UK politics

It turns out disgust at enforced mourning is something of a British tradition:

If the mass hysteria about the death of the nation’s racist grandpa is this bad already, imagine what happens when Beth pops her clogs. Eight days of mourning, BBC with wall to wall coverage on both BBC One and Two, the shutting down of BBC Four yesterday, all the pious assholes who couldn’t say anything as covid racked up 150,000 deaths due to Tory complacency now scolding anyone not in the mood to mourn… All the things that the British public was accused of after Diana died, now enforced by the government, the media and an army of finger wagging neighbour watch types on Twitter and Facebook.

But in the end nobody cares but the sort of royalist simp who thinks it’s understandable to be worried about the colour your grandchild will be born with.

Oliver Eagleton exposes the limits of Owen Jones and puts the boot in hard in his review of Jones’ new book on the failure of Corbynism:

Of course, Jones is most aligned with his Guardian colleagues on The Antisemitism Crisis (which he places centre-stage, awarding it more coverage than any other topic). Here again, press relations are the overwhelming concern—a fixation evidenced by the semantic fluidity of the term ‘crisis’. Sometimes Jones suggests that antisemitism had reached crisis-levels within Labour; sometimes he describes a pr crisis rather than a real one. A similar sliding of sense afflicts the word ‘failure’: it is unclear whether Corbyn failed to deal with a racist infestation, or failed to rebut a smear campaign—as if Jones cannot distinguish between the objective reality and the media representation. He accepts that allegations of antisemitism have sometimes been cynically deployed to gag critics of Israel, but he would presumably lose his column space were he to describe the charges against Corbyn as a politically motivated miasma. So instead he strives for ‘balance’ through a series of self-contradictions. Corbyn is a lifelong campaigner against antisemitism, yet he has a ‘blind spot’ on the issue. Only 0.3 per cent of Labour members were accused of antisemitism, yet it is a ‘crisis’ within the party. The leadership team vastly improved the disciplinary process, yet their response suffered from ‘a lack both of strategy and emotional intelligence’. The party produced a thoughtful pamphlet ‘designed as a political education tool for members’, yet it ‘never rolled out political education’. Alongside such incoherent formulations is a summary of Israeli history which ‘could have been written by Shimon Peres’, as one critic has remarked. The description of Israel’s foundation as a valiant socialist endeavour, worlds away from ‘settler-colonialism’, which subsequently degenerated under a series of reactionary leaders, is a rehearsal of liberal-Zionist hasbara that betrays scant engagement with scholarship on the region.

The inability or refusal to see the Labour antisemitism crisis as manufactured is the worst failure of Jones and people like them on the (soft) left. Being employed by The Guardian it is likely more the latter than the former, because his employer was such a major player in ginning up this crisis in the first place. Column after op-ed pretending NWO1488ILoveHitler tweeting something antisemitic had anything to do with Labour just because he said he was a Labour voter. Granted, Jones was one of the few nominally left wing voices in the UK media that even tried to argue against this, but in the end he still accepted the framing of Labour and Corbyn as inherently antisemitic.

Like almost every other pundit, Jones now has to keep up the pretence that this was a serious crisis, because to do otherwise would reveal his own culpability in the whole ‘scandal’. Less guilty than others, sure, but he still played an important role in it, by establishing the limits of acceptable criticism. Jones could say that the attacks on Labour were politically motivated or exaggerated the crisis, but not that the crisis wasn’t real. Even now we conclusively know how little substance there was to the allegations thanks to the EHRC report, Jones has to keep up the charade. That’s why his retrospective is so incoherent, because he cannot afford to admit the truth.