ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

If Steve Baker is any guide, the backbench lunatic fringe is holding fire on public opposition to Johnson for now.

I don’t blame anyone for leaving the Labour Party at the moment. It’s ‘under new management’ indeed—meet the new boss, same as the old boss. We’re self-evidently under enemy occupation by a leadership that does not share our values, our aims, our analysis, or our programme.

— Joe Guinan (@joecguinan) October 31, 2020

good thread, tho i'm too tired and distracted to know whether i agree with him

i'd avoid the replies if you value your blood pressure tho

there's already got a model for how to fight within the party to retake the leadership: wrecking. unfortunately, left voices don't have a as mature a rolodex as the right nor a sufficiently pliant media

Finally, we should remember the moves Starmer has made since becoming leader and the ruthlessness with which he operates. Next time there should be no holding back. Party democracy. Rulebook reform. Open selection. A new General Secretary. And a clean-out of the party machine.

— Joe Guinan (@joecguinan) October 31, 2020

next time... see you in thirty years

all things considered i'm on the side of shrugging and fuck the Labour Party forever at the moment. hard to understand people's continued belief in this thing that produced one decent government almost by accident in its entire history

and this in a country where the chunk of the bourgeoisie that considers itself left-liberal is more bovine, more reactionary, more hateful to the working class, to democracy and to equality than its compadres on the right

I get where you're coming from NV, but Iain Duncan Smith is in the Telegraph today complains about the government "giving in to scientific advisers"

yeah i know there was some poetic exaggeration altho i was thinking of the average little Englander bourgie right rather than full blown libertarian chancers like IDS

Weird how furlough couldn't be extended for restrictions in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Manchester, Liverpool, Blackburn, Newcastle, etc, but as soon as it hits the south everyone's back up to 80%

Furlough is absolutely essential not just to keep people alive but also to maintain widespread support for lockdowns. Reduced rates for other regional areas, well that doesn't exactly elude interpretation and Tory MPs in those areas were well aware of that.

Looking at the rules for hospitality and we’re back to takeaway and delivery obv, but it now specifically disallows alcohol takeaway, which I don’t think was the case last time? Not even sure what the rationale behind it is but it’ll come as a nasty shock to ppl who were assuming they could fall back on off sales to an extent

I guess it's to stop people queueing up outside pubs and drinking from plastic pint glasses on the street?

Like I'm guessing an offlicense can still deliver and you could get beer delivered with your curry but maybe I'm wrong here?

Yeah I think it’s alcohol takeaway *as opposed to delivery* that’s banned - in lockdown 1 a lot of places adapted to serve from a little takeaway window with socially distanced queueing (as cafés will still be allowed to do presumably) and it seemed fine to me

there were a bunch of places doing it round here by the end of the 1st lockdown but since big chunks of the city have "no boozing in public" zones i was never quite sure how that worked

It was definitely an issue that they closed every public toilet here but park drinking was allowed (half of them are still not open despite everything else coming back, which is violence against ibs sufferers imo - ffs guys you can’t let me go to greggs and have no crappers in a 5 mile radius when the gastric distress hits)

Scotland's been pretty much 'no boozing in public' for years. We're very draconian/progressive/puritanical/health-conscious depending on which lens you look through.

I look through the lens that it's fucking ruined a few summer events for me where I'd otherwise have ruined myself.

I’ve never come up against it before in England - I think there were theoretically parts of Brighton beach where it was prohibited to drink but never saw it enforced. My sister once went to London on NYE and got harassed by a pig who made her pour her drink out even tho everybody there was clearly drinking because it was a huge fucking NYE party in Trafalgar Square

America vmic insane with stuff like this, I remember innocently flouting some demented “open container” law once and the ppl I was with were like Jesus Christ put that away, like I’d lit a crack pipe in the library or something

i think it's only really used in Hull to harass people that pigs feel like harassing but the first lockdown was weird and disorienting enough that i couldn't be bothered testing whether i could sit in a mostly empty marina with a pint in a skiff

I don't believe this guy ever really caught in in England.

https://collectionimages.npg.org.uk/large/mw280090/John-Calvin.jpg

Good thread on schools:

6) There was time to talk about all this, and to facilitate schools into transitional controls (e.g. shorter classes or even a shorter week), but none of that happened.

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) November 1, 2020

Ah well.

Incredible story in The Times, which I'm told is definitely true. For most of its existence, the contact tracing app for England and Wales has been using the wrong risk threshold, so it's hardly been sending out any alerts telling people to self-isolatehttps://t.co/t4OTrC4i6W

— Rowland Manthorpe (@rowlsmanthorpe) November 1, 2020

Jesus fuck

Great!

I've now read the EHRC report, and feel i've got to a position on this, but wanted to get people's views here, because I think it's different from a number of people who I trust itt.

The first really important thing to note is that the EHRC is a legally binding document. You don't have to take on the exact recommendations they make, but you have to show you've addressed the issues raised. It's not a document that can be ignored.

Second – it's entirely a document to do with governance and process, as applied between 2016 and 2019. It's quite clear that the problems it describes have been present under Blair and Miliband. Where Corbyn is mentioned by name, it's only to do with the specific complaint about the mural, and its handling. The rest of the time it refers to the office of the LOTO, especially wrt interference in individual cases.

A few things consistently singled out throughout the report. The good processes and governance around handling sexual harassment in the Labour party are compared to the poor handling of anti-semitism complaints. The view of the report being that it was possible to have a good set of processes there, learning from the code around sexual harassment, but this template was not applied. The second is that the recommendations of the Royall and Chakrabarti reports had only been implemented partially and often not at all, which showed lack of commitment.

Overall it seems like a good report with a sensible set of recommendations. But the point is that it is legally binding. Doesn't matter whether you agree with the conclusions or not, the Labour Party is required to implement it.

The report also clearly states that statements saying the problem was being overexaggerated or the result of a witch hunt are unacceptable. This is due to the fact that the large number of complaints about anti-semitism tend to be from Jews, and that therefore statements suggesting that these are fabricated or part of a witch hunt lead to indirect racism, as it puts their status in the complaints process at a disadvantage, and can create a hostility towards them and discourage complaint.

Obviously when the report was released, much of the media had a huge interest in conflating the report with Corbyn specifically. If you're anti-left it's a very useful thing to do.

Which means I think it's just staggeringly stupid for Corbyn to have said what he said. The report was literally about institutional antisemitism in the Labour party, so there was no need to talk about the media hysteria (which we know exists). It's also clear that the LOTO office interfered with a number of complaints, sometimes to accelerate the process, but sometimes to try and make them go away, including with regard to the complaint about Corbyn and the mural, which is just wtf. So there's evident culpability there, which I think was probably to do with internal panic around the media salience of it.

Now, I completely agree with his view that media apply a huge amount of hostile focus on racism in the Labour Party, while excusing and encouraging it elsewhere. I was also more aligned with his politics than any Labour leader I've known in my lifetime.

But it will be a huge problem for the left if they a) conflate the EHRC report and Corbyn's suspension and b) if they conflate media anti-Corbynism with a genuine need to sort out what looks like pisspoor governance in the party. As I say the document is legally binding, so getting on the wrong side of that process would be a huge mistake.

I think Corbyn has really helped the media do that conflation, and it's not totally unreasonable within the terms of the report for Starmer (let's ignore the idea that he wouldn't have known and approved) to suspend him under the charge of bringing the party into disrepute. I think it would have been hard not to given the wording in the report, even leaving aside factionalism against the left. The ONE day you do not want to release a statement saying that is on the day the report is released. And there was literally no need for him to say it.

Best thing he could have said is that I recognise there was more we need to do, and I hope this document can be the start of the process across all areas of the Labour party.

So for the sake of the future of left wing socialism within the left, I really think that people need to work to implement the EHRC recommendations and engage with that process on the left.

Surely there is a material difference between saying that claims were fabricated as part of a witch hunt and saying that the size and scale of those claims have been consistently exaggerated? The former is covered under the Pam from Bromley / Ken Livingstone examples. Is the latter?

I agree with pretty much all of that Fizzles post fwiw.

The thing is, it isn't Corbyn that's been found to have unlawfully discriminated against Jewish people, nor is it Corbynites, or figures on the right of the party trying to undermine Corbyn, it is the Labour Party as in institution. The whole of it.

The problem is - and there's no getting away from this - that it was Corbyn himself that was leading the party over that time, and you can't have power with accountability. Ironically - and he would never recognise this in himself - Corbyn this week behaved like thousands of bad bosses do, failing to take responsibility for the fuck-ups on his watch and instead trying to minimise the issue or trying to shift the blame in order to cover his own arse. If you don't want that kind of accountability, don't lead an organisation. Even if he was being systematically undermined from the right of his own party, I'm not sure it makes a difference because it's the party as a whole that was under investigation.

It also doesn't matter whether the LOTO was interfering in order to speed up the process, the whole point is that this and other systemic flaws deprived Jewish people of the right to lodge complaints without politically-motivated interference. (One thing I don't think I've seen mentioned here is that if Starmer was personally behind the suspension then he may also have intervened in an inappropriate way).

I've also made the point elsewhere that just because this is being weaponised doesn't mean it was being exaggerated. In any case, Corbyn himself is no position to judge whether it's been exaggerated or not, because a central finding in the report itself was the processes for assessing these were not fit for purpose.

I also understand the impulse to form a rhetorical protective huddle around Corbyn - it was necessary at several points over the past few years, and I've done it myself when I've heard someone parroting some nonsense in the pub for example. The question remains whether, in this case, Corbyn himself actually deserves that protective huddle, and I don't think he does. And if he doesn't, then it stops being a protective huddle and becomes factional wagon-circling. (Some of the smarter MPs on the left, like Nadia Whittome, have done the sensible thing and stated their disagreement with Corbyn's statement while also saying they feel the suspension itself was wrong.)

I'm not sure that many people on the left have started to appreciate quite how bad this has made it look to outside observers, including those who would otherwise not be especially hostile to many of its aims - and the left itself barring some major unheavals in society is never going to be big enough to obtain or sustain any real power or influence without functioning alliances with other groups. As it is the chance of it doing so is increasingly remote and Corbyn's statement was fundamentally damaging to its prospects of doing so again and Corbyn doesn't seem to realise the damage he's done to the left's future prospects this week. And that's a real disaster for those of us who desperately wanted an end to austerity, a more redistributive country, reduction in inequality and everything else that goes with it.

i thought people had pointed out in this thread that if Starmer influenced the suspension - he has semi-plausible deniability but i don't believe he didn't - then he was breaching one of the findings of the report. i also agree with most of what Fizzles said, but having not read the entire report i was under the impression that statements about the extent of antisemitism within the Party are protected/not inherently antisemitic. claiming that complaints are motivated by faction is materially different and is antisemitic imo.

Corbyn never gave the impression of being on top of the issue as leader and his statement this week was unnecessarily self-serving. i've seen a lot of unhelpful stuff from left Twitter this week and a lot of people lashing out at MPs like McDonnell or members like Lansman when they've appealed for people to step back and think about their reactions. it's a fucking mess and it highlights how the problem was able to get so overwhelming in the first place.

i have considerably less faith than you Matt that any kind of leftist politics will be allowed to influence our existing parliamentary parties.

the Labour Party is useless for reasons other than this fiasco. it is absolutely essential that the report is understood and implemented, i just don't think that even if that happens as efficiently as possible the Party will be any more use than it is now, it'll just be marginally better at dealing with the minimum expectations of equality law

I'm going to scroll back up to reply to that Fizzles post as I've read the report and have opinions but just to say this:

The thing is, it isn't Corbyn that's been found to have unlawfully discriminated against Jewish people, nor is it Corbynites, or figures on the right of the party trying to undermine Corbyn, it is the Labour Party as in institution. The whole of it.

...isn't even a finding of the report, after all that.

also this thread is one of the few spaces i can think of where we could have a halfway reasonable conversation about this stuff and the toxicity of the general social/media environment and its ranks of fascists and the centrist stooges who love them is not conducive to moving this issue forward. maybe Starmer should set up an independent taskforce to implement the findings of the report and have the good grace/fucking brains to make it transparently bipartisan as far as Labour politics goes

OK maybe there's a legal distinction I'm not quite appreciating but committing unlawful acts of harrassment including antisemitic tropes. Perhaps that isn't discrimination in the strictly legal sense, idk.

on a lighter note Tommy Robinson has been arrested and thrown in jail just for saying he's English

(FWIW I've read the key sections of the report but not the whole thing as it's 100+ pages).

The report was literally about institutional antisemitism in the Labour party, so there was no need to talk about the media hysteria (which we know exists).

This was the level of the conversation most of the time, not the discussion about the procedures and whether Jewish complainants were disadvantaged and, by this fact, subject to antisemitism by the institution of the party.

I missed this at the time: Simon Heffer saying that Jeremy Corbyn "wants to reopen Auschwitz".

Holy shit.

(42:57 or so) https://t.co/lgRpdtvHrw

— Andrew Bartlett (@AndrewBartletta) November 20, 2019

if they conflate media anti-Corbynism with a genuine need to sort out what looks like pisspoor governance in the party

In any case, Corbyn himself is no position to judge whether it's been exaggerated or not, because a central finding in the report itself was the processes for assessing these were not fit for purpose.

It's absurd to deny there is antisemitism in Labour.

It's also absurd to deny the scale of the issue has been overstated when the public thinks that a third of party members face antisemitism allegations, rather than the actual figure, which is less than 0.3%.

Me on @TimesRadio pic.twitter.com/Vx8fAwjkZ5

— James Schneider (@schneiderhome) October 30, 2020

including with regard to the complaint about Corbyn and the mural, which is just wtf. So there's evident culpability there, which I think was probably to do with internal panic around the media salience of it.

So for the sake of the future of left wing socialism within the left, I really think that people need to work to implement the EHRC recommendations and engage with that process on the left.

OK maybe there's a legal distinction I'm not quite appreciating but committing unlawful acts of harrassment including antisemitic tropes. Perhaps that isn't discrimination in the strictly legal sense, idk.

In this context, harassment means unwanted conduct related to race, which has the purpose or effect of violating a person’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.

This is really missing the point of the reality of the reporting, though. "Institutionally" is not one person, but the whole press for the past two years has been acting as though it was. Starmer's press conference the day of the report was question after question about whether he'd be throwing Corbyn out. It's a fundamental flaw with the unseriousness with which this has been treated from the start.

Agree with this fwiw, it's the same impulse that ends up with Livingstone and Williamson on Times Radio, attempting to stir things up in a way that isn't exactly out of concern for the victims.

There's also a wider question of how you can build a genuine mass movement party without attracting people with reprehensible views and without them making those perfectly clear on social media in away that is ripe for being seized on or ignored according to expediency. Lord knows what an EHRC investigation into racism in the Conservative Party would unearth and in membership terms that's a tiny party relatively speaking.

Not one person has asked how Jewish people are meant to respond to a historian saying that Corbyn wants to reopen Auschwitz. If you’re already worried about Corbyn then that’s really just going to rachet it up even more. Is that a measured interjection into a heated debate or is it pouring petrol on a blaze without regard to the people you’re causing anxiety to?

Definitely been disgusted by the excuses and whataboutery from the another angry voice crowd in my circle so fizzles post seems sound to me - making this all about corbyn is the opposite of the introspection Jewish members deserve & maybe it was always going there but I think jc and starmzy share the blame for making sure it went there immediately.

Suspension still feels like bollocks to me - I get being pissed off that the “overstated” comment is in there but saying it’s minimising the issue really depends on ignoring the previous paras saying it is a real and serious problem no? Many xps at this point

I'm not really deeply engaging with this because I'm done with the Labour Party and am very low energy right now. But will say that gobby left-twitter "personalities" having a go at Jon Lansman for calmly posting about this report is very fucking wrong.

this has all gone exactly to plan

the right: why are you hitting yourself

the left: well, it's beca-

the right: why are you hitting yourself

I'm not sure who the "people" you're referring to here are? This was never left to cool and let everyone take a breath, it's been factional cluster bombs from day one. I'm largely disinterested in the question of engaging in the process as I've already left, but you are affording Starmer far too much credit. He wants a model of the party that's top-down, not member-led, where members fund and leaflet for the party and have absolutely no other input apart from doing as they're told, and the left's whole presence challenges that.
― liberté, égalité, scampé (gyac), Sunday, 1 November 2020 16:54 bookmarkflaglink

sorry, yes, 'people' was totally unclear. by people, i mean people on the left, who want to maintain a left voice within Labour. (I can understand those who do not, though I don't think this particular report and the fallout is the right hill on which to die).

i *think* i subscribe to what you say about starmer there. but it's not totally clear for me. a theory i have in my head is that starmer is trying to grab back the member-led approach unlocked by the registered voters rule change, which effectively saw a lot of new members feel empowered to vote for a different sort of politician and politics. he can't change the rules at the moment, but he can alienate the base. or perhaps more importantly he can marginalise representatives of the left on the front bench.

and i'm just not sure how true that theory is (genuinely not sure, not rhetorically not sure). and even if it is, is this particular process an engine of that? they've still got what i would consider left wing policies like scrapping tuition fees, and nationalisation of certain industries. the marginalisation of MPs on the left genuinely seems a thing, and again, it's clear the power base is being shifted, which is.... shit tbh.

a theory i have in my head is that starmer is trying to grab back the member-led approach unlocked by the registered voters rule change, which effectively saw a lot of new members feel empowered to vote for a different sort of politician and politics.

they've still got what i would consider left wing policies like scrapping tuition fees, and nationalisation of certain industries.

Time will tell whether the figures bear it out but it feels like the demographic base of the party is shifting as well, or at least efforts are being made to explicitly ‘win back the trust of white voters’.

It’s one of the reasons the legacy of Corbyn’s time at the helm, and the claims made about it, have to be analysed appropriately seriously. Even when sincerely held, I don’t think the belief that, if elected, Labour would have been an existential threat to British Jews can be separated from the presumed hostility of the Muslim / Black members and voters who supported him, the Muslim / Black immigrants he’d have supposedly allowed in to the country, the Muslim countries he wouldn’t have used Trident on, etc. I think for a lot of those voters, running a mile from interrogation of whether that threat was exaggerated it itself extremely loaded.

I'm not sure that many people on the left have started to appreciate quite how bad this has made it look to outside observers, including those who would otherwise not be especially hostile to many of its aims - and the left itself barring some major unheavals in society is never going to be big enough to obtain or sustain any real power or influence without functioning alliances with other groups. As it is the chance of it doing so is increasingly remote and Corbyn's statement was fundamentally damaging to its prospects of doing so again and Corbyn doesn't seem to realise the damage he's done to the left's future prospects this week.

This is a bit overdramatic tbh. The left have different sets of views, for one. Was in a call with the left-wing section of my Labour ward (with a few from other wards invited) last night, which was bought on by Corbyn's suspension and basically the goings on in the party since the Left lost its leadership.

There are basically two camps: one of which is broadly in agreement with Fizzles' post, in the sense that the EHRC report is a bit like an ombudsman report which looked at processes, found them to be inadequate, and are now putting forward a set of recommendations. On that basis the thinking is we ought to go along with a lot of it and work so that processes are improved.

The other camp basically want to die on the Corbyn suspension hill. They think the EHRC is a stitch-up and the right are going to use this to put the boot in on the left. For these individual members the right to free speech is also being threatened as they cannot be seen to be publicly questioning it in a loaded way that Corbyn has, as they will be expelled.

(this is broadly what I saw on Left Twitter btw)

(This all flows into what motion is put in at a Local Labour meeting and I won't talk about what was agreed because its a bit boring)

I was pretty much aligned with he first camp. Not least because Starmer might have had a hand on Corbyn's suspension. One of the members on the call was an immmigration lawyer and she said that most of the time she wins appeals against the Home Office is because we use "their own laws against them" so its almost certain that Corbyn will be re-instated because as people have pointed out it looks like Starmer has broken one of the recommendations on the report on the day it was published! Corbyn's statement was a good demonstration of how badly we managed the power we had, when we had it. Now we have lost it we need to think more strategically - so the Left membership shouldn't look to die on this stupid fucking hill, see it out, and go on trying to, for example, get Left-wingers on councils and the like. "Stay and fight" is just a weird phrase to me.

Ultimately, if you are either a socialist or want to see socialist policies implemented I think being branded all sorts of shit by your opponents who -- and this is key -- hold most of the power then what happens in this or that week is neither here nor there. That also goes for what Corbyn does or doesn't do, but I could sense this is a tough issue because afetr all he is literally the reason so many of the younger members are in the party. But letting go off is a thing to be done. Not least because the bigger picture is one of a world that is being run in a way which is unsustainable (as covid has demonstrated).

95% of the comments I’ve seen from the left Twitter accounts I follow start from the position that the report is careful and fair but has been misrepresented in the press, etc. As someone mentioned at the time, it can be used to validate whichever position you held to begin with.

Not much to add but some really good posts in the last couple of hours.

The camp I am with btw was the majority and had a range of ages. The cranky stuff was spouted by some of the older members - no idea if this is matched across the country but I just want to record this observation.

this has all gone exactly to plan

― imago, Sunday, 1 November 2020 bookmarkflaglink

the right: why are you hitting yourself

the left: well, it's beca-

the right: why are you hitting yourself

― imago, Sunday, 1 November 2020 bookmarkflaglink

I know this is dumb fucking crap but its worth just exploring for a sec. This isn't some Tony Montana-esque grab for power at all costs but about building a place -- whether that's the Labour Party or somewhere else -- where, as a body of people wanting to bring about socialism, that its a place that is safe and considerate for all peoples and their needs. As a party we need a place that is far, far better (more humane, smarter) than the society it seeks to represent. So if it takes 'hitting yourself' to achieve then fine, that's hard work, time and effort. But I know Tories don't know what that is.

^ Yeah, that (Matt DC). Thanks for the initial Fizzles post.