no avail.

In a book published after Corbyn’s crushing 2019 defeat, Jones acknowledged many of the issues around antisemitism that he had publicly previously denied, provoking unsurprising fury among Labour’s alienated Jewish supporters. Then, sensing his support slipping after that repudiation of Corbyn, Jones all but rejected his own book’s narrative and changed his views again.

It is this politics-as-fandom — a concept explored in I Heart Politics: How People Power Took Over the World, a fascinating new book by the writer Phoenix Andrews — that lets Jones and other “extremely online” personalities explain away these inconsistencies. Once you have good guys and villains, it is set: the good guys change their minds when the facts change, while villains change position for their own cynical advantage. We robustly fight the good fight, whereas they engage in ad hominem attacks. Why engage with anyone else’s ideas when their motivations are so foul?

All of this is a shame and a loss. The debate on the left is increasingly stale and rancorous. There is no refreshing battle of ideas and there is no honest engagement. One cannot pin it on Jones, of course. Instead, he is perhaps the most visible symbol of what the toxic cocktail of political populism and social media fandom has done to everyone who lived through it all.

Allen Ginsberg famously saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Have we lost ours to Twitter?
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