General Election 2019

Given journalists must surely realise why Corbyn doesn't give a straight yes/no answer to the question 'will you apologise to British Jews?' - does there come a point where repeatedly asking it becomes partisan?

Completely agree with villa-ru's assessment the that nuance isn't going to win an election - but it's that very fact that I find most dispiriting, that there appear little to no place in contemporary political discourse for it (and not in a centrist-dad/'both sides' way).

Oh my god I need to watch that!

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It seems to have gained very little traction outside the right wing press.

What other press have we got?

Sorry, I meant ordinary day to day conversations, my house mates haven't mentioned it, no one at work has mentioned it etc.

Labour must have had these documents before the leaders debate, if so I applaud them for holding them back, this is a roller coaster and labour are back onto the front foot again.

To be honest I can't ever remember seeing any anti-semitism, only reports in the papers of it. I'm not saying no Labour members are anti-semites but the media response feels wildly out of proportion.

I didn't witness it but was told of an incident. A woman joined our branch. She openly admitted to campaigning against Labour for the London Mayor and for Respect. This was a strange admission and could (and possibly should) have been reason for her being denied membership. But people are polite. After a while and a series of pointless interjections in meetings, she ceased to attend. When I noticed this, I asked someone what had happened to her and was told that at a meeting I missed, she had made an antisemitic comment. The reaction to this from all of the other members (some of whom but not all of whom are Jewish) was such that she walked out and never came back. That is the reaction from members that one would expect. I was delighted to hear about it.

I should add that I would not just expect that reaction in the Labour Party but throughout society.

This is a decent read:

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/labour-and-chief-rabbi.html

Then again, zelostreet is generally a good read.

Agreed. The wider discussion would seem to include the context of the use of the term 'longstanding friendship' in another post (reported here.

It's not conclusive IMO.

The full phrase used is:

...a longstanding friend and champion of the Jewish community,

Which doesn't indicate if the Chief Rabbi has even met him.

Or your racism aligns with Boris'

Apparently initially posted on reddit about a month ago

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2019/nov/27/general-election-leaders-try-to-steer-campaign-away-from-race-and-faith-live?page=with:block-5dde6b958f087410d9873997#block-5dde6b958f087410d9873997

Which wouldn't have been a problem, had he handled it quickly and decisively in the first place.

Something he seems incapable of doing on any topic. Wouldn't matter so much if his team worked to supplement his own skill set, but that doesn't seem to be their style.

If you’re interested in a long-range view of left antisemitism, Steve Cohen’s Thatʹs Funny You Donʹt Look Anti‐Semitic is available here:
https://libcom.org/files/thats_funny.pdf

I agree with you the response is kind of dumb, but isn’t his point that this problem is nowhere near the problem it is being made out to be in the press and by the Tories?

Isn’t the percentage of Labour Party members that have been accused of antisemitism something like 1% EDIT: 0.1% is the figure I read (here: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/26/antisemitism-labour-everything-you-need-to-know) Have I missed a newspaper article Corbyn wrote about the Jewish community or something? Because we have a PM who literally wrote an article about Muslim women looking like letterboxes but he isn’t asked about Islamophobia in the Tory party at every single press conference.

I think it’s crazy for anyone to believe that if Corbyn admitted they were too slow in handling this, that like magic the press and the Tories stop. It would just carry on.

From the moment Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, the Tory tactic and the Tory press, has been to absolutely destroy his integrity. They started with his lack of tie, his lack of patriotism, his terrorist sympathising and so on.

Genuinely, as I’m sure it’s possible that I have, someone please point me to whatever it is I’ve missed that shows antisemitism has taken over the Labour Party.

There would have been a time when a bombshell like this NHS revelation today would have been an earthquake in an election campaign, I’m admittedly a pessimist, but just like Trump’s ability to shrug off lies I wouldn’t be surprised if Johnson does the same - particularly when the press is as batshit crazy as this:

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Half a dozen people I work with have mentioned it (a variety of green, labour and lib dem). Only a couple had actually seen the full interview (and thought he'd done badly) but the others also all thought he'd done badly from press coverage or seeing excerpts of the interview.

Something he seems incapable of doing on any topic. Wouldn't matter so much if his team worked to supplement his own skill set, but that doesn't seem to be their style.

He said as much in the debate with Johnson - that he leads collaboratively, with consensus from those around him. That would be fine, even admirable, in another time, but is not strong enough for today. And as you say, the team around him don't (or aren't empowered to) take up the slack. It seems he is on a pedestal within the labour party (if not the PLP) but that doesn't translate to those viewing from the outside - big disconnect there.

Isn’t the percentage of Labour Party members that have been accused of antisemitism something like 1%?

Wouldn't that be quite a lot?

From what I've seen so far the NHS stuff doesn't look that bombshelly. Is there anything that I've missed that could really derail the Tories?

Yeh, I found the article, Labour says it is 0.1%

Here: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/26/antisemitism-labour-everything-you-need-to-know

Like I said, I’d genuinely like to see evidence to the contrary if I’m misinformed.

Having spent nearly ten years dealing with outsourcing, privatisation and other fuckery in the NHS I can say that my opinion of the documents when I read them this morning is that they are very worrying.

In my experience, you have to look for what is conspicuously absent in documents like this rather than what they explicitly say.

Most if not all of the preliminary reports I saw that were written by the government (admittedly not just Tory) did not even hint at the possibility of outsourcing or privatisation bit it still happened. People know not to put shit like this in writing.

Sorry for the lazy Wikipedia cut and paste but I thought this was pertinent:

In 2015, 2016 and 2017, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA)
commissioned YouGov to survey British attitudes towards Jews.[89] The
2017 survey found that 30% of supporters of the Liberal Democrats
endorsed at least one "antisemitic attitude", as defined by the CAA,
compared with 32% of Labour supporters, 39% of UK Independence Party
(UKIP) supporters and 40% of Conservative Party supporters.[89][90]

You read the Guardian article, right? Does it really sound like business as usual? Genuine question.

Hundreds of complaints about alleged antisemitic comments by Labour members have been submitted over the last few years to the central party, which has struggled to cope with the volume. For example, 635 complaints were made in the first six months of 2019, which resulted in eight expulsions from the party during that time period.

I have no idea, it certainly sounds awful but I don’t know if that is business as usual, as I don’t know if that is a normal level of complaints for a mainstream political party to receive.

It would be helpful if these articles included the number of complaints for alleged antisemitic comments for the other political parties. I’d also like to see the number of complaints for Islamaphobic comments too.

Racism is vile, I just find it difficult to believe that the issues that the Labour Party are reported to having, aren’t present in the other political parties.

More details from Sayeeda Warsi regarding the Tory islamphobia.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/27/sayeeda-warsi-tory-islamophobia-muslim-prejudice-investigation