Labour – Wis[s]e Words

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?

Daily Telegraph headline: Man who broke the Bank of England backing secret plot to thwart Brexit

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..

Labour 2005 election poster showing Oliver Letwin and Michael Howard as flying pigs

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?

Unfortunately Hazel Blears kept her seat, but nice to see both Charles “safety elephant” Clarke and Jackie Smith finally were told to bugger off by their constituencies. Also good to see the Greens win their first seat.

The overall impression seems to be that, despite all the triumphalism, the television debates did not have the impact on the election itself they were predicted to have based on the polls. It became an almost normal two horse race again, with the Lib Dems doing nowhere near as well as “Clegg Mania” was supposed to make them. Currently they’re at 47 seats according to Wikipedia, with 565 of 650 seats declared. Last time they won 62, if the end result is the same, slightly better or even worse then it’s clear that Clegg has failed to deliver the breakthrough the debates seemed to hand him.

And the reason might just be that enough people took a second look at the likely outcome, saw the Tories looming and decided better to vote for the devil they knew. Labour might be bastards, but the Tories seem to be even worse bastards and a Lib Dem victory at the expense of Labour might just have delivered a Liberal-Tory government. Meanwhile the Tory voters the Lib-Dems were chasing refused to be caught it seems, rather having the real ones in power than a surrogate. A wasted opportunity, though the Lib-Dems might still end up holding the balance of power in what now looks like a well and truly hung parliament. They should’ve gone for the left of Labour vote, not chase lefty Tories.

Good to see Caroline Lucas become the first Green MP. Results from Poplar and Limehouse, where George Galloway is standing, aren’t in yet, but it looks like Labour has won that, according to the BBC.

What’s really worrying are the reports of polls closing while there were still voters waiting to vote; that’s a sign of bad organisation.

Articles with the Tag Labour

Bye-bye Charles! Bye-bye Jackie! Hello Caroline!