Seizing back control: The ILX lol brexit is how we're all gonna die thread.

i think there are things that can be done quickly - not in terms of individual cases, but for example making a clear statement of intent and setting out an agenda for restructuring the necessary rules and dealing with how the party responds to (social) media stuff. but i don't think anything's actually going to happen in the current status quo.

They have had an investigation, published a report, clarified the guidance, implemented a disciplinary process, etc, etc. What specifically would you like them to do next?

maybe if they had publicly condemned the lack of contrition in that CW apology, it might have at least shown they are not happy with the situation.

or if they did I missed it.

He has had the whip withdrawn and the case is going back to the NEC.

true but I meant rapidly... not after a shitstorm!

a significant impediment currently is the fact that the lab leadership and the PLP are at constant medium intensity factional war, that nothing done will get full-spectrum support, in public briefings or in private counter-briefings

— this is actually one of the "win the day" things the blair team was better at, with the caveats that (a) the underlying situation was very different and (b) their commitment to high-viz win-the-day splurge was often extremely reactionary in outcome (yarl's wood, ASBOs, the drug czar, the fkn iraq war) while the intricate soc-dem solutions behind this splurge did nothing actuyally to change anything, so e.g. the labour PLP was and is actually quite racist across the board since time immemorial, which hugely enrages corbynistas suddenly confronted with "having to clean racism" via quick-fix public whatever

another significant impediment is that mainstream media coverage of all of this is (and will remain) in massive bad faith, and that's before you even look under the bonnet at rightwing AS

none of which is to say that labour under JC is handling what's confronting them particularly well, particularly as certain elements on the left hunker down into ancient familiar paranoid defensiveness (it's only some, but it only takes one for the times to be able to nutpick)

xp

Rhea Wolfson was livid at the time, and they need more Jewish MP's like her .. so they can start sweeping AS under the carpet .. jokes of course!

a secondary problem is that the accusation of racism is of social significance over and above its narrow political context, not only moving towards defamation but also getting into industrial tribunal territory -- which in both cases means lawyering up in other kinds of courts and a case dealt with rapidly but inaccurately much later suddenly returning to explode back all over those who attempted the rapidity

(in these threads i've cnstantly argued that the corbs team eschewing rapidity is more virtue than not in the current mediascape -- with the reservation that i think this is more about temperament and capability than actual strategic choice. it's the strategy bcz JC very much favours non-rapidity, and in many cases he's more right than wrong, BUT he favours it also bcz he's not that great at it, and sometimes in politics it will certainly be needed)

Entirely otm

tl;dr me: the blair team were actually quite gifted at delivering rapid responses to crises* which would be greeted as credible -- but of necessity this meant that credibility was primarily being judged by e.g. the mail and murdoch, all of which the corb team entirely disdains. some of the disdain is merited, some of it springs from long-term weaknesses in the corbyn project

*this didn't really include an AS crisis unless you count their endless tug-of-war with ken-gone-rogue

another significant impediment is that mainstream media coverage of all of this is (and will remain) in massive bad faith, and that's before you even look under the bonnet at rightwing AS

none of which is to say that labour under JC is handling what's confronting them particularly well, particularly as certain elements on the left hunker down into ancient familiar paranoid defensiveness (it's only some, but it only takes one for the times to be able to nutpick)

yes to all of that.

as to what could be done differently i think a lot of it may be about optics and i've just spent 20 minutes trying to cobble together some incoherent thoughts that aren't worth expressing. the complaints procedure for all examples of prejudice, not just AS, could still be made more independent i think. in a case like Williamson's his politics and who his allies may or may not be should be irrelevant.

Agree with all that’s been said but it drives me mad that few condemned Alistair Campbell’s ‘vampire’ campaign against Michael Howard (apart from Luciana Berger, but she wasn’t yet an MP, and when confronted AC told reporters to fuck off and cover something ‘important’) and all these people hollering about AS in Labour never spoke up for Ed Miliband (or his dad) - the only pushback came from the left, and Corbyn in particular.

The double standards are infuriating.

it drives me mad that few condemned*

i mean on one hand this is totally understandable -- bcz it's enraging and unjust -- but on the other hand, we should stop expending energy wishing for the playing field to level itself by itself, bcz it's not going to. i have no thoughts abt how to achieve the leveling which do not involved the return of the guillotine and mme calzino as head tricoteuse (which is also a fantasy and insofar as it is not dispiriting in its unrealism it is nihilistic) (pleasingly nihilistic) (but nihilistic nevertheless)

*iirc luciana berger was one of those who did protest?

lol sorry you just said that abt luciana berger suzy

The complaints procedure seems to be designed to have one vocal supporter of the Palestinians, one vocal supporter or Israel and one bored old man who wants to get home in time for Countdown to cast the deciding vote, so probably some improvement possible. The biggest problem with Williamson is that he hasn’t explicitly broken any rules - he has just skirted around them repeatedly enough to get into trouble - so the outcome is inevitably going to be linked perceptions of his character and politics.

This is always going to be messy, though. The clear-cut cases are fairly easy to deal with. Labour has chucked out more people under Corbyn than they ever did under Blair, partly because of the need to be seen to have robust processes, partly because social media brings more of them to light, The difficulty is almost always going to be in grey areas and idk how they can be dealt with in an apolitical way.

As a reader of CH comments the commentary on there have been banging on about how all immigrants need to take British citizenship to “prove their loyalty” to their country or some shit

lol, I imagine most immigrants - especially those without EU passports - would be happy to! One way to get more people to sign up would be to make this procedure less prohibitively expensive. Kinda hard to imagine a giant influx of immigrants getting voting rights would be something for CH to rejoice about mind.

Oh they don’t think Irish immigrants should be able to vote here either.

I mean, I definitely use ‘who spoke up before’ as a baseline to determine how much some MPs on the right of the party (who spent 2010 to 2015 sniping about ‘wrong brother’ too) are leveraging this for political gain, which a) contributes to freaking out Jewish people to the extent that some would emigrate if Labour get in b) shows they have no interest really in sorting out the problem when it gives them a chance to say Corbyn is the problem. Additionally, let’s not forget:

1. The deputy leader has taken half a mil for ‘office costs’ from the son of the UK’s most famous fascist anti-Semite (I don’t give a flying fuck if it’s Leveson-related; you don’t take donations from someone who does Nazi BDSM under any circumstances). That money was at least partially inherited, too. Yuuuuuuck. Watson would rise in my estimation if he returned it, and *popcorn* if people on the Left start to demand this.

2. We have to determine what percentage of ‘abuse’ online is opposition troll accounts/bots (and who is behind it) and find a way to bring that up without it looking like excusing genuine examples of real people doing AS things.

3. Like any other example of someone saying or doing one racist thing to other BAME individuals or groups, people have to allow the individual some benefit of the doubt, that in anti-racism we can accept that an unacceptable statement or action in most cases doesn’t mean someone is a racist, particularly if the person is contrite after having an objection pointed out to them. Tropes exist and many people aren’t aware they’re indulging one.

4.

2.

Honestly I think that rapidity of response is a red herring - what matters here is transparency and that's what's lacking. The NDA row feels it just exacerbates all that and it's an entirely avoidable own goal that makes everyone concerned look shifty.

No doubt the party's disciplinary procedures have been a mess since time immemorial but they're going to be shown up by the current situation - you can't have mass membership parties without attracting people with dodgy views and how you deal with them matters.

There's an argument for hiving it all off to an independent committee rather than relying on factional groups with all the vested interests that implies.

Yes previous Labour administrations and Tory governments have been institutionally antisemitic but using that as a defence - even when it's true - just looks like Owen Jones whataboutery.

Sorry, I’m on my phone and it wouldn’t let me scroll down to nuke those bits at the end.

4. There has to be a nice way to pay tribute to Jewish people’s ability to organise to gain mainstream redress when other minorities don’t have this or are denigrated for trying, gaslit, etc. Having grown up with Jewish people who are (still) passionate in fighting antisemitism while also expressing solidarity with more marginalised groups, I find myself very disappointed by British Jewish anti blackness and Islamophobia when I see it, and I’d like to find ways to call that out too.

Just want to raise the question of how much this is essentially playing off different minority groups against each other. For example, you often hear people say “oh if they said that about ANY OTHER minority” but that just isn’t true. Labour isn’t good at dealing with any kind of racism, afaict, and we all know the Tories are far more racist, plus racism in the Tory party is an actual plus in most circumstances. But it must rankle to be seeing Labour constantly pilloried over this form of racism when Sarah Champion and Jess Phillips have both made some vile comments about Islam, when Blue Labour is a non-stop source of “the white working class” type shit and when most of Diane Abbott’s own colleagues actively ignore her treatment. It has to be solved because it’s the right thing to do, and if it costs them the votes of racists, so be it.

There's an argument for hiving it all off to an independent committee rather than relying on factional groups with all the vested interests that implies

i don't disagree with this but if this is the decision that needs making who (to shift out of the passive voice) actually makes and enacts it?

(non-rhetorical question alert: i don't know the answer)

is it NEC as ratified at conference? if so, then who this independent committee is and what constitutes independence is going to generate more than just a few months screaming and time-wasting behind the scenes, with all the wrecking leakage that entails -- it's extremely hard to escape the gravitational pull of faction, and the labour party is basically constructed of decades of work-around avoidance from which faction has been a power source at a given moment, which further in fact embed it via layers and layers of corrosively obscurantist checks and balances

in principle the corbs project is saying "the solution to this is to empower the mass membership!" -- not least bcz democracy has more than mere rhetorical force in this and other situations -- but a. this too is only the start of a big fuck-off fight within the party and b. beyond rhetoric, the corbs project has not actually moved very far forward with this empowerment, perhaps bcz always firefighting -- and faction-fighting -- but also bcz a lot of ppl at the top of the JC team (tho arguably not JC himself) wd actually like more power to return to leadership, per the blair model, than they can often say out loud

Corbyn bang on here

This #Pride, we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. It’s a moment to remember that those “riots” were direct action by an oppressed community, led by black trans activists struggling against a bigoted state.https://t.co/wcTroz73nF

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) July 5, 2019

The blue-tick TERFs are predictably incensed by this tweet.

Good.

That is good news, very glad to see it.

This from the chairman of People’s Vote seems to confirm for the first time that the PV campaign is now unambiguously in favour of Remain, rather than simply a campaign to deliver a referendum while being neutral on the outcome. Quite a big and controversial shift https://t.co/owvHciPmyi

— Robert Peston (@Peston) July 7, 2019

waht

moderately warm take: famous people are exponentially more likely to be TERFs than regular people, why are they so invested in it though?

re: the Peston tweet....is he being disingenuous or dumb? I feel like some of these people are so caught up in their own narratives and frameworks that they are genuinely surprised when entirely obvious things contradict picture they've prepared

xp my overwhelming thought for these people is always ‘really? THIS is the hill you want to die on?’

if you google graham lineham you get a whole page of his transphobic activities and there might be a brief mention of comedy somewhere. it's almost like that hill is the only thing he's get left in his life now and he's very nice plot in a prime spot on it. If you google other famous TERFs like Greer or Helen Lewis you get mixed results showing that they have plenty of other bigotries/controversies/spinning bullshit plates on the go to keep them busy!

They're not used to being challenged on their liberal bona fides and gang up when they're perceived as under attack. When your key marketable talents are having the 'right' opinions and knowing the right people, that shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. 'Criticise Hadley Freeman / Graham Linehan and you criticise us all' has a measure of truth to it. It's a symptom of a media class being outflanked by the left more broadly and clinging on to relevance.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/08/labour-centre-ground-jeremy-corbyn

This prompted a further thought: how easy it would be to construct a pretty decent cabinet from Labour’s backbenches: Jess Phillips, Seema Malhotra, Owen Smith, Stephen Kinnock, Gloria De Piero, Angela Eagle and David Lammy for a start. Then add in a handful of existing frontbenchers – Tom Watson, Keir Starmer – and, before you knew it, you’d have the basis of an electable Labour government with a fighting chance of uniting the country and governing it competently.

dying

fucking hell, it's like the last 4 years never happened

I read part of a Guardian article the other day full of whimsical daydreaming and imaginations of alternate near futures entirely routed in magical thinking. Chastened right wingers in rags begging to be let back into the EU, surrounded by wild dogs presumably created immediately after Brexit, I can live without another exercise in vacuous fantasy

A cabinet of all the talents!

I have to say I’ve never understood why Corbyn never gave Lammy a post - I’d rather see him in Shadow Cabinet than, just for example, Nia Griffith.

D'Ancona October 2018: This prompted a further thought: how easy it would be to construct a pretty decent magazine from melt Twitter and the broadsheets' back pages: James Bloodworth, Peter Hoskin, David Patrikarakos, that son of a Viscount or something who was accused of sexual assault, etc. and, before you knew it, you’d have the basis of an outlet capable of effortlessly juggling print and digital while skewering the sacred cows of left and right with the elan of a 1930s New York salon.

D'Ancona January 2019: Ah well, nevertheless...

making ridiculous melt-tastic fantasy Labour XIs could be a symptom of losing your grip on reality.

I saw Yvette Cooper and Stella Creasy chatting over a cup of tea. Which got me thinking: it was no stretch at all to imagine these two talented politicians as prime minister and chancellor, discussing the forthcoming comprehensive spending review.another decade of austerity - but done with a heavy heart this time!

that's what i love about the piece, it's like a beautiful daydream

Glinner is a total zoomer and has been for some time. Extremely cool how he targeted an RSPCA employee as being a threat to children, just because the guy had a kink profile & was gay.

OK Graham Linehan is an Irish man that I have no problem with the Brits claiming as British

— adam (@RummHammm) June 1, 2018

100% chance that shadow cabinet fantasists don’t really get why people hate Blair.

Clearly not awake enough to have realised that I wrote RSPCA when I meant NSPCC - imago, make sure to stick that on the xls

it's not even so much that D'Anconas still exist as that the Graun is still plugging away with them

Where do I get that kind of conditionless funding to write my own witless screeds? I mean, I’ve never voted Tory or had a failed website which puts me ahead of him on several metrics.

I'm guessing it gets clicks and can be spun as broadening 'debate', ditto Simon Jenkins. D'Ancona - the former editor of The Spectator - is better when writing about the Tories' problems because he actually understands that world and comes from it.

But he's also the guy who described Osborne's disastrous 2016 Budget as "deeply moral" which shows you how he can write an entire column on The Sensible Grown Ups In The Room without austerity occurring to him as a contributory factor. These people aren't seriously engaging with the question of why their favourites aren't trusted by the membership they need to win over.

That is a truly amazing article (though I agree with gyac about Lammy, if he'd take the post)

I think there might be a translation issue with these articles to be fair, they probably look better in the original language before the clapping emojis between each word are removed