Jeremy Corbyn - fecked?

[vanderark14]

34 minutes ago, Jim Beem said:

Agree about Corbyn.

Although I did seen an interesting comment the other day along the lines of ‘ the anti-semitism in the Labour Party seemed to have ceased immediately as soon as as the result was in ‘  A lot of truth in that. Wankers 

I'll admit I never read much into it but was there really an anti jewish agenda in the labour party or was it a campaign to smear corbyn? 

 

Edited December 15, 2019 by vanderark14

[aaid]

20 minutes ago, vanderark14 said:

I'll admit I never read much into it but was there really an anti jewish agenda in the labour party or was it a campaign to smear corbyn? 

 

Both.   

There is an underlying issue, probably not as endemic as it's been portrayed, and it's been used to get at Corbyn.

My personal view was that it didn't make me think he was tolerant of anti-semitism but that it showed poor leadership in not dealing with it decisively.

[Ally Bongo]

1 hour ago, vanderark14 said:

I'll admit I never read much into it but was there really an anti jewish agenda in the labour party or was it a campaign to smear corbyn? 

 

 

42 minutes ago, aaid said:

Both.   

There is an underlying issue, probably not as endemic as it's been portrayed, and it's been used to get at Corbyn.

My personal view was that it didn't make me think he was tolerant of anti-semitism but that it showed poor leadership in not dealing with it decisively.

Personally i think it all stemmed from within the Labour party themselves in an attempt to get Corbyn out

[aaid]

12 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

 

Personally i think it all stemmed from within the Labour party themselves in an attempt to get Corbyn out

I'd say it all stemmed from *some* Labour Party members being anti-semitic.   That then led to complaints from other Labour members, some Jewish, some not, some pro-Israeli, some not, some who had an ax to grind with Corbyn, some not and some who were all three.   The Tories and the media jumped on the bandwagon.   Had Corbyn nipped it in the bud early enough, it would never have grown the arms and legs it did.

 

[Huddersfield]

15 hours ago, vanderark14 said:

I'll admit I never read much into it but was there really an anti jewish agenda in the labour party or was it a campaign to smear corbyn? 

 

I obviously can't speak about every single case, but what I have witnessed as a party member (albeit fairly inactive these days) is an increasing tendency for people to be silenced from talking about Israel & Palestine. Any time the subject is brought up in social media environments, comments are shut down almost immediately & I know some people have been threatened with being investigated for AS who never particularly seemed so to me.

My personal view is that, whilst I'm sure it exists in places, I think the origin of the 'scandal' is probably traceable back to forces at play in Israel & America who really didn't want any sort of pro-Palestinian government coming to power here so fuelled the (as we know quite easily spread) misinformation campaign.

[vanderark14]

9 minutes ago, Huddersfield said:

I obviously can't speak about every single case, but what I have witnessed as a party member (albeit fairly inactive these days) is an increasing tendency for people to be silenced from talking about Israel & Palestine. Any time the subject is brought up in social media environments, comments are shut down almost immediately & I know some people have been threatened with being investigated for AS who never particularly seemed so to me.

My personal view is that, whilst I'm sure it exists in places, I think the origin of the 'scandal' is probably traceable back to forces at play in Israel & America who really didn't want any sort of pro-Palestinian government coming to power here so fuelled the (as we know quite easily spread) misinformation campaign.

That's the impression I got and thanks for replying. 

 

[Toepoke]

In answer to the OP....yes.

[Ally Bongo]

On reflection the establishment were never going to allow Corbyn's Labour to win a majority and they doubled down after the GE in 2017

I believe some of us thought this and stated so when he was elected leader 

In many ways he made their job easier

 

[EddardStark]

Corbyn is a toxic brand in England with the exception of London and probably Liverpool. His polices where in the main very good ones though. Labour are in a bad place. They have lost their traditional support but still  backed by a very active idealistic middle class base. They are in danger of becoming a protest movement. 

On the radio yesterday I heard that many voters could relate to Johnson more. Not his politics or his  background but rather his flawed personality. The problem for Corbyn is he is a mystery to many voters and in many ways too intellectual. 

Edited December 18, 2019 by EddardStark

[ParisInAKilt]

1 hour ago, EddardStark said:

Corbyn is a toxic brand in England with the exception of London and probably Liverpool. His polices where in the main very good ones though. Labour are in a bad place. They have lost their traditional support but still  backed by a very active idealistic middle class base. They are in danger of becoming a protest movement. 

On the radio yesterday I heard that many voters could relate to Johnson more. Not his politics or his  background but rather his flawed personality. The problem for Corbyn is he is a mystery to many voters and in many ways too intellectual. 

Correct. 

The rare time I would watch TV in the lead up to the election it was always these types advocating for Labour, your Owen Jones and Ash Sarkar’s of the world. 

I get there’s elements of the media against Labour but they’ve only themselves to blame. 

[Huddersfield]

What really frightened me about this whole campaign & the preceding months has been the core strategy of Johnson. In some respects it's Trumpist, but I suspect the ideas lodged in his brain many years previously.

What he has, in a nutshell, done quite skilfully (or at least the string-pullers have) is to be able to blend some fairly transparent lies with a narrative that the opposition are dangerous.

The avoidance of scrutiny, etc. were plain to see & it was easy to get agitated about the message being churned out that Corbyn sought only to house the armed wing of ISIS following his early years wandering around Belfast with an Armalite, but he married a very skilful disinformation campaign to a very troubling core message; that Parliament is your enemy & anyone who doesn't agree with me is a traitor.

I really do think that Labour shot themselves in the foot by their dithering over Brexit & the London-centric party managers clearly failed to understand how they were being perceived beyond SE England, but the undermining of democracy by the Tories through means we could see and, I have little doubt, a lot of activity we didn't see & probably wouldn't want to, doesn't bode well for the future.

I think the Tories & the 'ruling classes' learned valuable lessons from 2017 & set out to destroy Corbyn, whereas Corbyn himself, buoyed by 2017 continued to believe that polemic alone would continue his upward trajectory & only realised what was happening when it was far too late. Whereas Johnson was almost patted on the back for his avoidance of tricky questions, Corbyn was slaughtered for it. The media played their part, but this more than any other was an election where social media memes influenced many decisions.

Obviously I appreciate most people reading this have little time for Labour, but (as a member down here) I think the party now has a really tricky decision to make. Either do what Blair did & become better at handling the media environment than the Tories (which in this day & age means chucking more mud at them than they chuck back) or find a way to overcome that...& I don't have a clue what that approach would look like.

[ParisInAKilt]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2019/dec/18/labour-leadership-election-tony-blair-starmer-urges-labour-to-ditch-not-just-corbyn-by-corbynism-in-speech-on-partys-defeat-live-news#comments

Well this was predictable.

Good of the guardian to give Mr Blair this platform. 

[thplinth]

The reason they could not get rid of Corbyn was that change to how the leader got elected. Once it was down to members and not MPs it effectively meant JC could not be unseated by the Blairite/Tosser faction of the party. God knows they tried... Unless that system is changed somehow the same thing will happen again. They are going to pick a 'proper' left winger. I would strongly suspect the people who supported Corbyn are feeling extremely angry with the hatchet job that was done on him (aided and abetted by the traitors in his own party). So I see them finding a Corbyn2 rather than a Blair2. Ideally a Corbyn2 with some balls. If anything I think they might really turn on the Blairite faction as the treacherous slimy kents that they are. Would not be surprised if the Labour Party split (or rather the Blairites formed some breakaway party of uber wanks). Hard to see how all this is going to get fixed anytime soon. It is looking like a long 10 years ahead. Fuck knows what the UK will be like at the end of it. This is what made Thatcher so dangerous, the lack of any real effective opposition over a long period of time. Who knows maybe the LP can find someone to reunite the party but it is not looking too promising right now.

[aaid]

1 hour ago, Huddersfield said:

What really frightened me about this whole campaign & the preceding months has been the core strategy of Johnson. In some respects it's Trumpist, but I suspect the ideas lodged in his brain many years previously.

What he has, in a nutshell, done quite skilfully (or at least the string-pullers have) is to be able to blend some fairly transparent lies with a narrative that the opposition are dangerous.

The avoidance of scrutiny, etc. were plain to see & it was easy to get agitated about the message being churned out that Corbyn sought only to house the armed wing of ISIS following his early years wandering around Belfast with an Armalite, but he married a very skilful disinformation campaign to a very troubling core message; that Parliament is your enemy & anyone who doesn't agree with me is a traitor.

I really do think that Labour shot themselves in the foot by their dithering over Brexit & the London-centric party managers clearly failed to understand how they were being perceived beyond SE England, but the undermining of democracy by the Tories through means we could see and, I have little doubt, a lot of activity we didn't see & probably wouldn't want to, doesn't bode well for the future.

I think the Tories & the 'ruling classes' learned valuable lessons from 2017 & set out to destroy Corbyn, whereas Corbyn himself, buoyed by 2017 continued to believe that polemic alone would continue his upward trajectory & only realised what was happening when it was far too late. Whereas Johnson was almost patted on the back for his avoidance of tricky questions, Corbyn was slaughtered for it. The media played their part, but this more than any other was an election where social media memes influenced many decisions.

Obviously I appreciate most people reading this have little time for Labour, but (as a member down here) I think the party now has a really tricky decision to make. Either do what Blair did & become better at handling the media environment than the Tories (which in this day & age means chucking more mud at them than they chuck back) or find a way to overcome that...& I don't have a clue what that approach would look like.

One of the great tricks that Boris Johnson - or his machine - has managed to pull is that somehow he's been able to portray himself and the government he leads as being somehow completely detached from the previous Tory and Tory-led governments that have been in power for the last decade.  

I saw someone from Scunthorpe - or somewhere similar - saying that they'd voted Tory because their town had gone down the pan it was time for a change.    Now while on the surface that might seem ridiculous given that - by and large - the reasons why its gone down the pan are as a result of the last 10 years of Tory rule, they also in part stem with the failure of Labour in the Blair era to address some of the fundamental problems caused by Thatcherism in the 1980s, but that's a whole different story.

There is some logic in that argument, twisted though it may be, in that, if you're in Scunthorpe and your town has turned to shit for the last 40 years despite voting for Labour, may be voting Tory might make a difference and of course it won't make a blind bit of difference.    Its the same with Brexit IMO, for all there are fundamental problems with the EU, its not responsible for lack of opportunity, lack of housing, the NHS at breaking point, lack of investment in local infrastructure, etc., etc. and leaving the EU will do nothing whatsoever to address any of those, and in fact, will more likely make things even worse, but again, that's a whole different story.

I've struggled for ages to get my head round why Corbyn as an individual is *so* demonised and disliked in England.  I have my own view on him and its fundamentally that I can't see that he has any sort of leadership capabilities whatsoever and nothing he's done since being made leader has changed that view.  

I heard a clip at the weekend of Pat McFadden, the Scottish Labour MP for Wolverhampton on RTE Radio - as seems to the case now, some of the best commentary on UK politics comes from Ireland.    I don't have much time for him in general but I'd be interested in your take on this though.   He made the point that the main problem was patriotism, that Corbyn came across as fundamentally unpatriotic.   He was too ready to be critical of the UK's allies, e.g. the USA and also to quick to be supportive of it's enemies, e.g. Russia and that his whole worldview - and of those around him - comes across as being anti-western world. 

I think the whole anti-semitism row feeds into that, as it gives the impression that the Labour Party - or at least elements of it - are more obsessed with Israel and what is going on in the middle east rather than in the UK.

I personally don't hold much truck with that and while undoubtedly that's probably been exaggerated by a hostile media, it's not all completely made up.    I think it's difficult for a lot of Scottish people to get their heads around the idea of English patriotism but that all rings true to me.

[phart]

2 hours ago, thplinth said:

The reason they could not get rid of Corbyn was that change to how the leader got elected. Once it was down to members and not MPs it effectively meant JC could not be unseated by the Blairite/Tosser faction of the party. God knows they tried... Unless that system is changed somehow the same thing will happen again. They are going to pick a 'proper' left winger. I would strongly suspect the people who supported Corbyn are feeling extremely angry with the hatchet job that was done on him (aided and abetted by the traitors in his own party). So I see them finding a Corbyn2 rather than a Blair2. Ideally a Corbyn2 with some balls. If anything I think they might really turn on the Blairite faction as the treacherous slimy kents that they are. Would not be surprised if the Labour Party split (or rather the Blairites formed some breakaway party of uber wanks). Hard to see how all this is going to get fixed anytime soon. It is looking like a long 10 years ahead. Fuck knows what the UK will be like at the end of it. This is what made Thatcher so dangerous, the lack of any real effective opposition over a long period of time. Who knows maybe the LP can find someone to reunite the party but it is not looking too promising right now.

As Peter Osborne pointed out the press were attacking the opposition as opposed to the government.

[Dave78]

1 hour ago, aaid said:

I heard a clip at the weekend of Pat McFadden, the Scottish Labour MP for Wolverhampton on RTE Radio - as seems to the case now, some of the best commentary on UK politics comes from Ireland.    I don't have much time for him in general but I'd be interested in your take on this though.   He made the point that the main problem was patriotism, that Corbyn came across as fundamentally unpatriotic.   He was too ready to be critical of the UK's allies, e.g. the USA and also to quick to be supportive of it's enemies, e.g. Russia and that his whole worldview - and of those around him - comes across as being anti-western world. 

I think the whole anti-semitism row feeds into that, as it gives the impression that the Labour Party - or at least elements of it - are more obsessed with Israel and what is going on in the middle east rather than in the UK.

I personally don't hold much truck with that and while undoubtedly that's probably been exaggerated by a hostile media, it's not all completely made up.    I think it's difficult for a lot of Scottish people to get their heads around the idea of English patriotism but that all rings true to me.

This. Absolutely this.

You should definitely watch the very end segment of last night's Newsnight.

Had a look for the full section, but could only find this clip. From memory, i think the other contributor to the discussion surmised the issue better. Here's Billy Bragg though:

 

 

 

[aaid]

15 minutes ago, Dave78 said:

This. Absolutely this.

You should definitely watch the very end segment of last night's Newsnight.

Had a look for the full section, but could only find this clip. From memory, i think the other contributor to the discussion surmised the issue better. Here's Billy Bragg though:

 

 

 

I even think that's too simplistic from Billy Bragg, I think its a lot more complicated than that, although I have heard him expand on this so that could just be down to the limitations of Twitter.

 

[Dave78]

21 minutes ago, aaid said:

I even think that's too simplistic from Billy Bragg, I think its a lot more complicated than that, although I have heard him expand on this so that could just be down to the limitations of Twitter.

 

The other guy in the discussion was this guy, a former Labour minister now academic. What he argues here rings true to me: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/13/english-nationalism-brexit-remain-and-reform

Britishness is dead and won't be revived. The respective English and Scottish branches of Labour and the Tories need to split and properly embrace the nations of this Disunited Kingdom. 

 

[aaid]

10 minutes ago, Dave78 said:

The other guy in the discussion was this guy, a former Labour minister now academic. What he argues here rings true to me: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/13/english-nationalism-brexit-remain-and-reform

Britishness is dead and won't be revived. The respective English and Scottish branches of Labour and the Tories need to split and properly embrace the nations of this Disunited Kingdom. 

 

I'd agree with every word of that piece and wish I'd seen it earlier as I've been struggling to articulate exactly that.   That's not of course to say that I agree with the sentiments, just that chimes with my views from speaking with people.   The opening paragraph nails it 

Quote

Over the past three years the spectre of a rampant English nationalism has gripped the imagination of the liberal left. The rise of a racist, backward-looking, imperialistic and xenophobic political force has been conjured up by politicians and commentators alike, serving as a convenient whipping boy for Brexit chaos and other travails.

If there's one thing that really annoys people who voted for Brexit, its the accusation - either implied or explicit - that somehow they are racists particularly if they mention immigration as a reason.

The other thing I hear a lot of is how its unfair that Scotland gets its own parliament and gets lots of things "for free" that "England pays for".    Clearly that's not something I agree with but even reasonable people struggle to accept that's as a result of the imbalance in the UK political system, ie, England having 85% of the population and everything flowing from funding decisions on England, they still just see it as "free things that England pays for".

[vanderark14]

1 hour ago, Dave78 said:

The other guy in the discussion was this guy, a former Labour minister now academic. What he argues here rings true to me: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/13/english-nationalism-brexit-remain-and-reform

Britishness is dead and won't be revived. The respective English and Scottish branches of Labour and the Tories need to split and properly embrace the nations of this Disunited Kingdom. 

 

Britishness is dead. I love that 😎👍🏼

Someone might need to inform the staunchest of the staunch

[thplinth]

First order of business...

I guess this is the quid pro quo for the character assassination of the Labour Party and Corbyn.

https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/12/16/613831/UK-Britain-PM-Boris-Johnson-Israel-Zionist-lobby-BDS-anti-Semitism-Corbyn

[thplinth]

Looking back on Corbyn he really should have shown some balls and told them to fuck off. 

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200411-jeremy-corbyn-was-defeated-because-he-refused-to-defend-himself-against-the-israel-lobby/

Quote

 

So that’s it. Jeremy Corbyn is out. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

With the media’s attention rightly focused on the coronavirus pandemic, coverage of Corbyn’s departure as Labour leader last weekend was muted.

In truth, the die had already been cast the moment Corbyn announced, after December’s election result, that he would be stepping down.

For all his flaws, Corbyn and the popular movement behind him, represented the single best chance for radical change in this country for a generation. Now, all that is gone, and this is a moment of woe.

This marks the end of an era in British politics – and, indeed in world politics.

Corbyn represented a serious challenge to 40 years of neoliberal consensus among political leaders in the West. In that respect, even in defeat, he has had some success. The national narrative has changed irrevocably – austerity has been utterly defeated.

READ: What can we expect from Britain’s new Labour Party leader on Middle East issues?

It is now quite unimaginable for a British politician to talk about cuts to public services, especially to the National Health Service.

Corbyn played a pivotal role in bringing about change to the way politics is talked about in this country.

But let’s not beat about the bush, Corbyn lost the election in December. There’s no avoiding that fact, and it was a serious defeat for the left.

What was the cause of that defeat?

In the reams of post-mortems that have already been written on Corbyn’s political career, many have examined this question. But very few have acknowledged a major facet of Corbyn’s defeat, if not the greatest factor of all – Corbyn’s refusal to fight the Israel lobby.

Over the course of five years, the Israel lobby, in alliance with Labour’s own right wing, relentlessly smeared and defamed Corbyn and his movement as anti-Semites.

This is a decades-old strategy employed by Israel and its lobbyists, which they continue to use, because it continues to work.

Corbyn unfortunately had no strategy to counter this. Instead, betrayed by even some on the Labour left over the issue, he eventually began to concede.

He reluctantly indulged the smears, repeatedly apologising for anti-Semitism in Labour, when in fact it was virtually non-existent – as all empirical polling data showed time and time again.

READ: Israel needs the Arab world to be ruled by dictators

These apologies were to no avail. The Israel lobby always demands more. They wanted him out, and they continued the defamation campaign until the bitter end.

A leader from one such pro-Israel group boasted in a bizarre video rant over the Christmas holidays last year, that they had “slaughtered” Corbyn.

“We defeated him,” proudly announced Joe Glasman of the so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism. “They tried to kill us,” he ranted, but “we won.” The Campaign Against Antisemitism is very misleadingly named. A more accurate title would be The Campaign Against Palestinians.

Despite his lies about Labour anti-Semitism, Glasman was correct in one aspect: the Israel lobby did defeat Corbyn.

The success of the “Labour anti-Semitism crisis” smear campaign will have to be faced by the British left, if they ever want to succeed in changing the country.

It is not the case that the Israel lobby is all-powerful in objective terms – it is not, and that is the tragedy of the situation. If Corbyn had truly fought them, they would have crumbled.

Instead, he stood by, as good socialists and anti-racists like Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson were purged from the party.

He even failed to stop Labour adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s appalling redefinition of anti-Semitism – which deliberately conflates Palestine solidarity campaigning with anti-Jewish racism.

READ: The Israel lobby is mobilising to stop Bernie Sanders

Polling by Lord Ashcroft after the general election indicated that the smear campaign was indeed successful. It was one of the top five reasons that voters had turned against Corbyn, after his major advances in the 2017 election.

That poll also showed that almost three quarters of Labour’s membership thought that the anti-Semitism crisis had been “invented or wildly exaggerated”. The same figure was 92 per cent among Momentum members.

If only Corbyn and his team had listened to his own members, instead of attempting to embrace his own most bitter enemies within the party, especially such internal Labour pro-Israel elements such as the Jewish Labour Movement and right-wing MP Margaret Hodge.

If the British left hopes to avoid Corbyn’s fate in the future, they will have to learn this harsh lesson: never make concessions to the Israel lobby. It will never be enough, so they would be better served to reject their demands outright.

 

 

[Huddersfield]

The report on anti-semitism (800+ pages of it) has been leaked online. I've not seen a copy of it, but it's creating a shitstorm on the left in the party. A key finding seems to be that right-wingers & senior party officials conspired to make sure Labour lost the election as a way of getting rid.

https://novaramedia.com/2020/04/12/its-going-to-be-a-long-night-how-members-of-labours-senior-management-campaigned-to-lose/

Also I think some suggestions (as I think people were saying before the election) that some of the accusations of AS were driven from outside the party or by vested interests; on top of that, a criticism that investigations of accusations (including potentially some legitimate ones) were mismanaged.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes...there's definitely a mounting pressure to make it public, although I suspect most of the news agencies will have already seen it.

[aaid]

6 hours ago, Huddersfield said:

The report on anti-semitism (800+ pages of it) has been leaked online. I've not seen a copy of it, but it's creating a shitstorm on the left in the party. A key finding seems to be that right-wingers & senior party officials conspired to make sure Labour lost the election as a way of getting rid.

https://novaramedia.com/2020/04/12/its-going-to-be-a-long-night-how-members-of-labours-senior-management-campaigned-to-lose/

Also I think some suggestions (as I think people were saying before the election) that some of the accusations of AS were driven from outside the party or by vested interests; on top of that, a criticism that investigations of accusations (including potentially some legitimate ones) were mismanaged.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes...there's definitely a mounting pressure to make it public, although I suspect most of the news agencies will have already seen it.

There seems to be something in that report - and its leaking - for everyone that wants to have a go at the Labour Party in general or any particular factions within it.

The stuff about the cabal around Ian McNicol rings true as at that time there were some oblique references to there being unacceptable delays in pursuing AS cases and that they were being held up by Labour HQ.    A lot of those who are named in the report left en-masse after the 2017 GE and when McNicol was replaced by Jennie Formby.    Unsurprisingly, they all seem to have landed on their feet with various Union or NGO organisations, or in McNIcol's case, a peerage.

None of this should be any surprise but nor does it disprove that there is a problem with anti-semitism in the Labour party regardless of whether anti-Corbyn factions used that to their advantage.

Bottom line is that the Labour Party is an absolute shambles.

[Orraloon]

Well, that's the Labour party well and truly fecked now.