Remember Ed Milliband?

Remember how when he was Labour leader, during the 2015 election, he was treated as basically illegitamite for wanting to take power? How he, a Jewish man, was made endless fun off for eating a bacon sarnie a bit awkwardly? And that his father was accused of being a foreign agitator?

Speaking of Ed Milliband, curiously how antisemitism in the Labour party stopped being an issue the day Starmer was elected as leader, eh?

That same rightwing press, having had oodles of fun with that picture of Ed eating that sarnie, suddenly found itself Very Concerned about antisemitism in the Labour Party, didn’t they? The Blackshirt supporting Daily Mail, the notoriously antimigrant Sun, the Spectator, praising the Wehrmach one issue and Greek neonazis the next, the Daily Telegraph busy using Soros conspiracy theories straight out of the Protocols of the Elders as headlines, all suddenly Very Concerned about this issue. And all very, very confident that it’s the fault of one lifelong antiracist activist and not something that’s a structural problem in UK society also manifesting itself in Labour. Of course they were the most convinced that this issue was an isolated case and we need not worry about its equivalent in the Tories, or warnings from inside of the party itself that islamophobia is rampant in it.

Antisemitism in the party is of course something Labour, as a leftwing party needs to get its house in order on. Just as it needs to do with the lingering strains of antiblackness, transphobia and islamphobia also present in it..

But when you have Alistair Campbell, notorious for using antisemitic election posters against Michael Howard as your spokesperson on driving out antisemitism in the party, when you have his mates sabotaging efforts to get Ken Livingstone ejected for his antisemitism, you wonder how much of the anxiety about it last year was genuine. Especially when you have the oldest Jewish newspaper in the world about to to cease publication because of the policies of its hardline rightwing editor, as he used it as a vehicle to slander Labour and other leftwing activists. The Jewish Chronicle, published since 1841, destroyed to get the Tories re-elected.

That whole deluge of mostly false or half true accussations, that unprecedent weaponisation of antisemitism concerns, is perhaps the most cynical part of the whole campaign to keep Corbyn out of number ten. It and everything around is why, suddenly, as Flying Rodent put it:

the public organically decided they wanted a highly exotic and destructive trade/political restructure and they also decided – all by themselves – that the leader of the opposition hated white people and Britain.

You’re hard pressed to find anything about that in Labour Together’s election review. All of that just spontaneously materialised and nobody in the press has to ask themselves any awkward questions.

And yet: remember Ed Milliband?