Ben Elton: absolutely right on Rishi Sunak. Right on Corbyn – and Israel – too?
Ben Elton: praised for his opinion of Rishi Sunak, panned over Jeremy Corbyn. But he was right about Israel years ago. What a shame people didn’t listen.
There’s a lot of chatter on the social media about writer and stand-up comic Ben Elton, after he trashed Rishi Sunak’s interview on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday morning TV show.
For This Writer, Sunak’s big mistake was trying to brush the Post Office scandal under the carpet, after public feeling was stirred up by the excellent Mr Bates vs the Post Office drama on ITV last week.
He said it was something that had happened during the 1990s – which was a lie. The first wrongful prosecution of a sub-postmaster whose takings were fiddled by the Horizon computer system happened in 2001, and the last was in 2015. That makes it as much a problem for the current government as for those of any other under whose rule it took place.
His attitude towards the scandal was mirrored in his attitude to other issues Kuenssberg raised, and that is what led Elton to make his widely-praised response later in the same show:
Still the same old Rishi Sunak on #BBCLauraK. Nothing has changed since the last time he was on. Ben Elton was right.
“He’s the Prime Minster. He owes us honesty and we got nothing but mendacity, evasion, and vanity.”pic.twitter.com/Ekbp2YNpVJ
— Eddie Burfi (@EddieBurfi) January 7, 2024
Here’s where it gets interesting: some social media commentators have resurrected a Jewish Chronicle interview with Elton from (we think) 2020, in which he criticised former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for failing to tackle the anti-Semitism issue that had dogged his party since 2016. But again – it seems to me – Elton was right.
He said: “He [Mr Corbyn] needed to get a grip. But either because he is incapable or because, incorrectly in my view, he did not want to inflame a part of his base that conflates Israeli foreign policy with all Jews… For whatever reason, he has allowed what is clearly a fringe problem to become a cancerous poison.”
My reading is that Elton was saying Mr Corbyn was misled by his advisors into trying to appease a group of radical Zionists who insisted that criticism of Israeli government policy was the same as anti-Semitism and that this meant Labour was riddled with anti-Semites – thereby smearing members of good conscience who were simply voicing accurate criticisms of the Israeli government.
He clearly stated: “In the Labour Party I don’t believe there’s as much [anti-Semitism] as we fear there is.”
This reading of his words is supported by his comments elsewhere in the interview about the Israeli government itself:
He stresses his support for Israel’s existence, but adds that, as a people “that have known brutality in an unimaginable scale”, the Israeli government should avoid “using that to justify further brutality.” Instead, they “should say, ‘this is why we won’t do this’.
“At the moment, they are singularly not doing that.”
And now Israel is committing genocide in Gaza – probably the most extreme example possible of them “singularly not doing that”.
So, again, it seems Elton’s opinion was right on the money. And it seems to me that, if people like current Labour leader Keir Starmer had been a little less keen to jump into bed with those radical Zionists who had been so desperate to demonise Mr Corbyn, Israel might have been less enthusiastic about the atrocity it is now committing in front of us.
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The only thing I got against JC is he allowed stammer and the rest of the greedie ones to infest the party he should have thrown these out but to say the labour party was full of well the right used it has a weapon against him while they are the ones who were