If you’re having trouble coping with the idea that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – for all its posturing about opposing racism, opposing anti-Semitism – is in fact both anti-Semitic and racist, here’s some context.
Way back in 2017, just two years after Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader of the Labour Party, the Tory-owned polling firm YouGov ran a survey on anti-Semitism in the main political parties.
The results will be surprising to anybody who believes Labour became more anti-Semitic under Mr Corbyn’s leadership: in fact, the reverse is the case.
The poll was commissioned by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, and This Writer’s experience of that organisation suggests that this was an attempt to find that Labour had become more anti-Semitic between 2015 (before Mr Corbyn was elected) and 2017.
But the graph shows that anti-Semitic attitudes among Labour members had not only fallen – they had fallen more sharply than in either the Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties:
Dorset Eye explains what the findings said to Mr Corbyn’s political opponents:
It meant a lot of work was required to tarnish the name of a long term human rights supporter and anti racist. This is when the establishment set to work.
That work involved attacking campaigners against racism and anti-Semitism as exactly the kind of people they opposed. It involved accusing Jewish people of being anti-Semites.
It involved vilifying Mr Corbyn and his supporters – including Diane Abbott; the woman who receives more racist hate mail than any other MP has now been accused of racism herself.
All on the basis of a lie – or at least, on a claim that could not be supported by the facts. Keir Starmer’s right-wingers in Labour have a lot to answer for.
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It said: “Have you seen Jeremy Corbyn’s video on *Double Down News* on YouTube? He lays down the facts of the right wing faction [in the Labour Party] and the 2017 election! Worth a watch!”
I had not seen that video – but now I have.
And I think you should too. Here it is:
His comments on complaints of anti-Semitism are particularly revealing.
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Offensive gesture: ‘where are Labour voters going to go?’ is the question Starmer seems to be asking. He seems to think left-wing voters will have no choice but to support his hard-right sub-Tory version of the party. Is he correct?
Labour’s leader has betrayed the party’s members yet again.
After wooing leadership voters two years ago with a vow that the 2017 manifesto, devised under Jeremy Corbyn, that brought millions of voters back to the party was its “foundational document” and that “we have to hang on to that as we go forward”… he’s ditching it.
It’s the latest volte face against the policies on which he was elected party leader in 2020 – and possibly the last. After turning his back on his “10 pledges”, is any of his original leadership platform left?
What does it mean, in practise? Well, “left-wing campaign group” Momentum had this to say to The Independent:
“Our country faces huge challenges, from the cost-of-living crisis to the existential threat of climate breakdown. The status quo is failing millions of people – and socialist solutions like public ownership and raising the minimum wage enjoy widespread support amongst the British public.
“But the truth is that the Starmer leadership is avoiding facing these challenges in favour of a reheated and deeply unpopular Blairism. Whether it’s abandoning transport workers fighting for their livelihoods, or offering a windfall tax less ambitious than that of the Tories, Starmer’s tepid, unprincipled approach will neither tackle today’s challenges, nor invigorate a winning electoral coalition.”
And Ian Hodson of the Labour-defying Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union, tweeted this:
Starmer to move @UKLabour further towards alignment with Tories to satisfy Murdoch and potential big donors. They will also align to enable Tories a safe home inside the party. https://t.co/DpJPtMbi9R
But with Labour taken over by Tory squatters (including Starmer himself), where will the 10 million who voted for Corbyn’s – authentic – version of the party go?
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Nadhim Zahawi: it seems the co-founder of YouGov intimidated the polling firm into changing its methods – falsifying poll results – to make it seem the Tories were more popular than was true in 2017.
This is shocking and Nadhim Zahawi should be made to answer some hard questions.
It seems polling in 2017 showed Labour overtaking the Conservatives – until the Conservatives (Zahawi in particular) intimidated leading pollster YouGov.
A whistleblower on Dorset Eye explains:
The first thing I would do every morning is download the overnight data, and each day the gap just kept getting smaller and smaller. On the morning of the Manchester bombing, we actually had Labour pulling level, although the poll got spiked because the campaign rightly paused.
And then we released the MRP*. This was probably the worst possible idea. The MRP was actually showing exactly the same thing as our standard polls would have, but it was the first time anybody had said “hung parliament”.
Nadhim Zahawi called up the CEO and said he would call for his resignation if he was wrong.
This meant our polling and coverage was a lot worse for the rest of the campaign. We did a fantastic debate poll in the hours following the debate that Corbyn took part in. The results were stark – Corbyn won by a country mile, and one in four Tory voters thought he was best. But despite having written the story and designed the charts, we were banned from releasing the story because it was too positive about Labour.
Similarly, there were a few “minor” methodology changes for the final poll which increase the Tory lead. This was done after pressure from high-ups (and despite protests from those of us who thought it wasn’t ok).
Was the 2017 election rigged because people were influenced by falsified opinion polls?
The evidence here suggests it was. We might never have had Tory Brexit, Boris Johnson and all the horrors of the last five years if YouGov’s founder had left its employees to do their job. And will you ever trust an opinion poll again?
*MRP stands for multilevel regression and post-stratification. This is a statistical method that produces predictions for small geographic areas even if a poll had few respondents from that constituency. Instead, census data, such as the age and income distributions of voters in that area, is put into the model with the national survey data.
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Keir Starmer: is he happy to be stained by the corruption alleged against Labour officers over the last few years?
We’ve all heard the claims from the leaked Labour report into factionalism in the party that interfered with anti-Semitism investigations – it also stopped the party winning the 2017 election.
Nothing was done about the right-wing faction that was said to be sabotaging Labour’s election hopes.
While some of the faces changed, we may take it as read that the same attitudes prevailed in Labour HQ – even after last year’s Panorama documentary, Is Labour Antisemitic?, revealed the rot at the heart of the party (although the perpetrators were claiming to be the good guys).
So this should come as no surprise:
Labour officials ran a secret operation to deceive Jeremy Corbyn at last year’s general election, micro-targeting Facebook adverts at the leader and his closest aides to convince them the party was running the campaign they demanded.
Campaign chiefs at Labour HQ hoodwinked their own leader because they disapproved of some of Corbyn’s left-wing messages.
They convinced him they were following his campaign plans by spending just £5,000 on adverts solely designed to be seen by Corbyn, his aides and their favourite journalists, while pouring far more money into adverts with a different message for ordinary voters.
What was the message – “don’t vote Labour”?
The more were learn about the rot that has been growing in the heart of Labour since before the days of Tony Blair (This Writer personally believes it started to set in during the leadership of Neil Kinnock), the worse it seems.
Jeremy Corbyn was certainly at fault for failing to take action, although he may have felt constrained by the spin that may have been put on it – by, for example, the organisations who lobbied so strongly about alleged anti-Semitism.
Keir Starmer is under no such constraints, although he will be if he fails to take swift and decisive action (something he has hitherto been reluctant to attempt).
It seems to This Writer that the Americans have the right idea after all.
When they change government from Democrat to Republican, or vice versa, the incoming administration changes everybody – all of the civil servants – to ensure that the workers enacting their policies are fully supportive of them.
I had always considered it somewhat extreme.
But recent revelations suggest that this is exactly what should happen in the Labour Party – certainly if a left-wing leader ever gains ascendance there again.
And Starmer will have to do the same, sooner or later.
Whether deservedly or not, the party’s reputation is now one of corruption.
If the new leader doesn’t make a show of purging it, then he will be stained by it.
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A traitor to his party? Labour’s former general secretary Iain McNicol is among several suspects who may have helped engineer a Conservative victory in the 2017 general election.
Yes, ‘Labour’ – you have to put the word in quotation marks when describing these people because they do not in any way represent the party or its members and should be removed at once. Enough is enough.
It seems these people deliberately tried to sabotage Labour’s 2017 election campaign by manipulating social media advertising to ensure that it was targeted at the party leadership and known left-wingers, rather than the wider audience that would have benefited from it.
According to this Guardian article, the non-Corbyn-loyal members of the GE17 campaign team were Patrick Heneghan, Iain McNicol and Emilie Oldknow.
Which of them were the traitors? Or did they all conspire, against the national interest, to re-elect a Conservative government? And was anybody else involved?
Jeremy Corbyn must launch an investigation and expulsions must follow.
Astonishing new information has revealed that had it not been for the actions of a small number of disloyal anti-Corbyn Centrist Labour Officials who actively worked against the democratically elected leadership in the run up to the election, the Labour Party may well have been able to gain the extra votes they needed to form a government.
A new book written by Ed Miliband’s former Director of Communications, Tom Baldwin, has revealed that a number of so-called ‘moderate’ Labour Campaign Chiefs secretly refused to run numerous adverts devised by the Labour leadership team because they did not approve of the left-wing messages contained within them.
The Labour Officials are said to have been able to deceive Corbyn and his leadership team by specifically targeting the [online] adverts at the Labour leader and his closest allies, rather than the voting public as they were meant to.
The deceitful Labour Officials believed that adverts such as one urging people to register to vote were not worth spending money on, and instead decided to pour the money into running adverts with different messages.
Corbyn’s manifesto – entitled For The Many, Not The Few – was leaked early, with rumours emerging at the time that the same so-called moderate Labour Southside Campaign Chiefs who were later to deceive him had leaked the document in the belief that it would be widely ridiculed by the general public, and in order to hasten Corbyn’s exit as leader.
However, rather than go down like a lead balloon as the leakers had presumably imagined it would, the manifesto was received with adulation by both the general public as well as, astonishingly, a large section of the corporate media.
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“Privydrizzling”: Philip Hammond delivers his speech to the Conservative Party Conference.
Philip Hammond’s speech at the Conservative Party Conference was the opposite of John McDonnell’s – not in its political slant but in its total lack of any useful content.
This Writer therefore had to devise a word to describe it, that is the opposite of “barnstorming”. Fortunately my brother – Beastrabban – came up with a perfect term when I caught up with him yesterday, and here it is: “Privydrizzling”.
You know it’s the right word for the job.
Among the comments the Chancellor (God help us!) “drizzled” into the conference chamber “privy” was:
Shocking that Hammond used conference speech for apology to Tory financial backers but no apology for his pay cut to public sector workers. pic.twitter.com/x6EONsVY9y
This zombie-grey fool needs to remember that the bankers are responsible for the collapse of the western world’s financial system in the crash of 2007 onwards. They created the recession that has pushed living standards through the floor and into the gutter.
Voters are going to be angry about that.
The financial crisis pushed government debt through the roof on the expectation that working people would pay it back, rather than the rich financiers who racked it up.
Voters are going to be angry about that, as well.
And while working people were experiencing the longest-sustained squeeze on their wages since the 1750s, the richest in society were enjoying a near-tripling of their already-exorbitant incomes.
Voters are going to be very angry about that.
But Mr Hammond thought it was appropriate to apologise to the bankers who created all that chaos, for failing to deliver the election result they wanted. We may, therefore, assume that the Conservative Party in its entirety is in thrall to the financiers of the City.
They’ll never do anything for real people, other than exploit us. The evidence is all around but some seem willing to be misled.
What else did Mr Hammond say?
Well, he badmouthed Labour, and Jeremy Corbyn. He did a lot of that, in fact.
A surprising amount of it.
No, really – he spent most of his speech harping on about Labour.
What is the point of Tory Conference when all they do is attack other Party leaders ,nothing positive at all ,woeful !
He referred to “Corbyn’s Marxist policies” and attacked the plan to renationalise privatised utility companies:
“We know what state control does to industry: utilities, transport; energy; steel, coal, mail, shipbuilding, telecoms, ports, airports and much of heavy manufacturing were all nationalised.
“Almost all of them were massively inefficient, running up huge losses – because the Unions knew that with the state as owner, they could not go bust. So the setting of wages and prices was determined by naked political power, not market forces. The losses those industries piled up, and the capital they needed to keep going competed with our public services for scarce resources. The Labour Government squared the circle by borrowing money and then when the lenders took fright at the mounting debt and the supply dried up they had to go cap in hand to the IMF.”
But his rhetoric ignores the fact that privatisation has not improved matters; it has made them worse. The industries he mentioned have been bought up mostly by private concerns and nationalised industries based in foreign countries – and bled dry, the profits they make going abroad, rather than being invested back into improving the services.
Here in the UK, we have ended up paying more and more for ever-worsening services, while the state has been forced to continue subsidising the industries it privatised. Look at the railways – the public purse pays more for their upkeep than ever before, and most of that money goes abroad as profit. That is the result of Conservative policy and if Mr Hammond thinks it is a triumph then he needs to be in a psychiatric hospital, not a political party conference.
Oh, and did you notice the jab at the unions and workers? The claim was that they pushed up wages beyond the ability of their nationalised industries to pay.
But nearly half of the FTSE100 – British companies – have helped themselves to £44 billion of profit and refuse to pay a living wage to their workers. The money is there – and always has been. It’s just being paid to the wrong people, in the wrong amounts.
Let’s not dwell on Hammond’s attacks on Labour, though. It’s his claims about the Conservatives, and (lack of) policy announcements that were the real howlers.
He said the Thatcher government abandoned “the delusion that the state could run the economy, that we could borrow our way out of every problem”.
But the Conservative and Conservative-led governments of 2010-17 (so far) have collectively borrowed more money than every Labour government, ever. Mr Hammond seems to think the state can borrow its way out of every problem, so attributing that flaw to Labour is nothing less than a lie.
This Government have borrowed more than any Labour government ever. #CPC17
He said the Tories “created the conditions that led to decades of rising living standards for the British people”. Delusional. Remember: We are in the longest-sustained squeeze on living standards (for the many) since the 1750s.
Hammond says Conservatives should worship Policies that have put 4 Million kids in poverty and forced a million people to turn to foodbanks
He said, “Under Ruth Davidson’s dynamic leadership we saw Scotland sending 13 Conservatives to Westminster – re-establishing an assertive Scottish Conservative voice in our UK Parliament for the first time in two decades.” That happened only because some Scottish voters lost faith in the SNP but did not return to Labour; the Tories won in those constituencies by default and that won’t happen again.
“Our economy is not broken: it is fundamentally strong,” he said. Delusional. If it was strong, then productivity would be increasing and people on part-time and zero-hours contracts would be taking offers to work longer hours for higher wages, and that’s not happening.
“And while no one suggests a market economy is perfect, it is the best system yet designed for making people steadily better off over time and underpinning strong and sustainable public services for everyone.” Delusional. People are increasingly worse-off and public services are collapsing.
He said: “We face an immediate challenge managing uncertainty about the outcome of our Brexit negotiations. We face a medium term challenge of restoring our public finances to balance and starting to pay down our debts – so we do not burden the next generation with the cost of our mistakes. And we face a longer term challenge of raising Britain’s productivity – increasing the amount we produce in each hour we work – so that we can get wages growing more quickly, without simply stoking inflation and so we can fund our public services to support our ageing population.” But he offered no suggestions on how to meet these challenges.
Announcements were thin on the ground, in fact, but I did hear this: “Today I am announcing a further £300 million to future-proof the railway network in the north.”
But…
Doesn’t sound so great when you realise Crossrail is £20 billion, nearly 100 times as much. https://t.co/NryZOCypiB
He announced an extra £10bn in funding to provide loans under the Help to Buy housing scheme through to 2021. But this will increase demand without increasing supply, artificially inflating house prices. The knock-on effect is that homeowners won’t want new houses to be built, because that would cut down the value of their own homes, which have now become investments. But how will they ever get a return on them?
Have I missed anything? If so, it probably wasn’t worth the time.
Verdicts from people who aren’t Tories have been as negative as you might expect:
Chancellor makes his leadership bid speech to #CPC17 it was dreary, full of vacuous attacks on Labour and he delivered unfunny gags #dire 👎
They’re also accurate, to the acute embarrassment of the Conservative Party at large – and Philip Hammond in particular.
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