Ne'er get thee stitched til Booris be ditched: UK General Election 2019

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Worst take of the day

In all seriousness, this makes a mockery of legitimate, life-dependent human rights, like, I don't know, the freedom of religion. But I guess Labour are too far gone on that one. https://t.co/Oc53WWgrqv

— Will Tanner (@Will_Tanner) November 15, 2019

While I don't really want this thread to become like the USpol threads (impotently mocking the tweets of our enemies for 900 posts a week), there is some god-tier shithead content coming out today

I mean this thread has at least three big advantages over the US politics threads I can think of...

And yeah, point taken, but it remains completely insane. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.

MENA is where the real headz hang out

just been youtubing the leadership debate from 2015 where Corbz rinses Cooper in a discussion on PFI's/quantitative easing, where she gets increasingly angry but doesn't manage to land one blow on him and all her pro PFI/austerity lite arguments have aged so badly, her fiscal credibility is way to the right of the current tories and Corbz is sounding just about where he is now.

I love cunt chicken season. feel like the manifesto is going to include some proper piss boilers and I am here for it

Successful domination of the news cycle for an entire day though. They should drop one policy a day for the rest of the campaign.

I feel like the manifesto is going to be packed full of goodies, like an excellent advent calendar

Are the Tories even going to attempt their own one this time?

They’re holding on til December

submarine strategy. presumably think polling is so good why ruin it by attracting scrutiny. seems dumb to me - letting labour do all the running

december 13 iirc xp

especially when voters are so volatile these days

I’m getting annoyed with some of my fellow journalists saying it’s a fact Corbyn is an antisemite rather than, you know, an opinion they hold about him.

Any British Jews itt?

My sister-in-law is Jewish and she thinks Corbyn is an anti-Semite and, on Facebook, was bemoaning the fact that she has no-one to vote for. One of her friends said he was holding his nose and voting Tory and got pelters for it.

How would you (not necessarily you, Tom) respond to this piece?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/09/jews-brexit-boris-johnson-jeremy-corbyn

To be clear, I’m talking about journos who aren’t Jewish, who never had anything to say about the subject until a politician they already disliked or considered ‘unelectable’ became prominent.

I responded to the piece back when it was published by saying if Jonathan Freedland saw Corbyn walking on water, the headline would be LABOUR LEADER CAN’T SWIM.

the piece was posted less than 24 hours after freedland had himself done a racism.

this is a good piece on the topic:
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/11/corbyn-and-antisemitism.html?m=1

a jewish centre-left friend of mine loathes corbyn for his anti-semitism.

xxp comparisons with disbelief in the miracles of Jesus perhaps unsuitable in this instance lol

But it's not just about Jonathan Freedland. He summarizes the views of an important segment of the Jewish community, including many who are by no means hostile to Corbyn's policies.

well, shit, guess they're gonna vote against the policies they like then

was going to post that. my personal feeling is that he’s made some ill-judged moves usually on some sort of Palestine vector, which is a problematic space on the left and includes some nasty anti-semitic fellow travellers, but has himself supported religious communities of all sorts including Jewish communities and their interests.

xp

pom also correct - using my friend as an example to generalise from, freedland’s view is representative of a large segment of jewish people.

My sister-in-law would definitely vote Labour but for Corbyn, she's anti-Independence so voting SNP is a problem, but I reckon that's what she'll end up doing. Her constituency is Tory just now.

The footage of the 'British sense of humour' speech still makes me deeply uncomfortable, I'm not convinced he personally is antisemitic but he has definitely been guilty of unthinkingly repeating antisemitic tropes and playing to an antisemitic crowd. Whether there's any difference there really I don't know, I wouldn't blame any Jewish person for feeling trepidation at the very least and it's a bad look for anyone to be dismissing or belittling that. It's also not the only example of antisemitism we've seen from Labour (Michael Howard as a pig, anyone) and I have no time for non-Jews who only decide antisemitism is bad when it suits them politically.

At the same time it's awful to see the concerns of the black British community, who have seen friends and relatives literally involuntarily repatriated, overlooked in these 'can't put Corbyn into Number 10' pieces. Like it or not it's Corbyn or Johnson and British Jewish people are not the only minority with reasons to feel fearful right now.

I mean Tory MEPs literally voted in support of Viktor Orban but apparently there's only one party with an antisemitism problem.

the tories are also rabidly anti-muslim as a party and there's way less ink-spilled regarding that

that british sense of humour thing was bad on many levels.

yes - that is one of the most frustrating parts of this discussion. the focus on tory party islamophobia elides their own very real issues with antisemitism. the simon wren-lewis article is really good. definitely accept the party has a problem & there’s no doubt that JC’s ascendancy has let fringe elements (suppressed by new labour hegemony) resurface

focus in massive inverted commas there

True, but the Jewish vote plummeted in the Miliband years, when EM made recognition of a Palestinian state official Labour policy. Obviously Corbyn hasn’t altered the two-state policy at all, but I find the “it’s nothing he’s ever *said* but we know what he’s *thinking*’ assertions about him really awful in light of that rationale being trotted out by antisemites re: Jewish people having a hive mind about various things.

tbf to my sister-in-law when one of her friends said he was voting Tory she said "But Boris is an Islamophobe".

Also MDC OTM.

... she also said she'd encountered anti-Semitism from SNP supporters, which I can believe.

Re: that mainly macro blog post:

Corbyn was commenting after the Palestinian ambassador to the U.K., who was born and raised in Jerusalem, had made an ironic statement. Corbyn made the observation that when the ambassador had made the same comment in his address to parliament, some Zionists in the audience “berated” the ambassador for what he said.

He said that those who berated the ambassador “don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, don’t understand English irony either.” By comparison, Corbyn went on, “Manuel does understand English irony, and uses it very effectively.” So Corbyn was not making a remark about all Zionists, let alone all Jews, but a few in particular - those who had misunderstood the ambassador’s remark at the time. There is no hint of any generalisation from a particular group of Zionists to all Zionists in the UK.

I fail to see how context exonerates him in this particular instance? He could've (and should've) just said 'they don't understand irony' tout court.

Jews not understanding irony seems unlikely ime!

I believe he was talking about two men who regularly go to these events mostly to heckle Palestinians, and have form for being rude and disruptive (I watched the footage when it first came to light and it came off, to me, like someone telling off a native English speaking bigot for being rude to someone whose first language isn’t English, who nevertheless has a better command of it than the rude native).

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/germany-ends-tampon-tax/

^ Labour could knock our socks off by going further on this

I was talking to a friend from Germany and has two children over there the other day and he was telling me about some of their loony left (well according to right wing uk commentariat) policies like free childcare, free school dinners, and think he also said people on benefits get free heating/electricity. He also said the kids at school have a dinner monitor encouraging them to eat their greens or something .. possibly that's nanny state going to far!

yeah, basically germany under christian democrat hegemony seems to be basically luxury space communism compared to anywhere in the anglophone world

need to use basically less

What does that make France?

well france nobody under 40 has a job it seems like so it seems less exciting

I just want to echo what Matt said above re other communities, and we are way past the point of being toxic and this is way too far into people playing communities off each other for their own benefit. Sorry to cite SV’s post yesterday, but a lot of the more racist view is that Corbyn is deliberately peddling antisemtism to appeal to Muslim voters - a view that has been thoroughly discredited and is shockingly racist, yet one constantly alluded to by people who should really know better. Feeling like Lionel Hutz going “there’s racism and there’s racism” - where one is bad and evil and needs rooting out, and the others the kind you do for votes.

In French public discourse Germany's 'mini jobs' are often held up as the slippery last step before zero-hour neo-liberal dystopia.

xp

my kids’ dinner ladies in London definitely tell them to eat their greens! it has provoked a phalanx of inventive skullduggery to get around. take that, Target Culture UK

strange things occurring on AQ tonight. I understand it's probably purdah why the host gave Diane Abbott a warm intro but weird listening to a Surrey studio audience clapping her, but it's obv a very remain audience. Shock horror Claire Fox thinks government owning means of fibre-optic communication is sinister stuff.

The thing that always sticks in my mind about fibre optic cable is that if it breaks in your hands and cuts you it can send a tiny crystal shard of death straight through your bloodstream and into your heart and kills you dead!