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

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

Also since these people seem to like torturous football metaphors so much every time they hail someone from either party as the future - latest example is Rory Stewart - it puts me in mind of some Ligue 1 YouTube wonderkid who you know is going to end up playing for Newcastle, Galatasaray and then in the Swiss second division.

he uses populism as a pejorative to dismiss a quite tamely centre-left (in the EU scheme of things) Labour manifesto because it opposes austerity, and he seems have zero curiosity as to why austerity might be very unpopular with 40% of the electorate. Just let the adults get on with grown up politics.

*I'm probably repeating what has already been post xps edit*

More plausible explanation - Matthew D'Ancona had about 15mins to write a column in between shopping and packing for holiday.

If only these Political Lionesses were given free reign, they would comfortably beat Farage and Boris with incisive and persuasive argument, switching the play with wit and logic. One even wonders if there might be a place on the bench for Toni Duggan! Watching the country get behind our Political Lionesses on a strong Remain platform would be a joy to behold. I would wager money that they could go one further than their footballing counterparts and bring the EU Membership Trophy home, defeating a bedraggled Leave side devoid of ideas (and with their own strikers banned due to financial irregularities the karma would be complete). One can indeed dream!

xp
Peter Bradshaw once used that excuse for giving a hot 4 star review to some execrable pile of garbage.

Lammy's too busy actually bothering to respond to his trolls on Twitter too often - the pigs like it etc.

Luckily I have access to funding to write bottomless screeds about how being a mere liberal is not good enough in an age of austerity, corrupt government, rising homophobia, racism and sexism, widening inequality and all the rest. I’m on it.

Lammy was probably offered a shadcab role but turned it down.

Lammy has spoken about this and said he wasn’t and he wasn’t under Miliband either and seems bitter about it.

the book of Lammentations

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.

aren't Kinnock and De Piero both outspoken critics of Labour backing a second referendum? it's difficult to imagine them finding common ground with Lammy, Starmer etc

Tom Watson has been terrible as shadow DCMS for the entire time he’s been prioritising palace coups and the like, he ought to be told to fix up.

Kate Hoey is not standing again, which avoids the need for removing her. idk if the DUP have any vacancies.

Hooray!

(Just wait, Amy Lamé will try to win that seat, having come very close to being selected to replace Tessa Jowell).

Lol wtfffff

Sad to see you leave the Commons. A principled MP.

— John McTernan (@johnmcternan) July 8, 2019

I mean, she is quite principled? Her principles are like "fox hunting and Hard Brexit are good, accountability to your constituents, gay rights and spitting in football are bad", but they're certainly out there

anyway, good riddance, may the good people of Vauxhall never have a headbanger parachuted in as their MP ever again

do any of you have a suggestion of something to read to understand the Labour anti-semitism hullabaloo ? I’ve tried googling around but seem to find only cagey, meta-level commentary: eg “so-and-so said xyz which reignited the abc controversy” and I can’t decipher what the issues are. I was thinking, is this like “is it racist to say Zionism is racist”? but I can’t tell from what I’ve read. And one reads that the issues of Labour with anti-semitism are historic and long-standing: what of that can I read?

Just totally lolled at that piece on Universal Credit scammers on pm. Job centre staff talking about false claims made for peaple with 3 kids called hah, hah and hah! A 19 year old women with 6 blind children. Someones claim made for a landlord called Harry Kane!