{"id":9326,"date":"2021-03-18T15:10:14","date_gmt":"2021-03-18T20:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=9326"},"modified":"2021-03-17T16:00:59","modified_gmt":"2021-03-17T21:00:59","slug":"the-limits-of-owen-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2021\/03\/18\/the-limits-of-owen-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"The limits of Owen Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nOliver 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<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\nOf 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\u2014a fixation evidenced by the semantic fluidity of the term \u2018crisis\u2019. 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 \u2018failure\u2019: it is unclear whether Corbyn failed to deal with a racist infestation, or failed to rebut a smear campaign\u2014as 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 \u2018balance\u2019 through a series of self-contradictions. Corbyn is a lifelong campaigner against antisemitism, yet he has a \u2018blind spot\u2019 on the issue. Only 0.3 per cent of Labour members were accused of antisemitism, yet it is a \u2018crisis\u2019 within the party. The leadership team vastly improved the disciplinary process, yet their response suffered from \u2018a lack both of strategy and emotional intelligence\u2019. The party produced a thoughtful pamphlet \u2018designed as a political education tool for members\u2019, yet it \u2018never rolled out political education\u2019. Alongside such incoherent formulations is a summary of Israeli history which \u2018could have been written by Shimon Peres\u2019, as one critic has remarked. The description of Israel\u2019s foundation as a valiant socialist endeavour, worlds away from \u2018settler-colonialism\u2019, 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.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nThe 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<\/cite> 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nLike 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uk-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9336,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9326\/revisions\/9336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}