Keir Starmer at it again..
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Templeton Peck
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Osborne is impressed with the latest shadow cabinet appointments. Always a good sign.
This leaked report... man. It's depressing, infuriating, in so many ways. I'm putting this post here rather than the Corbyn thread because really, this is more about what Starmer does in response than Corbyn specifically.
For anyone who doesn't want to wade into the swamp of Labour infighting and wants just a summary, it's incredibly damning for an anti-Corbyn part of the party - but it's also not necessarily exculpatory in terms of Corbyn and his team. It was commissioned by Jennie Formby - outgoing general secretary (nothing to do with Momentum) - to form part of the evidence to be given to the EHRC as part of the investigation into antisemitism. It has stacks and stacks of email and WhatsApp correspondance between key figures in the party's bureaucracy (including then-general secretary Ian McNichol and figures like the then-head of compliance), detailing all kinds of shenanigans between 2015 and 2018. The idea was to use the party bureaucracy as a bulwark against moving the party leftwards, including but not limited to making the antisemitism issue deliberately worse.
While there is a lot of unpleasant chat in there which you'd probably find in everyone's private messages, there are some things discussed by these people which have massive, massive implications for Labour in the future. The thing is, the people involved here are all figures from the right of the party, and they've largely been in place since the Blair/Brown years - they think that anyone to the left of them is not just not to their taste, but is actively dangerous and needs to be pushed out of the party so that their mates can take over again. (Even Andy Burnham was too left-wing for this lot, he confirmed on Twitter yesterday; they've been a problem in various ways since Brown.) They're a tight-knit clique, fundamentally opposed to any kind of input by unions or members because they assume that anyone who joins the party to take an active role is some kind of "trot" - and the report has pages and pages of conversations about "trot hunting" and similar during 2015-16 in particular, when they assumed that the membership surge before/following Corbyn's leadership win must have been a result of coordinated far-left infiltration. For all the characterisation of the core people around Corbyn as cliquey and insular, the Labour right - judging from this - must be the worst within the party. They're intolerant, egotistical, aggressive, oftentimes deluded, and overall they come across as much more concerned with making sure that the "wrong" kind of Labour leader never becomes PM than with Labour ever winning any kind of contest. Every by-election victory and every poll bounce while Corbyn was leader was greeted with dismay and fury.
Regardless of the ideological differences involved between the various wings (and hoo boy, the differences are stark here), some of what's in this report is genuinely shocking:
- Lying to Corbyn's office about how many antisemitism complaints were being received, then leaking the real numbers to the press with the explicit aim of using it to discredit the leadership
- Encouraging .
- Spending huge amounts of time investigating (and expelling) members if they had been critical of MPs from the right of the party.
- Finding similarly tenuous grounds for expelling members who filed complaints about Islamophobic comments by Labour councillors (and also ignoring the Islamophobia).
- Trying to find ways to suspend MPs sympathetic to Corbyn while also trying to protect/restore anti-Corbyn MPs who had brought the party into disrepute (eg, trying to parachute Simon Danczuk back into a new seat).
- A six-figure slush fund was established for the 2017 election so that campaign funds could be secretly funneled towards defending the seats of Labour right MPs like Mike Gapes and Tom Watson, and away from defending the seats of MPs they disliked.
- Repeated harassment of black women MPs, in particular Diane Abbot and Dawn Butler, as well as repeated dismissal of complaints of other forms of racism by members/elected officials besides antisemitism as unimportant.
Overall, it provides concrete evidence that antisemitism was weaponised against Jeremy Corbyn by this group. Indeed, many of the key figures involved in these conversations appeared as "ex-Labour whistleblowers" in the July 2019 BBC Panorama special about antisemitism in Labour, while their internal comms from the time period show them deliberately making the problem worse as a tool in a factional dispute.
Now, a lot of the anger in response to what's in here is understandable - the language is often vicious and hateful, well beyond what you'd expect in private messages between friends (let alone colleagues), even allowing for irony or hyperbole. And there's a real hunger out on the left for silver linings and post-facto vindications after December's election, so to read that a lot of the core managers at the heart of the party were spending day after day not just hoping for Corbyn to fail, but actively working towards that happening.... well, it's like a bucket of chum dumped among sharks. Especially as one of the key people involved here was - up until the report leaked, I imagine - Keir Starmer's first choice as new party general secretary.
But - and there are huge buts here - it's also not a vindication of Corbyn's leadership, nor is it any kind of report into the antisemitism crisis being manufactured wholesale. The report explicitly says this, repeatedly: Not only are characterisations of the problem as some kind of "witch hunt" completely unfounded, it's only evidence towards why the party dragged its feet so badly between 2015 and 2018, not a justification for that slowness. There are numerous antisemitism complaints which are investigated and dealt with, and there are figures on the left of the party who somehow come across even worse (Chris Williamson, for example, who judging from this report is even more of a tosser, unbelievably).
And yet...
- While it's fascinating to read what a bunch of lovely, likeable folk the Labour right are, the majority of what's detailed in the report is petty, immature, schoolyard bullshit; it doesn't really contribute that much factually, but it surely made it all the more tempting to leak it unredacted...
- While things do seem to improve from 2018 once Formby is general secretary and the crowd involved in this report have almost all left... did it? It doesn't really explain why things were still so bad by the 2019 election, not to mention why the leadership could never articulate or organise any kind of response that recognised the demands of the Jewish community, which in itself made the problem worse and worse with time all by itself
- As much as it's galling to see people on your team were working behind the scenes to make you lose, it doesn't really "prove" that but for what they did Jeremy Corbyn would currently be three years into his first term as prime minister. I say this as a Labour activist, and a socialist, who joined when Corbyn became leader and who spent days and nights out knocking doors in the cold just a few months ago trying desperately to avoid what ended up happening. It feels good to have someone to blame, but this... this isn't enough to offset all of the other problems of Corbyn's leadership, and I think it's a dangerous trap to think that it does.
- Not to mention the massive caveat that Formby herself commissioned this report, and we don't know who wrote/compiled it, nor what was left out during editing...
Obviously, internecine civil wars among the left are one of our proudest traditions, and this kind of right vs left clash of ideals has been going on inside Labour since... well, since the party was founded. (Nye Bevan was the token lefty in a plum cabinet role of his day, just as RLB is now, for example.) Starmer's whole pitch is to be a unifier who's going to end the factional in-fighting, and his cabinet is fairly representative of the breadth of the PLP... except that in the junior roles it's more tilted towards the up-and-comers in the right of the party than the left, and in particular some minor figures - like eg Wes Streeting - who are implicated in some of the more controversial events recorded in the leaked report. The right of the party loves nothing more than being a complete pain in the ass if it doesn't get what it wants, and it can be such a pain in the pass because they're the Malcolm Tucker wing - they know all the right journalists, and just the right inside information to make life uncomfortable for a leader they dislike. We can debate the degree to which Corbyn's failure to win in 2017 and/or 2019 was down to the right's wrecking tactics until the cows come home, but we know for a fact that being a Labour leader who isn't Tony Blair means you're going to have people like this in your party trying to tear you down because they'd rather see a Conservative in Downing Street than their own guy.
It's an incredibly tricky challenge for Starmer, because as far as I can see there's no way to rip out this kind of factionalism and do what he wants - professionalise Labour and make it an efficient, unified team again - without demoting or expelling a number of people who will make life much more dangerous outside the tent pissing in than inside the tent pissing out. But if he doesn't confront them, and doesn't take action, then poof - there go all those left members who joined under Corbyn, and there goes all your money.
And in the middle of all of it, British politics yet again treats the rights and dignity of ethnic minorities as just another tool in the bastard's toolkit. Sigh.
For anyone who doesn't want to wade into the swamp of Labour infighting and wants just a summary, it's incredibly damning for an anti-Corbyn part of the party - but it's also not necessarily exculpatory in terms of Corbyn and his team. It was commissioned by Jennie Formby - outgoing general secretary (nothing to do with Momentum) - to form part of the evidence to be given to the EHRC as part of the investigation into antisemitism. It has stacks and stacks of email and WhatsApp correspondance between key figures in the party's bureaucracy (including then-general secretary Ian McNichol and figures like the then-head of compliance), detailing all kinds of shenanigans between 2015 and 2018. The idea was to use the party bureaucracy as a bulwark against moving the party leftwards, including but not limited to making the antisemitism issue deliberately worse.
While there is a lot of unpleasant chat in there which you'd probably find in everyone's private messages, there are some things discussed by these people which have massive, massive implications for Labour in the future. The thing is, the people involved here are all figures from the right of the party, and they've largely been in place since the Blair/Brown years - they think that anyone to the left of them is not just not to their taste, but is actively dangerous and needs to be pushed out of the party so that their mates can take over again. (Even Andy Burnham was too left-wing for this lot, he confirmed on Twitter yesterday; they've been a problem in various ways since Brown.) They're a tight-knit clique, fundamentally opposed to any kind of input by unions or members because they assume that anyone who joins the party to take an active role is some kind of "trot" - and the report has pages and pages of conversations about "trot hunting" and similar during 2015-16 in particular, when they assumed that the membership surge before/following Corbyn's leadership win must have been a result of coordinated far-left infiltration. For all the characterisation of the core people around Corbyn as cliquey and insular, the Labour right - judging from this - must be the worst within the party. They're intolerant, egotistical, aggressive, oftentimes deluded, and overall they come across as much more concerned with making sure that the "wrong" kind of Labour leader never becomes PM than with Labour ever winning any kind of contest. Every by-election victory and every poll bounce while Corbyn was leader was greeted with dismay and fury.
Regardless of the ideological differences involved between the various wings (and hoo boy, the differences are stark here), some of what's in this report is genuinely shocking:
- Lying to Corbyn's office about how many antisemitism complaints were being received, then leaking the real numbers to the press with the explicit aim of using it to discredit the leadership
- Encouraging .
- Spending huge amounts of time investigating (and expelling) members if they had been critical of MPs from the right of the party.
- Finding similarly tenuous grounds for expelling members who filed complaints about Islamophobic comments by Labour councillors (and also ignoring the Islamophobia).
- Trying to find ways to suspend MPs sympathetic to Corbyn while also trying to protect/restore anti-Corbyn MPs who had brought the party into disrepute (eg, trying to parachute Simon Danczuk back into a new seat).
- A six-figure slush fund was established for the 2017 election so that campaign funds could be secretly funneled towards defending the seats of Labour right MPs like Mike Gapes and Tom Watson, and away from defending the seats of MPs they disliked.
- Repeated harassment of black women MPs, in particular Diane Abbot and Dawn Butler, as well as repeated dismissal of complaints of other forms of racism by members/elected officials besides antisemitism as unimportant.
Overall, it provides concrete evidence that antisemitism was weaponised against Jeremy Corbyn by this group. Indeed, many of the key figures involved in these conversations appeared as "ex-Labour whistleblowers" in the July 2019 BBC Panorama special about antisemitism in Labour, while their internal comms from the time period show them deliberately making the problem worse as a tool in a factional dispute.
Now, a lot of the anger in response to what's in here is understandable - the language is often vicious and hateful, well beyond what you'd expect in private messages between friends (let alone colleagues), even allowing for irony or hyperbole. And there's a real hunger out on the left for silver linings and post-facto vindications after December's election, so to read that a lot of the core managers at the heart of the party were spending day after day not just hoping for Corbyn to fail, but actively working towards that happening.... well, it's like a bucket of chum dumped among sharks. Especially as one of the key people involved here was - up until the report leaked, I imagine - Keir Starmer's first choice as new party general secretary.
But - and there are huge buts here - it's also not a vindication of Corbyn's leadership, nor is it any kind of report into the antisemitism crisis being manufactured wholesale. The report explicitly says this, repeatedly: Not only are characterisations of the problem as some kind of "witch hunt" completely unfounded, it's only evidence towards why the party dragged its feet so badly between 2015 and 2018, not a justification for that slowness. There are numerous antisemitism complaints which are investigated and dealt with, and there are figures on the left of the party who somehow come across even worse (Chris Williamson, for example, who judging from this report is even more of a tosser, unbelievably).
And yet...
- While it's fascinating to read what a bunch of lovely, likeable folk the Labour right are, the majority of what's detailed in the report is petty, immature, schoolyard bullshit; it doesn't really contribute that much factually, but it surely made it all the more tempting to leak it unredacted...
- While things do seem to improve from 2018 once Formby is general secretary and the crowd involved in this report have almost all left... did it? It doesn't really explain why things were still so bad by the 2019 election, not to mention why the leadership could never articulate or organise any kind of response that recognised the demands of the Jewish community, which in itself made the problem worse and worse with time all by itself
- As much as it's galling to see people on your team were working behind the scenes to make you lose, it doesn't really "prove" that but for what they did Jeremy Corbyn would currently be three years into his first term as prime minister. I say this as a Labour activist, and a socialist, who joined when Corbyn became leader and who spent days and nights out knocking doors in the cold just a few months ago trying desperately to avoid what ended up happening. It feels good to have someone to blame, but this... this isn't enough to offset all of the other problems of Corbyn's leadership, and I think it's a dangerous trap to think that it does.
- Not to mention the massive caveat that Formby herself commissioned this report, and we don't know who wrote/compiled it, nor what was left out during editing...
Obviously, internecine civil wars among the left are one of our proudest traditions, and this kind of right vs left clash of ideals has been going on inside Labour since... well, since the party was founded. (Nye Bevan was the token lefty in a plum cabinet role of his day, just as RLB is now, for example.) Starmer's whole pitch is to be a unifier who's going to end the factional in-fighting, and his cabinet is fairly representative of the breadth of the PLP... except that in the junior roles it's more tilted towards the up-and-comers in the right of the party than the left, and in particular some minor figures - like eg Wes Streeting - who are implicated in some of the more controversial events recorded in the leaked report. The right of the party loves nothing more than being a complete pain in the ass if it doesn't get what it wants, and it can be such a pain in the pass because they're the Malcolm Tucker wing - they know all the right journalists, and just the right inside information to make life uncomfortable for a leader they dislike. We can debate the degree to which Corbyn's failure to win in 2017 and/or 2019 was down to the right's wrecking tactics until the cows come home, but we know for a fact that being a Labour leader who isn't Tony Blair means you're going to have people like this in your party trying to tear you down because they'd rather see a Conservative in Downing Street than their own guy.
It's an incredibly tricky challenge for Starmer, because as far as I can see there's no way to rip out this kind of factionalism and do what he wants - professionalise Labour and make it an efficient, unified team again - without demoting or expelling a number of people who will make life much more dangerous outside the tent pissing in than inside the tent pissing out. But if he doesn't confront them, and doesn't take action, then poof - there go all those left members who joined under Corbyn, and there goes all your money.
And in the middle of all of it, British politics yet again treats the rights and dignity of ethnic minorities as just another tool in the bastard's toolkit. Sigh.
Elephant Pyjamas
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Thanks for that Proslo, makes for depressing reading though.
Tredman
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If only we had had this 2 years ago we might not be looking at 50,000+ people dead:
https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1258010797902565377?s=20
https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1258010797902565377?s=20
Elephant Pyjamas
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I don't think he has done enough to be honest, it's all been a bit timid? Also other than PMQs i'd like to see a lot more of him? He's still around 20 points behind in the polls too.
Tredman
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DP.
He can't go all in as we would have people complaining he is making political advantage out of people dieing (which would be correct to a certain extent). Plus a quieter commons is better suited to this type of actual analysis.
Polls mean shit at the moment.
He can't go all in as we would have people complaining he is making political advantage out of people dieing (which would be correct to a certain extent). Plus a quieter commons is better suited to this type of actual analysis.
Polls mean shit at the moment.
Elephant Pyjamas
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I dunno, i think the polls should be pretty telling during a pandemic that has lead to as you say 50k deaths and the 2nd highest death toll in the world. That is surely exactly when the opposition poll ratings should be going up!
Deutsch Wolf
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I don't want him to be an attack dog as such. Just take down the utter piffle that Johnson spouts on the rare occasions he bothers to speak publicly, and do it in a calm, considered, thorough manner. That's what he's good at.
Elephant Pyjamas
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It is, will that win him votes though?
Deutsch Wolf
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I dunno mate. I've yet to make my brain compute why anyone would vote for Boris Johnson so I'm not the right person to ask.
Elephant Pyjamas
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A few days old, and you would imagine the last few days would have seen things swing a little, but i don't know.
Westminster voting intention:
CON: 51% (+1)
LAB: 33% (-)
LDEM: 6% (-1)
GRN: 3% (-)
via
@OpiniumResearch
, 29 Apr - 01 May
Chgs. w/ 23 Apr
Westminster voting intention:
CON: 51% (+1)
LAB: 33% (-)
LDEM: 6% (-1)
GRN: 3% (-)
via
@OpiniumResearch
, 29 Apr - 01 May
Chgs. w/ 23 Apr
AndyWolves
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Keir Starmer is everything I want from a politician. Polite, firm and factually aware
PMQ is so much better without all the other twats braying to Johnsons piffle.
PMQ is so much better without all the other twats braying to Johnsons piffle.
Paddingtonwolf
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The polls mean very little at the moment. He ably has shown both Raab and Johnson to be rubbish in PMQs but nobody is going to clear the nearly dying stuff in a fortnight. Give it time.
Wilf Wolf
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Polls are irrelevant at the moment. People generally don't like admitting they were wrong and it will take time for people who voted for Johnson to accept he has performed appallingly over this. The claims he was at death's door will also make people less likely to be critical, as will a natural desire to be supportive of the Government in times of crisis. Gradually more and more will wake up and smell the coffee but it won't happen quickly.
BGreenWolf
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Starmer absolutely filleted Johnson yesterday. I'm not sure what more you'd want, to be honest.
Paddingtonwolf
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It’s almost as if the PMQs performance of a top QC with a meticulously prepared brief has come as a surprise.
Elephant Pyjamas
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I don't really understand "how polls are irrelevant at the moment", polls are always relevant, especially during a period when the focus is on the government more than ever.
Elephant Pyjamas
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I hope you're right, but i really struggle to apply logic to how the public think in this country anymore.
