British Politics

Labour’s Shame: How The British Labour Party Betrayed Its Founding Principles

The newly published report on anti-Semitism in the British Labour party couldn’t be more damning. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) spoke to dozens of witnesses as it investigated how Labour had repeatedly and remorselessly betrayed Britain’s Jewish community. Once the party had been their natural home; now it had become their sworn enemy.

Weeping with shame

Denis MacShane, the former Labour MP for the Yorkshire town of Rotherham, wept with shame as he stood before the EHRC and confessed that he had worked for decades on behalf of rich and powerful Christians in far-off London while ignoring the powerless working-class Jewish girls being raped, prostituted and murdered by vicious Christian gangs in his own constituency. “As a staunch socialist and life-long feminist, I was elected to defend the interests of working-class Jewish girls above all others,” Denis sobbed. “And I betrayed that sacred trust.”

Racked with remorse: Denis MacShane

Other witnesses from Rotherham revealed that the Labour council there had deliberately suppressed details of Jewish suffering at Christian hands for fear of upsetting “community relations,” while Sarah Champion, MacShane’s successor as MP for Rotherham, described how she had been thrown out of the Shadow Cabinet by Jeremy Corbyn for speaking out against the Christian rape-gangs in defence of her working-class Jewish constituents.

Labour was founded to defend Jews

Another Labour MP, Ann Cryer, said that the horrific abuse of Jewish girls by Christian gangs elsewhere in Britain had been ignored since the 1980s by Labour-controlled institutions and by Britain’s most powerful Labour-supporting newspaper. “I couldn’t get The Guardian interested,” she recalled sadly. “Its reporters seemed paralysed by political correctness.” The veteran Labourite Roy Hattersley made another shame-filled confession, revealing that, during his decades in parliament, he had always refused to act on his Jewish constituents’ clearly expressed opposition to mass immigration by bigoted and violent Christians from the Third World.

Those are only a few examples of the horrific anti-Semitism uncovered by the EHRC as it probed the foul and fetid depths of Labour’s betrayal of the Jewish community. Under Tony Blair, the Labour government had ignored the rape and murder of Jews even as it opened the borders to mass immigration that destroyed the livelihood of Jews, caused crime to flourish, and forced Jews to flee their traditional districts. The EHRC report concluded with these ringing words: “The very name of the Labour party — from the Hebrew Laab, ‘Serve,’ and Ow’r, ‘the Jews’ — proclaims its founding commitment to work tirelessly for the Jewish community. Labour has betrayed its very reason for existence by allowing the Jewish community to suffer for so long and in so many ways.”

Back to reality

Well, that isn’t what the EHRC report into anti-Semitism really said, of course. Jews in Britain haven’t been suffering any of the things I described above. No rape, murder, beatings, impoverishment and ethnic cleansing for them. Instead, the Labour party inflicted all those things on the White working-class. In reality, the MP Denis MacShane worked for Jews in far-off London while ignoring the rape and murder of White girls by Muslim gangs in his Yorkshire constituency. Mass immigration has impoverished and ethnically cleansed the White working-class, not Jews. The Jewish peer Lord Glasman served in Blair’s government and witnessed what he called “a terrible situation where a Labour government was hostile to the English working-class.”

The rich Jewish lawyer Rebecca Hilsenrath

The rich (and homosexual) Jewish lawyer David Isaac

The Labour party is still hostile. And the Equality and Human Rights Commission doesn’t care in the slightest. After all, the EHRC is headed by two rich Jewish lawyers, Rebecca Hilsenrath and David Isaac. The EHRC works against White interests, not for them. That’s why it ignored the genuine crimes committed by Labour against the White working-class and focused on threats to Jewish interests. Inter alia, the real EHRC report exposed and attacked Labour anti-Semites who “referenced conspiracies about … Jewish power and control” or “accused British Jews of greater loyalty to Israel than Britain.”

Friends of Israel in very high places

What are rape and murder compared to horrific truth-crimes like those? For example, it should be utterly unacceptable that a national newspaper in Britain could openly proclaim that Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) is “the biggest lobbying group in Westminster, holding lunches for 700 guests, making countless Downing Street visits, and developing contacts throughout Israel and the Middle East.” That’s shamelessly feeding conspiracy theories about “Jewish power and control” and about how Jews have “greater loyalty to Israel than Britain.”

Lord Polack at Conservative Friends of Israel

Which national newspaper said that about Conservative Friends of Israel? It was the Jewish Chronicle, the same newspaper that has just issued a special edition in celebration of the EHRC report into Labour’s anti-Semitism. The Chronicle described CFI like that during a scandal about how the CFI’s shadiest and most powerful official, the Jewish Lord Polack, had guided the Conservative politician Priti Patel to secret and unminuted meetings with Israeli politicians on Israeli, British and American soil.

The most pro-Israel war-criminal in British history

If a shady lobbyist called Mahmoud Rafsanjani or Dmitri Bogdanov had guided Priti Patel to secret and unminuted meetings with Iranian or Russian politicians, the Jewish Chronicle would have been thundering about conspiracies and demanding Patel’s resignation. But it’s fine when Jews do the same underhanded things for Israel’s benefit. And it was also fine when Tony Blair’s Labour government, funded and controlled by Jews like Lord Levy, betrayed the White working-class whom Labour was founded to serve. Blair is a war-criminal who has always worked for Israel, bankers, big business and the military-industrial complex, not for the working-class. That’s why he’s now worth more than £100m and why the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said that Blair is “generally regarded as the most pro-Israel prime minister in British history.” Marie van der Zyl, head of the Jewish Board of Deputies, has recently “praised Mr Blair as a ‘true friend’ of the Jewish community.” In other words, Blair followed Jewish orders, so it didn’t matter that he was a dedicated enemy of Labour’s traditional supporters in the White working-class.

Then the dim narcissist Blair left office and in time the dim Marxist Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader. Corbyn opposed Blair’s mass-killing in the Middle East and has never wanted to be a millionaire. In other words, he wasn’t prepared to follow Jewish orders for financial reward. And that’s why he was relentlessly demonized as an anti-Semite and has now been suspended from the Labour party. He refused to grovel in contrition when the EHCR report was published. I think he was right not to grovel. But Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t be ashamed if the EHRC published a truthful report into Labour’s genuine and decades-old crimes against the White working-class. As I’ve said before, Labour is better regarded as a criminal conspiracy than as a political party. Under pro-war, pro-plutocracy Blair, it conspired against the White working-class on behalf of Jews. Under anti-war, anti-plutocracy Corbyn, it conspired against the White working-class on behalf of Muslims, Blacks and other alien invaders.

Pro-Black bureaucrats and anti-White Jews

George Orwell wrote the following in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): “Even the names of the four Ministries [in his fictional dystopia] exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.”

In real 21st-century Britain, the Labour party concerns itself with attacking the working-class. And the Civil Service, overseen by a so-called Conservative government, concerns itself with working against civilization and for barbarism, as a recent article by a pseudonymous journalist has revealed:

On 3 June [2020], Jonathan Slater, Permanent Secretary of the Department for Education, responded to the DEFRA [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] Permanent Secretary Tamara Finkelstein’s call to “fight racism” by tweeting the Black Lives Matter hashtag and declaring his quest to “tackle the whiteness of Senior Whitehall” (both these Whitehall heads are white, incidentally). …

Our supposedly impartial civil service is institutionalising far-left identity politics. It has fallen prey to networks of entryist activists like Project Race who, like BLM [Black Lives Matter], are adept at disguising neo-Marxist ideas as kind-hearted truisms. The influence that senior civil servants have granted these activists stops junior civil servants speaking against them, which in turn allows senior civil servants to broadcast patently absurd or partisan views with total impunity. One junior civil servant has described to me a non-stop, daily bombardment of “anti-racist” activism at work since the BLM protests began. Because no-one questions it openly, the woke browbeating continues as if it were no more controversial than a stationery audit. The evidence above is only the tip of the iceberg, but it’s already wedged deep into the ship’s hull. It remains a mystery why Captain Boris [Johnson] [and] First Officer [Michael] Gove … haven’t sounded a vigorous alarm about any of this. (The BLM takeover of Whitehall: Why don’t ministers care about the politics of their civil servants?, The Critic, 18th August 2020)

That article should be read by all intelligent Whites in Britain, before they begin fighting back against the hostile elite that intends to destroy them. Alas, it won’t be. It was written under the pseudonym of “Justin Elderman” by someone (possibly Jewish) who rightly fears that using his real name would harm his career and perhaps even his physical well-being. And look again at the question raised by Mr Elderman: “Why don’t ministers care about the politics of their civil servants?” He didn’t answer the question, but he had given his readers a big clue here:

On 3 June [2020], Jonathan Slater, Permanent Secretary of the Department for Education, responded to the DEFRA [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] Permanent Secretary Tamara Finkelstein’s call to “fight racism” by tweeting the Black Lives Matter hashtag and declaring his quest to “tackle the whiteness of Senior Whitehall” (both these Whitehall heads are white, incidentally). (The BLM takeover of Whitehall)

Tamara Finkelstein works for Jews

I don’t think Tamara Finkelstein regards herself as “white” any more than her brother Daniel Finkelstein does. No, both of them regard themselves as Jewish, not as White. The powerful bureaucrat Tamara Finkelstein proudly states that she is “Joint Senior Sponsor of the Civil Service Jewish Network” in her Twitter profile, while the powerful politician Daniel Finkelstein is a Vice President of the Jewish Leadership Council and has waxed lyrical in the Jewish Chronicle about “That mysterious sense of Jewish connection,” which ensures that “most of my best friends are Jewish.”

Anti-White activists Tamara and Daniel Finkelstein

Daniel Finkelstein is a senior figure in the so-called Conservative government that is ignoring the anti-White activism of senior bureaucrats like his sister Tamara Finkelstein, a BLM-supporting “Race Champion” in the Civil Service. Finkelstein himself belonged to the leftist Social Democratic Party in his youth. Then he joined the Tories in 1990 and began campaigning to “modernize” the party — that is, to turn it into something that worked solely for Jewish interests, having abandoned its conservative principles and the historic White Christian nation of Britain.

White Lives Don’t Matter

In 2020, the “modernization” is complete. The not-at-all Conservative party is thoroughly Finkelsteined. It has a Jewish treasurer, Ehud Sheleg, an Israeli plutocrat who openly admits that he makes “my homeland” of Israel his first concern. And all the most important posts in the government are held by kosher-certified Friends of Israel: the part-Jewish, part-Turkish prime minister Boris Johnson; the fully Jewish foreign secretary Dominic Raab; the Indian-Hindu chancellor Rishi Sunak; and the Indian-Hindu home secretary Priti Patel. These not-at-all Conservatives have done nothing as anti-White activism sweeps the Civil Service. But can you imagine what they would do if senior bureaucrats began a campaign against Israel in support of Palestinians? They would respond instantly, banning the anti-Israel campaign and sternly rebuking bureaucrats for breaking their strict code of political impartiality.

As it is, the Tories are doing nothing, because Jewish interests are not being challenged by anti-White activism and Black Lives Matter. On the contrary, Jewish interests are being strengthened. As Kevin MacDonald has described, BLM and Antifa are footsoldiers in what can be called a “Jewish coup” against the historic White nation of America. The same applies in Britain. But don’t expect the Equality and Human Rights Commission to take any action when Whites and their interests are harmed. In Brave New Britain, White Lives Don’t Matter.

Unexamined, Unquestioned, Unchallenged: Jewish Power in Brave New Britain

Ehud Sheleg. Who is he? CFI. What is that? The vast majority of people in Brave New Britain still don’t have a clue, because the mainstream media completely ignored these very interesting and important questions during the just-ended general election.

The biggest lobbying group in British politics

But this is the Occidental Observer, the Home of Hate, and we think that interesting and important questions deserve answers. Sir Ehud Sheleg (born 1955) is the Israeli Jew and possible “binary options” fraudster who is currently Treasurer of the Conservative Party. He succeeded Sir Mick Davis, a Jew from South Africa, in 2019 and has openly admitted in the Jewish Chronicle that he puts Israel’s interests above those of any other country. And CFI? That’s Conservative Friends of Israel, described in the same Jewish Chronicle as “the biggest lobbying group in Westminster [i.e., British politics].”

The Goy Grovel: Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson perform at CFI

CFI, under the control of another undeservedly obscure Jew called Lord Polak, was responsible for shepherding a female Hindu politician called Priti Patel to a series of secret and unminuted meetings with Israeli politicians in 2017 (and probably long before that too). Patel had to resign her post in Theresa May’s government because of her off-the-record pandering to a foreign government, but don’t worry: she bounced back to an even bigger and better post when Boris Johnson replaced May in 2019. Yes, the four most important people in British politics — part-Jewish Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, Pakistani Muslim Sajid Javid as Chancellor, Indian Hindu Priti Patel as Home Secretary, and Jewish Dominic Raab as Foreign Secretary — are all devout Friends of Israel. Read more

Jeremy’s Jackboots: Even More Jewish Hysteria about Jeremy Corbyn and the British Labour Party

“Gobsmacked” is a good English word that’s gaining ground in America, I’ve read. If it’s not familiar to you, it means “very surprised or otherwise affected,” like someone who has been unexpectedly smacked in the gob, or mouth. I’ve recently been gobsmacked not once but twice by a Scottish journalist called Stephen Daisley.

Corbyn’s a monster, Blair’s a mensch

My first gobsmacking from Daisley came when I read this article by him in the cuckservative Spectator:

A vote for Labour is a vote for anti-semitism

The Labour party (1900 – 2015) is dead. It died the day a majority of members, £3 and otherwise, voted to make their leader a man already plainly drenched in the moral sewage of anti-Semitism. The Labour party (2015 – ) is Corbyn’s party and if the famous centrists are working to preserve any party, it is that one. They might eventually salvage something out of it — Corbynism without Corbyn — but they will remain culpable for his actions until then.

Every vote for Labour is a vote for Corbyn. Every leaflet delivered is a two-fingered salute to British Jews. Every door knocked is a declaration: this is who I am and this is my tribe. You can campaign for Labour and vote for Labour without being an anti-Semite but in doing either you announce that you have reached an accommodation with anti-Semitism. Colluding in the organisation of politics against the Jews is worth it to get the railways renationalised.

The Labour party is going to fail the anti-Semitism test and the country might too. (A vote for Labour is a vote for anti-semitism, The Spectator, 29th October 2019)

As you can see, Daisley thinks that Jeremy Corbyn (often nicknamed Jezza) killed the Labour party by becoming its leader in 2015. Obviously, then, Daisley also thinks that Labour was alive and well under the leadership of Tony Blair. You remember Blair, don’t you? He’s the devious narcissist who lied the UK into a disastrous war in Iraq that killed huge numbers of innocent people and that directly led to the rise of the head-choppers and sex-slavers of Islamic State. Blair also nefariously opened Britain’s borders to migrants not just from Eastern Europe, who undercut the wages of Labour’s traditional supporters in the White working-class, but also from the Third World, who set about raping and sexually enslaving the daughters of those traditional Labour supporters.

Porcine punims

Having left office after these crimes, Blair began piling up a vast fortune (now possibly well north of £100 million) as he was rewarded by the greedy and amoral globalists for whom he had worked so hard as prime minister. Jeremy Corbyn resolutely opposed Blair’s Iraq disaster and is not interested in money or material possessions. Yet it’s Corbyn, not Blair, who’s “drenched” in “moral sewage,” and it’s Corbyn, not Blair, who “killed” the Labour party – according to Stephen Daisley. And this brings me to the second gobsmacking I’ve received from Daisley. I looked for photographs of him and found these:

The porcine punim of Stephen Daisley

The porcine punim again

I have never seen a more porcine and less trustworthy punim (which is Yiddish for “face”). And I doubt I ever will. Daisley looks as though he’s in training to play the role of the giant slug-like villain Jabba the Hutt in a remake of one of those old Star Wars movies. But I’m glad Daisley looks like that, because it means his punim is as repulsive as his ideology. I’m no fan of Jeremy Corbyn, believe me. But clearly he’s a far less immoral person than Tony Blair and has been responsible for far less evil in the world. Corbyn opposes war and the military-industrial complex. Blair supports war and has grown rich by working for the military-industrial complex. Read more

Anything to Stop Brexit: Churlish Attacks on a Noble Book

Jacob Rees-Mogg, The Victorians ( W.H.Allen, 2019)

The author of this 440-page study of twelve “Titans who forged Britain” is a well-known right-wing conservative statesman, currently Leader of the House of Commons in the Boris Johnson Conservative government in the United Kingdom. Noted for his very traditional manner of self-presentation and his strong support for Brexit, Rees-Mogg was educated at Eton College and then read History at Trinity College, Oxford, after which he proceeded to a very successful career in finance before taking up his parliamentary career. He is a Catholic with six children and hails from Somerset in south-west England. The publication of this book was timed to coincide with the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Queen Victoria.

Upon its appearance in May it was greeted with extraordinary hostility in some quarters. Dominic Sandbook described it as abysmal and soul-destroying. Writing in The Sunday Times he stated: “The book is terrible, so bad, so boring, so mind-bogglingly banal that if it had been written by anyone else it would never have been published.” In The Observer Kim Wagner wrote: “The book really belongs in the celebrity autobiography section of the bookstore. At best it can be seen as a curious artefact of the kind of sentimental jingoism and empire-nostalgia currently afflicting our country.” He called it “a sentimental vision of the past as the author wishes it had been,” resembling a series of “half-remembered anecdotes from a Boy’s Own story, or perhaps tales told by his nanny.”

In The Guardian Andrew Rawnsley commented that, while Rees-Mogg “claims an ambition to restore the reputation of this vivid period of history, all he achieves with this awful book is to make a shipwreck of his own pretensions as they are repeatedly dashed on the rocks of his incoherent thoughts before sinking under the dead weight of his lifeless language. … The only purpose of this dreadful pulp is to demonstrate why Britain’s past is no more safe in Jacob Rees-Mogg’s hands than its future.” A. N. Wilson in The Times wrote that the author’s effort was “anathema to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply common, sense” and described the book as “a dozen clumsily written pompous schoolboy compositions” which amounted to “yet another bit of self-promotion by a highly motivated modern politician.” Also in The Guardian Kathryn Hughes commented: “In Parliament, Rees-Mogg is often referred to as ‘the honourable member for the 18th Century’, a nod to those funny clothes he wears, along with pretending not to know the name of any modern pop songs. What a shame, then, that he has not absorbed any of the intellectual and creative elegance that flourished during that period.” Simon Heffer in The Telegraph opined: “I find it hard to believe Rees-Mogg actually wrote this book or, if someone wrote it for him, allowed it to be published under his name. It is a complete turkey. … Parts of this appear to have been written by a baboon.”

Jacob Rees-Mogg 

Probably the most devastating assault of all came from master historian Richard J. Evans, famous ever since his role in the High Court defeat of David Irving’s defamation case against Deborah Lipstadt. In NewStatesmanAmerica he wrote: “To say that this is a selective reading of Victorian attitudes would be an understatement of huge proportions. … This is the view from inside the Westminster bubble. …The working class is entirely absent from this book, except as an object of upper-class philanthropy and the benevolence of politicians. … Rees Mogg’s perceptions are myopically rooted in the past. … The Victorians is written … in a plodding, laborious and barely readable style, completely lacking in humour, sophistication or polish as well as in every other literary quality. … The accolades distributed to Rees-Mogg’s subjects are framed in clichés that no half-way intelligent or discerning writer would dream of handing out. … Patriotic, enthusiastic and celebratory, The Victorians is the kind of history that Michael Gove, as education secretary, wanted to be promoted in the national history curriculum for schools, until he was forced to withdraw his proposals after a deluge of criticism and ridicule from the entire history profession. … This kind of colonial nostalgia exerts a baleful influence over the minds of Brexiteers today, who view the prospect of a ‘global Britain’, illusory though it is, as a kind of resurrection of the imperial glories of the Victorian era. … Rees-Mogg picks out of his source material only those aspects of his subjects’ lives that help him grind his political axe. … The Victorians is hopelessly inadequate as history, but it’s also too badly written, too pompous and too cliché-ridden in every sense to serve its real purpose as providing any kind of historical justification for Brexit. What’s most striking about the book is its naivety and simple-mindedness – qualities shared by the Brexiteers in full measure as they declare that nothing could be easier than leaving the EU.”

It is plain that this book has been met in many influential quarters with that “unmeasured vituperation” that John Stuart Mill noted of some political writing in his own time. The sort of malicious invective and sweeping exaggerations listed above clearly do much to de-authorise the writers’ attempted demolition, even if some of their observations may be true and some of their judgments may have merit. It’s time to consider the text itself to see what the real truth about it is. Read more

Brexit: The Banality of Treason

“We have no real democracy at the present time, because again and again the people have voted for decisive action, yet again and again their will has been thwarted by obstruction in the talking shop at Westminster. Democracy only begins when the will of the people is carried out.”
Sir Oswald Mosley, 1931

One of my all-time favourite fictional stories about the nature of political belief is Flannery O’Connor’s The Barber, published in 1948. This remarkable short story, written when O’Connor was just 20 years old, follows a number of interactions in the life of George Rayber, a college professor who decides to visit a new barber just prior to a governor’s election. Rayber is a typical liberal, blindly convinced of his progressive beliefs and his own intellectual powers. In contrast to Rayber, the Barber and his other customers are supporters of the racial status quo. As Rayber sits for a shave, and discussion moves to the election, the interaction between college professor and barber becomes a masterful allegory for competing political philosophies and behaviors. Rayber finds himself arguing with an audience that is grounded in reality, immune to abstraction, and who seem to understand the economic interests he has in the election better than he does. It is the Barber who repeatedly reminds the conceited, and self-deceiving, college professor to really “think” and to use his “horse sense” rather than blindly follow progressive fantasies and intellectual fashions. Rayber, incensed by the reactionary views of the Barber, is nevertheless unable to offer an articulate, factual rebuttal, sitting mute and angry. Frustrated and embarrassed by someone he sees as an ignorant bigot, he then neurotically spends the night writing a “systematic analysis” for why voting for his candidate is a good idea, and plans to confront the Barber with it before the election. The story reaches a climax when Rayber finally gives his impromptu lecture in the barbershop, is greeted with laughter and derision, and subsequently lashes out by punching the Barber — confirming, with his violent loss of self-control, his own ideological, intellectual and personal defeat.

Although it’s been noted by biographers that she enjoyed “racist jokes,” O’Connor was politically ambiguous and her precise intentions in this story went with her to the grave when she died of lupus aged 39. In this case, however, I subscribe to the school of formalist criticism in that I see The Barber as possessing a life and existence beyond its author and her intentions. Regardless of what O’Connor intended, or how other critics have interpreted it, the story remains one of the most profound and succinct fictional portrayals of modern left-liberalism. We know, for instance, from several scientific studies that although leftists believe themselves to be agents of rationality they are in fact more likely than Rightists to be swayed by emotion.[1] They are also prone to weaker levels of emotional regulation and to “extreme acts of solidarity … with groups to which they do not belong originally.” The ongoing tragicomic presence of Antifa, recently filmed screaming “Nazi” at a milquetoast female conservative approaching her eighties, and the growing culture of censorship, are surely proof that the spirit of George Rayber is alive and well. The Left continues to evade debate, forfeiting argument in order to punch the “ignorant” in the smug belief that the Left, and the Left alone, are both intellectually and morally correct. Read more

Labour’s Fictitious Anti-Semitism Problem

A supposed problem

According to much of the British media, Labour has had an ‘anti-Semitism problem’ since Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015. The more impartial headlines call it a controversy or a set of claims. Corbyn critics speak of a crisis while his supporters complain of a witch-hunt.

As with any claim of anti-Semitism, the accusers refer to one or both of two things: that the party is racist towards some or all Jews, or that it is critical of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, in ways that it would not be of any other country.

Why use that term?

For Labour to be racist toward Jews would be strange. One would think that such a tendency would alienate the Jews deeply embedded and strongly over-represented within Corbyn’s Labour. Three of the four founders of the Corbyn-backing Momentum organisation — John Lansmann (no stranger to denouncing people for racism), Adam Klug and James Schneider — are Jewish, as are prominent Corbynist activists like Max Shanly. Several organisations supporting Labour, especially since Corbyn became leader, are Jewish, such as Jewish Voice for Labour and Jewdas. None of these, nor any of the many signatories to public letters supporting Corbyn against his critics, seem to have found any troubling signs that they are in fact supporting a party that quietly despises them and all their kind, whether defined by faith, ancestry or anything else. Several Jewish leftists, not unconcerned with racism against their own group, have examined the claims in good faith and at great length and found no particular problem in Labour [1]. Soon after the controversy first ‘erupted’ (though we can fairly doubt its spontaneity) following a re-tweet by Labour MP Naz Shah in 2016, Jamie Stern-Weiner wrote an article exhaustively demonstrating the alacrity with which the party excluded those who showed actual racial antipathy [2].

Nor is Labour’s opposition to Israel based on the country’s Jewishness. In a book claiming to explain ‘The Left’s Jewish Problem’ but actually almost entirely concerned with leftist opposition to the Israeli state, Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust showed clearly enough why leftists like Corbyn oppose Israel — because they see it as an outpost of Western imperialism and capitalism which oppresses, displaces and kills Palestinian Arabs who, until the last century, had dominated the region for centuries. The leftist position is consistent with their worldview, and that worldview is not founded on racial hatred.

If they were only referring to racism against Jews, opponents of anti-Semitism would use a more rational term like Judeophobia or anti-Jewishness. But those who defend Israel know that they are defending actions which they would reject if carried out by other, genuinely Western states and thus find it politically useful to use one term, ‘anti-Semitism’, which enables them to conflate criticism of the state with attacks on the people it claims to represent. [3] Read more

The Value of Victimhood: Liverpool, Labour and Lucky Luciana Berger

The English port of Liverpool is famous for three things: soccer, music and violence. Historically it falls within the boundaries of Lancashire, but culturally it has never fitted there. It’s always been too self-assertive and idiosyncratic, so much its own place that its inhabitants go by two names. Formally, they’re Liverpudlians; informally, they’re Scousers.

Militant parasites

As the media clichés have it, Scousers are fiercely proud of their city and fiercely tribal in their politics. And their politics have always been left-wing — sometimes very left-wing. When George Orwell talked about “Irish dock-labourer[s] in the slums of Liverpool” in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he said that you can “see the crucifix on the wall and the Daily Worker on the table.” The Daily Worker was the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain (now the paper is called The Morning Star). In the 1980s, Liverpool was the home of a Trotskyist group called the Militant Tendency, or Militant for short, which tried to infiltrate the Labour party and use Labour’s far greater power and prestige for revolutionary ends.

In biological terms, as I suggested in “Verbal Venom,” Militant were a tiny parasite trying to subvert the nervous system of Labour and divert Labour’s resources to their own use. If Militant activists had stood openly as Trotskyists, they had no chance of winning elections and entering local councils or parliament. Wearing a Labour mask, they could win elections and enter power. And that’s exactly what they did in Liverpool, where they won control of the city council. But their parasitic infiltration of the wider party failed: Labour woke to the threat and fought off Militant’s entryism, as this Trotskyist tactic is called. Read more