ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

In general I'd hold with the principle that any complaints process needs to be independent of concerns over the kind of headlines it will generate, whether that's possible within any political party, where headlines are usually the overriding concern, I would question.

The issue with Plax's post is that Starmer has only been in charge of the Labour Party for a few months, that his tenure is (afaik) outside of the inquiry period, and that the report contains clear recommendations that he can implement (and, as been pointed out, has to implement in any case). There isn't an especially difficult political call for him to make here, and he looks like the new broom regardless.

So it comes down to the reason for the suspension, which is likely to come down to a vague 'bringing the party into disrepute' line which might also circumnavigate any issues re: clashing with the reports own recommendations. And as NV has pointed out he's got plausible deniability given he was doing his own press conferences at the time. IDK, he's a high-level lawyer, he's not going to get caught out by something this basic.

I mean, want to bet? He’s been getting caught out by the brain geniuses in government and by his own shit decisions for months now.

Arguably there's a difference between making a shit political call and making a bad legal call. He's a highly experienced lawyer and a pretty inexperienced politician.

luchador social, eh

replaced by a social climber :(

The victims are all those who needed an electable challenger to the Tories

from the end of Rawnsley's piece. these lads can't help themselves.

some of that good old condescending paternalism from addled melty old cunts never gets old

Arguably there's a difference between making a shit political call and making a bad legal call. He's a highly experienced lawyer and a pretty inexperienced politician.

i was unsurprised by starmer's 'high-level lawyer'-ish-ness not holding any water at PMQs, but i was fucking disheartened by the idea that he can't make it work in a channel four interview

-

The propulsive language around Corbyn by liberals who have him down as ‘arrogant’ because he is ignoring their abuse or refused to capitulate during coup time tells me a lot more about them than it does Jeremby Crumlin

there was a piece by marina hyde around one of corbyn's earlier failures to be sufficiently contrite that basically came down to 'how dare he act like he has moral convictions! how dare he!!' and on reading that i finally got it. i felt like a veil had been drawn from my sight

A careful lawyer at the top of his game would probably not have been on Radio Four talking about this as evidence of his willingness to make tough decisions.

The victims are all those who needed an electable challenger to the Tories
from the end of Rawnsley's piece. these lads can't help themselves.

― big man on scampus (Noodle Vague), Monday, November 2, 2020 11:40 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

pace corbyn the real victims of his media persecution are british jews

pace rawnsley the real victims of antisemitism are blairites

i really can't get any further than 'fuck me' tbh

In general I'd hold with the principle that any complaints process needs to be independent of concerns over the kind of headlines it will generate, whether that's possible within any political party, where headlines are usually the overriding concern, I would question.

The issue with Plax's post is that Starmer has only been in charge of the Labour Party for a few months, that his tenure is (afaik) outside of the inquiry period, and that the report contains clear recommendations that he can implement (and, as been pointed out, has to implement in any case). There isn't an especially difficult political call for him to make here, and he looks like the new broom regardless.

So it comes down to the reason for the suspension, which is likely to come down to a vague 'bringing the party into disrepute' line which might also circumnavigate any issues re: clashing with the reports own recommendations. And as NV has pointed out he's got plausible deniability given he was doing his own press conferences at the time. IDK, he's a high-level lawyer, he's not going to get caught out by something this basic.

― Matt DC, Monday, 2 November 2020 11:26 (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

- Starmer has been most successful as a prosecutor and I think its important to distinguish between knowing how to defend yourself (as a lawyer) and acting within the law, and we shouldn't simply conflate the two.
- His tenure is outside of the period of investigation. However, just as the report criticises the party for not implementing the chakrabarti report, it has now also made more explicit criteria for breaches which did not exist previously (hence the calls in the press for corbyn to intervene etc.). So just as the corbyn-era party is now guilty of failures judged by this interpretation of HRA (this is how legal precedent is basically made) so starmer is bound to principles established by the report and has been since he took over.
- your point that he can play this to 'look decisive' and clean break-ey is true but doesn't contradict the fact that he is playing this to his advantage rather than taking it seriously.

A careful lawyer at the top of his game would probably not have been on Radio Four talking about this as evidence of his willingness to make tough decisions.

― Scampo di tutti i Scampi (ShariVari), Monday, 2 November 2020 11:45 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

back to not being able to keep up with this thread btw

I wouldn’t bother tbh, seems it, like my lifelong practice of voting, has run its course. Truly cannot handle the reasonable critiques from posters I respect that only work if you view people as having the worst possible motives and the people who’d do you harm of having better ones than they’ve previously demonstrated.

luchador social, eh

― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Monday, 2 November 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Qué?

It’s his political judgement in question here.

When I said "he's not going to get caught out by something this basic" I was talking about the legal side, whether Starmer was himself guilty of breaching the report's own recommendations. I'm personally unimpressed by his political judgement and suspicious of his motives but that's not what I was talking about.

A careful lawyer at the top of his game would probably not have been on Radio Four talking about this as evidence of his willingness to make tough decisions.

Difficult to know without the exact wording of what he said really. I saw a lot of "the Labour Party I lead" which is pretty borderline. If he's actually taking credit for the decision then that's pretty dumb.

(Or he believes he can take credit for it with impunity)

Keir Starmer took the decision to suspend Jeremy Corbyn. Labour claimed the General Secretary did in a flawed attempt to evade the charge of political interference—the very thing the EHRC condemned. But Keir couldn't resist boasting about his "difficult decision" on the radio. pic.twitter.com/fhkHr40p1u

— Alex Nunns (@alexnunns) November 1, 2020

here's a thread of starmer's dodgy statements where he either takes credit for the decision or was just consulted on it, which still would count as interference

thread

You can call pointing out that bad faith actors do not have the same energy for anti-black racism “whataboutery” I don’t care as it is patently obvious black lives do not matter. See the Windrush scandal not being a major election issue when people are dead.

— marcus (@marcusjdl) November 2, 2020

It’s one of the reasons the legacy of Corbyn’s time at the helm, and the claims made about it, have to be analysed appropriately seriously. Even when sincerely held, I don’t think the belief that, if elected, Labour would have been an existential threat to British Jews can be separated from the presumed hostility of the Muslim / Black members and voters who supported him, the Muslim / Black immigrants he’d have supposedly allowed in to the country, the Muslim countries he wouldn’t have used Trident on, etc. I think for a lot of those voters, running a mile from interrogation of whether that threat was exaggerated it itself extremely loaded.

― Scampo di tutti i Scampi (ShariVari), Sunday, 1 November 2020 19:18 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

in fact the report suggests that complaints process is in general just as bad for handling all racist allegations and its worth remembering that a key issue in the wadsworth affair was the suggestion that his intervention that he was trying to handwave antisemitism with some 'all lives matters' stuff which was always pretty laughable, borne out in this report and which there has been scarcely a mention of in the press.

SV's point here is impt because it goes beyond simply these 'procedural' questions to the questions of structural inequality that are continually compounded by austerity and the wider culture of policy and governance in this country generally:

Covid brought to light to anyone who wasn't paying attention (which turned out to be almost everyone!) that existing health inequalities hugely disproportionately affected health outcomes for BAME people. Its obvious that policing, housing and benefits, access to education, job prospects are all affected by policies that compound inequality in ways that are, in a word, racist. Its not surprising that the EHRC are never going to investigate the ways in which both parties are responsible for racist laws and policies that effect people much more than labour's failure to deal in a more transparent and efficacious way with antisemtic abuse and language by members. I would struggle to think of ways in which parties could be said to be responsible for similar AS policies etc in the way they have so clearly enacted other racist policies.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/El0iCh5W0AAfTCU?format=jpg&name=900x900

this dirty lying mofo breaks pledges like Lewis Hamilton breaks records

Yeah there's a lot going on here outside the limited scope of the report and the issues of the remit and resourcing of the EHRC more generally. The points in the last few posts are reasonably uncontroversial on this thread (although transparently not in society at large). Maybe the framing and phrasing is wrong here and there should be a move away from discussing whether AS in the Labour Party has been "exaggerated" and towards the fact that other forms of racism are consistently downplayed - I think that's an important distinction and not purely a semantic one.

both things are true though!

And the uses of both are distinct in ways that are consequent of that fact

In the broadest sense, yes, but if one of the other forms of racism involves positioning a political coalition heavily supported by minority voters as endemically hostile to British Jews, and singles out Muslim and Black MPs, councillors, PPCs, etc, for targeted harassment based on this supposed hostility, the two are linked.

xps

Unfortunately there's next to zero chance of British society being able to address the complexities of this in the ways that are required.

(I'm also distinguishing here between the exaggeration of the volume or seriousness of the cases and some of the wilder claims that were made by right-wing commentators fwiw)

The exaggerating of AS situation in the media has been politically expedient for some (most prominently johnson and starmer!) and the vehicle for all kinds of discourses by various bad actors. Many of those discourses are attempts to chill certain leftist statements and themselves highly antisemitic (conflating antisemitism with anticapitalism, anti racism or political sympathies with palestinians).

i don't think its enough to say 'this is too complicated for the british public to get their heads around.' Political cultures are comprised of people existing together in general agreement of highly complex arrangements of political and social norms. And these change, gradually or suddenly. I think the problem is corruption of political and media classes as evidenced in the appalling bad faith which is further evidenced in starmer's behaviour on EHRC day

Yeah I mean less that "this is too complicated for the average person on the street to understand" and more that an even half-way mature discussion about this is too much to hope for given there are people right at the top of government who are heavily invested, for both ideological and tactical reasons, in the country NOT having that discussion. Attempts to open up the debate about the legacy of empire over the summer were met with the full force of the Dominic Cummings Outrage Machine, and if it isn't Cummings doing it then it'll be someone else. These have little to do with the minority groups themselves and more about creating a constant sense of imagined threat to our way of life (and we're back to the Farage thing again). (Also I know everyone here knows this really but it bears repeating).

i agree but jesus you sound defeatist. almost a tacit acceptance that the way we think about things is implicitly governed by those in control and that our imaginations just submit to that.

I am pretty defeatist about it happening in the short term, in the longer term less so. There are plenty of signs of changing attitudes in wider society, particularly among younger people, that will be beneficial in the longer term.

i have questions about how we can sustain those attitudes into the future against the very hardworking fascist media and also whether simple attitude change is going to happen fast enough to deal with the big existential threats like climate change etc but i think "always be challenging the narrative" is pretty key here and of course precisely what the electability wing of the Labour Party want to avoid

The left under Corbyn didn't do enough of that. Ultimately lit's up to groups like BLM and so on to push on the stuff that doesn't translate into what's electable rn to what can perhaps be in future.

I agree with plax (ico) and Suzy.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/El1kB4MXgAYzEKL?format=jpg&name=900x900

I was thinking lol good one lads, but this profile pic is straight from Starmer's office.

Shambles, Labour is now the party of petty authoritarianism https://t.co/5UDh6AQykQ

— Stephen Smith (@SteveNickSmith) November 2, 2020

very nicely put, if only the evil forces of Koba-ism employed had such petty micromanaging against their party enemies for the last five years while they were blatantly wrecking the whole fucking show.

One executive member on the Zoom call said:

"They may take our zoom co-hosting rights, but they will never take our freedom."

I already knew Grayson Perry was a tedious reactionery wanker and a typical brit-art mediocrity, but the smug arsehole has totally outdone himself today with his comment. If the Rona really was a darwinian force for good clearing out the brit-art dreck, he'd be the first one on Universal Credit, because his work is aesthetically, conceptually, intellectually .. however you want to gauge it .. just utter fucking shite.

https://thumbor.mumu.agency/unsafe/1000x562/https://www.theransomnote.com/media/articles/grayson-perry-provencial-punk-a-reflection/9900acba-9dc6-444a-837d-0df56492913e.jpeg

makes u think (about the vast chasm between bad twee commercial illustration and the good stuff)

yeah, I remember reading about him before he won the turner prize and thinking it sounded pretty interesting but in reality it's as you describe. it's only gotten worse since, the thing in the image you posted just looks like graphic design for a pub chain or co-working/co-living space.

I feel like he was invented just to be in all those 'great British' TV programs where it's like "this week's challenge is to bake a WACKY cake!"

the bbc love him. I can't remember the format of the program but he was sharing his thoughts and observations on humanity on r4 a couple of months back and it was just as facile/bang average and tedious as his work - and also with a bonus veneer of pc-gone-mad don't u see?

A city on the brink: 40% of households renting privately in London are on Universal Credit.https://t.co/6TfpE79hns

— Aditya Chakrabortty (@chakrabortty) November 2, 2020

what?? jesus christ

I wonder what that figure rises to when you factor in furloughed workers in hospitality and other sectors that are unlikely to be coming back any time soon. (In other words, people who will be on Universal Credit soon enough).

It was about 35% prior to COVID iirc.

a system that was designed to make life unbearable for the "undeserving poor" is now dragging many more millions into that despair of choosing between rent and food. Good job super Rishi is such a nice guy with limitless funds to ameliorate evil tory policies of the last decade before they start affecting non-benefits scum who are on benefits.

I strongly agree with Calzino about Grayson Perry. The kind of person that deserves The Calzino Treatment !!

Is Koba-ism a sophisticated ironic reference to Corbynism as Stalinism? Raymond Williams in 1960s the wrote a play about Stalin called KOBA THE DREAD.

It occurs to me that for Paul Mason it would not be ironic.

Didn't know that about Williams - Martin Amis also wrote a non-fiction book called Koba the Dread, in 2002.