Another report was funded by the Labour Party itself.
Both reports described discriminatory and racist language and behaviour, and the EHRC finding was that Labour had broken the law.
Those are the facts. Not knowing the facts about a long-running and abstruse political dispute in a foreign country is completely understandable. But if you’re going to express such a strong opinion about what the facts are, you should try harder not to buy into obvious partisan lies.
The tribal urge to automatically defend political allies is why this problem festered within the Labour Party in the first place.
All this leaves out that Labour was going through an internal war and the centrist faction was shooting itself in the foot to purge Corbyn’s leftist faction. The accusations against Corbyn were disputed, even by Jewish groups: Antisemitsm in the UK Labour Party - Rebuttals - Wikipedia
These allegations always happen when a politician criticizes Israel’s apartheid. It’s disingenuous to call Corbyn racist and absurd to say that Sanders meets with racists for clout.
There is an issue with those things in Labour, but Corbyn was yeeted for pissing off the Centrists, and for losing (largely because the Centrists sabotaged)
That said, I do think Corbyn was politically around the same level of electoral competence as the Florida Democratic Party.
It seems like there are a lot of attempts to suggest that Corbyn just coincidentally kept being involved with all that racism and antisemitism, by accident… I don’t think I buy that.
From what I’ve been told from folks over there- his anti-semitism was not giving a blank check to Israel. He’s definitely been against Israeli aggression in an absolute way, in a way no American politician outside of Omar could be.
I definitely have no love for Corbyn, I just feel the hate-boner some have is order above justice in nature, and the current Labour party is a wet noodle (only the SNP seems to be good in the UK these days)
There’s an issue to a greater or lesser extent in all political parties. The problem wasn’t that Labour was particularly antisemitic, the problem was that the leadership tacitly encouraged the antisemites to do antisemitic things, and sabotaged the disciplinary process.
I think with Trump we’ve seen how important it is in a 2 party system that both parties remain in some way moored to the reality based community.
This was someone willing to believe Kremlin propaganda who made a serious go at getting in charge of the country. I mainly want to really emphasize how cranks like him should be seen as what they are and not treated like proper politicians.
For Corbyn personally, I don’t think he’s ever been directly accused of racist language or behaviour. Personally, I wouldn’t even call him racist - given that we almost always treat it as a binary attribute, calling his “see no evil” act racism seems to dilute the word too much. He enabled racists, or excused racists, or chose not to notice racism that happened near him. He was OK taking money from Iranian State TV, because even if they were turning the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into a 24-part TV spectacular while using him to produce state-approved propaganda, that wasn’t the point. They were sound on Palestine. Similarly with many others he shared platforms with. Somehow he just never noticed the hate-filled and anti-Semitic rhetoric they used, and anyway everyone knows that accusations of antisemitism are just what you hear from pro-Israel shills.
And you’re doing the same thing he was. People in your political tribe simply can’t be the bad guys, especially on race. It’s easier to deny all the evidence than to accept that. Corbyn enabled, from the top, a corporate culture that preferred to assume that any mention of antisemitism was just a political slur, and therefore allowed a minority of members whose anti-Israeli beliefs were so strong that they were willing to buy into all the old racist tropes about Jews, up to and including Holocaust denial.
Lol, I’m sorry for not being able to reconstruct the sources of Aceris’ outburst. I did my best to understand why he was was so upset when he did not give any sources or other information. I’ll try to do better on my forensic bibliography next time. /s
Oh wow, a lot to unpack here.
Item #1 is that if you read the report from the EHRC, it is using the word “race” exclusively in the British context, e.g. you guys consider the Jewish religion to be a race. Which is just like, wow. I always forget you guys do that. So you are right, I was misunderstanding the complaint that you and Aceris were making, and did not understand that every time you say “racist” you mean “anti-Semitic”, and every time people say “racist and anti-Semitic” they mean “anti-Semitic and anti-Semitic”. So this whole thing has been an attempt to gentile-splain to Sanders who he should and should not be meeting with. Lol. Sanders is pretty smart! Maybe leave it up to him to decide whether he thinks Corbyn is an anti-Semite and is worth having a cup of tea with.
Item #2
Is that yes, when I was talking about Corbyn’s political opponents, the corporate faction of the Labour Party was primarily what I was talking about. They’ve been involved in a vicious internecine war with the left wing of their party, which I thought was common knowledge & wouldn’t be so confusing to people.
Anyway one of the salvos in that war is detailed here:
Some of the quotes from the right wing:
"One exchange shows a senior official described another from the left of the party as “pube head”. In another, months later, they called her a “smelly cow” and comment that she “had the exact same clothes on yesterday”.
Party staff around the unit were also documented regularly describing people, including colleagues they regarded as not sufficiently opposed to the leadership, as “trots” – short for Trotskyites, or disciples of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Chat logs show that some colleagues who denounced “trots” themselves were in turn themselves privately regarded as “trots” by other staffers for being seen as insufficiently critical.
During the 2015 and 2016 leadership contests a large number of staffers at Labour HQ appear to have worked to exclude those they regarded as “trots” from voting in the election – believing that they would vote for Jeremy Corbyn.
The report says staffers trawled social media to find reasons to exclude voters from the contest, work which was referred to on numerous occasions by staff as variations of “trot busting”, “bashing trots” and “trot spotting”. One staffer described themselves as being “trot smasher in chief”, while another said during the 2015 leadership election that the “priority right now is trot hunting”. In 2015 two officials discussed the fact that they were “playing trot or not” while “the real work is piling up”. A senior official described this work as “saving the Labour party”.
The report claims that “The party’s resources – paid for by party members – were often utilised to further the interests of one faction and in some cases were used to undermine the party’s objectives.” Ahead of the 2017 election officials spoke of channelling resources to candidates critical of the leadership, with one telling colleagues “we need to try and throw cash” at the seat of then-deputy leader Tom Watson, a persistent Corbyn critic. It is claimed that officials operated a “secret key seats team” based in Labour’s London region office in Ergon House, “from where a parallel general election campaign was run to support MPs associated with the right wing of the party”.
An election night chat log shows that 45 minutes after the exit poll revealed that Labour had overturned the Conservative majority, one senior official said the result was the “opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years”, describing themselves and their allies as “silent and grey-faced” and in need of counselling.
Another said: “We have to be upbeat and not show it,” while a third told the group that “everyone needs to smile”, describing the result as “awful”. Another very senior party official said it was going to be “a long night”.
So yes, these people who were perfectly happy to sabotage their own party did an investigation, and shock they discovered that all the people in their party with left wing leanings were in fact anti-Semites and needed to be kicked out immediately.
Anyway, I do not think think that Corbyn is an anti-Semite and should be an untouchable. You seem to strongly disagree, so hey, good luck with that, maybe send Sanders a postcard with an international stamp & convince him otherwise.
One thing that confuses me, what’s the difference between a corporate Labour party person and a Lib Dem?
Lib Dem seems like a more natural home for them (I have a friend in the UK who supported the LIb Dems heavily because of their record on trans rights and they were only opposition to the Tories)
Well, I doubt that such a thing as a “corporate Labour” supporter really exists. That’s more the kind of slur that someone on the democratic socialist side of the party would aim at the social democratic side (not that internal Labour factions label themselves in those terms, but I think they’re approximately correct).
The Lib Dems are often positioned as the centrist party in Britain, but depending on which policy area you’re talking about, they turn out to not be centrist at all. I think in some ways they’re the alternative Left, one that’s almost entirely given up on Marxist analysis to justify its positions. But calling a Lib Dem “corporate” would be considered just as insulting as saying that of a Labour supporter.
You asserted some facts about reports into antisemitism in the Labour Party. Your facts were made up. Many people don’t seem to realise, but it turns out that if you don’t know, you can choose not to have an opinion.
It turns out that if you stop practicing the Jewish religion, that won’t stop the Nazis from trying to kill you based on your ancestry, nor the right-wing nut jobs from identifying you as part of a globalist conspiracy based on your name, nor a member of Momentum from asking how much money the Rothschilds gave you. So if you’re trying to argue that antisemitism doesn’t count as “real” racism…? Well, I don’t know what the fuck kind of point you think you’re making.
No one was confused, you were just talking bollocks. There’s no such thing as a “corporate faction” of the Labour Party, that’s just the insult used for anyone not left-wing enough for your tastes. And despite your repetition of the same lie, the anti-Corbyn faction didn’t get to run the EHRC investigation, nor the large amount of independent reporting on this issue over the years.
You were confused! You were confused and bamboozled. I referenced the Labour report that was used against Corbyn and his faction, and then you came along and linked to the same report and claimed that I did not know about it, and even claimed that I was a liar for referencing it. Despite all of that, despite thinking that I am a liar and a bollocks talker and a buyer into and a repeater of obvious partisan lies, you do eventually come to nearly the same conclusion as I do, e.g. in response to Aceris’ claim that Corbyn is racist I disagree and say:
While you come to the conclusion that:
Like, we both agree that it’s fine for Sanders to meet with Corbyn. So I have no idea why you have a bone to pick with me, rather than with Aceris who disagrees with you and thinks that Sanders is evil for meeting with Corbyn and that Sanders supporters are idiots for being fine with it.
I was making the point that I made, that Americans think of race and of religious and racial discrimination differently than the British do. So over here when we say something is racist, we almost always mean “you were an asshole to someone of a different skin color/ethnicity”. And if we are talking about religious discrimination, we usually state that directly, and say that you were anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic or anti-Amish. But to the American ear it would sound really weird to hear of an anti-Amish hate crime being reported as “racism”. And you can see that confusion in several places from American commenters, e.g. stuff like
The above statement really only makes sense if the racism in question was different from anti-Semitism. And as I mentioned before, I assumed that Aceris was originally talking about something besides anti-Semitism, simply because it would be so weird to condemn Corbyn for anti-Semitism while Corbyn was having a pleasant meeting with Bernie Sanders.
As you know very well, this came after your two one-liner posts that contained the same insult, and nothing else.
Sure, when someone comes to the conversation with “alternative facts”, I won’t hold back when expressing my opinion of those “facts”. On the other hand, I stand behind all of my recent posts that you so selectively quoted from, as listing facts, sourcing of those facts, and a cohesive argument based on those facts.
If you can’t tell the difference between these things, I don’t know what to tell you.
“These are the reasons why I was a dick” is such a time-honored form, but it’s hard to make it work without putting more effort into it than this. Maybe just ignore me?
