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Keir Starmer


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Good article by Joh Harris...

 

'One of the most glaring aspects of the Covid-19 era is yet another Westminster-centred crisis of political leadership, if not politics itself. This may be a polarised age in which the idea of millions being helped through dark times by the people at the top is laughably old-fashioned. Trust in power has hardly been a feature of recent British history. But it has been clear from the start of this crisis that Boris Johnson has neither the gravitas nor the basic administrative talents to offer us any convincing kind of inspiration or comfort, and the surreally poor quality of the cabinet only makes things worse.

 

And then there is Keir Starmer. In the eyes of most voters, the Labour leader is clearly a vast improvement on Jeremy Corbyn. The skills he developed as a lawyer mean that he does such an enviable job of skewering Johnson and his colleagues’ failures that it has become a cliche to even mention it. The union jacks Starmer habitually appears in front of are clearly intended to tell the people rattled by Corbyn’s time at the top that all is now well again. But for many reasons, the use of such symbols feels awkward and incongruous: here, it seems, is someone who would like to channel the national mood, but cannot yet find a way to do it.

 

If you were feeling charitable, you might assume that the party and its leader were simply biding their time, waiting for the right moment to spell out their vision. But Labour insiders talk of Starmer and his people being “not political” and having little or no “analysis about where they ultimately want to get to”. Perhaps the unwieldy shopping list of ideas that played some role in the epic defeat of 2019 has spawned a strange mistrust of any ideas; maybe the Labour leader and his senior colleagues are the kind of rather bloodless politicians who are more comfortable with small items of debate than anything transformative.

 

Yet the coronavirus pandemic has exposed vast social and economic injustices, making inequality more than ever a matter of life and death. All told, this moment seems to be brimming with what Joe Biden’s inaugural address termed “the cascading crises of our era”. So amid all the talk of a historic global moment, why does Labour seem so small?

 

There are key themes linked to the Covid crisis that the party leadership should surely be talking about. After a decade of austerity and the accelerated transformation of the benefits system into a deliverer of cruelty and punishment, living in poverty – something that now applies to 23% of the population – has at last been pushed into the national conversation. But this has mostly happened in the wider culture rather than politics, as proved by the inspirational efforts of the footballer Marcus Rashford, and recent stories about those shamefully poor food parcels for schoolchildren. The best Labour has recently done is to highlight the brutality of the government’s plan to end the £20 increase in universal credit – a worthy cause, but tiny compared to the urgent challenge of reinventing the welfare state.

 

One key reason Britain’s experience of the pandemic has been so awful is bound up with our hollowed-out public services, and longstanding neglect of the fact that people’s health is central to so much beyond the NHS. Housing is a health issue. Childcare is too. So is work, and whether you are so insecure and put-upon that earning has to take priority over your family’s wellbeing. If there are further pandemics, we have to ensure that survival does not depend on whether you can retreat into your home, or whether precarity and poverty will push you into harm’s way. These matters should surely focus urgent attention on the most basic aspects of how all of us live, and our relationship with the state.

 

Which brings us to questions of power, and how it is distributed. Beyond devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, this has never been something Labour is terribly comfortable with. To his credit, Starmer has promised a “UK-wide constitutional commission to consider how power, wealth and opportunity can be devolved to the most local level”. But this is a long way from forming any kind of Labour narrative, and the party – as usual – seems incapable of demonstrating how modern power ought to work by opening itself up to outside voices.

 

Our basic system of government is in crisis, from the Whitehall departments that still lord it over faraway towns and cities, to the profiteering shadow state represented by Serco and all the rest. That the Tory dream of “levelling up” is so far the only political trope that has brought any of this to life is proof of the work Labour has to do. There’s no guarantee the party will rise to the moment.

 

In education, two cycles of cancelled exams and all that stop-start schooling have highlighted much more than the ineptitude of the education secretary, Gavin Williamson. If the key transition point between schooling and adult life now comes at 18, why does the watershed point at which we push young people into exam halls still come two years earlier? Given that the pandemic seems to have exacerbated a crisis of mental health among children and young people, what does that say about a huge tangle of issues – from the state’s approach to play and recreation, to a curriculum that has often reduced schooling to rote learning?

 

At the same time, our chaotic, marketised system of higher education has been tested to destruction. To emerge from this crisis and leave these systems unchanged would be a heartbreaking insult to the millions of young people whose lives have been so cruelly interrupted. But again, Labour has so far been largely silent.

 

As ever, its leadership faces complicated, often contradictory political pressures, and the fact that barely a year has passed since one of the party’s most seismic defeats should put its current travails in perspective. Nonetheless, two questions ought to be nagging at its upper ranks. If mass vaccinations finally contain the virus and the Conservatives start to look capable rather than incompetent, how will Labour present itself as an alternative? And if a moment of crisis, institutional failure and rising despair is not a time to think big, when will be?'

 

Quite fair, I think.

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Exclusive: BoD and JLM given veto to exclude expert nominees from Labour’s ‘independent’ antisemitism ‘advisory board’

 

BY SKWAWKBOX (SW)27/01/2021

 

‘Independent’ process gives non-Labour group, whose constitution says one of its reasons for existing is to ‘advance Israel’s security, welfare and standing’, veto over appointments – and even former Chief Rabbi of Liberal Judaism has been excluded, according to Labour sources

 

Keir Starmer’s call for nominations to his new ‘advisory board’ on Labour’s ‘independent’ antisemitism complaints process is a sham, according to Labour insiders. The members of the board have already been decided – and the right-wing Board of Deputies has been given a veto over appointments to the advisory group, alongside right-wing affiliate the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) which, despite a common narrative that it has a history as a Labour affiliate of more than a century, was reportedly re-founded in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader out of concern at his victory and the prominence of Bernie Sanders in the US.

 

According to well-placed sources, those rejected for positions include Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) nominee Adam Hurst and all three prominent Jewish figures nominated by former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell:

 

Brian Klug

 

Oxford University senior research fellow and tutor in philosophy Brian Klug is a member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University. He is also an honorary fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton and fellow of the College, Saint Xavier University, Chicago.

Klug is associate editor of Patterns of Prejudice, a peer-reviewed journal examining social exclusion and stigmatization and a founder member of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights, a UK-based group that addresses racism and antisemitism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, immigration, and the treatment of asylum seekers

 

Antony Lerman

 

Lerman is a British writer who specialises in the study of antisemitism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, multiculturalism and the place of religion in society. He is a former Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, a founding member of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights and a former editor of Patterns of Prejudice. He served on the Runnymede Trust’s Commission on Antisemitism sits on the advisory committee of the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust exhibition

 

Rabbi Danny Rich

 

Until last year, Labour councillor Danny Rich was the Chief Rabbi of Liberal Judaism in the UK. Although a patron of the Zionist Federation, he was attacked by the right in 2018 for hosting a shabbat dinner with Jeremy Corbyn and a JVL representative. Rich was also attacked by the right in 2012 for speaking at an event alongside two Jewish pro-Palestinian activists.

 

JVL’s nominee Adam Hurst is a Sheffield Labour Councillor and Reform synagogue member. He spoke in favour of a Sheffield City Council motion to recognise Palestinian statehood.

Despite the breadth of views and obvious depth of relevant experience and expertise represented by these nominees, none of them have made it onto the advisory board, according to Labour sources.

 

The Board of Deputies is estimated to represent – though rarely presented as such – only around a third of UK Jews. Its constitution states that one of the reasons for its existence is to ‘advance Israel’s security, welfare and standing’. The group has no affiliation with the Labour party and, the day after the 2019 general election published an article prominently headed by the Conservative party logo, attacking Jeremy Corbyn and praising the ‘historic achievement of Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party’:

 

McDonnell said:

We have yet to hear who the party has appointed to this body. The individuals I proposed are people of immense experience and knowledge held in high standing for the work they have undertaken on issues affecting the Jewish community. I would hope and expect that nobody within or outside of the party would view them as anything other than ideally suitable for the role envisaged by the EHRC.

 

The Board of Deputies has taken an extreme position on the level of antisemitism within the Labour party that went far beyond what the recent EHRC report found to be the case, as the above article shows. The EHRC did not find Labour to be institutionally anti-anti-Semitic and found only a couple of cases – which are disputed by legal experts – in which Labour could be held accountable for behaviour the EHRC considered anti-Semitic.

 

In spite of this clear conflict, admission to Labour’s ‘independent’ advisory board – which is being set up in response to the EHRC’s recommendations – is subject to a veto by a right-leaning, non-Labour group with an explicit, constitutional commitment to Israel and an entrenched position on ‘Labour antisemitism’ that far exceeds the EHRC’s findings. And expert nominees who have equivocated at all on the subject of Israel and Palestine have been denied a place.

 

Meanwhile, Labour members have been banned for arranging or attending training sessions run by JVL.

Supporters of justice for Palestinians will be unlikely to consider that the ‘independence’ of the advisory board and the new disciplinary process it is meant to oversee will offer them any meaningful balance, or protection against politically-driven accusations.

 

 

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14 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

Going after Corbyn for court costs seems a bit shit.

I guess it's to dissuade him from bringing the case. I think - probably just because I'm Starmer's number one fan - the minute somebody starts legal action against you, all bets are off. Corbyn's lawyers were in court the other week calling Starmer all sorts, which is fair enough, but you can't then expect for him to play nice in return. I suspect Corbyn is right and he and Starmer did have a deal (I said at the time that I thought his original statement would have been as part of a deal) but I also suspect that the deal was for him to apologise and he didn't, so Starmer have him the ol left-right-goodnight. Bunch of dickheads. I hate the current bunch of left and the centre-left politicians. They're a bunch of infighting losers. The best thing Starmer can do is persuade Corbyn to not bother trying, or make it clear that if he does that he will crush him and cost him a load of money. I guess it all depends on the evidence that Corbyn currently has, and if it's not that good (which you have to question, as he wanted discovery to find more) then he might drop it. Still, I think there would be another round of discovery if he pushed ahead, but at that point if he has misjudged it then he's fucked and cost himself a load of money. 

 

Can somebody get on and beat the Tories? I loved the 'UK Trump' trending on Twitter when Trump was fucked off, with loads of tweets saying 'one down, one to go'. 

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3 minutes ago, Numero said:

Not a cult.
 

Unlikely though, isn’t it? We all know how inadequate Corbyn was at dealing with antisemitism. 

Not a cult indeed. 

 

To be honest it was a flippant remark, so hopefully we can both enjoy our evening swearing at the television and calling everyone cunts.

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5 minutes ago, Scooby Dudek said:

Not a cult indeed. 

 

To be honest it was a flippant remark, so hopefully we can both enjoy our evening swearing at the television and calling everyone cunts.

There was no need to bring Corbyn up in this thread tbh. No idea why people have to keep valiantly defending his honour. 
 

Im hoping for a smoother ride tonight, with lots of laughing at ‘special’ Portuguese guys. 

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1 minute ago, Numero said:

There was no need to bring Corbyn up in this thread tbh. No idea why people have to keep valiantly defending his honour. 
 

Im hoping for a smoother ride tonight, with lots of laughing at ‘special’ Portuguese guys. 

In was in relation to the Corbyn court case discussion, hence the "clever" link to the other court case. 

 

Or the "special" England captain 

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7 minutes ago, Scooby Dudek said:

In was in relation to the Corbyn court case discussion, hence the "clever" link to the other court case. 

 

Or the "special" England captain 

I meant generically - that bastard Section’s fault. Talking of dribblers, I’m going up to the FF to see the team. 

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36 minutes ago, sir roger said:

I think the polls are that volatile at the moment I don't think they are worth looking into that much 

I agree, and with the pandemic people cast their gaze in a adoring manner at political parties they  would normally cross the street to avoid. An example is I had a nice long chat with a girl outside my local lib dem office last week, a few years earlier I petrol bombed the entrance because of welfare cuts. 

 

She seemed a lovely girl, glad now she remained unarsoned.

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55 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

I agree, and with the pandemic people cast their gaze in a adoring manner at political parties they  would normally cross the street to avoid. An example is I had a nice long chat with a girl outside my local lib dem office last week, a few years earlier I petrol bombed the entrance because of welfare cuts. 

 

She seemed a lovely girl, glad now she remained unarsoned.

Brilliant

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His approval rating will in part at least be hit by the fact he's constantly under fire from his 'own side' allowing the unstable 'party at war' narrative to play out again and again. It's human nature, I thoght Brown was a decent PM but just became the target for endless shitballs and in the end you start to wonder if they can carry it off, it's like watching a comedian you think is funny get relentlessly heckled, in the end you find yourself sliding down your chair.

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3 minutes ago, Brownie said:

Rigged system.

 

Yep, we know this, they know this, the only way to 'win' is to understand this and factor it in.

 

It's an uphill battle, but if we start from the position of accepting this then we know where we are and what needs to be done, change it if/when we ever have a sniff of power again.

 

This is why News GB is a terrible idea.

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1 hour ago, Section_31 said:

His approval rating will in part at least be hit by the fact he's constantly under fire from his 'own side' allowing the unstable 'party at war' narrative to play out again and again. It's human nature, I thoght Brown was a decent PM but just became the target for endless shitballs and in the end you start to wonder if they can carry it off, it's like watching a comedian you think is funny get relentlessly heckled, in the end you find yourself sliding down your chair.

I don't think it will be high on the agenda for most people voting in these polls as I am sure you are aware there are slightly more pressing matters in the country at present , and other than odd bits about the Corbyn court case it has been barely mentioned outside a few articles in the likes of the Guardian and Indy. Don't let me stop you riding your hobbyhorse though.

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