Starmer As Labour's leader - what should he do?

nicky wrote:

No Ken, that’s not accurate at all. There were many reasons for Clinton’s loss but Assange’s meddling was surely one of them. Trump’s win was so close that Assange was likely enough to put him over the top. Of course we’re were other reasons that also could have been decisive by themselves.

Assange's role was far less important than

1) The fact that Hillary never held a rally in the Wisconsin or Michigan, and only one in Pennsylvania in the fall campaign, but focused instead on trying to flip states like Arizona and Georgia that everyone knew she was never going to flip.  The arrogance of that choice offended and drove away hundreds of thousand of voters in those states, many in the Democratic base itself, who sat out the election in disgust at the dismissiveness they'd been subjected to;

2) The fact that Hillary never mentioned the Sanders items she had had to accept in the Democratic platform in her campaign ads-ads that focused solely, instead, on the useless, irrelevant themes of A) "it's time for a woman as president", B) "Defend reproductive choice", a valid issue, but hardly the most important item on most of the country's agenda that year, and C) "Trump is a misogynist scumbag"- a true fact, but a fact that no swing voter anywhere cared about, as the results proved;

3) Her refusal to allow the Democratic platform to explicitly oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord, giving Trump his single-most effective wedge issue;

4) Her all out support for the bloodsoaked, militarist LBJ/"Scoop Jackson" Democratic foreign policy tradition, which gave Trump another wedge issue by allowing him to present himself as the peace candidate- a presentation, bogus that it is, that he continues to this day in his insincere yet loud denuniciation of "endless wars"- a presentation which leaves the Biden-Harris wing of the party running to his right on military policy;

If the Clinton campaign had been explicitly anti-TPP, had run ads specifically appealing to Sanders voters and promising them that their issues would be a real part of her agenda as president- none of the Sanders items in the platform were in any way unpopular- if she had treated working-class voters of all races as being just as important as the wealthy white suburbanites she was courting in Georgia and Arizona- the ones who were never GOING to vote for her, because wealthy white suburbanites never vote for anyone but the most right wing candidate in the race- if she had done any of that, she would have won.

Her campaign did none of that, and, four years later, the Democratic establishment is insisting on running an exact replay of her failed campaign this year.   

That is why the establishment anti-progressive Dems are obsessed with passing the blame from themselves to Assange; they would rather stop any real change within the Democratic Party and lose by continuing to run as centrist militarists than win by letting the party change, letting it at least go New Deal 2.0 on economic issues.

Assange is a sometimes exasperating character, but he did not cause Trump.   The epic incompetence of the Clinton-Kaine campaign did that, combined by the epic stupidity of the Democratic establishment in insisting that the party nominate the least popular, least-electable and most-distrusted candidate they could find.  

And they've probably lost most of the next generation in the process.

There is a real danger that the Biden-Harris campaign will replicate the Tom Dewey GOP presidential campaign of 1948, in which Dewey, by saying nothing, lost what should have been an unlosable election.

And there is an even worse danger that, if that happens, the establishment Dems will once again argue that Democrats need to move even "further to the center" for 2024-they'll probably end up arguing that the party should just embrace the current GOP platform, with the sole exception of being mildly "pro-choice" and mildly pro-LGBTQ.

And that, after doing that, they will STILL pound their fists on the table and insist that all progressives have a moral obligation to "vote Blue- no matter WHO!"

 There's no way supporting that kind of bill or any part of the "national security state" mentality can gain Labour votes-there's no large block of voters who'd want left-of-centre domestic policies AND a state apparatus that suppresses dissent while keeping the permanent war economy going.  Social and economic justice and militarism can't co-exist.

nicky wrote:

Ken, I challenge you to point to anything I have ever said that supports the curretn Israeli government or its policies towards the Palestinians. 

You can't. So stop repeating this slur.

That's the only possible interpretation that can be made of your insistence that Labour adopt not only the parts of the IHRA guidelines that dealt with bigotry against Jews-the parts Corbyn and his supporters were all glad to adopt- but the parts that equate criticism of the Israeli government with bigotry against Jews, when no comments that can be made about a state are ever equivalent to bigotry against a community, religion, or ethnic group.

Corbyn did nothing to deserve suspension.  It was perfectly legitimate for him to say that the AS situation was exaggerated.  

For the last five years in the UK, for no valid reason, the media and the political establishment acted as if AS was the most prevalent and rapidly-growing prejudice in the country- as if there was more AS than anti-BAME prejudice, more than Islamophobia, more than xenophobia-it was treated as if it was the prejudice that mattered more than any other, and it was linked, again and again and again, with solidarity with Palestine.

(side note:  I hope even nicky would agree that British Palestinians who are Labour Party members can be exempted from the apparent requirement that all Labour members must be Zionists-especially since there is no longer any such thing as a Zionist perspective that acknowledges that Palestinians have any legitimate grievances or are the victims of any injustices at all.  It is impossible for a Palestinian to be "pro-Israel" without totally surrendering in their own fully justified struggle for liberation).

No, thanks to what your right-wing antisocialist hero Starmer is doing, every Labour Party member will now be obligated to be a Likudnik, to be a defender of every aspect of the Occupation, of everything the IDF does, of every injustice.  They will all be required to unquestioningly endorse, as you clearly do, the narrative that Palestinians and other Arabs are morally indistinguishable from the Caesars, the Inquisitors, the Tsars and Schikelgruber.

It is impossible to adhere to the IHRA guidelines and show any humanity towards Palestinians at all, or dissent in any meaningful way from anything Prime Minister-for-life Netanyahu does to Palestinians.

And your insistence that every aspect of the IHRA guidelines and examples be endorsed by Labour can only mean you endorse that.

Corbyn was never slow in fighting AS-the worst violator of them all, Livingstone was out of the party within a year of Corbyn's victory in the leadership fight, and it makes no difference whether he was expelled or whether he resigned on the verge of expulsion.

Starmer, in refusing to stop the war against Corbyn, has destroyed party unity and has destroyed any chance for a Labour victory at the next election.  

There is no way to go forward from what has happened and, after anathemizing a man who did nothing to deserve anathemization, to offer a positive, radical transformative vision for the future.  There is no way to punish a person undeserving of punishment one day, and offer anything hopeful and positive the next day.

You've got what you wanted nicky, but made a Labour victory, even if it is still possible, meaningless.

This proves that the whole thing was never anything but a pretext to purge the entire Left from the party:

https://twitter.com/AaronBastani/status/1321862860864147458/photo/1

The EHRC itself stated that Corbyn had every right to question the scale of AS in the party, which proves his suspension is unjustified.

https://skwawkbox.org/2020/10/29/exclusive-ehrc-itself-states-that-corby...

The CAA want a purge of virtually every MP associated with the Labour Left, as this tweet proves:  https://twitter.com/AaronBastani/status/1321862860864147458/photo/1

You've shown your true colors, nicky.  This was never about AS- you knew Corbyn was innocent of any charges made against him on that- it was about moving Labour back to the 1997 policies- even though nobody wants Labour to go back to that and even though moving to the right at all can only mean going full Tory like Blair did.  

2010 and 2015 proved that policies like that will never make electable again, so what's the point?

I started this thread with positive intent, nicky, but you wouldn't accept that positive intent and kept up your vendetta against Corbyn even though any possible justification for it ended when he stood down as leader. 

Why couldn't you just engage on what I was discussing?  Why did you have to keep on with the "distancing from Corbyn" thing when the election of a different leader was more than distance enough?

You can't possibly believe that, after all this nastiness, Labour under Starmer will offer any radical or even mildly progressive policies at all.  How could it, when it is driving everyone who wants Labour to work for a better world away, when it is becoming an activist-free zone, when it is back under the control of the Alastair Campbell types who care about nothing but turning Labour into a socialism-and-idealism free zone?

You can't crush dreams one day and have any right to claim you want to make life better on the next.

(self-delete.  Dupe post).

The EHRC report also exonerated Chris Williamson and found that Labour was NOT "institutionally antisemitic".  So, Corbyn is essentially innocent of any wrongdoing.

He had no power to make the disciplinary proceedings against the tiny, trivial number of actual antisemites go any faster, and Livingstone just barely got out before being expelled.  What the hell more could he have done, really?