Quench the flame of [ censored word]emitism, Starmer, but put out the crazy Trots too
Rod Liddle
Sunday June 28 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
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You’ve got to admire their tenacity and persistence. An entire world emerging from a pandemic and lockdown to a future of financial chaos and ruination — but Labour’s lefties can still find time to have a go at Jews. The obsession that cannot ever be diminished; the flame that never dies.
The latest came from the gloriously irritating Corbynista actress Maxine Peake, who managed to link the killing of George Floyd to the state of Israel. The fact that a decade or so ago some police officers from Minnesota, where Floyd was killed, attended an anti-terrorism conference hosted by the Israeli consulate was enough for Peake. Israeli collusion in the murder of a fine upstanding man, was the gist.
Her maniacal conspiracy-theory observations were retweeted by Rebecca Long Bailey MP, who, for reasons presumably satirical in design, holds Labour’s education portfolio. Well, held, at least. The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has sacked her, and the political firmament today shines a little less brightly, now that Rebecca’s shimmering brilliance has been peremptorily dimmed.
Starmer’s supposed reasons were sound — Labour is trying to “rebuild trust” among a British Jewish community that, until Corbyn and Wrong Daily came along, voted Labour almost unanimously and would now, in similar unison, vote for almost anyone but. The recently dispossessed lefties are furious, of course. Wrong Daily pleaded with her leader to take her back, insisting that, while she had retweeted Peake’s idiocies with the commendation that the TV star was a “diamond” (in that she is overvalued and transparent, possibly), she had never meant to endorse the entirety of her observations. In which case perhaps she should have tweeted “Maxine Peake is a diamond, apart from the anti-Jew stuff”.
The disagreeable whiff of sulphur you’ve just caught on the wind, meanwhile, was John McDonnell rising from his crypt to announce that he stood “in solidarity” with Long Bailey, most notably on the grounds that a commitment to [ censored word]emitism should not preclude criticism of the government and policies of Israel.
Many on the far left made that very point — and, of course, it is correct. Criticism of the Israeli government is just fine. It is the weird, relentless obsession with Israel, above and beyond all other countries, that is the signifier of undiluted [ censored word]emitism.
It is a mania that leads in the end to the condition that afflicted the former Liberal Democrat MP Jenny (now Baroness) Tonge, when she gave credence to claims that Israeli rescue workers were harvesting organs from victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, calling for an inquiry into the allegations. It is a kind of mental illness, a derangement. But this racism still has purchase in certain sections of our population. A study from Oxford University revealed last month that a scary 19% of British people believed that Jews were in some way responsible for the coronavirus. Those evil bat-eating Jews, then. Are one in five of us really that doolally?
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My suspicion, though, is that Sir Keir found the Peakegate Twitter business extremely expedient. A more honest and noble course of action would have been to sack Long Bailey months ago, because she is utterly, staggeringly, useless. The former leadership contender had her place on the Labour front bench as a sop to the Momentum hordes, who worship the woman. But there should have been no such sop. Such was the distance that Labour had travelled from its voter base under Jeremy Corbyn that Starmer should have been ruthless in purging every last Trot-friendly, victimhood-obsessed ninny from his political front line, including the increasingly berserk David Lammy.
A split in the party? Sure, fine, bring it on. It would have done him no harm at all, any more than it did Tony Blair. But Sir Keir is still a little too keen to take the knee to whichever faction of the party demands it and, three months after his accession, I still do not have a clue what he believes in or stands for, admirable though he may be each week at prime minister’s questions.
The latest polling research shows that Labour is now seen, pretty much unequivocally, as the party of the affluent. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to vote Conservative. The polls may have narrowed dramatically — but that is a consequence, I reckon, of an enormous disillusion with the government’s inept handling of the pandemic, rather than a positive vote for Labour. So who should replace Wrong Daily as Labour’s education spokesperson? It needs to be someone with Rebecca’s robust intellectual clout, soaring imagination, forensic attention to detail and remarkable articulacy. Richard Burgon, anyone?