Bye bye, Tories, hello what?

That first part seems key: a lot of the media and social media seem to focus on the parliamentary seats when Labour only convinced one in three voters. That is not a lot for a mandate, really. I also strongly assume real preference for Labour may be closer to 20%, only a lot of people vote tactically because they know their vote would be wasted on the smaller party that they actually support. What is more, reverse the splintering of the right, and the result is reversed without anybody shifting camps. The first past the post system is simply not fit for purpose.

My prediction would have been that Labour, having promised not to do anything that would improve the economy, will in 2029 have disillusioned many of its voters and lose against a reinvigorated, perhaps even more radicalised right wing party. Seeing these numbers I now realise that this could happen even if Labour has a lot of luck on the economy and entirely maintains its vote share, because it is so small to begin with.

As I wrote before, the ratchet applies across much of the Western world since the 1980s: conservatives sow fear of immigrants and promise to lower taxes, they win elections, then privatise, deregulate, suppress wages, and cut services until voted out. Then the centre-left wins an election or two on the promise of being less incompetent and less corrupt than the right, and does nothing substantial to re-nationalise, to re-regulate, or to re-build services. Rinse and repeat until we are in late stage of the Roman Empire territory and our social structure falls apart because nothing works anymore.

That first part seems key: a lot of the media and social media seem to focus on the parliamentary seats when Labour only convinced one in three voters.

Yes: their vote share is much lower than Corbyn’s in 2017 (40%) and barely improves on 2019 (32.1%). Also the lowest turnout in 20 years.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/05/election-night-labour-wins-smaller-vote-share-than-corbyn/

Fits with Starmer’s aspiration to be a fake rerun of Blair I suppose.

Another seconding of AlexSL. England is not immune from the right-wing winds hitting Continental Europe. See also Pollievre here in Canada.

Yes, I know, what happens in England is very significant. But in keeping with the tenor of the observations so far, I just wanted to remind (a) that Labour seems to have returned to dominance in Scotland and in Wales, and (b) that Scottish Labour was an important presence in “New Labour.”” My guess is that the latest Scottish Labour contingent at Westminster will be Starmerite to their core and that, being rigidly so, they’ll bear a lot of responsibility for sending the new Labour government down the awful path some others have suggested here.

As to what might happen, the Guardian’s vox pop of the bourgeoisie might help. Bungs to green (and not so green) business, “stability around taxes” and “bold reforms” especially to planning law and pesky banking regulations might be on the cards… hallelujah and hosanna (to quote the Graun’s top thinker, Polly Toynbee, elsewhere in the same edition).
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/05/need-brave-business-leaders-react-labour-victory-industry-starmer
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/05/general-election-tories-politics-labour

Short version. Both parties subscribe to the same bullocks about government spending with a model that has nothing to do with reality. Loans create money. Money is not a fixed amount. If economists ran physics we would still believe that heavy things fall faster, and there are 4 elements, earth, air, fire, and water.
Per Steve Keen:
The root problem, as I noted in my previous post (Substack;Patreon), is that both parties—and almost all of the bureaucracy, the media, and economic thinktanks, as a reader pointed out—have Neoliberalism “embedded in them”. They hold the belief, derived from supply and demand analysis, that the government borrows from the private sector when it runs a deficit, and that, therefore, a deficit reduces total savings.”

Subscribe to Steve’s Patreon account.

“Starmer’s victory speech was … largely devoid of content”

Since the Reagan-Thatcher era, UK Labour, like US Dems, have pretty much accepted the neoliberal view that economic policy should be made by private actors (i.e., rich people), not by government. I expect do-nothing obfuscation and obscurantism from Starmer. I fear that he will open the door to a Farage/Trump-like successor.

Btw since this is a thread about Alex’s prediction, I broadly agree—I think I might have advanced something similar when CT was anointing Macron in 2017 (it gives me pleasure etc)—however I dissent from the implication that the centre-“left” is the stationary moment of the neoliberal ratchet: in Britain among other innovations they marketised HE and created the monstrous “work capability assessment” system the Tories would later use to massacre large numbers of the disabled (ofc they also joined neoconservative US in massacring millions of Iraqis and destabilised the surrounding region but that’s water under the bridge now apart from the waves of refugees and the breakdown of a law-governed international order).

Bbtw having encountered an unusually broad sample of British society today (mostly not far-leftists) I have to say the Guardian opinion section’s K-pop concert audience mood seems unrepresentative to put it mildly. Did they all do too many pills at Glasto?

The Blair comparisons don’t do justice to Starmer’s factionalism and extreme intolerance to even the moderate left.
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/06/keirll-fix-it

This is good on the precarity of Starmer’s en marche. Nice vase you got there…
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/majority-without-a-mandate

In Ilford North, independent left candidate Leanne Mohamad came within 500 votes of unseating the incoming health minister Wes Streeting; in Bethnal Green & Stepney, the incumbent Rushanara Ali, who refused to back a ceasefire in Gaza, saw her majority reduced from 37,524 to 1,689; in Birmingham Yardley, the right-wing sectarian Jess Phillips was almost unseated by the Workers’ Party; and in Chingford and Woodford Green, where Faiza Shaheen was blocked from standing as the Labour candidate, she fought her former party to a draw – splitting the vote and allowing the Tories to retain the seat…

Meet the shad cab:

Reeves: ‘There’s not a huge amount of money’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cldyeykzp33o

Life on benefits will not be an option under Labour, says Liz Kendall
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/04/life-on-benefits-under-labour-will-not-be-an-option-says-liz-kendall

Labour would ‘hold the door open’ for private sector in NHS, says Wes Streeting
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/labour-private-sector-nhs-wes-streeting-2760505

Two-fifths of Starmer’s cabinet have received funds from pro-Israel groups, Declassified UK finds
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/two-fifths-starmers-cabinet-have-been-funded-pro-israel-lobbyists-declassified-uk

“So a Labour government, even with a large majority, trying to governm Macron-style from the centre, faces the prospect of a French-style polarisation, losing votes to the left in the cities and the far-right on the edges.’

I’ve been making this general argument for ages now

https://crookedtimber.org/2016/02/29/the-three-party-system/

In this context, what we need to hope for is to keep Trumpist support low enough that they can be beaten by a coalition of soft neoliberals and the left, and that this coalition should actually form. Given the irrelevance of neoliberalism to the actual problems we face, this coalition should eventually be dominated by the left

RobinM@27 Was there any such talk about the inherent unfairness of FPTP when the Tories got a lopsided number of seats before?

As I understand it, the Bush people had prepared a campaign against the Electoral College to be undertaken if Gore had won the EC and lost the popular vote. If Biden carries the EC this fall by slim majorities in a number of states but Trump is reported a massively lopsided majorities from Red States, resulting in his first winning vote, I am somehow certain the Trumpers would instantly reverse their 2016 position that only the EC counts.

In other words, is this what is going on with “a lot being said…?”

While I don’t doubt, Steven @ 32, that there are those who respond to FPTP or the EC depending on whether it favours or disfavours their partisan wishes at this or that election, there are surely some people who take a rather less partisan position on these matters.

So a couple of thoughts on what was a very weird election –

1) Labour’s vote share – I go back and forth on how significant the 34% figure is. I’m a PR advocate because FPTP is democratically indefensible, but I’m also not sure I agree with Chris Bertram’s analysis about what happened with those missing votes. Basically this election result was nailed on from the start – a lot of the Labour ‘excess’ vote took the opportunity to give a free kick to Starmer and might reasonably be expected to return home when things tighten up a bit. In this sense its a little like the 2017 election – there was a widespread (correct) assumption that Corbyn couldn’t possibly become PM so it was safe to vote Labour to kick May for her terrible campaign. When it was an actual choice, a not terribly popular Tory leader (Johnson) was able to run a pretty mediocre campaign with a simple offer and absolutely bury Labour. I don’t think the Tories are going to suddenly discover that tacking endlessly rightward was a bad strategy, and will make someone like Badenoch or Braverman leader. That is, someone who doesn’t fix the competence problem and will conclude that trans issues and turning the racism dial rightward is the way to win.

In other words I think the odds of ten years of Starmer are pretty solid (followed by Phillipson, Reeves, Nandy or some other ambitious female Labour MP not yet identified as a potential leader). The key take away is that under the system as it is Starmer took Labour from an epochal defeat to a massive majority in five years, which should lead to the conclusion that he and his team are indeed Very Good at Politics, but I suspect won’t. The “broad but shallow” mandate could also be good from a party management perspective if handled skilfully – If Labour is going to build on this result its going to have to deliver results, particularly in planning reform and housebuilding. Being able to tell a bunch of possibly recalcitrant MPs on thin majorities that their hopes of a second term depend on a rising tide lifting all boats is probably a more effective strategy than “2024 isn’t going to happen again, so just accept you’re here for five years”, which is what was was going to be the case when Labour was expected to win over 40% and 450+ seats.

2) Labour has been in power for less than 72 hours but so far the signs are good. Timpson, in particular, is the kind of ministerial appointment that should be taken as evidence that Starmer is more progressive than the popular caricature suggests. Also – rail renationalisation. Great! Engaging with the mayoralties and devolved administrations is also a sign that regional development is probably going to get more constructive and practical attention rather than vague bullshit about ‘levelling up’. Giving Burnham the resources to pursue development projects in Manchester is much more likely under Labour for political reasons and likely to be both effective and popular. Above all we can be very confident Starmer will have zero time for the idea that he should be bound by things he said in the election campaign if they prevent him from doing things that will improve the state of the country in government. This is also good.

3) The Tories probably got saved from outright oblivion by Nigel Farage indulging in a bit of ill-timed Putin-snuggling at the end of the campaign. That said, for building up Reform going forward the five seat caucus is probably the perfect result for them. If Farage had found himself at the head of 13 MPs, of whom roughly half couldn’t be trusted not to show up to parliament in a replica SS uniform, he would have been spending all of his time trying to wrangle a parliamentary party and absolutely hating it. As it stands, Farage, Anderson, Tice and the other two are a tight enough unit that they can maintain discipline and maybe even avoid having to vote on controversial bills while also benefitting from a lot more short money. That said, they’ll all be subject to declarations of interest which will be very, very funny when Farage fills out his.

4) The Tories themselves look like they’re going to straight up ignore the fact that they lost dozens of seats to the Liberal Democrats and fool themselves that if they can just add Reform’s vote to their own everything will be hunky dory. This is an idiotic strategy particularly given Reform’s vote is probably a lot more heterogenous than just ‘pissed off right-wing Tories’ and can’t be trusted to move over en masse. They’re in a bad position in that if they DO try something like merging with Reform they’ll just add to the Lib Dem tally, but if they don’t its not clear where their niche in the market is. Oh dear what a pity never mind.

5) The left-wing is jubilant due to the success of the Greens, Gaza independents and Jeremy Corbyn. I think this is probably short sighted. I have no notion of the politics of the Gaza independents who were elected but will note that one who narrowly wasn’t is Akhmed Yakoob, whose policy views on Israel-Palestine may appeal to Owen Jones, but whose social views are unlikely to do the same. The Telegraph shrieking about sectarianism is clearly sotto voce racism but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Gaza block voter base isn’t a million miles away from Reform’s in terms of basic values and priorities, minus the white-power racism.

Similarly, the Novara media types seem to have convinced themselves that the Green party is the new vanguard of democratic-socialism without considering that its national electoral coalition might be more complicated than that. For every Bristol student progressive in there there is also a country-side turbo-NIMBY – call them Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Greens.

What happens to Jeremy Corbyn in all of this is intriguing. Personally, I think it speaks to the immense strategic short-sightedness of the UK left that they poured significant resources into making him an irrelevant backbencher for largely sentimental reasons when they could have been doing something politically useful, but you won’t see me complaining. I could see him trying to form some kind of left-wing ‘popular front’ on the backbenches with the Greens and the Gaza independents which, for the reasons outlined above, would probably collapse in on itself extremely quickly. As I’m always in need of a good laugh and it is for the good of the country that Corbyn’s energies be diverted into the least harmful avenue available to them I hope this happens.

6) The “Starmer as Macron, Handmaiden to the Far Right” argument: Well for one thing, its just an exit poll but it looks like Macron’s gamble seems to have paid off, so I dunno, maybe the people who have continually failed to gain political power may want to give a bit more credit to the people who have, and perhaps even try to understand why.

As a nudge in that direction – the French left made a deeply unpleasant egotistical narcissist with terrible politics and a cult-like following that repels most voters its standard bearer in the presidential elections. In the current legislative elections it made him a key figure in its coalition and a likely candidate for prime minister. France Insoumise is now projected to come behind Macron’s Renaissance.

While Jeremy Corbyn differs from Melenchon in that the former’s anti-semitism is more down to a kind of passive indifference rather than the latter’s active hostility, both men continually and reliably cap the ambitions of the political forces they affiliate with due to their manifest unsuitability for political leadership.

The Corbyn cultists doing their absolute best to preserve Corbyn’s potential to be a challenger to Starmer from the left exponentially increases the chances of that project failing. The Tories are likely to make a similar, inverse mistake on the right flank.

Obviously Starmerism is going to live and die on economic results, which will in large part be shaped by events beyond his or any UK politicians control (a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan first among them). But the signs so far that while his coalition may be narrow and vulnerable his opponents on both sides are likely to simply vacate the field.

Big mistake of Libdems in 2010 was to agree to a referendum on AV. They should have demanded legislation as a condition of coalition.

Labour should legislate AV, but won’t. They prefer taking turns with the Tories to anything likely to produce leftish minority governments or coalitions.

@John Q

Agree on the legislation but I don’t think the Tories would have worn it and opens up the path to it being legislated away. And ANY party that gets in under FPTP is going to have a strong incentive not to reform. The idea that there’s a permanent progressive majority in the UK is a myth, and you’d get plenty of right wing governance under PR too.

Big mistake of Libdems in 2010 was to agree to a referendum on AV. They should have demanded legislation as a condition of coalition.

Insisting on AV without a referendum would clearly have been more in line with considerations of Lib Dem partisan advantage, but the proposal for a referendum wouldn’t have been as easy for them to resist with arguments consistent with their stated principles. Obviously AV would give the Lib Dems more seats (and probably even more influence even for the same number of seats, or votes), but if you are arguing ‘AV will do a better job of giving the voters the Parliament they actually want’ then it’s difficult to consistently resist the argument that the voters should be allowed to say whether they actually want AV. (Why the voters did reject AV I don’t know–I mean, there must have been more than one reason why people voted the way they did, and I could hazard a guess at what some of those reasons might have been, but I have no idea which were the most important in swaying the aggregate result.)

Having mentioned considerations of principle, though, I add that there was a different option open to the Lib Dems in 2010 which would have combined consistent defensibility on principle with partisan advantage: they could have announced that their purpose was to represent in Parliament the principles for which they stood and which their voters had endorsed, not make deals with other parties, and that in the Commons they would take each vote on its merits. The predictable consequence (not that they would have had to say this) would have been the formation of a minority Conservative government. In some ways, without the constraining presence of any Lib Dem ministers, that government might have been worse than the actual Coalition government, but on the other hand their legislative agenda would almost certainly have been significantly constrained by their prccarity of their position in the Commons. Be that as it may, the outcome would almost certainly have been more to the future advantage of the Lib Dems as a party, compared to the actuality in which they still have not recovered from the damage that clown Nick Clegg did to them. (I am aware that they have just done well in terms of seats won in the Commons, but my point is confirmed by looking at the vote share. In ten elections from 1974 to 2010, the lowest vote share for the Lib Dems or their predecessors was 13.8% for the Liberals in 1979; in four elections from 2010 to 2024 it’s never been that high again. The Lib Dems now, nine years since the coalition came to an end, are still less popular with the voters than David Steel’s Liberals in 1979.)

“the proposal for a referendum wouldn’t have been as easy for them to resist with arguments consistent with their stated principles. ”

What principles are these? There’s no general tradition of making decisions by referendum in the UK. …

Maybe I buried my point in my comment, so I’ll repeat just that part:

…if you are arguing ‘AV will do a better job of giving the voters the Parliament they actually want’ then it’s difficult to consistently resist the argument that the voters should be allowed to say whether they actually want AV.

The underlying principle, to be even more explicit, is that the voters should get what they want.

Re: the vote share and tactical voting, would this not have also worked in the other sense? I.e. reducing Labour’s vote in the Home Counties/”Blue wall” as voters looking to remove the Tories consolidated their efforts on electing the Lib Dems? Might also explain the discrepancy between the various MRPs and the final outcome, in that people who professed a preference for a Labour government may have voted in the way most likely to bring that about — which may not necessarily have been to vote for a Labour candidate.

There’s also the question of how salient the war in Gaza will continue to be: is it the start of a permanent rift between Labour and some socially conservative ethnic minority groups, or a temporary split that could be reconciled when (or should that be if?) the conflict cools down again, and the UK officially recognizes a Palestinian state?

As for predictions, it’s quite hard to make them when within 5 years, we go from a hung parliament to a +80 majority to a +180 majority in the other direction. There’s no sense of finality about this either. I can see two alternatives:

Starmer manages to reduce the political “noise” in everyone’s day-to-day lives, by running a relatively competent government that doesn’t have a major scandal every fortnight, and manages to stop the economy and NHS from declining further — but not securing any great changes. In 4 years they run and get a majority of about 100 as the parties of the right continue to be in disarray.
Either through their own mismanagement or external factors, Labour’s tenure is somewhat rocky and more parts of the country start falling off. As Tories and Reform dig into the culture war issues and immigration, infighting between the Labour left and centre ratchets up. In the next election, the Labour vote in middle England and Scotland falls, and their support in urban areas continues to decline, handing some combination of the two right wing parties a plurality of seats.

Thanks to FPTP and Farage, Starmer now has the chance to govern. Let’s hope he doesn’t squander it.

Daragh 36: “the French left made a deeply unpleasant egotistical narcissist with terrible politics and a cult-like following that repels most voters its standard bearer in the presidential elections. In the current legislative elections it [the French left] made him a key figure in its coalition and a likely candidate for prime minister. France Insoumise is now projected to come behind Macron’s Renaissance.” [since LFI competed as part of the NFP alliance, the statement is meaningless.]

Daragh 47: “NPF [should be NFP] isn’t Melenchon’s party – it’s a broad left alliance, most of which can’t stand Melenchon and his France Unbowed party”

The first part of the second quote is correct, the rest is all bs.

Daragh, you are getting into trolling territory. You claimed that the left did poorly because it’s dominated by Melenchon, then claimed that the left (but not LFI, which btw is the largest fraction within NFP) did well because Melenchon doesn’t matter within the NFP. One of both of these statements has to be wrong. The election results are what they are irrespective of your or my opinion of Melenchon. I won’t engage any further.

“Under PR, Labour would have to form a coalition with the Greens and the LibDems.”

This may be right, but we don’t know because, eg, we don’t know what the right split would look like under PR. Under PR there might be a larger Reform party, and a moderate right party that many LibDem voters would be entirely happy to vote for. And Labour might be two (or even three) parties — a center-left one with a roughly Starmer-ish program which includes the lefter LDs, a more metropolitan left one and, possibly, a more authoritarian left party exploiting the situation in Gaza (maybe Workers Party plus). I’m inclined to think the left-of-center parties in England would probably have gotten more than 50% of the votes under PR at this election, but maybe not, and anyway if we ALREADY HAD PR we have no idea where we’d be.

For reasons I don’t really understand, precedent is that major constitutional changes are expected to go to referenda, and I really doubt that either Labour or the Tories would have coalesced with the LDs if they’d insisted on A/V legislation in 2010. A/V lost because it wasn’t a priority for the government that introduced the referendum, and voters just don’t care much about electoral reform (or other constitutional issues).

Chris @57

The French left, defined as both the parties and their electorates, absolutely did make Melenchon the standard bearer by your own logic. The voters lining up behind LFI even as Melenchon goes further off the deep end are making a choice, just as Labour members supporting Corbyn to the bitter end made a choice. These people are adults, with agency.

As to the parties themselves, you may be right that the NFP/NPF couldn’t afford to simply refuse to deal with Melenchon. OTOH, the other parties of the left might have expanded their potential electoral coalition by making it very clear at the start of the campaign that they wanted nothing to do with LFI and that Melenchon’s brand of politics was destructive, alienating and pointless. But that’s a counterfactual.

Daragh, the purge at LFI nearly broke the alliance, and leaders of other parties NFP were very open and explicit about what they thought of Mélenchon’s antics then. I think you are sounding off on the basis of what you’ve read in the anglophone press, which very much ventriloquized the Macronist take on the NFP.

Y’all should watch the speeches from LFI’s victory rally in the Place de la République last night: moving, inspiring, and a million miles from the mass depression Reeves and Starmer are busy cultivating here (even if ending with the national anthem is a little hard for a British leftie to grok).

Not a Brit either, and don’t give a damn about fine details. But my daughter lives there, in a run-down London suburb. She says a round trip train ride to London (30 minutes each way) costs 13 gbp. She says if the rail network was nationalized again, and its prices brought to a reasonable level, it would be a huge help. Is there any chance of that now? Internet is not too helpful in getting the answer. Thanks.

if the rail network was nationalized again, and its prices brought to a reasonable level, it would be a huge help. Is there any chance of that now?

No.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy63j4x66ylo

NPF isn’t Melenchon’s party – it’s a broad left alliance, most of which can’t stand Melenchon and his France Unbowed party for the same reason that most UK voters couldn’t stomach Corbyn’s Labour (led by a charlatan who is ten times less smart than he thinks he is and riddled with anti semites).

If there is evidence that there was more anti-Semitism in the Labour Party (before, during and/or after the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn) than there is in the Conservative Party, or than there is across UK society generally, it hasn’t come my way. If it exists, it would be worth it to me to know about it.

Given the known history and prevalence of anti-Semitism, I assume by default that it exists to some extent in most places: it might be absent in very small groups (although of course there do exist some very small groups which are explicitly organised around anti-Semitism) and in parts of the world where there are no Jews (although even there it exists sometimes), but the default expectation has to be that there is some of it in any country as large as the UK (where there are Jews) and also that within a country like the UK that there is some of it in any significant political party. The complaints from people in the (UK) Labour Party about encountering anti-Semitism there confirm the default expectation; but a lot of the complaints about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party while Jeremy Corbyn was its leader came from Conservatives and their sympathisers and from other opponents of Jeremy Corbyn, who had obvious axes to grind. It is emphatically correct for people inside the Labour Party to focus as a priority on anti-Semitism in their own party, but any Conservative who attacks Labour for anti-Semitism while saying nothing about anti-Semitism in their own party is obviously not to be trusted. Given the known history and prevalence of anti-Semitism, the default expectation must be that anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is no worse (not that this is any excuse) than anti-Semitism in UK society generally, and not as bad as anti-Semitism in the Conservative Party.

Even more emphatically, the default expectation must be that anti-Semitism exists in LFI but is not as bad as anti-Semitism in the RN, in which case anybody who had justification to regard LFI with suspicion because of anti-Semitism would also have had justification to support it against the RN.

‘Charlatan’ is a weird thing to call the leader of a political party.

Yes TM, but these are the Tory voters.

The Tory members – who brought us Boris Johnson – are another matter:

Braverman is the only potential leadership candidate who has suggested the Tories should seek an accommodation with Farage and the hard-right Reform UK. Of those surveyed, 47% of Conservative members said they were in favour of a merger, with support strongest among the over-50s and those from lower-income backgrounds.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/10/almost-half-of-tory-members-wants-party-to-merge-with-reform-poll-reveals

J-D: Two very good accounts of Corbyn’s time as leader of the Labour Party (Macguire and Pogrund, Left Out, and Owen Jones, Our Land — note, Owen Jones was and is an enthusiastic supporter of the Labour Left, and very close to McDonnell) make clear that there was a serious antisemitism problem in the Labour Party. More tellingly, both show that Corbyn was a disastrous party manager. Things seem to have improved over time, but, really, Corbyn had spent his entire political career avoiding picking up the skills needed to lead the Labour Party. There’s a possible world in which McDonnell, someone with relevant management skills and dispositions, and real ambition for power, was Labour leader instead, but its very distant from ours — people like Sadiq Khan and Andrew Smith who nominated Corbyn for the leadership to promote debate wouldn’t have done the same for McDonnell. The point is that the problem wasn’t just Labour having a lot of anti-semitism, but the persistent unwillingness/inability of the leadership to deal with the problem.

A former friend sent me an invite to the Palestine Live fb group (this was before the furore ). I saw that my wife’s former boy-friend Jeremy Corbyn was a member, as were dozens of other people known to me. The antisemitism on display was graphic and revolting. I posted my reaction. Someone else in the group personal-messaged me and “accused” me of being a Jew, and of being responsible for the deaths of family members of his who had died in the world wars. He went on to tell me that he knew where I live, did not live very far away, and would visit me sometime.
I copied Elleanne Green into the exchange. She brushed aside my anxieties, expressed sympathy for the other guy–described him as a good guy and a valued member of the group. She implored me not to leave the group, but I did.
I take the word of my Jewish wife that Jeremy Corbyn is not antisemitic. Nor do I think the Labour party is rife with antisemitism. There are some though, contemporary and historically. Perhaps someday there will appear an illuminating revisionist account of the posthumous scapegoating of Peter Rachman and the part played in that by Labour MPs at the time.

@Chris Bertram

I actually get my takes on France more from my French in-laws and from various Blablacar passengers and drivers we’ve met while visiting them.

On Melechon, charlatanism and the French left generally. Melenchon is a guy who ran for president on a platform of a 100% tax on incomes above €400k, something that is both practically impossible and economically unwise. His foreign policy stances have generally been “America=bad” while equivocating about Russia’s ongoing imperialist war in Ukraine. He is very good at shouting slogans, jumping up and down and generally posturing as a ‘radical’, and a plurality of the French left-wing electorate unfortunately thinks this is good enough to earn their vote, even as it repulses the great majority of the rest of the French electorate. Head to head match up polling in 2017 showed that he would have lost roundly to Macron or Le Pen. While it may be comforting for some to think that any serious left candidate would be subject to the same criticisms regarding toxicity and charlatanism, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s a toxic charlatan.

Jim has already eloquently explained why the issue of whether there is more or less anti-semitism in the Labour party generally as opposed to other UK parties is besides the point. Corbyn and his clique, through their actions and inactions, encouraged anti-semites in the Labour party to be open in their anti-semitism particularly in party forums. This was a problem, just as the Tories leniency on Islamophobia is an ongoing problem in their party.

As to Jeremy Corbyn himself – I used to be of the opinion that he was not personally anti-semitic. However – during his time as LOTO Corbyn refused to unequivocally condemn terror bombing in Syria (as noted in Andrew Fisher’s resignation letter) and when Russian GRU agents used a Russian poison to try and kill a former Russian spook on British soil responded first by refusing to acknowledge the obvious and then caviling about the OPCW.

By contrast when the Al-Ahli Arab hospital explosion occurred, Corbyn had no problem immediately blaming Israel. He did not correct the record when it became clear that it was most likely a failed rocket launch by a Palestinian group. This was at a time when British Jews were facing increased threats and the overall situation was incredibly tense, and political leaders had an obligation to avoid inflaming the situation. Corbyn’s reaction, particularly given his record with states other than Israel, is what poker players would call “a tell”.

Daragh McDowell@78 This intervention is more evidence that anti-Zionism is defined as anti-Semitism in the UK as well as the US, at least by the acceptable people. This is also evidence against the position that “Labour”/Corbyn were disastrous failures at party management for not whipping the membership into shape, into acceptable people who supported Zionism.

Ok, Daragh, Melenchon is a “braying jackass”, Corbyn is a racist, Shami Chakraborti is bent. Did you, by any chance, ever have Bernie Sanders in the back of your Blablacar?

I quite like Bernie Sanders

Well that’s one thing we’ve got.

Amazingly enough Corbyn isn’t even an anti-Zionist but a long-standing supporter of a negotiated two state settlement.

Thanks J-D.

Politically, whether anti-semitism was worse in the Tory party than in the Labour party didn’t matter. The media (including the BBC) was so outraged that Labour had elected a left-wing leader that it focused relentlessly on Labour. Just to be clear, this was entirely predictable, and predicted. So, politically, Corbyn’s failure as a party manager mattered.

But, sure, it didn’t answer your question. I don’t know of any good studies of anti-semitism in the Tory party, though no doubt someone does. For most of the twentieth century the Tories were where you would look for anti-semites (much less so after Thatcher became leader) But few senior Tory MPs have shared platforms with members of Hamas or Hezbollah, or referred to them as “friends”, or stubbornly refused in interviews to call Hamas a terrorist organization. And the most virulent right wing anti-semites usually have other parties where their views are enthusiastically welcomed (my guess is that if Galloway can turn the Worker’s Party into something more than a vanity vehicle, it will play the same role on the left).

Even if the proportion of anti-semites in the Tory party were higher than in the Labour party, they wouldn’t have had as much of a political problem, because the press never scrutinizes the Tories as much as Labour, and never any party as much as a left-led Labour Party. Undoubtedly (and by the testimony of some senior Tories) Islamophobia was and remains a problem in the Conservative Party, as Corbyn’s leadership pointed out. But, just as my last sentence is irrelevant to what you asked, it is irrelevant to the fact that Labour had a problem with antisemitism, and pointing it out made Corbyn look like he wasn’t taking responsibility his own party’s problem.

J-D @ 87: “Is there more anti-semitism in the Labour or the Conservative party?” isn’t a well-defined question, because different antisemitism isn’t a well-defined term – different people disagree about which forms of anti-Israel/anti-Zionist sentiment count as antisemitic, and to what extent, compared to “traditional” antisemitism.

I think that “traditional” antisemites are probably more likely to vote Conservative (or Reform) than Labour (although I wouldn’t swear to this), but I am absolutely certain that critics of Israel are far more likely to vote Labour.

So that if you use a “minimalist” definition whereby you can say whatever you like about “Zionists”, no matter how transparently euphemistic, without it being antisemitic, then there is probably (not certainly) more antisemitism in the Conservative party, whereas if you use a “maximalist” definition whereby not engaging in full-blown Nakba denial is antisemitic then there is definitely more in the Labour party, and somewhere in between is a definition whereby it’s 50/50.

This was a problem, just as the Tories leniency on Islamophobia is an ongoing problem in their party.

The difference is that hardly anyone ever talks about Islamophobia in the Tory party.

Ie. “Jewish members are six times more likely to be investigated and more than nine times more likely to be expelled from the Labour Party for anti-semitism than non-Jewish members”
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/campaigners-file-formal-complaint-to-ehrc-over-labour-mistreatment-of-jewish-members

Honestly what really did for Labour in 2019 was Brexit, and to be perfectly honest I think Corbyn’s instincts on Brexit were probably quite in tune with those of the part of the electorate that defected from Labour. [1] I would bet his instinct was to support May’s deal, and if he’d done that, Labour would have lost votes to the LDs (many of which they could have afforded to lose, because in seats with large majorities) and lost fewer to the Brexit party (which targeted Labour to deflate its vote in marginals). On the other hand, Labour might have split apart over it, and even if not, of course, there wouldn’t have been a 2019 election, and we wouldn’t have a Labour government now). His political instincts on the anti-semitism issue were terrible (have you looked at the notorious mural?; he should have been utterly revolted by it at first glance), and following them was politically damaging; his political instincts on Brexit were pretty good, and not getting the party to follow them (which of course would have been extremely difficult even for a much more capable leader) was disastrous.

[1] I remember in the summer of 2017 Peter Oborne, then a brexiteer, commenting on a Week in Westminster, saying that he was pleased Corbyn was Labour leader, because Corbyn was going to be the person to deliver Brexit, and I don’t think that was a ridiculous thing to think.

My possibly unreliable memory: the mural showed white and Jewish capitalists exploiting black people. (If it had shown only white exploiters it would perhaps have been fine and PC and could have been incorporated into an advert for hamburgers or Harvard.) Corbyn’s crime was to ask, without noticing the Jewish bourgeois (who aren’t explicitly identified), in a 6-year-old Facebook comment he made as a back-bench local MP, why it was being removed. Fwiw I agree with Corbyn’s considered judgment that the council was right to remove it. There was an useful discussion to be had about the potentially problematic intersection between anti-capitalism, especially of today’s race-focussed kind, and antisemitism but that was not the discussion the media gave us.

Ok, I’ll admit, I wrote a several sentence response taking you seriously. Well done! That “Bob Pitt” piece is hilarious.

People looking at mural: “hmmm, seems kinda anti-semitic – for example, that one guy looks obviously Jewish.”

Essayist:

In fact the mural would appear to be based in large part on Icke’s deluded antisemitic fantasy that the world is under the control of “Rothschild Zionism”.

(The guy who looks Jewish turns out to be a Rothschild).

Essayist:

In short the mural undoubtedly was antisemitic, but you couldn’t tell that just by looking at it….

I don’t know about (100) “hilarious,” it’s certainly comedic but there’s a sad quality to to the whole exercise as well.

What started me down the rabbit hole of a discussion about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership which described it as ‘riddled’ with anti-Semitism. Why ‘riddled’? What impact is that word choice having in that description?

I know myself that my own word choices are sometimes the product of deliberate reflection and sometimes not, and as far as I can tell this is true of other people as well. But even when people have not deliberately reflected on why they are choosing to use a particular turn of phrase, there’s always a reason for it: the difference is that it’s easier for me to explain why I have made a particular choice when I gave it conscious thought in advance than when I didn’t.

The most likely reason why somebody would make the particular phrasing choice of describing the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership as ‘riddled’ with anti-Semitism is that they were influenced by a particular narrative prominent in the media at the time. To me, this makes it germane to point out that the narrative, although not entirely without basis in fact, was a distorted one, distorted partly by a cynical exploitation of the issue of anti-Semitism by opponents of Labour in general and Jeremy Corbyn in particular to use it as a stick to beat them with. Anybody who is genuinely concerned about the problem of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and wants to do something about it should understand it in the broader context of anti-Semitism in British society in general, a connection conspicuously neglected in the media narrative I mentioned. It’s not easy, though, to discuss this succinctly. If I write (what is, as far it goes, true) that anti-Semitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was the subject of a media beat-up, then I am liable to be interpreted (and naturally and understandably so) as denying that there was anti-Semitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. To guard against that misinterpretation, I could add something like ‘of course there was anti-Semitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership’, but then I would be inviting the natural and understandable (but inaccurate) interpretation that I was trying to excuse or mitigate that anti-Semitism. I was careful in my original comment to make an observation about the justifiability of people inside the Labour Party fighting against anti-Semitism inside their own party (and it’s because I consider that important that I add that they will be hampered in doing so if they don’t consider the connection between anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and the broader context of anti-Semitism in British society generally). On reflection, I feel that despite my best efforts to guard against misinterpretation, I still didn’t extend my commentary, long-winded though it already was, sufficiently to guard against the misinterpretation that I was suggesting it would be appropriate for the Labour Party to respond to charges of anti-Semitism by pointing to anti-Semitism elsewhere, including in the Conservative Party, as if that were a defence or a mitigation, which it wouldn’t be. However, I still think it’s appropriate to point out (not as a defence of the Labour Party but as a contribution to the general fight against anti-Semitism) that Conservatives (and Conservative supporters) who drew attention to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party without reference to its connection with the broader phenomenon of anti-Semitism in British society generally, including in the Conservative Party itself, were not making a genuine contribution to the fight against anti-Semitism but were showing themselves up as the disgusting cynical unscrupulous lowlifes they were.

Actually nobody here described the LP as being riddled with anti-semites. But, your general point: yes, I got that eventually, and you’re absolutely right.

Daragh McDowell did, and JD quoted him in his original comment.

If you’re surprisingly unfamiliar with the imagery on a US dollar bill, then misinterpreting the mural would be natural. Ditto if you’re surprisingly unfamiliar with the Monopoly game imagery.

Or at least, far better than mine!