'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.
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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