#Corbyn For Prime Minister

[lamardeuse]

YES JEZZA YOU ABSOLUTE LEGEND

Update: oh shit it hasn't been declared yet but it looks good

[ceoandslutler]

ciel really is exploiting seb's labour just for his one(1) soul and it's a zero hour contract too. under capitalism, even demons need to sell their time/labour in order to eat 😔

[gawsby]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE BEST PRIME MINISTER WE NEVER HAD

a man who has always been on the right side of history.

JEREMY BERNARD CORBYN

75 TODAY

[skywastherobot]

As the UK elects a new Prime Minister, Sam and Natalia look back on the last 14 years of British politics before reacting to the 2024 UK general election results.

Topics of conversation include Keir Starmer, the 2016 EU referendum, the Green Party, Kelly Osbourne, Monzo bank, Maggie Thatcher the Milk Snatcher, Private Eye, gay marriage, the worst Prime Minister in UK history, Sam’s “vibes-based” theory of politics, Jeremy Corbyn and Jeremy Hunt, David Tennant, the difference between British and Polish tourists, FAWLTY TOWERS, and the future of Britain.

If you would like us to read your comments on the podcast, leave us a five-star rating on APPLE PODCASTS with your comments included as part of the review.

[chadara]

noam chomsky got roasted today by times radio comedian matt chorley. absolutely brutal

[ayeforscotland]

A protestor at the Labour conference shouts “What about the children of Gaza?” to which the Prime Minister smugly replies, “I think this guy got his pass for the 2019 conference,” in reference to when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.

That’s your fucking Labour Party right there. Ugly and soulless.

[natequarter]

pros of this election:

corbyn trounced labour in islington north

labour won

lib dem won 71 (that's seventy-one) fucking seats!!!

and they won my seat!!!

green won four seats!

NO tory seats in wales left

LIZ. TRUSS. LOST.

cons of this election:

reform won four seats

keir starmer is now prime minister

[toaarcan]

I need the anti-voting crowd to understand that not voting isn't going to cause the Democrats to take a long, hard, look in the mirror and suddenly decide that they need to swing left to appeal to more leftists.

When these centre-left parties lose, they get more centrist. They try to broaden their appeal and make themselves as appealing to as many people as possible.

The example I'll point to is my local centre-left party, Labour, who are currently poised on the brink of one of the largest victories they've ever had. By the time you read this, it may have already happened, election day is today.

Labour have been drifting rightwards on several fronts for a while now. One of the biggest examples of this was the 1997 elections. After repeatedly failing to defeat Margaret Thatcher and then subsequently losing once to John Major, Tony Blair became the new leader of the party, and reinvented it as New Labour, adopting a much more neoliberal economic approach and promptly got a historic victory.

Now there are a lot of reasons why Blair won as hard as he did, and I don't have time to break them all down, but at the end of the day, their adoption of neoliberal economic policies worked out enormously for them. Not only did Blair romp to victory, he maintained most of his popularity afterwards, reigning for an entire decade before finally stepping down in 2007.

Labour is also a handy demonstrator of why they don't lean leftwards after a defeat, because they actually did try that and it failed spectacularly.

After Ed "Wrong Milliband, wrong Ed" Milliband's dismal performance in the 2015 election, Labour actually decided to try and lean leftwards again, and selected Jeremy Corbyn as their leader.

Unfortunately, Corbyn was useless. Many a Brit will accuse him of not even actually wanting to be Prime Minister, instead just wanting to sit opposite an actual PM and oppose them. They're probably right.

The 2017 snap election, called by Theresa May, should've been an open goal. May was embattled largely by her own party, many of whom were strongly opposed to her attempt at a moderate Brexit deal. She was an unelected PM, chosen by internal party mechanisms after David "Bae of Pigs" Cameron fucked off post-Brexit disaster. The massive, and ever-growing pro-EU voting block were entirely unrepresented. The Liberal Democrats, normally a bit of a thorn in Labour's side in terms of hoovering up more left-wing votes, were still trying to recover from the massive hit in popularity they took after the disasterous Tory-Lib Dem coalition. Blood in the water for any left-wing party worth its salt.

Yeah so Corbyn fucked it up and lost. While May only ended up weakening her position, losing 13 seats and dropping below a majority, the Tories still got their largest vote share since the 80s and held onto power for grim death.

Corbyn stuck around, still didn't get any better, and promptly lost the 2019 election in a landslide. To this guy.

People didn't vote for Corbyn. In the media, he was pilloried as a communist and an antisemite (and he did such a terrible job of fighting that second one that to this day I still have no idea whether it was true or just a smear campaign), and his determination to take the high road only made him look weak and avoidant to the public. His policies got little attention and his campaigning was likely deliberately weak, shooting for the role of opposition rather than government.

It also didn't help that the people for whom Labour wasn't Left Wing Enough still didn't turn out. They still voted Green or didn't vote at all.

To the party itself, though, the message was clear. They'd gone leftward, and it had backfired spectacularly.

Corbyn promptly fucked off at long last and was replaced by Starmer, who is, as expected, another milquetoast neoliberal in most regards. And now, with the polls open for the 2024 election, and Starmer projected to win by such a massive margin that the term "Supermajority" has been thrown around like it's an inevitability, Labour has been engaging in what's been called a "purge" of its leftmost members, with most of Corbyn's base, including Corbyn himself, being barred from running as Labour candidates and instead having to run as independents.

Now, that might horrify you as a leftist, but to them, it's a course-correction. Corbyn and co. represent an era of failure for the party, where a leftward lean cost them two elections.

To swing back around to American politics, if the Democrats lose because of voter apathy, they aren't going to take it as a sign that they need to appeal to the left. They're going to take it as a sign that their appeal wasn't broad enough and they need more outreach to right-wingers.

They already lost in part due to voter apathy in 2016, they didn't move left to compensate. They found the Most Neoliberal Average Establishment Guy they could, rallied behind him, and it partially paid off for them. They at least won.

You want a more leftist Democrat party? Not voting isn't going to get you that. In fact, it will most likely have the exact opposite effect.

[zvaigzdelasas]

Jeremy Corbyn said he had instructed lawyers to take legal action against Nigel Farage over remarks in which the right-wing commentator accused the former Labour party leader of subscribing to an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

On Wednesday, Farage took aim at Corbyn on his GB News show while hitting back at Corbyn’s successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer.

Starmer had earlier claimed in parliament that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government was "dancing to the tune" of Farage, former leader of the UK Independence Party and Brexit party.

Farage then sought to discredit Starmer by noting that he served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet until 2019, making disparaging remarks about the former Labour leader that his team said "accused Jeremy Corbyn of subscribing to an antisemitic conspiracy theory".

“I have asked my lawyers to take the first steps in commencing legal proceedings against Nigel Farage, following a highly defamatory statement about me,” Corbyn posted on X on Monday.

4 Mar 24

[mariacallous]

The triumph of populist parties such as the French National Rally (RN), Alternative for Germany, and Brothers of Italy in the recent elections for the European Parliament seems like an inflection point in Western politics. It suggests that the European Union’s most powerful states could soon be led by populist parties. French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for elections to the National Assembly might lead to cohabitation, should the RN win a majority and elect a far-right prime minister. Former U.S. President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans have a better-than-even chance of winning the U.S. presidency by the end of the year.

To understand the challenge posed by these far-right parties, they need to be properly named. Not labeling them “populist” would be a good place to start.

In contemporary usage, populism is a term deployed by centrist commentators to claim a monopoly on political common sense for the moderate middle—an objective-sounding word for extremism and excess in the same way as centrism is a synonym for sensible moderation. But the currency populism has gained thanks to this rhetorical maneuver has been bought at the expense of coherence and precision.

The term populism derives from a political movement in the southern and western states of the United States in the late 19th century. Agrarian cooperatives and trade unions in this region founded a political party in the early 1890s called the People’s Party. The party demanded the government become more responsive to its rightful owners, the people. This sweeping rhetoric in favor of democratization was central to the eponymous historical movement that birthed populism. It is an integral part of movements that can be properly described as populist, like Peronism in Latin America.

But the way the term is now used in the West suggests instead that populism is a political style, not an ideological position, which can be used to describe the idiom of both right-wing and left-wing movements. Trump and Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage are routinely described as populists.

The argument for this conflation is that both tendencies are defined by their hostility to the institutions, conventions, and expert elites that sustain liberal democracies. Populism, left and right, is said to be an expression of illiberal democracy undomesticated by the rule of law. This left-right dyad is actually a threesome, because the institutions and conventions that populists are allegedly hostile to are embodied by the moderate center. This middle ground is the vantage point from which populists become visible. The problem with this centrist god’s-eye view is that it obscures both the differences between left and right and the nature of the threat posed by the latter.

Populism became part of the European discourse in the 1980s when French political scientists like Pierre-André Taguieff began to use the term “national-populism” to describe the far-right National Front led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Anton Jäger, a historian of populism, argues that populism was initially used in France as a pejorative term, but once journalists got hold of it, its academic lineage gave reportage and analysis an air of neutrality “different from the semantic overkill associated with terms like fascism or the extreme right.” By the 1990s, the leaders of the National Front looking to escape their neo-fascist past had embraced national-populism as a self-description. According to Jäger, this twist in the intellectual history of a term “transformed the [National Front] from a fascist party to a populist one.”

The extension of the term to left-wing political movements suggested that the center was threatened by extremists from both wings of politics. It was an unpersuasive argument because it was untrue. It’s hard to see Sanders and Corbyn as the left equivalents of Trump and Farage if only because their political careers have been lived out in conventional mainstream parties where their left-wing pieties were a traditional part of the ideological spectrum contained by those parties.

Corbyn’s euroskepticism has a long history on the Labour left, dating back to Tony Benn’s opposition to the United Kingdom’s membership in the European common market, the EU’s lineal ancestor. Sanders’s calls to reform Wall Street, audit the Federal Reserve, break up banks classed as “too big to fail,” and tax the “1 percent” are the stock-in-trade of the Democratic left. For these to be classed as populist in the aftermath of the crash of 2008 tells us more about the dogmas of ideological centrism than it does about populism. The self-serving centrist use of the term populism to describe right- and left-wing movements has lent a veneer of respectability to right-wing extremists and eased their entry into the political mainstream.

Trump, Farage, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Mahendra Rajapaksa, Min Aung Hlaing, and Alice Weidel aren’t populists; they are majoritarian nationalists. Every one of them has the same goal: to take the nominal majorities in their countries (defined by race or religion) and turn them into self-aware, supremacist majorities, determined to remake their nations in their own image and to reduce religious and ethnic minorities to the ranks of second-class citizens or worse.

The historical font of majoritarian nationalism is not populism, but Hitler’s National Socialist party. The Holocaust disqualified majoritarianism from the political mainstream in postwar Europe. The Cold War, in turn, froze the nationalist imagination on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But Nazism’s master concept of a majoritarian nation-state built on the scapegoating of “inferior” minorities remained an inspiration to supremacists elsewhere. M. S. Golwalkar, the chief ideologue of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organization of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), held up Hitler’s treatment of minorities as an example for Indians to follow.

Indians are more sensitive to the significance of majoritarian nationalism than their Western counterparts for historical reasons. Late colonialism and the prospect of self-determination forced anti-colonial intellectuals to actively imagine the post-colonial nation-state. Colonized nationalists tended to mimic European models. They invoked language and religion to legitimize the nations they wanted to build.

The only decolonized states that refused an explicitly majoritarian nationalism and founded formally pluralist nation-states to accommodate their diversity were India and Indonesia. “Formally” is doing a lot of work here, because in several unspoken ways India and Indonesia deferred to the sensibilities of their religious majorities from the early years of their histories as republics. Their constitutions, though, rejected the idea of an established faith. Indonesia is arguably the less interesting of the two because it was for many decades an authoritarian state. India was the only post-colonial state in Asia to combine democratic practice with a rhetorical commitment to a homegrown pluralism that it defined as secularism.

The systematic uprooting of this pluralism by the BJP and Modi made Indians acutely aware of the existential threat that majoritarianism poses to liberal democracy. They had witnessed firsthand the use of institutional and vigilante violence to hack out a harshly Hindu nation. Still, the threat from majoritarianism wasn’t always obvious to Indian commentators; they had to be educated into it by India’s experiences in the 21st century. It wasn’t until well into the first decade of this century that the term majoritarianism achieved currency.

Before that, Indians used a term that, like populism, obscured more than it revealed. The term was “communalism,” a peculiarly Indian political coinage that described the weaponization of religious community for political ends. Communalists came in different flavors; there were Muslim communalists whose parties sought to represent only the Muslim interest and there were Hindu communalists whose parties addressed themselves only to Hindus. There were minority communalists and majority communalists.

But it was the triumph of Modi that forced the recognition that a communalized majority had the demographic weight to reimagine and reconstitute India in a way that wasn’t available to a minority. Majority communalism was best understood as majoritarianism, the nationalism of a supremacist majority. If South Asian commentators were relatively quick to understand this, it was because they had the intellectual “advantage” of being adjacent to the savage majoritarian violence that ravaged the recent history of the subcontinent. The Gaza-like destruction of Tamil areas in northern Sri Lanka and the violent ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine State in Myanmar underlined for them the bloody logic of majoritarianism.

From Lucknow, Lahore, Colombo, Kathmandu, Dhaka, or Yangon, it’s obvious that the violence visited on Gaza and the dehumanization of Palestinians in the West Bank grows out of a project of majoritarian supremacy.

The Western nation-state’s failure to name or confront majoritarianism has helped the far right mainstream itself. The once-fringe but now respectable notion that the West’s white Christian natives are being replaced by foreigners via legal and illegal immigration is the ideological foundation for the hegemony of the right. The popular appeal of majoritarian parties has pulled centrist parties like Sweden’s Social Democratic Party and France’s Renaissance to the right on immigration, to the point where their policy is nearly indistinguishable from the positions of far-right parties. Even Britain, Europe’s most successfully multicultural country, has Labour, a social-democratic party, criticizing the Tories for not doing enough to reduce immigration.

Tough talk about immigration is a form of dog whistling, whether it comes from a ruling majoritarian party like the Brothers of Italy or a centrist one like Britain’s Conservative Party. Stephen Bush writing in the Financial Times notes that Meloni’s government hasn’t brought illegal immigration down; she has actually increased quotas for overseas workers. How could she do otherwise? Italy has one of the worst demographic deficits in the world. But to prove her hard-line credentials, she has made it legal to detain an undocumented migrant for 18 months.

Bush points out that an honest plan to restrict immigration would entail a public willingness to raise taxes to fund the services that immigrants provide or a public commitment to curtail them. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer haven’t made that case because they know that the voting public might not want immigrants, but it does want better care homes, a more efficient National Health Service, cheap deliveries, and low taxes. In the absence of candor or a willingness to make the case for immigration, muscular centrist rhetoric about limiting immigration piggybacks on majoritarian prejudice. The massive gains made by majoritarian parties in the recent European Parliament elections suggest that the center’s bid to steal the far right’s lines isn’t working.

The now-mainstream concept of “Fortress Europe” isn’t only about keeping foreigners out—it’s indistinguishable from surveilling and disciplining resident immigrants within. Dog whistling about Muslims is now respectable in Europe because centrist parties and commentators do it, too. The massive marches in London pressing for a cease-fire in Gaza were criticized across the political spectrum for allegedly intimidating members of Parliament. The speaker of the House of Commons excused his violation of parliamentary convention by citing his anxiety about the safety of MPs. Articles in the New Statesman and the Guardian, organs of the center-left, cited in this connection the factoid that three-fourths of all extremist violence in Britain was the responsibility of Islamists. The willingness of social-democratic governments—Germany is a case in point—to use the Gaza protests to put their Muslim citizens on notice is a warning that the majoritarian right might be knocking on an open door.

It isn’t hard to imagine how these tropes about unreliable minorities might be used by neo-fascist parties within a whisker of office in the major nations in Europe. Europeans who believe that internecine violence on a South Asian scale is unlikely in Europe should think back on the genocidal majoritarian violence in Serbia and Bosnia 30 years ago.

Given the backlash faced by single-issue protests like Black Lives Matter and the Gaza encampments, a Trump presidency will amplify the sense of white grievance that put him center stage in U.S. politics. Given his track record of singling out Muslims for discriminatory treatment, the post-Gaza political landscape will be the perfect setting for a Trumpian reassertion of the Judeo-Christian values of a righteously white republic. “Making America great again” would almost certainly entail putting uppity minorities in their place again.

The West is now circling the same abyss as the non-West. France’s (and Europe’s) allergy to visible religious difference in the name of laicité is not different in principle from China’s determination to Sinicize the Muslim Uyghur. Switzerland’s ban on minarets echoes the zeal of China’s Han commissars for remodeling mosques. To continue to describe Trump and Le Pen as populists is to trivialize their historical significance. They are, like South Asia’s bigoted majoritarians, heirs to the blood-and-soil nationalisms of interwar Europe.

The difference is that this time around Muslims are the designated Other. Marine Le Pen has achieved mainstream respectability by walking the RN away from her father’s trademark antisemitism and toward Islamophobia. The reason she swapped scapegoat minorities so easily is that all majoritarianism needs is a minority to mobilize against; any minority will do. After Sri Lanka’s Buddhist-nationalist state bombed the Tamil minority into submission at the end of the civil war, it segued without missing a beat to demonizing Sri Lanka’s Muslim minority.

If the West is to avoid the violence foretold by recent South Asian history, its commentariat should be terrified that majoritarian parties and politicians are making the running in politics across Europe and the United States. Its progressive and centrist parties should learn from their Asian counterparts that stealing policies from the majoritarian right does not buy them time. Europe’s public intellectuals should be trying to make the cast-iron case for welcoming young migrants into a graying continent. Most urgently, the West’s political elites should stop being complicit in majoritarian fever dreams before they congeal into a rancid common sense.

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

The IDF estimates, maybe based on a baby bottle that was found where hostages are known to have been held, in the basement of the Rantisi hospital in Gaza, that a woman who was kidnapped while pregnant, has given birth in captivity. That makes her child the youngest hostage, at the age of a few days at most.

While our kids and babies are being held hostage in dark basements and tunnels, Israel is offering Gazans medical assistance for their kids. At this link you can listen to a subtitled conversation (the article is in Hebrew, just scroll to the first embedded vid), where an IDF officer is offering the Shifa hospital manager to place at the entrance to the building 37 incubators and 4 respirators for the kids and babies. The officer also vows to the manager to help protect as much as possible the patients, wards and staff in the hospital. During the conversation, the offer is accepted, but the IDF says later it was rejected. As I can't see who would outrank the hospital manager, I'm guessing the "No" came from Hamas.

Rockets continue to be fired into Israel. Today, a rocket barrage at Tel Aviv, at a kids playground, left one person seriously wounded, and two moderately.

Thank you so much to the Israeli Nonnie who sent me this vid. Yes, that is exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned in my update yesterday, this is Hamas attacking Palestinians in order to take over this aid truck and get all of the food for themselves (the relevant footage starts 11 seconds in):

Jeremy Corbyn, the man who could have been the British Prime Minister, and who British Jews called out on antisemitism, was interviewed by Piers Morgan. He was asked 15 (arguably 16) times to answer the question whether Hamas is a terrorist group, but refused to give a reply.

I was listening to this interview with Ella Keinan (it's in Hebrew), an Israeli travel vlogger, who has started posting about the Israeli POV since Oct 8. She didn't say anything I didn't know, but I thought the way she phrased things was powerful, so allow me to translate:

They created a brand called Free Palestine, which is not actually freeing the Palestinians and giving them what they want, but under this brand it's possible to do anything nowadays, it's possible to rape, it's possible to slaughter, it's possible to kidnap, it's possible to abuse, to kill, it's possible to hurt and kill Jews in LA, it's possible to attack them at universities, and you'll still be applauded. Meaning, you'll still be popular. That's how powerful this brand is.

Meanwhile, Israel's foreign diplomacy has officially been shut down due to a lack of budget. A lot of government offices are being shut down, and their budget is being re-directed to help the evacuated, the families of the murdered, the injured, financially supporting people whose businesses have collapsed, compensating those whose homes were destroyed by Palestinian rockets. So when you hear people dismissing regular Israelis' posts as paid propaganda by the Israeli government... what a fucking joke, Israel can't even currently pay professionals in this field, let alone regular people.

This is 19 years old Noa Marziano.

Yesterday, Hamas published a vid of her as a hostage. The Israeli media refused to cooperate with the psychological warfare, no one published it. Today, the IDF was able to confirm that Noa was murdered in captivity.

This is 12 years old Liel Hetzroni.

Her mother Shira, after gaving birth to her and her twin brother, suffered brain damage, and couldn't take care of her kids, so they were raised by their grandparents. Liel's grandfather and brother's bodies were already found. Today, after having been missing for 38 days, Liel's death was also pronounced.

This is 75 years old Vivien Silver.

She was a peace activists. Among other things, she used to volunteer her time driving Gazans to medical treatments in Israel. She was thought to be kidnapped in Gaza, but today her body was identified.

May their memories be a blessing.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[feckcops]

Starmer’s so-called “landslide victory” is built on sand

A deeply unpopular leader, Starmer has not secured the resounding endorsement his 412 seat tally would suggest, while record numbers of Green and independent MPs could pose a robust leftist challenge to Starmer’s Government ­– if they get organised

Keir Starmer, an ersatz Blair without a hint of his charisma or vision, is now Prime Minister, despite securing a vote share six percentage points lower than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. These results expose the widespread disillusionment, if not outright resentment, towards both Labour and the Tories. Smaller parties and independents had a great showing, with shock wins for Greens and pro-Palestine independents, but also Farage's Reform Party (if indeed you can call a limited company with a CEO and no membership a party). However, a large minority of eligible voters chose not to vote at all, with turnout dropping to 60 percent. This matches the record low set in 2001, when everyone knew Blair was set to be re-elected on a landslide. In elections expected to produce a new government, turnout usually rises – but not so this time. Shockingly, Labour’s mantra of “false hope is worse than no hope” failed to inspire any hope for real change.

It is a damning indictment of our voting system that a party can win over two thirds of seats and celebrate a “landslide victory” after winning over just one in five eligible voters. (Out of the 60 percent who voted, Labour only won a third of the vote.) Thanks to our twee unwritten constitution, this technical win grants Keir Starmer the right to form an electoral dictatorship for the next five years. However, the results do offer some silver linings...

Corbyn won his seat as an independent with a 7,250 vote lead over Labour, after he was blocked from running as Labour’s candidate in Islington North, a seat he'd held for 40 years. Labour also lost Chingford and Woodford Green to Ian Duncan Smith, after Faiza Shaheen was similarly blocked by Labour on dubious grounds and continued her campaign as an independent – ultimately this helped IDS win with around 17,200 votes, compared to Faiza Shaheen and the Labour candidate who each got around 12,500 votes. Shadow cabinet minister Jonathon Ashworth lost his seat to a pro-Palestine independent, along with three other Labour MPs, while another pro-Palestine independent left prominent Terf and shadow health minister Wes Streeting clinging on by a thread. Israel's brutal escalation of its 75 year-long genocide in Palestine has not only dismayed Muslims and anti-Semites, as the media love to imply, but a diverse coalition of people united by their outrage at leading politicians excusing, if not actively cheerleading, such barbarity. These results prove there is an electoral cost for enabling rogue states to commit crimes against humanity.

Beyond the three largest parties, the balance of power in Parliament now lies with a socialist, environmentalist, pro-Palestine left. The Greens won all four of their target seats – not only in the young, urban constituencies of Brighton Pavilion and Bristol Central, but also in the rural, once solidly Tory constituencies of Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire – an achievement few really thought possible. (Greens and pro-Palestine independents also came second in a record number of constituencies, laying the ground for more gains next time.) Those four Green MPs, along with Corbyn and the other four pro-Palestine independents, make up nearly double Reform’s five MPs. As such, we will have a principled leftist grouping in Parliament, not beholden to the Labour whip, to hold Starmer to account.

There is hope the new pro-Palestine independents can put aside subtle philosophical differences and work together to offer a robust left opposition to Starmer. We could see Corbyn and other independents join the Green Party. This would be a strategic move; they could still reasonably claim to be independent voices for their constituents as Green MPs, as the Green Party does not whip its MPs like other parties. Meanwhile, they would benefit from this established party’s resources, networks and mass membership. The highly democratic structure of the party means, if they brought a lot of their voters with them, new Green MPs could even secure a change to any Green policies they disagreed with. As for socialist Labour MPs, we could even see some defect to the Greens now they've secured their seats, especially if Labour remains a deeply hostile environment for them. Defections from Labour seem unlikely at this stage, but they cannot be ruled out.

More than anything, we should take heed that our best chance of enacting real change lies in our communities, through grassroots organising and direct, solidaristic action. Green and pro-Palestine independents only won by rooting themselves in their communities, engaging with the voters they hoped to represent, and inspiring masses of people to join their campaigns. We cannot rely on career politicians, whose class interests are diametrically opposed to ours, to protect us and our interests.

There's more to politics than elections, which only come around every few years and, all too often, seem to yield no real change. Real progress does not come from above. It is not gifted to us by the powers on high. It is fought for, from the ground up. In the words of Frederick Douglass, power concedes nothing without a demand. We must keep faith, keep fighting and keep organising. This election shows us that hard work can bear fruit. We know a better world is possible, but we won't achieve it by just voting. It’s on us to bring it about.

[zee-man-chatter]

I'm not going to add too much, other than the end of this story has some huge implications too on how Corbyn was ousted and Starmer put in. Read it for yourself, and make your own judgements.

[eretzyisrael]

by Lyn Julius

The results of the British Jewish election are in: a landslide victory for the Labour party. Will it be good for the Jews?

The Jewish vote will have reflected the national trend of a swing to Labour, but many Jews remain seriously concerned over resurgent antisemitism. They remain skeptical about new prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s reassurances that Jeremy Corbyn’s far left antisemitism has been expunged from the party. And, they ask, will a Labour government take a robust enough stand against antisemitism?

A global tsunami of antisemitism without precedent smashed into the Diaspora in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks; the link between antisemitism and anti-Zionism has never been clearer.  Hostility to Israel has translated into intimidation and  brutality against ordinary Jews and their property in London and Paris, Los Angeles and Montreal.

While the pro-Israel Conservatives did not always put their money where their mouth was – and the last foreign secretary, Lord Cameron, shocked many with his moral equivalence over Israel’s war on Hamas — the Conservatives’ fall from power means that UK’s 300,000 Jews have lost the most pro-Israel government they could have hoped for. Labour’s policy on the Middle East is ambivalent at best. The Greens are unabashedly pro-Palestinian and the Liberal party are equivocal, if not anti-Israel.  The Reform party have their fair share of antisemitic conspiracy nutjobs. Although ‘Gaza George’ Galloway has lost his seat, Jewish hearts will also sink at the news that four independent MPs were elected on a pro-Gaza ticket.

‘A pro-Gaza ticket’  is doublespeak for the demand for Israel to surrender unconditionally to Hamas, to be pilloried in the international courts for alleged ‘war crimes’ and to suffer political and economic boycotts and strangulation. The pro-Gaza lobby do not want a ‘two-state solution,’ they want Israel gone.

How has it come to this – that whole swathes of public opinion believe that the Jews are to blame for October 7, that Israel’s war against Hamas is unjust and and that Palestinian terror groups – in reality proxies for Iranian aggression and imperialism – are the aggrieved party? The role of the media in misleading public opinion by omitting essential context and amplifying blood libels cannot be underestimated.

The lie, peddled over decades by Western pundits and academics wracked by post-colonial guilt,  that Israelis are ‘white settler colonialists,’ is probably the most egregious. Tens of thousands of young people have been swayed by this inversion of the truth. Not only are Jews an indigenous people of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)  with a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, but they predate Islam and the Arab conquest in the wider Middle East by 1,000 years or more.  Even Jews from Europe and the US were traditionally treated as outsiders. They have incontrovertible  cultural, linguistic and genetic links with the Middle East. Crucially, over half the Jewish population of Israel are refugees from Arab countries or their descendants. Ninety-nine percent have been driven from the Middle East and North Africa by mob violence and state-sanctioned persecution –  in greater numbers than Palestinian refugees from Israel.

How many politicians taking their seats in the new Parliament will have heard of  the 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries? How many will be aware of the abuse of their human rights? Apart from a handful of MPs representing ‘Jewish’ constituencies –  none.

In order to challenge ignorance and entrenched misconceptions, we need to launch a massive, pro-active, education campaign about Jewish refugees from Arab countries. The largest act of ethnic cleansing in the Israel-Arab conflict took place not against Palestinians, but Jews. Hamas just wants to finish the job by eradicating our last redoubt in Israel.

We urgently need to reframe the terms of the debate.

[thelostdreamsthings]

‼️"Democracy" in the Great Britain 🤡

▶️ 80% of British adults did NOT vote for the Labour Party, which gets to choose the new Prime Minister!

How’s this democracy?

The math:

57% turnout, of which Labor party won 34% of the votes.

57% x 34% = 20%

▶️ The UK's new Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a pro-war, neoliberal Blairite who is closely linked to British intelligence and the US government. He was backed by big business interests after the corporate media destroyed popular left-wing, anti-imperialist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Ben Norton discusses how Britain is an oligarchy, not a democracy.

‼️"Democracy" in the France: 🤡

National Rally: 10 million votes

NFP: 7 million votes

But look at the seats won in the French parliament!

It’s 142 versus 178!

Whatever Melenchon is really up to, he's making the - two - right noises so far:

1️⃣ Recognize the state of Palestine.

2️⃣ Talk to Russia.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jul 5, 2024

Keir Starmer surely cannot believe his luck. He has achieved a landslide victory by doing very little. He received fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and yet has ended up with a whopping 412 seats in parliament. The rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has split the right-wing vote and ushered the Conservatives along to their worst ever election result, plunging them to even greater depths than the disastrous election of 1906 under Arthur Balfour.

This was very much a Conservative loss rather than a Labour victory. There is no great enthusiasm for Starmer, and his majority is an indictment of the “First Past The Post” system which, as I have argued previously, should be abandoned in favour of Proportional Representation. It is unsurprising that upon his victory in Clacton-on-Sea, one of Farage’s first public statements has been a commitment to campaign for electoral reform. His party received over 4 million votes and has returned only 5 seats. So that’s 1% of the seats for 14% of the votes. Compare that with the Liberal Democrats, who have 11% of the seats for only 12% of the votes. Most of us will see that there is a problem here, irrespective of our political affiliations.

Worse still, Labour’s victory will empower the culture warriors, those identity-obsessed activists who have accrued so much power already in our major institutions. While the Tory party claimed to be fighting a “war on woke”, all the while enabling the ideology of Critical Social Justice to flourish, leading Labour politicians have cheered on the culture warriors while pretending that they were nothing more than a right-wing fantasy. We have seen some pushback over the past two years in regards to the worst excesses of this movement, but all of this may soon be undone. Now that the identitarians have their political wing in power, we should expect a few years of regression.

Take the example of Dr Hillary Cass, now deservedly elevated to the House of Lords, whose review into paediatric “gender medicine” has catalysed a sea-change in public perception. While many medical journals and institutions are so ideologically captured that they have continued to deny the significance of Cass’s findings - preferring instead to continue with discredited and evidence-free “gender-affirming care” - the Labour Party has pledged to implement her recommendations. Wes Streeting, the new Health Secretary and potential future leader of the Labour Party (who narrowly held on to his Ilford North seat last night by a little over 500 votes), has made clear that the Cass Review will guide Labour policy. Starmer, meanwhile, has turned a blind eye to the bullying of MP Rosie Duffield within his own party and has expressed very little understanding of the issues. He has come around to the view that 99.9% of women “don’t have a penis”, which is still approximately 33,500 female penises in the UK alone. This is our new Prime Minister.

And here is Nadia Whittome, who has just been returned in Nottingham East, claiming that Labour will push through gender self-identification with “no ifs, no buts” and “resist calls to exclude trans women from women’s spaces”.

Such a system would have seen double rapist Adam Graham – who identified as Isla Bryson once he had popped on a blonde wig and pink leggings – accommodated in a women’s prison. Whittome also calls for a “ban on conversion therapy” with “no exemptions”. Such a policy would likely criminalise those health professionals who follow the recommendations of the Cass Review and take a psychotherapeutic approach when it comes to confused and vulnerable children. You can read my piece on why a ban on trans conversion therapy is effectively a new form of gay conversion therapy here.

Anneliese Dodds, who won her seat in Oxford East last night, has continually shown that she has a meagre grasp on gender identity ideology and why it represents such a threat to the rights of women and gay people. She has stated that “Labour will ban conversion practices outright”, in spite of appeals from groups such as Sex Matters and LGB Alliance to rethink this position. It is as though she is determined not to read the Cass Review, which was unequivocal on this matter:

“The intent of psychological intervention is not to change the person’s perception of who they are but to work with them to explore their concerns and experiences and help alleviate their distress, regardless of whether they pursue a medical pathway or not. It is harmful to equate this approach to conversion therapy as it may prevent young people from getting the emotional support they deserve.”

And yet Labour politicians continue to push for a ban on “conversion therapy” which could put parents and doctors on the wrong side of the law simply for rejecting harmful “gender-affirming care”. One can only hope that leading figures in the new Labour government read over this policy response to its manifesto by the Gay Men’s Network and reflect on the issues.

Labour is also promising to implement its Race Equality Act, a regressive policy which will effectively prioritise equality of outcome over equality of opportunity (in other words, “equity” rather than equality). Labour wishes to ensure that those from ethnic minorities are entitled to “full right to equal pay”, somehow not realising that this has been enshrined in law since 1965. As Kemi Badenoch has pointed out, “Labour’s proposed new race law will set people against each other and see millions wasted on pointless red tape. It is obviously already illegal to pay someone less because of their race. The new law would be a bonanza for dodgy, activist lawyers.”

Labour is taking its lead from Critical Race Theory in assuming that all disparities in outcome are evidence of systemic racism. This faith-based position was challenged by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which found that there is no evidence at all that the legal and educational systems of this country are rigged against minorities. Activists were so furious that the facts went against their precious narrative that the commission’s chairman, Tony Sewell, was compared to Joseph Goebbels and the Ku Klux Klan. These privileged and predominately white “woke” activists simply cannot tolerate black people who don’t know their place.

And so under Labour we are likely to see these racially divisive ideas implemented under the guise of “anti-racism”. In its manifesto, Labour also pledged to “reverse the Conservatives’ decision to downgrade the monitoring of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate”. This looks very much like an insinuation that the party will reinstate police recording of “non-crime hate incidents”, a clear affront to freedom of expression. It is a staple of “woke” activism that censorship is necessary to ensure social justice. Given Labour’s ideological steer, it is likely that under its watch free speech will erode even further.

I very much hope to be proven wrong in all of this, and that Labour will learn to reject the regressive and divisive influence of intersectional identity politics. The Tories were bad enough, with their restrictions on peaceful protest and their attacks on free speech via the Online Safety Bill. But now we have a government whose authoritarian instincts are even more pronounced. Progress is often an inchmeal affair, and sometimes we have to suffer the occasional retrograde lapses along the way. So we would be wise to brace ourselves for the next few years. For now at least, the culture warriors have the upper hand.

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If you want to see where the UK is heading, look where Canada is now.