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

"Lenin had it right about the Labour Party 100 years ago. 'A thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie."

https://twitter.com/Louis_Allday/status/1321807356443971584

Ditto the 'progressive left' NDP

Starter must be doing something right. Marginalizing the Corbynites perhaps?

https://labourlist.org/2020/10/labour-secures-five-point-lead-over-tories-ipsos-mori-poll-shows/

"The question that UK British people should be asking is not whether there is antisemitism in the Labour Party, but why there has been no investigation into the corruption of UK politics by a foreign power?"

https://twitter.com/mojos55/status/1321932295364902914

'But Russia...'

Corbyn issued a statement in response to the report, which claimed the “the scale of the [antisemitism] problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party”.

He was suspended because what he said was true.  

Sorry. That is a You Guv poll released today

Ken, no responsible person ever said Corbyn was an anti Semite. He tolerated anti Semitism within his faction, however. The EHRC certainly didn’t “exonerate” him on that.

Ken Burch wrote:

Mass resignations from Labour now happening...only the Tories can possibly benefit from that.

Again, it was enough that Corbyn stood down.  Nothing beyond that was needed.

Resignations are good, but without forming a new party, they will have little impact.  All the left have to look forward by staying in a Labour is to be shit on, as they were for 30 years prior to Corbyn.  

7 major UK unions issue joint call for Corbyn’s immediate reinstatement – still not told what rule he supposedly broke

https://skwawkbox.org/2020/10/31/breaking-7-major-uk-unions-issue-joint-call-for-corbyns-immediate-reinstatement-still-not-told-what-rule-he-supposedly-broke/

Economic Policy After Brexit and COVID-19: Taking Control

https://youtu.be/2VNJwsoVLk4

"One of the problems we have is that there's internecine warfare within the progressive side of the polity. That played out in the Brexit debate quite clearly, where you had the urban voices talking about Remain as a sort of globalist vision - 'cosmopolitanism', which in the EU ends at its  borders. It's not cosmopolitanism at all. The EU leaves people dying on its borders or drowning at sea and lying on beaches. So we've got this real problem where there's a split within the progressive movement.

I see this morning that Jeremy Corbyn's been suspended from the Labour Party for god's sake. My friend Chris Williamson was expelled from the Labour Party. Things like that do not auger well for what we need to do. And what we need to do is to create a true working class movement..."

“https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/01/jewish-labour-members-have-been-vindicated-antisemitism-ruth-smeeth

”Shit-stirring Zionist cum buckets, bought and paid for by Israel.” According to the Labour party governance unit, as recently as last year, this statement made about Margaret Hodge and I was neither racist nor misogynist and didn’t warrant any action against the Labour party member who had written it. That is, until it appeared on the front page of a national newspaper and even then, the member wasn’t suspended until Jeremy Corbyn had to face MPs in parliament.

This is just one example of literally hundreds detailing how Jews were treated by Corbyn’s Labour party. The last five years have been grim for too many Jewish Labour party members. We have been abused, threatened, belittled and then told we were making it all up or if it did exist we were weaponising racism for factional gain. It felt like a systematic campaign to break us and hound us out of the party. Every day there was a new antisemitism scandal and every day the leadership of the party tried to turn a blind eye.

The fact that I had to move home on the recommendation of the police due to the sheer scale of the threat and that Luciana Berger had to have police protection at the Labour party conference, in the city she represented, were merely inconvenient truths for people who wanted us out of the party, who wanted us silenced.

The Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), the Labour party’s oldest socialist affiliate, at first tried to find a way to work with Corbyn’s team but every effort was rebuffed – to the point that when an antisemitism subcommittee was convened by the Labour party, JLM was told to wait outside: we weren’t wanted at the meeting as they discussed us.

After three years of misery JLM decided that enough finally was enough and that we had no option but to appeal to a regulatory body, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), to intervene to determine whether the Labour party was systematically discriminating against us because of our heritage.

And finally, last Thursday the EHRC did the unprecedented – it found the Labour party responsible for three breaches of the Equality Act and stated that: “The equality body’s analysis points to a culture within the party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent antisemitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it.”

My tears were of horror, deep sadness but also relief. The world could no longer dismiss what we were saying as a smear

Those words made me cry. My party, my political home for 25 years, was found to have been illegally discriminating against its Jewish members. My tears were of horror, deep sadness but also relief. We had been vindicated, the world could no longer dismiss what we were saying as a smear. It would finally be possible to move on and fix the endemic racism that had taken a grip of the party I had dedicated my life to.

So, the only important question now is what should to happen next? The EHRC has outlined a series of steps that the party needs to take but the reality is that its remit is about policy and procedures not cultural change. Of course, the JLM wants to work with the new leadership of the Labour party to make sure that the new systems work and that we as targets of abuse have confidence in the new procedures, but we need more than that.

Jewish members need to be heard, our stories of harassment acknowledged and we need to see real cultural change in the party, not just to ensure that the Labour party is a safe space for Jews and non-Jews alike but also to make sure that this never, ever happens again, to Jews or to any other minority community.

Keir Starmer has a huge job of work to do to rebuild bridges with the Jewish community and to fix the Labour party. He didn’t create this mess but fixing it now lies with him. All I can ask of him is please don’t less us down.

Ruth Smeeth was Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, but left the Commons on 6 November 2019

Starmer Begins Purge of Corbyn Supporters From Labour Party

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/31/corb-o31.html

"...The Zionist Community Security Trust (CST) stepped in to reinforce Starmer's witch-hunt, with the Guardian reporting, 'The group said it had used software to search for terms linked to leftwing antisemitism, such as 'Zionist,' 'Mossad,' and 'Rothschild' along side Starmer's name over the past 30 days.'

In the Labour leaership contest, Starmer and the three other candidates were all asked if they were Zionists and all said they were. He told the Jewish News, 'I do support Zionism...I support Zionism without qualification.' *

This was widely hailed by Jewish publications, who would all now be identified as part of a spike in anti-Semitism by the CST's software. Corbyn was forced to deny the EHRC report's claim of widespread anti-Semitism attributed to his leadership of the party, but added, 'While I do not accept all of its [the EHRC's] findings, I trust its recommendations will be swiftly implemented to help move on from this period'  -  giving de facto endorsement to the contrived witch-hunt of his own supporters, just as he did while still party leader...."

*(At least he admitted it. His actions become clear and follow logically from that point on.  See also #207)

The Rare Sight of a Political Reckoning

Britain’s Labour Party has suspended its former leader. Who knew in this partisan age that politicians could hold their own side to account?

HELEN LEWIS

OCTOBER 30, 2020 

FRANK AUGSTEIN / AP​

These days, it is rare that a piece of political news can make your jaw drop. But the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from Britain’s Labour Party lit up social media—and my phone—like a fireworks display.

Until April, Corbyn was the leader of Britain’s main opposition party. (He stood down less than four months after leading Labour to a thumping general-election defeat last year.) The man who replaced him, former lawyer Keir Starmer, supported the punishment.

The immediate cause of Corbyn’s suspension was his reaction to an independent report, published this week by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a British watchdog group, on anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. The report found that his office had interfered with complaints about anti-Semitic postings and comments, objected to an investigation into Corbyn himself, and contributed to a hostile environment for Jews in the party. Significantly, it found that the offenses amounted to three breaches of equalities law. One section was entitled “A Failure of Leadership.”

In this context, taking action against the man who oversaw this failure might seem obvious. Yet our political climate encourages partisans to dismiss or even cover up wrongdoing by their side. The American comparison underlines how extraordinary Starmer’s action is. If Donald Trump loses the upcoming U.S. presidential election, absolutely no one expects the Republican leadership to repudiate his racism, sexism, and contempt for democracy. There will be no reckoning with the man who corrupted the values of his party. In a hyper-partisan era, the temptation to excuse and obfuscate the mistakes of one’s own side will surely prove irresistible, even to those who have privately expressed their disgust with the president.

• 

  Healing the Rift With Britain’s Jews

  HELEN LEWIS

• 

  Why British Jews Are Worried by Jeremy Corbyn

  HELEN LEWIS

• 

  Boris Johnson Is Not Britain’s Donald Trump. Jeremy Corbyn Is.

  TOM MCTAGUE

The most extraordinary aspect of Corbyn’s suspension, then, is also the most basic one: A party leader has disciplined his predecessor. (Labour insists that the decision was not taken by Starmer personally—but he created the “zero tolerance” rules which made it inevitable, and it was his chosen candidate for the party’s top official who wielded the axe.) Starmer won the leadership in part because he did not denounce Corbyn, as other Labour politicians did. Indeed, he served in party leadership under Corbyn. He is far from the British equivalent of a Never Trumper. Yet it is under his command that the party has severed the link with its most recent leader. It’s not regicide or patricide, but it feels close to both.

Read: The lessons of Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat

Corbyn’s reaction to the anti-Semitism report was typical of his attitude to the broader issue, which has dragged on for several years. In a Facebook post, he said he regretted the slowness of reforming the complaints procedure under his leadership, but argued that Labour’s anti-Semitism problem had been “dramatically overstated” by his opponents and the media. He used a favorite phrase—denouncing “all forms of racism”—which he must know by now is upsetting to Jewish activists, who see it as evidence that he cannot recognize the unique challenge of anti-Semitism. Corbyn added that he did not accept all the findings of the report.

That last statement sealed his political death warrant. Starmer served as Corbyn’s Brexit spokesman, and ran for the leadership on a platform of unity, promising to heal the division between the Corbynite left and the rest of the party. He was widely expected to reform Labour’s complaints procedures in light of the EHRC report and perhaps even criticize his predecessor by name. But suspending Corbyn from the party, one he has represented in Parliament since 1983, is a much more decisive—and incendiary—move.

Corbyn won the Labour leadership in 2015 on the promise he would take the party to the left, breaking with the capitalist-friendly policies and political centrism of former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Labour’s socialist faction had long been marginalized—one of Blair’s advisers once spoke about consigning it to a “sealed tomb”—and from the start, Corbyn felt attacked by the media and undermined by many of his own members of Parliament, who sat closer to the political center than Corbyn’s supporters.

As the friction grew, his long associations with fringe left-wing groups were a point of contention. A firm opponent of colonialism, he had spent years associating with activists who saw Israel as one of the evils of the modern world because of its activities in Gaza and the West Bank. In those circles, criticisms of Israeli policy too often slid into conspiracies about divided loyalties, a sinister “Jewish lobby,” and shadowy cabals of “bankers” or “Rothschilds” ruling the world. Corbyn had personally invited a Holocaust denier to Parliament and referred to members of the militant group Hamas as “friends.”

Before last year’s election, Britain’s chief rabbi went public with his fears over what a Corbyn government would mean for British Jews. One of Labour’s oldest affiliates, the Jewish Labour Movement, refused to campaign for the party. Britain’s Jewish population is tiny, so this had a negligible effect on the electoral results, but it tainted Labour’s cherished self-image as a champion of equality and anti-racism.

Starmer’s wife is Jewish, and he feels a moral, as well as strategic, imperative to tackle anti-Semitism. His first speech as leader addressed the problem head-on, and he quickly met with Jewish groups that had complained of being frozen out by Corbyn. In June, he sacked his Corbynite rival for the leadership, Rebecca Long Bailey, from his shadow cabinet for sharing an article containing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory on social media. After several other Corbynite shadow ministers resigned on October 5 over an unrelated disagreement (a bill about undercover operations by the security services), the Labour left is now highly marginalized in Parliament again. It might not be in a “sealed tomb,” but it has gone from believing it could be on the verge of governing Britain to its present humbled and diminished state in less than a year.

Read: Britain just got pulled back from the edge

How much firepower do Corbyn supporters have to aim at Starmer? The current Labour leader is no one’s idea of a charisma machine, but he has previously run a large organization, as Britain’s chief prosecutor, and is nerdishly interested in how institutions work. That has served him well as Labour leader. Since taking over, he has assembled a loyal office, installed his favored candidate in the party’s administration, and laid the ground for the decision to suspend Corbyn by declaring that the party had a “new leadership.” Nonetheless, a civil war in Labour could prove debilitating and even fatal to his chances of becoming prime minister.

As I wrote in December, denying the extent of anti-Jewish sentiment and conspiracy theories—implying that there was a “witch hunt”—had become a loyalty test on the left in Britain. Starmer has indicated that Labour has no room for anyone, no matter how senior, who contests the existence of the problem.

The question now is this: Will the rump of Corbyn’s supporters mount a coup attempt on Starmer? Or now that the pretense of “unity” is gone, could Corbyn become a king in exile? Since stepping down, the former leader, who once drew thousands to his rallies, has largely retreated to defending his record and commenting on liberation struggles abroad. Perhaps he might remember his heyday and brand himself as the leader of “True Labour” or something similar. Any new outfit would struggle to win seats under Britain’s electoral system—the experience of those who left Labour to form a new party in the last Parliament is not a happy one—but who cares? Corbyn never really believed in parliamentary democracy as a route to socialism anyway. He might feel life is more congenial as the Old Pretender, criticizing his successor from beyond his reach.

This is an arresting moment in British politics—a truly unexpected event—and a rare one in global terms, too. The U.S. is less than a week away from an election which the president is expected to lose. Yet if he does, there will be no catharsis, no reflection, no denunciation.

Starmer has shown that another way is possible. His decision is a gamble. It is the nuclear option. It is a reckoning.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/jeremy-corbyn-...

The Labour Party has one objective and that is to win elections and unfortunately Corbyn is an impediment to that objective. It's time for Corbyn to moveon.org

One thing Starmer clearly stands for is Zionism. Not only has he declared it but demonstrated his commitment by Corbynning the previous party leader.

What nonsense you spout Ken? No difference between The Tories Labourunder Starmer..

If you believe that it is time for you to join the Socialist Workers Party. Please take Corbyn with you because no one has ever inflicted as much damage on the LabourParty as he had.