Corb Blimey!

[Toby Gymshorts]

Just when I think the collective can't amaze me any more, then BOOM another sliver of information emerges and I'm reminded of how humdrum my life was / is.

Damn you, the collective.

[ad hoc]

There is nothing about this whole thing that is not depressing. From the antisemitism, to the "overlooking" of the antisemitism, to the lack of understanding that this needs to be stamped out and tackled all the way, to the gloating of the Labour right, to the enjoyment of the media, to the accusations of anti-semitism that are being flung at people where none exists, to the general happiness of the government. I can see no way forward. None at all. Party politics is, as far as I can tell, dead. There are people out there who I agree with on many many things but disagree with fundamentally on things that i regard as so important that I cannot even bear to be in the same facebook thread as (whether those people be those who are trying to make excuses for anti semitism, or people who are calling me and people like me "fundamentally antisemitic"). I just want to give up.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Just to say I more or less agree with ad hoc there.

[E10 Rifle]

Yeah what ad hoc said. Except I'm still trying with the 'party politics' thing.

[johnr]

And me.

I think I might write a few thoughts soon about what, for me, it's been like going from adhoc/TT's position to E10's over the past couple of years (that is, feeling too compromised on some issues/personalities to even think of allying with a party, to being an enthusiastic member of one, with all those compromises still there). It's certainly challenging.

[Snake Plissken]

Well, that is the point isn’t it? To grind you down.

As Blair said, it’s not about getting rid of Corbyn anymore it’s “the people around him”. Those enthusiastic, active members.

[E10 Rifle]

I can remember concerns about AS tolerance within StWC being discussed on here certainly as far back as 2005.

Yeah there were. I'm gonna try, in good faith, to attempt an analysis of how we got where we are. The anti-war movement of the early 2000s was huge and diverse –*unexpectedly so – and the sight of so many people on the streets excited a previously demoralised and defeated left. Of course, within that huge diversity were, inevitably, some cranks and bigots. And it's probably fair to say they were allowed to hide in plain sight a bit too readily. They weren't particularly liked or listened to but people put up with them – out of laziness, out of cowardice, out of perhaps a tin-ear to certain concerns.

Because, contrary to excited hopes at the time, the anti-war politics of those years didn't really shift the overall political pendulum to the left. Projects such as Respect failed ignominiously. Inequality continued and was tolerated, unions remained weak, activism low, and the Labour left was a pretty lonely place, albeit shored up by a promising younger generation that began to come through in the late 2000s. So some Labour left gatherings probably tolerated cranks more than they should have (and again, in my experience, I'm talking about literally two or three people, and not about antisemitism but just about generally bonkers conspira-loon type attitudes and belligerent overall behaviour in meetings).

Corbyn's unexpected election changed everything, brought in a new demographic, better more representative people in many ways, but it didn't clear out that handful who still thought they were at a meeting of 12 people in a pub and could behave as the wished without regard to the consequences. There wasn't enough clear political education and analysis around some of the stuff being talked about.

So I think, given the way things had been in the preceding 10 years, the left was ill-equipped to deal with the onslaught it would face once it got the leadership of the opposition. It was and remains relentless. Every bit of mud would be slung. Wolf would be cried. Bad faith and dishonesty would be everywhere, with the result that there would be so much fog that there would be an inability and, in places defensive unwillingness, to identify and deal with actually existing problems. So now no one trusts anyone else's agenda.

There needs to be a way out of this, because the consensus-change that last year's election signified needs coherent and effective political expression, and there are loads of great people in the contemporary Labour party - doing practical things, galvanising people, standing for election (declaration of interest: my partner's one of the latter). A retreat to election-losing centrism and acceptance of the past 30 years' dogma isn't a viable or palatable option. Perhaps we all just need to shut up and listen for a while, but there isn't much hope of that.

[Flynnie]

I think that every developed country had at least one guy like that.

We had a whole generation of people "re-creating" baseball games from telegraph reports which allowed for massive embellishment. That was one of the ways Ronald Reagan paid the bills before he went to Hollywood. He was of course a natural at a job that required little grasp on reality.

The fact that broadcasting was never a nationalised thing here meant that we had a lot of regional grandees of this sort.

I did commentary on proper football for the university radio station and was anything but histrionic. Our audience was also almost certainly smaller than the group around the village crystal set.

We had nationally prominent commentators, but they tended to be reserved. Red Barber, Vin Scully. Mel Allen was exciteable but not really by the standards of O'Hehir. Ray Scott on football. Chris Schenkel on basketball. Al Helfer was downright boring.

The closest equivalent to those types were probably Jim McKay doing the Indianapolis 500 every year and Jack Buck, but CBS's Jack Buck was a different cat to "GO CRAZY FOLKS, GO CRAZY! IT'S A HOME RUN BY THE WIZARD!!!!" Jack Buck on St. Louis Cardinals radio.

[Flynnie]

I find myself agreeing almost totally with both Snake and ad hoc's posts on the previous page, which shouldn't really be possible, but they've both articulated the complex sentiments around this problem.

This excellent piece from Richard Seymour and David Schneider's Twitter thread which E10 posted a couple of pages back make for the best reading on the matter. There's a problem with antisemitism on the Left, unquestionably, but that's because there's a problem with antisemitism in society in general. It's not more common or more extreme on the Left, it's just that the Left is supposed to oppose everything embodied by antisemitism and any form of prejudice so it's all the more heartbreaking when it does rear its head.

Corbyn's not an antisemite (his voting record demonstrates as much) but that's of little comfort to Jews and Jewish members of the Labour Party if his similarly-evident blindness or unwillingness to confront antisemitism where it's occurred isn't addressed. If anything good is to come from all of this maybe it can finally be an opportunity to, dare I use the word, purge the Left of its antisemitic strain. How exactly that would work I don't know in practice but it should probably start with severing all ties with repeat offenders like Livingstone, meeting Jewish party members and groups in an attempt to heal the wounds and to #DeleteFuckingFacebook forthwith.

There are two things that cannot be allowed to happen.

1) Antisemitism in the Party to persist

2) The Corbyn "Project"* or the rebirth of Socialism cannot be derailed and territory ceded back to the Sensibles and Centrists who display a similar blindness to the concerns of other marginalised ethnic groups

There is hope for a better future in all of this. For a noted pessimist like myself that's saying something but in a perverse way it's good that the Left is having to confront this head-on. Maybe we'll win back some old friends, if we do it right.

* I use this term in place of anything better. Corbyn isn't indispensable to the regeneration of the Left.

I think the most disappointing thing about this is Corbyn has been late to the party on several occasions when it comes to putting the boot on the throat of antisemitism. Yes, not many are dealing with this issue in good faith, but Corbyn can't let it stink up his leadership or the project-at-large (which it has for at least one Jewish friend of mine). Condemn it, stamp it out, and it would be nice if there was a lack of equivocation about it. I feel like I've seen several statements from the leader's office that can't help but mention "and all other forms of racism", which has been seen as deflecting the issue.

Lansman's shown a pretty good way to deal with this, probably because it affects him personally, and it should be followed if at all possible.

[Lucy Waterman]

This I found really interesting as a potential way forward for the hard left, courtesy of a couple of Marxists.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politic...-it-sees-world

[E10 Rifle]

I think they're a bit too harsh on Corbyn there, but there's plenty to chew on. I think some of this comes from Corbyn's tendency to shield some of his more full-on systemic Marx-influenced views and cloak it in the language of "elites", "rigged systems", "the 1 per cent and their friends", which he might see as a more youthful Occupy- and anti-war-friendly way of framing things. But can indeed lead to dark, antisemitic places. It's about systems, stupid.

Cos I think some of this does indeed come from an inadequate political education, and some of it linked to the sort of conspiratorial tendencies found among 9/11 truthers, which is one very definite place where antisemitism is visible. Conspiracy theorism is the enemy of progressive politics, because it's rooted in the idea of ordinary people's powerlessness in the face of a shadowy all-powerful plot.

(As an aside, I certainly don't think Palestine should be dialled-down as an issue. It's as important as it ever was, but now greeted with much more indifference and silence than 10, 15, 20 years ago. Ad hoc, for example, regularly posts updates of injustices there on Facebook which get precisely no reaction.)

[Lucy Waterman]

The "MSM" thing is another example of the conspiratorial tendency. Not the fact that the media is, by and large, ranged against Corbyn and Corbynism - and that they understandably reject it on that basis - but the idea that it is coordinated.

[E10 Rifle]

Again, a class-analysis rather than a conspiracy-analysis would explain the media thing rather more concisely.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

This should be very easy. Start from the principle that everyone is equal, So stop arbitrarily grouping people together to discriminate against them. Move from that to saying that discriminating against any group of people on any grounds is simply wrong and unacceptable, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-catholicism, fat jokes, and gingerism are all basically the same idea, and wrong for this reason. When it comes to political arguments, remember that Governments and political actors are separate from the group of people that they claim to represent. The Government of israel is separate from Jewish people, as are the palestinians and hamas. The Issue that you can legitimately have with the Israeli Govt is that they engage in systematic oppression based on religious and ethnic grounds. This happens all over the world, so i'm not sure why you need to focus on the Jewish aspect of it. Also it's not the fucking 13th century, so lets drop this whole jewish financier bollocks. Don't use a legitimate distrust of financiers to justify bullshit that went out of date with the Medicis.

Discriminating against people based on an accident of birth is bollocks, and is fundamentally incompatible with the aims of a party focused on building a better, more equal society, and anyone who doesn't accept this can fuck right off. This should be easy to get right for the labour party. It is a fucking disgrace that this wasn't sorted out years ago.

[Nefertiti2]

The "MSM" thing is another example of the conspiratorial tendency. Not the fact that the media is, by and large, ranged against Corbyn and Corbynism - and that they understandably reject it on that basis - but the idea that it is coordinated.

Some things are definitely co-ordinated to cause maximum impact. Call it media management if you prefer. Remember whichever Labour nonentity resigned live on BBCdp coaxed by Laura Kuennsberg. The rebooting of the Mural story the media pile on a few weeks before the council elections. Same thing happened during the junior doctors’ strike.

One can be concerned about “ pockets of antisemitism “ on the left and still think that much of this is an alliance between those who don’t want Corbyn anywhere near Downing Street.-pro Likud Jewish organisations, right wing Labour the Tories.does anyone really think Ian Paisley gives a drummers fart about antisemitism?If the media were genuinely concerned about anti-Semitin why the lack of scrutiny of and impossibility of getting traction for criticism of the Conservative party ‘s long lasting unsavoury links with the Polish LAnd and Freedom Party which the Board of Deputies raised in
2009

[E10 Rifle]

Yeah but I think the media management is done by the politicians more than the media. And journalists tend not to be co-ordinating attacks across media outlets, mainly because papers would rather scoop their rivals than collaborate with them. What does happen, though, is the phenomenon of "avalanche journalism", where everyone piles in on the same theme, and every two-bit pundit Must Have Their Say. Corbyn's copped loads of that.

[Lucy Waterman]

Yes, I agree. And avalanches don't happen because all of the snow has a meeting and decides to roll downhill at the same time.

[ad hoc]

To be fair conspiracy theorising is not just something that certain people on the left are guilty of. I've read a number of people from "the centre" today talk about how this anti-semitism is something planned and deep rooted within the left such that it's actually the goal of Corbyn et al. Mind you I don't want to get into some of the stuff I've read today from some people who I used to have a lot of time for.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The rebooting of the Mural story the media pile on a few weeks before the council elections

Are the local elections really that important? In terms of real actual people's lives, they can be, sure, but in terms of "choppy waters for Corbyn"? The elections themselves are over a month away. This could have been rebooted a week before. Labour can count themselves lucky it wasn't around during the General Election campaign. If anything, this was a good time for it to (re)break, because he had enough problems with Russia, having been hung out to dry by the rest of the Shadow Cabinet, including McDonnell and Thornberry.

[E10 Rifle]

To be fair conspiracy theorising is not just something that certain people on the left are guilty of. I've read a number of people from "the centre" today talk about how this anti-semitism is something planned and deep rooted within the left such that it's actually the goal of Corbyn et al.

True enough. See also the obsession with "Momentum plots", which any number of excitable centrists froth about, and on which pretend-centrist Gideon Osborne's Evening Standard has again gone utterly mental today.

[Lucy Waterman]

I haven't heard anyone making the link with the local elections outside of Corbyn supporters.

I'm not saying his position is not under attack, but I don't see that it has much to do with the local elections.

[E10 Rifle]

I'm probably a bit more sensitive than most about the local elections, since they're such a dominant part of my life at the moment.

[Lucy Waterman]

True enough. See also the obsession with "Momentum plots", which any number of excitable centrists froth about, and on which pretend-centrist Gideon Osborne's Evening Standard has again gone utterly mental today.

Well now, hang on. Any specific "Momentum plots" prompt all sorts of hysteria. But Momentum does organise itself, that's what it's for.

(What I mean is, there's a distinction to be drawn between real organisations and imagined ones).

[Lucy Waterman]

I'm probably a bit more sensitive than most about the local elections, since they're such a dominant part of my life at the moment.

Ha! Genuine good luck to Madame Rifle.

[E10 Rifle]

Well in that case every example of a political organisation doing anything in a co-ordinated fashion would be described as "a plot". It isn't. Momentum "plots" as much as Progress does (probably less so, tbh, as it's more diffuse), as much as the Tories do. They're not all described in the same breathless fashion.