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It was barely 5 months ago that Dame Laura Cox issued her withering report on an entrenched culture within Parliament “cascading from the top down, of deference, subservience, acquiescence and silence, in which bullying and sexual harassment have been able to thrive and have long been tolerated and concealed.” Strong stuff. But despite token words of condemnation and promises to learn the lessons and implement the necessary changes, the report – let alone the promised actions – seem to have sunk without trace.
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Ah, but it is easily possible to criticise Israel without being antisemitic. Yes. But less easy to travel back in time and not make crass comparisons of Israel and the Nazis (and it is ironic that one of Corbyn's keenest critics has also used absurd Nazi comparisons against his leadership). And since the IHRA definition also mandates taking a firm line against other states, it is not actually that easy.
That, in a nutshell, is Corbyn's and Labour's problem: not now but the recent past; not this week's speech but the past few decades'; not Jews but Israel. There is a strand on the left that is unduly exercised by foreign affairs: Israel, Venezuela, and in the past, South Africa. (And not just Labour: remember that in 1974, Heath could not save the Conservative government by coalition with the Liberals because that party wanted to bomb Rhodesia.)
There is also the suspicion this is being stirred up by the right. Well yes, of course it is. That's politics. It is true but does not explain, still less excuse, antisemitism.
Corbyn will step down in a year or two. Unless Theresa May calls a snap election, he will not fight the next one in 2022. His views, and his record, will no longer prevent a change in the zeitgeist.
Thanks for the reminder of how the Cox report was buried, mostly because a large group of MPs think that the guy at the top of that organisation would be useful to them in the coming weeks and months.
Half-asleep, but will give the article a proper look following caffeine infusion.
Also going to start a ramble-blog about F1. Likely nothing too exciting, just mood music from testing.
You really have to take about four paces back, to think to yourself "We are talking about one of our two great democratic parties of the past hundred years. We are talking about an issue that was integral to one of the two great wars of the past hundred years. And that democratic party is now on the wrong side of that issue. Nobody is now arguing that they are. They are arguing by how much - and whether it has the will to do anything meaningful to reduce it."
How the hell could that state of affairs come about? And how the hell does it still have more than about 30 MPs? If instead of anti-semitism, the party was riddled with keyboard warriors who were advocates of paedophilia, safe because those at the top wouldn't boot them out, you have to wonder how many of them would still be MPs proud to wear the red rosette.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/with-a-past-like-hers-margaret-hodge-might-show-a-bit-more-humility-10098871.html
Prominent Labour members implicated in the coverup of this scandal include Hodge, Harman, Corbyn, Macdonnell, Blair...
It looks like he's saying were racist, which we know goes against the facts. So we probably shouldn't do it. Things like that can be used against you. From an electoral point of view the Tories response to their far greater Islamophobia problem is far better from a PR angle.
Betting-wise, since this is a betting site, the main impact of all this is to kill off Boris's leadership chances..
You understand of course that as MP Corbyn wasn't actually anything to do with the running of care homes. Slipped your mind again I'm sure.
That Tom Watson is seen as the last man able to try and sort out the problem, shows how ingrained and pervasive that problem has become.
The High Court found right to rent discriminatory and blocked its further roll-out to the rest of the country.
As with most of Theresa May's works, the policy failed.
Mr Justice Spencer said the scheme had "little or no effect" on its main aim of controlling immigration and even if it had, this was "significantly outweighed by the discriminatory effect".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47415383
Of course he didn't have anything to do with running children's homes. Nobody is suggesting that. But he knew what was happening and failed to report it or take any action over it. That counts as being part of the 'cover up.'
Put it this way - if, knowing what he did, I had acted as he did, I would be sacked and banned from teaching.
The truth is simple. Project Corbyn allowed back in all the screaming anti-semitic nutters. They advocate the right of return of "refugees" - in reality the second and third generation descendents of refugees whose return would sweep the extant Jewish population into the sea. They scream on about how Israel is using financiers to directly corrupt the media to tell lies about the JC. It's blatant open anti-semitism and yet anyone pointing it out is denounced as a Blairite.
Which is the ultimate charge because association with a trice elected Prime Minister who materially transformed the lives of people like Angela Rayner is truly a crime. These hard left agitators are experts at manipulation. Which is how I now read on Facebook from younger "if it's on Facebook it's true" members that the evil Watson is a Blairite. Yes. He personally organised against Blair and was I strumental in Blair going. He's a Blairite apparently. Says someone who doesn't undertake d what a Blairite is, what it means, or who the key players were and what they did.
It truly is 1984 levels of bullshit. Which is why Watson has to keep track. Because when LOTO is actively squashing moves against headbangers because they are allies, when Formby is doing literally nothing, then what else is he to do?
However, what ‘The Independent’ article does not mention is that one of the main perpetrators of the abuse was a (now dead) prominent Labour activist in Islington Labour Party.
Hodge does bear a terrible responsibility for failing to do any thing -- actually worse, attacking the victims -- but the allegations against the individual concerned must have been known more widely in the local Labour party.
I don’t think YDoethur’s suggestion is out-of-the-question.
This is not some out of control fringe, but the heart of the operation. They cut their teeth on Iraq/Blair, sharpened them on the Tories/austerity and bite hard into anyone and everyone that threatens the Corbyn project. They have a holier than thou, blind missionary zeal. They wear a white hat and for that reason can do nothing wrong.
In doing so they created the conditions that caused many to cross the line and to continue to cross the line on AS and other issues. And yet for all that, the leadership doesn’t seem to take ownership of the monster they have created. They wash their hands and say it’s not in their name.
Oh. Just Tories was it? Ah. Awkward......
I can think of no problem or injustice which will not be magnified by an investigation by Tom Watson.
In other contexts we are warned not to apply the standards of today to activities in the past.
Not defending, just saying.
After your last post on this subject, I was left feeling that you had too much faith in systems and procedures. This one leaves me feeling the other way, that all complaints systems depend on the people who are respnsible for them .. and they will never be perfect, either.
So it is back to a hunt for an analogue of democracy - the least worst system.
On the specifics - progress on Parliamentary bullying will not happen until Bercow is defenestrated, and it is a material issue in the following Speaker's election. I don't think they will accept a "suspend while investigating' paradigm for bullying *or* sexual abuse complaints, given the recent string of failed / false sexual abuse complaints against Parliamentary figures - it is too open to abuse for political purposes as a system.
On antisemitism, consider Paul Flynn. Whilst being an Expenses Saint, Paul Flynn's 'dual loyalties' was imo also an example of casual antisemitism. Like many of the current incidents, after his 'dual loyalties' comment he just could not see what was wrong, so any apology is for 'choice of words', which is a mere triangulation.
I think there is a Corbyn-Bercow parallel. Bercow cannot deal with bullying because he is implicated; Corbyn cannot deal with AS because doing so resolutely that would involve washing away a chunk of his own powerbase.
I am not sure on Watson. I know him as a Brownite machine-politician with some big pluses (eg his Open Rights work), and some big minuses.
However, this isn't about legal responsibility. I was pointing out that he was involved in a cover-up. He may just have been involved because he's quite lazy and not very bright and failed to ask the right questions, but he's still involved.
For that I am afraid he has a problem. As do so many other organisations (and the Tories' and Liberals' hands are not clean on this either).
Edit - you asked me where I got this from. It was actually John Mann who raised it during the leadership election, so of course the cult will dismiss it as a Tory smear. Before that, indeed, I had never heard of Corbyn (ah for those happy days of innocence and bacon sandwiches). Being rather startled by it, I did some further research and came across some very disturbing investigations in the Islington Gazette from the mid 90s. Not sure if they're still online, but they were pretty shocking.
If the Labour party was actually institutionally antisemitic, as distinct from anti-Zionist, Lansman (founder of Momentum) and E.Miliband (the previous leader) would also be hounded out. The Italian Fascist party had Jewish supporters and even ministers until the mid 1930s, but they were expelled and some subsequently killed after Italy's rapprochement with Germany consequent to the Abyssinian affair in 1935. That is what happens when a political party actually becomes institutionally antisemitic.
Regarding WW2, other than from a Jewish perspective, and in some of the countries where it took place (mainly in eastern Europe), the Holocaust was a minor detail in the history of WW2, particularly from an Allied perspective. It had nothing to do with the reason why the UK declared war or how it undertook it, and barely gets a mention in Churchill's epic 6 volume history of WW2.
As for the Tory party, its current leader was shameless in the use of the classic antisemitic trope "citizens of nowhere" (akin to Stalin's phrase "rootless cosmopolitans").
To give you an example, I witnessed in the pub an old comrade 6 sheets to the wind ranting on (as usual) about the media. Then on to how the Jews were controlling the media and spreading lies about The JC. Then onto how Israel was paying £300 @ week to a rival local activist to do his apparent false flag obsessions about AS.
Another old comrade who was sat listening to this still loudly denounces anyone who says we have an AS problem as he himself has apparently never witnessed any. They are so anti-capitalist anti-establishment that they don't get how these paranoias spill over into overt AS.
And no. I haven't reported it. What's the point?
Personally, even as someone who was on the Labour Friends of Israel executive, I don't think that people who are against Israel are necessarily anti-semitic, which if it means anything sensible means "hostile to people who are Jewish, irrespective of anything else about them". Anti-semitism in that crude form is both idiotic and extremely rare and has been ever since WW2. As Sean Fear observes, one way that people critical of Israel can slide into it is believing that Israel, with all its faults, is propped up by a global conspiracy, and anyone Jewish is automatically part of it.
After WW2 and the Holocaust, virtually anyone with a shred of decency felt sympathy for Jews feeling they needed a safe homeland (basically that's what made me join LFI), and for some that extended to shrugging off the impact on Palestinians. But it has never been wicked to say (however unrealistically) that ultimately Jews and Palestinians would be better off if there was a unified secular state. It becomes wicked if one extends that to supporting war or terrorism or, more relevantly, to eyeing Jewish people with suspicion as "part of the conspiracy".
I don't think the litmus test for anyone on this should be what they think about the Middle East - even if they think Israel is malign and should be replaced, that's one-sided but ultimately it's just an opinion unless it mutates into support for war. The litmus test for anti-semitism is whether you have a theory about what "most Jewish people are like". If you do, you're a racist nutter and should be thrown out of any sensible party, following legally-sound but nonetheless speedy procedures (and frankly our procedures are ludicrously slow for all kinds of suspension). There are clearly some nutters like this in Labour who have been dealt with too slowly or too leniently. But I think that some critics, inside and outside the party, are in turn generalising too much, sometimes because they're eager to have a go at Corbyn or Labour in general. We should address the issue seriously, but there is an edge of hysteria to some of the criticism that shouldn't be accepted.
It's a view, I suppose. Not one I share.
Churchill of course was only interested in two things: (1) all the battles and (2) his own brilliance in winning the war(!). The Holocaust wasn't relevant to that.
I think you will find however that it was very relevant at, say, the Nuremberg trials. It was also a key theme running through Foreign Office documentation for most of the period 1941-44 (1942 being of course the year when rather over half the victims were killed) and a key concern of the papacy (which is ironic given what Pius XII has subsequently been accused of).
Keep digging......
There is a very old and useful saying: when you are in a hole, stop digging.
"...the Holocaust was a minor detail in the history of WW2, particularly from an Allied perspective. It had nothing to do with the reason why the UK declared war..."
Might that be because the war started before the full horrors of the Holocaust were unleashed, and certainly before they were known to the Allies?
But by 1942 there was a fairly strict limit to what could actually be done by the allies to stop the Holocaust. Neutral powers, Sweden, Switzerland and the Vatican, were better placed to help but had fewer resources to do so.
The Nuremberg trials happened after WW2 ended, and are not relevant to how and why the war was conducted at the time.
For one atrocity among many - I'm struggling to think of another occasion when people were systematically gassed, their hair cut off to make blankets, their gold teeth pulled out for ingots and the fat from their bodies used to make soap. Can you help me here? It seems a little unusual, to say the least.
Your second point is ludicrous. You said it was a minor detail. I was pointing out that the Nuremberg trials give the lie to that. Your response that they had no bearing on how the war was fought is a non sequitur.
I don't know why I debate people like this. Maybe because there's nothing funnier than watching people like you squirm as your myths are demolished.
Could there even be a narrowly lost MV2 this week followed by a weekend of urgent arm-twisting and MV3 on the 12th?
https://spotlightonabuse.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/keith-vaz-and-the-mystery-of-barnes-common/
What you have done this morning is demonstrate you have no clue what you're talking about, and whether deliberately or not you are now spouting Nazi propaganda, Try to get your facts from history books written by sane people, not from Irving, Cornwell, Hochhuth, Faurrison, Zundel or Katz.
To everyone else, have a good morning.
The EU giving ground - not going to happen.
Cox just modifying his previous interpretation - could happen right away.
The Germans, in diverting resources to their "war against the Jews", didn't help their fighting war effort, but it was only in Hungary in 1944 that the 2 events were happening at the same time and place.
https://twitter.com/HeleneBismarck/status/1102110283923886080
And doing nothing meaningful to prevent it is not pretty at all.
We had liberal democracy, and then some people chose to leave that to join death cults that would've been considered vicious and deranged even a thousand years ago.
I don't know what's worse. Industrialised killing, or chopping people up in person.
And what about the Rohingya in Myanmar?
She is seeking a free vote
Though I do like the point about how many of the most intensely loyal Corbyn supporters in effect call Corbyn a liar by adopting positions denying a problem or seeing it all as a weapon against him, even where he has said that is not the case.