the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

This period of attack is going to be ceaseless though

"get the cranks out of politics" = "get the salt out of the sea"

xxp I don't think that soft-peddling the crank-condemnation has worked as a strategy though, otherwise we wouldn't be in the position we're in now? There are for sure a lot of ppl that will continue to attack Corbyn as beyond the pale no matter how much condemning he does, I think the ppl backing Willsman are correct to say it's naive to think that (e.g.) the Times op-ed pages are going to be "ah, fair play" and leave it there if Corbyn came out against him and similar cranks, but that's not the point, it's necessary for Corbyn to do anyway.

Also, concern about anti-semitism goes beyond the ppl who are incurable enemies of Corbyn and the left, I think there's a significant constituency that would support him/the left in some scenarios but could be permanently alienated if they don't get a grip on this stuff

This period of attack is going to be ceaseless though

this will be true whoever is leader

the corbyn wing does have to be thinking right now properly and clearly abt who comes next tho, even if they're not talking about it yet -- one of the weird failures of the blair makeover of the party was that it had *so* little forethought abt its successor cadres

I've been mildly amused by "this period of attack". Most people are off on holiday.

Imagine someone, somewhere is running a poll to see the effect on this on Labour's ratings. xps

Also, concern about anti-semitism goes beyond the ppl who are incurable enemies of Corbyn and the left, I think there's a significant constituency that would support him/the left in some scenarios but could be permanently alienated if they don't get a grip on this stuff

I seriously think you are overstating this in terms of electoral outcome. Labour lost some council seats in *checks notes* Barnet. Was that it?

Like I said a lot of this is due the fact that ppl don't care about racism - which is true because we turn away from Islamophobia all the time.

Well, I hope you're right

Not so much about the racism bit

" Most people are off on holiday."

lol. You must be joking! Although listening to BBC reportage on Labour Antisemitism on the DAB whilst out in the local greenbelt has always seemed better than Tolcarne beach to me!

A rabbi stood for the Tories in Kersal (in Salford), which has a large Jewish population, and won it from Labour in the May elections. There have been Jewish graves vandalised in at least a couple of different cemeteries round Manchester recently, it's grim

I don't think that anti-semitism allegation have a big direct effect on electoral outcome, I agree that most of the electorate just doesn't care all that much, but I think it can indirectly damage electability by losing the support of ppl in politics/media/etc ("influencers" I guess?)

has the corbyn project ever had the support of ppl in media tho? i think on the whole not -- even OJ wobbled! i think part of its gamble -- and part of its effectiveness -- has been to end-run the very controlling blair-cameron approach, on the not-unconvincing grounds that much of what we're seeing in the unravelment of politics as we had grown used to it is ppl reacting against that kind of control

Also if people are coming into politics these days do you think the Labour party will serve them by being more bothered by anti-semitism, or less?

And no the answer isn't some sort of Caroline Lucas/Ocasio-Cortez being Labour leader dreck that yer LJs of this world are going on about.

Genuinely can't parse this.

end-run the very controlling blair-cameron approach

just to unpack this a bit: blair and cameron made no moves -- and very much shaped policy -- round the ways they could make it play in the media, endlessly pampering and thus pre-empting their own coverage. the corbyn project has bent the stick a LONG way in the other direction tactically, which of course suits their personal temperaments and their ethos -- it remains to be seen whether they need to become more flexible here (i find it hard to judge bcz my own political tastes get in the way)

LJ (and this is a lot of ppl within Labour) is for someone with Corbyn's politics but without that specific old-left baggage. Someone with better communication skills and so on. At least that's what I'm getting - I've never given enough of a shit to delve in it too deeply. xp

apropos of nothing being discussed at the moment: this profile of theresa may and the quietly-blooming mushroom cloud of brexit in the new yorker is a great read and i don't think it's been posted on ilx yet (?)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/30/theresa-mays-impossible-choice

lol. You must be joking!

Well lets talk when parliament re-opens and May has to get Brexit through. We'll see who gives a damn about the NEC then.

OJ has definitely wobbled (as has Ellie Mae O'Hagan and Abi Wilkinson).

one of the blunt facts abt all politics -- i am in apothegm-delivery mode today apparently -- is that while old ppl go away all the time, old baggage really never goes away

young people often get useful stuff done by not realising this tho

also many a mickle makes a muckle

i submit that old ppl in politics don't go away enough or early enough tbh

*often enough or early enough

logansrun.png

I'm not convinced we can pin all this on the Terrible Old Left btw.

i blame the future

it's not what it used to be, that's for sure

xx..xxp Is there anything you can see on this page that might count as specific old-left baggage

well we're all talking abt politics in english

As I see it people are routinely complaining about how Corbyn -- while acknowledging how much of this is driven by a press that is hostile to him -- has dealt with the anti-semitism as an issue, which goes back to parts of the old left that minimised this as an issue. xp lol

is that while old ppl go away all the time

Actually I read a tweet from an anarchist who joined Labour last year saying that loads of the old lot are fucking up Momentum. I don't know how much of that is true.

while we're talking about the various ways in which the Corbyn project could go horribly wrong, I've seen some people raise the concern that it could degenerate into something like Blue Labour, based on the reluctance to defend freedom of movement, the 'vote labour to protect our police' stuff etc?

something like this thing that Oskar Lafontaine and Sahra Wagenknecht are pushing in Germany:

As well as rallying around traditional leftwing causes such as disarmament and a reversal of Germany’s Hartz IV labour market reforms, an unsigned position paper circulating around Berlin political circles in recent weeks suggests the movement will also advocate law and order policies and a tougher stance on immigration. “Open borders in Europe means more competition for badly paid jobs,” says the paper, which is headed “fairland”.

Stegemann, who is not a member of any political party, said he was frustrated with middle-class leftwing intellectuals lecturing working-class Germans for their sceptical reaction to Angela Merkel’s decisions at the height of the refugee crisis.

“We are dealing with an absurd situation when the winners of neoliberalism tell the losers that they must be more humane. And it galls me when politicians think it is enough to pass down moral judgments. No, politics must act.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/22/german-leftwingers-woo-voters-with-national-social-stance

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/07/24/lafo-j24.html

What Corbyn has done -- and what mark s sorta hinted at in one of his posts above -- is to appear nice and affable but also staying under the radar in these periods of attack. All I've seen from Corbyn is a statement for one event. Note the young Novara crowd are going "Corbyn must say cranks are not going to be tolerated blah blah" and he he has rightly said nothing to that. Any left Labour leader will find themselves and this project under severe attack and it needs someone of just this kind of temperament to lead it - so whatever his faults..xps

The problem with this is that it doesn't distinguish between the times when sailing above the fray is justified and the times when it's (both morally and electorally) unjustified or actively damaging. Just because the press are after you doesn't mean they won't occasionally have a point. This is the second case and that's why it's so damaging. If your main reaction is "this won't really affect Labour's electoral chances" then you're not really taking it seriously and that's a problem in itself.

On a moral level it's a disaster because *we should expect better*. On a political level it could be the difference that loses them another election.

Don't think most Jewish religious groups are particularly arsed which group leads the Labour Party tbh. As far as they're concerned that's trivial shit.

OJ has definitely wobbled (as has Ellie Mae O'Hagan and Abi Wilkinson).

This purity test bullshit is just that. Are you just casually saying that the ongoing nonsense - putting aside factional and opposing motives and arguments not made in good faith - will blow over without any damage? Because that’s not true and hugely dismissive.

but without that specific old-left baggage.

Criticism isn’t the same as an attack. Corbyn has long had dissenting voices in the shadow cabinet and the party but he’s weirdly stubborn on this and it is absolutely not doing him any favours.

tl;dr if you’re sick of the press talking about antisemitism in Labour, it helps if there’s nothing to back that up on. Some of the old stories brought up this week have been pretty flimsy but it’s the new stuff that keeps it going.

Also a lot of people will be thinking - if Corbyn can't even keep this one party issue under control, or even demonstrate that he's willing to do what it takes to get to grips with it, how's he going to react when faced with a genuine crisis as PM?

weirdly stubborn

i keep going back to this but his stubbornness is closely connected to how he's learned over a lifetime in politics to steer away from vituperetive splits (which are endemic on the far left) -- and therefore not weird, in the sense that it has actually to date (medium- and long-term) served him well. i absolutely think they should have got in ahead of this problem earlier, but with the best will in the world this can only have meant between the election last year and now, and whenever it was confronted it was always going to lead to something like this

In light of the awful new legislation passed through Israel, is it not reasonable to say “it’s fine to criticise the government and it should be done” while drawing a firm line across the kind of people who use Israel’s atrocities to harass Jewish people in this country?

Corbyn agrees with you. The harrassment applies to a small minority in the Labour membership. The baggage doesn't apply to Corbyn himself but the range of people in the left he is able to connect with so they become Labour Party members.

Pressed submit early:

This purity test bullshit is just that. Are you just casually saying that the ongoing nonsense - putting aside factional and opposing motives and arguments not made in good faith - will blow over without any damage? Because that’s not true and hugely dismissive.

Its not a purity test. iirc OJ went concern trolling when he should've used his brain. He's shut up since the election, apologised and even hung out with Alastair Campbell for his sins! You go ahead and read his column. Waste your time with that.

Sounds like you’ve got me pretty bang to rights there. Absolutely those were the points that I was making.

xxxp I'm going to have to ask you to have another go at the second sentence there - as it is, it reads as "there aren't a lot of left-wing Jews so *shrug*"

If you mean that it's fine because the anti-semites aren't a large enough group, they are still larger than zero, and growing. I've always been one of the first to make the point that the longer you've been involved in left-wing politics, the longer you've seen the right use the left's natural position on Palestine as a stick to beat us with. But there's a councillor in Bognor Regis half Corbyn's age posting on Facebook about executing blood-drinking Jews - that seems like a reasonable sign that enough is fucking enough.

Yes, and a lot of the angriest people on this are the natural allies, the left wing Jewish members and voters and commentators, and they are upset because they’ve had Corbyn’s back on so much and yet this he can’t deal with.

From what I see twitter Left Jewish Labour haven't abandoned Corbyn but they have been erased in these debates.

That’s not the issue, have they abandoned him. Should it have to get to that point? Look at the timeline of any of the people who have defended him, just utter shit from both supporters and opponents both. Do you think that any of these people want to be talking about antisemitism constantly?

It will always get to that point because of Corbyn's pro-Palestinian politics, that's ultimately what's driving this. Removing him isn't going to stop the next leader getting attacked in some way.

Corbyn and many on the left are anti-imperialists and as I said a bit above, because the conversation isn't carried out in good faith it will always get to that point and it will be constant because the groups raising it basically don't want to pay tax.

This is really just trolling now, right? Who would read mentions of people defending Corbyn who share most of his views (including on Palestine) and conclude that the problem was tax dodgers?

Everyone seems to have forgotten Ed Miliband was criticized for being anti-Israel and the worst Labour leader for the Jewish community ever etc etc etc.

Everyone seems to have forgotten Ed Miliband

could have stopped there tbf

the reason for taking action isn't to reduce or deflect media criticism, bcz this won't happen (bcz too much of it is in bad faith)

it is to place labour in an unimpeachable *rhetorical* position when it comes to tackling racism in general, and to build cross-community support: at the moment it is clearly more vulnerable than it wants to be to the usual media whataboutery, and this can be leveraged beyond places where it's ignorable (the telegraph, the spectator) just by constant squall

gyac's point abt loyal corbyn supporters left in horribly over-exposed positions right now, attacked by both side, is pertinent bcz it can and will exhaust and deplete in-party support. i continue to think that something very much like this would have taken place had this been firmly addressed say 12 months ago, and this trial-by-fire was always coming. obviously i'd hugely prefer it was now a bad memory from last year deftly finessed (but it was never going to be finessed)

ed was good not bad, shut up

tbh I'm not sure what to think of a labour leader's stance on Israel till I've heard Maureen Lipman's very thoughtful take!