No, Keir, we do not all have the right to self-determination

'Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.'

Alan Bennett, The History Boys




The current Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer, is under fire again for undermining attempts at standing up to racism.

Since becoming the leader of the Labour Party in April, Starmer has found himself under fire for this quite a few times. He has referred to the Black Lives Matter protests as a 'moment', equated brutal police officers in Israel with Jews in general and used the release of a report into anti-Semitism to wage a cynical war against socialism. But in the last couple of days, this has increased with two utter public relations car crashes.

The first comes from an appearance on Nick Ferrari's LBC radio show (though given Ferrari's political persuasion, what exactly Starmer was doing on his programme in the first place is anyone's guess). You can listen to the full recording here, but I shall type up what was said as well.

A caller using the name Gemma (though apparently this is not her real name - more on that in a moment) phoned in and said this, in defence of booing footballers who take the knee for Black Lives Matter:

'If anything, the racial inequality is now against the indigenous people of Britain. We are set to become a minority by 2066. Taking the knee, bringing the political sphere into the football arena... we just have to look across to the Middle East. Israel has a state law that they are the only people in that country to have self-determination. Well, why can't I, as a white British female, have that same right?'

Starmer responded with:

'Gemma, we all have those rights. This is about recognising some injustice that has gone on for a very, very long time, and I think people were genuinely moved this year and want to make sure that that injustice is dealt with. People will look at it in different ways, but I think the vast majority of people do want a more equal society.'

The bits I've underlined are not typos, they are the parts of Starmer's response that I consider the very worst (as opposed to the rest of it, which is simply stating the bleeding obvious in as diluted a way as possible).

Tom Clark at Another Angry Voice reports that Gemma's real name is Jody Swingler, and that she's an extreme-right activist living in Ibiza. Which is an interesting development, and important to note, because I do not believe that her views actually speak for the British public. I mention that purely for the sake of noting this tactic of pretending to be normal members of the public that the far right has started using, because I actually don't consider Swingler or her ilk to be worth my time or energy fighting. What is more important though, is the weakness of Keir Starmer's response.

The Nation State law in Israel, which came in in 2018, is profoundly racist and has been criticised strongly by human rights groups across the globe. The law seeks to ensure that certain people who live in that region are considered more worthy of fair treatment, the right to speak their own language and basic humanity than others. In this response, Starmer implied that not only does the UK currently have an equivalent law (which is not true) but also that such a law would be desirable here!

I'm a white British male, and we are not destined to become an ethnic minority by 2066. I have fact-checked this claim; there is only one person who has ever made it, and even then I'm not sure exactly where he's got this data from. But more importantly, even if we were becoming a minority, what is actually wrong with that? I grew up in quite a diverse area, and in a few of my school classes there were more black or Asian people than white people. I don't remember being especially bothered by this, or indeed particularly noticing it. As a matter of fact, it has actually led me to subconsciously associate diversity with security - one reason I struggled in the few years I lived in a small town in Essex is that I don't like being in a room filled only with white people. I find that groups like that tend to be quite narrow-minded, and to lack the difference in experience and knowledge that a more diverse group brings. And surely we should all share experience and knowledge with each other? Isn't that the point of being alive?

Starmer's next mistake was the line 'People will look at it in different ways'. That is obvious because that always happens, but there's an implication there that all of the different ways to look at it are legitimate. They are not. This woman's ideas stem solely from racism, pure and simple. Starmer knows this as it's painfully obvious, and he should have called it out. There was no criticism from him, there was an attempt to make out that we rightly have a law like Israel's (which we don't, and it would be wrong if we did) and it really went very badly for him as he ended up kowtowing to a Nazi-esque troll.

Another fairly disturbing development for Starmer is this troublesome piece, about how Labour shadow frontbencher Bill Esterson (who has Jewish ancestry) was reprimanded after commenting on Twitter that Boris Johnson was 'leading us to a dangerous place' that he implied was reminiscent of Nazi Germany. This was described by Conservative chair Amanda Milling as 'shocking' and 'an outrageous insult'.

This is indicative of a very serious problem in our society - the idea that absolutely nothing can be compared to Nazi Germany unless it literally embodies the very worst parts of it. The quote at the top of the page is from The History Boys - a film my partner and I watched the other night and which I intensely disliked, although that one line was quite a good one (it refers to WWI instead of WWII, but it applies just as much). Because we do not take the time to remember, not really. What we remember is a selective interpretation of history, one in which we weren't complicit and one that does not equip us with the tools to prevent it happening again. From the way we talk about the Holocaust, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that the gas chambers at Auschwitz sprang up overnight. Of course, it didn't happen like that. It never happens like that. What actually happened, over the course of the 1930s, was a very slow erosion of the rights of Jewish people, and with it public attitudes - so that by the time the Holocaust came about, all the groundwork had been laid for it not to be a significant imaginative leap.

I remain hopeful that we'll never see an abuse of human rights as great as that again, and I believe it's absolutely possible (and indeed an imperative) to stop things if they ever look like they might be going that way. But there are some things in our society that are reminiscent of how the Holocaust started (our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, for instance) and by talking about Nazi Germany as if nothing can ever be compared to it, we are ignoring the way that these things start. It is commonly said that if you put a frog in a pot of water and increase the temperature very slowly, the frog will not notice the increase in temperature until it is too late to prevent itself being boiled alive. Apparently there's some scepticism about whether this is true, but the metaphor certainly works for human beings. If we allow things to slowly progress, by the time (God forbid) it ever reaches that point, we'll be beyond the stage of objecting to it. It is done this way deliberately, and it's a very common way of shutting down progress to say that it's somehow offensive to the victims of the previous thing to talk about preventing it happening again. The same cynical technique is used to shut down debate on gun laws in the USA - whenever there's a school shooting, we're told that it's insulting to the families to exploit their grief for political opportunity, and that we should wait for a more appropriate time to have that conversation. But there never is an appropriate time, is there? Because if there isn't another one for a while it won't be a major concern anymore, and when there is one the same argument is thrown back over and over again. And this is how so many innocent people, many of them children, many of them ethnic minorities, have been murdered in the USA without anything being done to stop it.

But again, in the case of Bill Esterson, Keir Starmer swiftly responds that he shouldn't have said it, and that MPs should refrain from using Twitter. Keir, this would have been an amazing opportunity to stand by your colleague and show the world exactly how bad this Government is. The thing that angers me the most about all of this is that we hear consistently about how much racism, particularly anti-Semitism, there historically has been in the Labour Party, and how Starmer is apparently standing up to it. He is not. All I can see is an attempt to extend the right-wing status quo for as long as possible, disguised as an attempt to fight racism. If Keir Starmer was serious about this, he would have actually enacted the recommendations of the EHRC report, rather than cynically interfering in an independent board's decisions and turning what should have been a time for reflection into another tedious war between different wings of the party. He would not have sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey for re-tweeting an article criticising Israeli police forces. He would not be expelling pro-Palestine Jews left, right and centre. He would not have dismissed Black Lives Matter as a 'moment'. He would have disciplined Lisa Nandy for describing anti-Semitism as 'a form of racism that punches up, rather than down'. He would have disciplined Rachel Reeves for honouring the incredibly anti-Semitic Nancy Astor on Twitter. But all of these instances relate to who in Parliament are his political allies, rather than what they are actually meant to have said.

Sadly, we seem to have a Leader of the Opposition that will do anything to avoid rocking the boat, including standing against his own MPs when they speak the truth. And this man hopes to become Prime Minister one day? Give me a break.

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You scumbag, you maggot, we love Diane Abbott

 A bit unusual for me to write a whole blog just to promote a song, but I had to make an exception for this!

If you've never heard of the singer Grace Petrie, you simply must check out her music. There are many incredible political musicians out there, but this one is pretty special. I've loved her music since 2013 when I heard her on BBC Radio 4's Now Show performing her song 'All In This Together', in which she claimed to have 'tried to write a song about her favourite MP, but couldn't narrow it down'. That song is really out of date now, but I still listen to it regularly! I've seen Grace perform live and she is an exceptionally enjoyable performer.

Every year we have a tedious discussion about whether the line 'you scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot' in Fairytale of New York is appropriate given its frequent use as a homophobic slur. I touched upon my view about this in this blog that I wrote last week, but I shall reiterate my viewpoint on it one more time. My view is that I have absolutely no objection to the word 'faggot' being in this song in the context in which it is used - that of the Irish version, meaning 'lazy person'. As someone in a same-sex relationship, my view is that the more we use terms like this to mean other things besides the homophobic meaning, the less effective it becomes as a homophobic slur. I believe that making words taboo only increases the ability of bigots to discriminate - we need to focus predominantly on intention, because words have no meaning by themselves. Also, I find it quite offensive that US slang is considered more important in the English-speaking world than Irish slang is.

However, irrespective of my personal view on censoring the line, I just love Grace Petrie's new cover, in which this line is now 'You scumbag, you maggot, we love Diane Abbott'. In addition to Grace's beautiful singing voice, the boldness of this line is important to stand up to an extremely insidious media narrative about this politician. Of all left-wing politicians, she is by far the one with the worst reputation - thoroughly undeserved, because Diane Abbott is an amazing human being. Occasionally she gets flustered on television, and when that happens it's talked about for weeks in an attempt to persuade the British public that she's incompetent - which sadly is often successful. But if anyone takes the time to actually take the time to read what she does via reliable sources (the link above will take you to her TheyWorkForYou page) you will see what an incredibly hard worker she is, how intelligent she is and how much she strives to improve quality of life for the least fortunate. Just as a personal anecdote, an acquaintance of mine told me a while back that in a struggle regarding the immigration status of their spouse, and said that of all the MPs they'd met, Diane Abbott was the only one who they really felt cared personally about what they were going through (which incidentally, I think is so important - when we talk about politicians, so often we focus on big global things and never consider the work that MPs do on individual cases. And I often think that's the most important thing - no matter what other flaws a politician may have, if they work hard on an individual case, something that isn't going to affect their electoral chances, that is more proof than any other that their heart is in the right place.)

In 2020, when the Labour Party is becoming increasingly right-wing, MPs like Diane Abbott are needed more than ever. I could talk about Diane Abbott until the cows come home, but the best thing you could read is this article by food writer Jack Monroe, which was originally posted on Twitter shortly before the 2017 election. Read it. Now.

You back? Okay, back to the song.

Now, I want this song to get to Christmas number one. I highly doubt that I can achieve this because my blog readership is TINY - but I thought, why not try? The worst that can happen is that I'll have at least got a few more people to buy it, which would help the artist. But more than that - if radio stations have started to say that they won't play the original (I personally disagree, but it's their right) why not give them an alternative that glorifies one of the best politicians we have? Someone who is almost never in the media unless it's something negative? As Boris Johnson destroys more and more of what we have, so many of us are fed up with the fact that our lives don't mean anything to politicians. So why not take the time to spend £1 (only if we can afford it, of course) to appreciate a politician for whom our lives actually do mean something, and help one of the most talented political artists around, and listen to a beautiful cover of everyone's favourite Christmas song, all at the same time?

Happy Christmas, everybody. I can see a better time when all our dreams come true.

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The suspension of Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi

 Any leftist in the UK following the situation within the Labour Party at the moment will be aware of the fact that there has been a lot of discussion recently regarding an alleged anti-Semitism crisis on the part of Labour members. Not being either Jewish nor a Labour member, it is certainly not within my capacity to comment on the accuracy of this, and I shall not do so. Suffice to say that as a believer in justice, I believe that all complaints of racism must be taken seriously and investigated to the full extent of the law (or at least, to the full extent of whichever anti-discrimination procedures are relevant at the time).

There has also been an awful lot of discussion on the suspension of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and seeing as I missed the chance to write about this at the time, at this stage I don't think anything that I write will add to the discussion in any productive way. I'm here to talk about something quite different, which is the suspension of Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, a senior official in the organisation Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), a network for Jews within the Labour Party.

I have quite a lot of respect for JVL; it was formed in 2017, its motto is 'Always with the oppressed, never with the oppressor' and its aims include promoting freedom of expression and democracy, acknowledging Jewish involvement in the socialist and trade union movements and opposing racism across the world, standing up against anti-Semitism and against wrongs committed against Palestinians. I'm in support of all of these things, but above all it's tremendously important to have strong Jewish voices speaking out in support of Palestine. In 2014 I worked on the Palestine demonstrations, went on some marches in Bristol and London and learned a great deal about the situation in this part of the world. In particular, this powerful speech by the activist Barnaby Raine has stayed with me for the past six years, because he talked so passionately about how much his Jewish ancestry has caused him to stand against oppression, whomever is causing it. This is the sort of voice that we don't hear enough in the media, especially not from Jews - not because not many Jews hold these views (I have met many who do in my own life) but because it doesn't fit the right media narrative. More on that in a moment.

Today, the Jewish Chronicle reported that Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi has been suspended from the Labour Party for her conduct in a CLP meeting. The article goes on to discuss that her 'crime' was to express dismay at the weaponisation of Jewish opinions. You should read the article and her comments yourself rather than just taking my word for it, but to paraphrase, quite a bit of her commentary was to do with the fact that Jews are now being seen as a group for whom it is impossible to discuss things openly without offending them - a notion that is deeply anti-Semitic in itself.

This is Naomi talking about the experiences of anti-Semitism she has faced for being a Jew with left-wing opinions (link redirects to Twitter). Have a look at what she has to say, then come back.

Finished? Okay then.

Naomi says a lot in that video, far more eloquently than I could. But I think what she's getting at is an idea that left-wing politics by itself has started to be considered anti-Semitic. There are numerous examples of this, and nearly all of them are examples of anti-Semitism themselves. In 2019, John McTernan wrote in the Financial Times (there's a paywall) that "Rhetoric about the 1 per cent and economic inequality has the same underlying theme [as anti-Semitic tropes] — a small group of very rich people who cleverly manipulate others to defend their interests. So anti-capitalism masks and normalises anti-Semitism". As Tom Clark at Another Angry Voice points out, this line of argument relies on the notion that Jews are greedy and that the left criticise greed, therefore a leftist anti-capitalist is inherently anti-Semitic. I think anyone with a degree of common logic can see that this line of thinking contains a pretty negative and untrue stereotype about Jews by itself. Another instance is this clip of Lisa Nandy on Radio 4, claiming that 'anti-Semitism is a very particular form of racism. It's the sort of racism that punches up, not down'. Again, she makes an assumption that the victims of anti-Semitism are going to be more privileged than those perpetrating it - a tired trope about Jews that she should know better than to be spreading.

But very few people expressing these sorts of views in the Labour Party seem to find themselves subject to any kind of disciplinary action at all. Those who face disciplinary action are people like Naomi, a proud Jewish activist, when they point out that it's pretty disrespectful to extend opinions held by certain Jewish lobbyist groups to be inherent to the entirety of Judaism. It's got to a point where they aren't even trying to make it plausible anymore - general secretary David Evans (who isn't Jewish) has claimed that any motions of no-confidence against himself pose a threat to Jews, without any clarity as to precisely why him keeping his job is so vital in the fight against racism!

In the fight against racism, discussion is vital. By shutting down discussion, we are unable to come together to work out an effective solution. My concern is that however well-intentioned the initial concerns about fighting anti-Semitism may have been, it has now been hijacked by those with a vested interest in maintaining Labour's top-down, anti-democracy, anti-grassroots status quo - most of them probably not even Jewish. We can tell this because since the EHRC report came out in October, the party's most prominent discussions haven't even been about its Jewish members. It has been nearly all in relation to Jeremy Corbyn, whether or not what he said in response to that report was acceptable and whether people should be allowed to discuss it. This report was meant to be the start of making the party a safer place - and any desire to do that was immediately abandoned in favour of waging another tiresome war between the left and the right. This will not achieve any additional safety for Labour's Jewish members - all it will do is a) make anti-Semitism harder to define, therefore making it harder to deal with; and b) make Labour far less likely to win the next election.

We on the left, quite rightly, abhor racism. It is right to stand against it, in all its forms. Unfortunately, the far-right (which incidentally, is exceptionally racist) has realised this, and is using it to divide us. We must not allow this narrative to win. At every accusation, we must look at exactly what is being accused and ask ourselves - is this a fair accusation? Has the person's words/actions been misinterpreted, or do they actually pose a tangible threat? How reliable is the person making the accusation? Are people with the opposite political viewpoint receiving the same due process? It is essential that we do this, because otherwise the right's go-to strategy to shut down any attempt to improve our world will be to accuse anyone it deems a political threat of racism, however spurious an allegation this might be.

Sadly for the Jewish community, it has been weaponised against its will, and if we continue down this path of hindering rational debate, any concerns Jewish Labour members have about the anti-Semitism crisis continuing are likely to come true.

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