Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
On Starmer/Gray, rightly or wrongly I suspect if it isn’t out of the news in a week it will fail the old Alastair Campbell “if you’re the story and you’re explaining then you need to resign” test; and she’ll never take up the post.
I suspect Gray will already be having second thoughts based on quite how visible she will be*, and the level of scrutiny there will be on everything she does.
Fair? No, but life isn’t.
*She will have known the theory, but this is the practice.
Boris has three faults. He's corrupt, he's lazy and his judgement is poor. The first is forgiveable, the second is unfortunate, but the third makes him unfit to govern. He's not a details man and a PM doesn't need to be as long as he has judgement.
Brown was a details man, and it meant he couldn't see the wood for the trees. Boris can't even see the trees.
I mostly agree except occasionally his judgement is ok (ending lockdown when many said not, Ukraine) and the corruption is not forgivable.
Starmer did look flustered when he was asked about the date he first contacted Gray about the job. OK, the rules were probably broken, but it's hardly a hanging offence. It means he's a bad liar, and that makes a change for a politician.
Given the fact that we're a sovereign country and can do whatever we like, why not just say we can shoot dead on sight anyone attempting to enter the country llegally?
Just make them all stateless. That's the solution to all our problems.
No. Shoot the bastards and put the videos on YouTube with a soundtrack of "Rule Britannia". Preferably get in close enough to see the blood. It won't even need to be edited to make it into a Conservative Party Political Broadcast.
The thing is, the BoD, JLM and EHRC have all said Starmer has done the right thing. If anti-Semitism was still a big problem for Labour these critics would have a point but it isn't. So therefore this is just Tories being Tories, they don't actually care about the issue itself.
Starmer has done the right thing since he became leader, but having been prepared to do wrong thing when it suited his interests.
Please quote the "BoD, JLM and EHRC" saying he did the right thing serving under Corbyn until 2019 when the British public, not Starmer, did the right thing in rejecting Corbynism and antisemitism. Had the public not done the right thing, Starmer was prepared to stand idly by doing the wrong thing until it became politically convenient.
That's opportunism not principles. Boris and other Tories are no better, they do the same, but many on here like to pretend that Starmer has more principles than Boris when Starmer's track record doesn't show that.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
No. Just like the government of Israel is not the same thing as Jews, Hamas is not the same thing as the Palestinians.
Given the fact that we're a sovereign country and can do whatever we like, why not just say we can shoot dead on sight anyone attempting to enter the country llegally?
I think that will be the REFUK manifesto pledge.
Priti Vacant demanded that the Navy do tow back on boats. The Admiralty protested - it isn't equipped for such an operation and it won't do anything as patently illegal as setting out to deliberately drown people.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Its the von Papen gambit. Stay and serve on the assumption that you can remove all the dodgy shit which the lunatic isn't serious about anyway? Or get the hell out of the country?
Corbyn was not going to win in 2019. Come on.
The polling certainly said so. It strikes me that a lot of people who voted for Pangloss Johnson found Corbyn to be a convenient fig leaf. Quite a few of them were stout defenders of PM Johnson’s subsequent arseholery for a VERY long time.
I voted for Johnson and don't regret it for one moment, despite the fact that I yield to no one in my estimation of him as a solipsistic, incompetent, lying twat.
The risk of Jezza getting into No.10 was just too high.
It is really heartwarming to see the Tory fan boys out in force today to uphold standards in public life and the avoidance of any perceived conflicts of interests. Where would we be without them I ask?
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
"Rwanda fills up" - is the UK "full"? Why would Rwanda be "full"?
If you're serious about the policy, then you reach an agreement that every single person who crosses by boat is instantaneously flown overseas. Do not pass go, do not speak to a lawyer, do not have a night in the UK.
Do that and within a day and a half the number of small boats crossing the Channel would drop to zero.
That's exactly what happened in Australia and led to the number of small boat fatalities (which had been quite high) drop to zero and there hasn't been a single fatality from boat migrants as far as I'm aware in Australian waters in the past decade.
That's the evidence that this isn't a serious policy.
The Rwandan government has defended the controversial asylum agreement but said it only has the capacity to hold 200 migrants currently.
The African nation had originally agreed to take up to 1,000 migrants from the UK in a trial deal worth £120million.
Yes, they could scale up, but that would be a lot of investment to create capacity that would be used once.
"originally ... trial deal".
When Australia did this there was a trial sending only a few, then it was switched to everybody who crosses by boat with no exceptions.
If you're expecting lots of legal challenges then there's not much point spending more up front, but once the legal challenges are resolved then if you're serious then you can scale up rapidly - and then scale back down again as once you're serious, then people will stop making that journey.
You have to be serious about it though, and I'm not convinced the Government are. But that doesn't mean that the idea is a non-starter, the idea would work if the Government are serious about it.
Last year, there were 45000 small boat migrants, concentrated in the summer months. Rwanda are reckoning on processing claims in 3 months, and currently have one hostel with 200 beds. You need something about 50 times bigger if you plan to deport everyone.
If these numbers are right, https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/asylum-boats-statistics/ the Australian small boat migration peaked at less than one thousand a year. In that case, something like Rwanda might work. In the UK context, it's a cruel trick the government are playing on the gullible.
No you don't, you're making the classic fallacy of assuming that people don't change their behaviour when the law gets changed. There wouldn't be 45,000 crossing if everyone was being flown to Rwanda, there'd be zero crossing, you only need an agreement that everybody is taken and start it to great fanfare in the winter months not the summer months.
The numbers would drop to zero if you're serious about sending everyone. When the summer comes, people won't be trying to cross anymore if they know they'll get a one-way ticket to Rwanda if they do. So there wouldn't be 45k in the first place.
You might not need 45k, but you need way more than 0.2k.
Punishing bad behaviour is one of the things I have to know about, because I'm a teacher.
And as such, I can tell you that a punishment system that reaches capacity is worse than useless. You can do a jumbo jet full of migrants to great fanfare. But as it stands, then you probably can't send anyone for three months. Shortly after your "ooh, they're sending people to Rwanda", you get "ah, they've stopped because they have no capacity".
Trust me on this one. If you really want to go draconian, you really have to go really big. Or you're worse off than you were before.
If it's a PR stunt, none of this applies.
I completely agree with you, then you need to go big and for this to work it needs to apply to everyone.
However do you agree with me that if it were draconian and applied to everyone, then it would work, and the numbers would be much smaller than 45,000? Perhaps closer to the 4,000 that they took from Israel under a similar scheme a few years ago?
To make it apply to everyone, and have some excess so that you be sure that it would apply to everyone and everyone knew it, I think I'd want hostel capacity of 10000 at any one time. At least to start with.
Since there's no sign at all of that happening, and I'm not convinced that the Rwandan government would be up for it anyway, I feel confident in drawing conclusions about the seriousness of this plan.
The answer might be "several years ago" of course. These things don't tend to occur at the first time of asking, and are based on a long relationship. Which can be spun negatively.
In the interview he confirms the position became available in October so it is likely that sometime since then he contacted her
He also confirmed he knew her before he came into politics but that is not the issue
He has cultivated a narrative of integrity but looks evasive when I do not understand why he cannot just confirm the date and end the matter
Oh, yes - I think he's doing exactly the wrong thing. "Obviously, I've known Sue since before I went into politics. I have wanted to work with her for a long time. This position became available in October and I/[whoever] contacted her [in]formally about it at that time. She was one of a very short list of candidates and I'm delighted she accepted." would seem reasonable, as you can then repeat it ad nauseam depending on which part the interviewer decides to press on.
You'd have thought that there would be a script for this?
I understand Civil Servants have moved into these positions many times before ... but the appointment of Sue Gray (notwithstanding her personal qualities) does look to me like a Labour mistake, because she ended up playing an important role in defenestration of a Tory PM.
It looks wrong, even if isn't.
The way it looks is very important in politics.
I'm confused. When the Gray report came out it exonerated Boris Johnson. A whitewash that didn't even investigate the dodgy stuff. Lauded by Johnson and his cabinet and PB Tories as a definitive line drawn and lets move on.
Yet now it, and not Pinchergate, actually brought him down?
They are relying on not enough people caring about that.
The 25+% of die hard Borisites in the membership wont care, the telegraph wont care. Throw enough about to confuse and you've half won already.
I do not think the Palestinian cause is anti-Semitic no and I feel like if you think that you basically undermine any point you have.
Are there anti-Semites in the cause, yes. Is the cause itself anti-Semitic, no.
Otherwise literally every British leader for fifty years must be anti-Semitic as they all paid at minimum lip service to the thing.
What the reality is, is that the Jewish people have a state of their own, Palestinians do not. The Israeli Government at best isn't helpful, at worst they actively target and kill Palestinians. Their leader has said at best that he doesn't give a toss about them, at worst he has actively pursued racist policies.
But then Hamas don't help themselves either with what they do.
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
And here is the comedy gold bit. Rwanda's capacity to take asylum seekers. Go ask them - they aren't hiding the fact that they wouldn't have taken planeloads had we sent them.
So look at the hurdles to cross: 1. Catch all the refugees - itself not as easy as suggested 2. House the refugees - we need to build an awful lot of additional capacity according to the government's own projections. And nowhere they have tried to do so will accept this - HUGE local protests. Because of 3. Secure the refugees. They keep walking off or being abducted. So having forced a concentration camp into a locality over the raging protests of their MP / Council / Residents / Rent a Racist mob you now need to have a significant force to guard them 4. Illegalise the refugees. It isn't as simple as banishing them. Or extracting ourselves from our post-war obligations. All 3 steps so far will go to court and the government itself is likely to be threatened with international action for breech of conventions. More "Enemies of the People" tactics only likely to unlock media exposure of the catastrophic cuts to the criminal justice system 5. Fly the refugees. It won't be a domestic carrier. Assume a hire-in from somewhere far away at vast cost. Assume it actually is licensed and safe. And the first refugee flight actually leaves. Once it lands in Rwanda, that is Rwanda full up.
So another round of TORIES TO STOP THE FORRIN INVADERS headlines and another round of abject failure to deliver anything at all.
And @MoonRabbit thinks this wins the Tories the next election!
Their capacity is that they'll take what we pay them to take. They've had this arrangement with multiple nations previously, and the United Nations, before. Which is why its all the more amusing that people want to appeal to the UNHRC that this is "illegal" when the UNHRC has this arrangement with Rwanda and is part of the legal precedent.
If you want them to take more, then you need to pay more, everything has a price and they're no more "full" than the UK is "full". Racists saying the UK is "full" are full of shit and saying it about another country is no more tolerant.
You have to be serious though if you're going to do it, and put your money and law where your mouth is. So far, the Government doesn't seem to be willing to do either. If you get serious about it, then the journeys across the Channel would drop to zero almost overnight, and then Rwanda wouldn't actually need to take any more, since people wouldn't be making the journey anymore, since people don't want to pay people smugglers in order to end up in Rwanda.
Rwanda says they can take 200. How much are you prepared to take to get that up to 1,000? or 10,000? Or however many we need cumulatively?
"Send them to Rwanda" appeals to children. But if we can't send them to Rwanda because Rwanda won't take them, this isn't going to work is it?
"You need to pay more" FFS and LOL - you know better than the Rwandan government about the ability or willingness of Rwanda to do what you demand.
They'd better watch out. Or we'll get out the Big Guns and send HYUFD in his little tank to sort them out.
EDIT have @HYUFD and Lt Gruber ever been seen in the same room?
200 is what Rwanda agreed to for a trial, it doesn't mean they can't or won't take more with more cash. Like the old joke with the actress goes, we know what you are now we're just haggling over price.
Israel reached a similar agreement with Rwanda years ago and 4000 were sent to Rwanda under it, not 200, so yes Rwanda has the capacity to take thousands not hundreds. If you were to implement a policy that absolutely every migrant who arrived on a small boat would automatically be sent to Rwanda then I expect we'd end up sending fewer there than Israel did, since the number of crossings would dry up before you hit 4000.
Yes, they did x for country y at time z, so they will definitely do something different for us now.
The simplest solution is to just invade Rwanda. Then we can send anyone we like there.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
p.s. apologies for absence on here but I'm travelling. Not bragging about it nor posting pointless pictures from bars, beaches, or any other spot. It's lovely to get away and I'll leave it at that.
YOU got your flask with you
Can I just point out that this is a subtly excellent joke, bravo @malcolmg
Had to read it twice - but then I properly laughed
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Maybe. Sometimes people can be so very wrong its hard to tell the difference on certain issues.
It is interesting though, is the Palestinian cause racist doesn't get anything like the outrage about saying that the Israel state is racist. (I don't think either are, the leaders on the other hand)
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Its the von Papen gambit. Stay and serve on the assumption that you can remove all the dodgy shit which the lunatic isn't serious about anyway? Or get the hell out of the country?
Corbyn was not going to win in 2019. Come on.
The polling certainly said so. It strikes me that a lot of people who voted for Pangloss Johnson found Corbyn to be a convenient fig leaf. Quite a few of them were stout defenders of PM Johnson’s subsequent arseholery for a VERY long time.
I voted for Johnson and don't regret it for one moment, despite the fact that I yield to no one in my estimation of him as a solipsistic, incompetent, lying twat.
The risk of Jezza getting into No.10 was just too high.
Mandy Rice-Davies lives on..
Very strange response. I loathe Johnson. But I loathed even more the prospect of Jezza getting into No.10. Why "would I say that, wouldn't I"?
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
"Rwanda fills up" - is the UK "full"? Why would Rwanda be "full"?
If you're serious about the policy, then you reach an agreement that every single person who crosses by boat is instantaneously flown overseas. Do not pass go, do not speak to a lawyer, do not have a night in the UK.
Do that and within a day and a half the number of small boats crossing the Channel would drop to zero.
That's exactly what happened in Australia and led to the number of small boat fatalities (which had been quite high) drop to zero and there hasn't been a single fatality from boat migrants as far as I'm aware in Australian waters in the past decade.
That's the evidence that this isn't a serious policy.
The Rwandan government has defended the controversial asylum agreement but said it only has the capacity to hold 200 migrants currently.
The African nation had originally agreed to take up to 1,000 migrants from the UK in a trial deal worth £120million.
Yes, they could scale up, but that would be a lot of investment to create capacity that would be used once.
"originally ... trial deal".
When Australia did this there was a trial sending only a few, then it was switched to everybody who crosses by boat with no exceptions.
If you're expecting lots of legal challenges then there's not much point spending more up front, but once the legal challenges are resolved then if you're serious then you can scale up rapidly - and then scale back down again as once you're serious, then people will stop making that journey.
You have to be serious about it though, and I'm not convinced the Government are. But that doesn't mean that the idea is a non-starter, the idea would work if the Government are serious about it.
Last year, there were 45000 small boat migrants, concentrated in the summer months. Rwanda are reckoning on processing claims in 3 months, and currently have one hostel with 200 beds. You need something about 50 times bigger if you plan to deport everyone.
If these numbers are right, https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/asylum-boats-statistics/ the Australian small boat migration peaked at less than one thousand a year. In that case, something like Rwanda might work. In the UK context, it's a cruel trick the government are playing on the gullible.
No you don't, you're making the classic fallacy of assuming that people don't change their behaviour when the law gets changed. There wouldn't be 45,000 crossing if everyone was being flown to Rwanda, there'd be zero crossing, you only need an agreement that everybody is taken and start it to great fanfare in the winter months not the summer months.
The numbers would drop to zero if you're serious about sending everyone. When the summer comes, people won't be trying to cross anymore if they know they'll get a one-way ticket to Rwanda if they do. So there wouldn't be 45k in the first place.
You might not need 45k, but you need way more than 0.2k.
Punishing bad behaviour is one of the things I have to know about, because I'm a teacher.
And as such, I can tell you that a punishment system that reaches capacity is worse than useless. You can do a jumbo jet full of migrants to great fanfare. But as it stands, then you probably can't send anyone for three months. Shortly after your "ooh, they're sending people to Rwanda", you get "ah, they've stopped because they have no capacity".
Trust me on this one. If you really want to go draconian, you really have to go really big. Or you're worse off than you were before.
If it's a PR stunt, none of this applies.
I completely agree with you, then you need to go big and for this to work it needs to apply to everyone.
However do you agree with me that if it were draconian and applied to everyone, then it would work, and the numbers would be much smaller than 45,000? Perhaps closer to the 4,000 that they took from Israel under a similar scheme a few years ago?
To make it apply to everyone, and have some excess so that you be sure that it would apply to everyone and everyone knew it, I think I'd want hostel capacity of 10000 at any one time. At least to start with.
Since there's no sign at all of that happening, and I'm not convinced that the Rwandan government would be up for it anyway, I feel confident in drawing conclusions about the seriousness of this plan.
I don't think you'd need to have 10k capacity up front since you can create capacity as you go along. People are housed in hotels in this country, so why not there?
Since the Rwandan government were prepared to take 4,000 from Israel I don't see any reason why they'd object to taking thousands if it came to it from this country either, so long as we gave them enough money which is to be brutally honest what this is all about for them. Especially since the thousands they took from Israel and any they'd take from us would almost all rapidly choose to leave the country voluntarily since nobody actually wants to move to Rwanda.
You have to be serious about it though, but if you are, the plan absolutely could work and has been proven elsewhere to definitely work.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
No. It is anti the way the Israeli Government treats the Palestinians which has got much worse recently. Many Jews are horrified by the latest developments and are protesting loudly.
There may be anti-Jews who also support the Palestinian cause just as there are many anti-Palestinians who support Netanhayu.
The way Palestinians are being treated by the Israeli government and the settler movement is an absolute disgrace. And no - I'm definitely not antisemitic.
Its actually pretty easy to criticise the settler situation for example without lapsing into anti semitic tropes. It wouldn't necessarily prevent accusations, but they would not be credible.
That certain activists think it is hard or impossible to do that is a key sign they are a wrong 'un.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
The answer might be "several years ago" of course. These things don't tend to occur at the first time of asking, and are based on a long relationship. Which can be spun negatively.
In the interview he confirms the position became available in October so it is likely that sometime since then he contacted her
He also confirmed he knew her before he came into politics but that is not the issue
He has cultivated a narrative of integrity but looks evasive when I do not understand why he cannot just confirm the date and end the matter
You're trying to ramp this, like you did Beergate.
It's simple. Her day job in the Civil Service will be, unsurprisingly, a politically restricted post, ie it stops her taking part in political activity in her personal life. She has to provide impartial advice to whomever is in government. There's been testimony from Tory politicians that this is what she has done impeccably.
When she stops being a civil servant, she is free to get involved in politics. Ok, so she was very senior so there's a case for ACOBA to look at her appointment. But that doesn't mean she can't have discussions about taking up a new role whilst still being a civil servant - as long as she continues to do her day job impartially. If Starmer's known her for ages why shouldn't they talk about him giving her a job?
Other than those with swivelling eyeballs who have sold their souls to Johnson, there is no suggestion she has ever not been impartial and professional in her role in the civil service. Indeed, at the time her report was released many of those now attacking her praised the report, and her, for her fairness and balance, including Johnson himself.
The suggestion that because she has decided to work for Starmer means her previous work is somehow suspect, or biased, or part of a Labour plot, is poor. This is desperate stuff from Johnson's rotten cabal.
You need to read my posts
I have admonished @HYUFD on suggesting that her report was tainted which clearly it was not
I consistently reject Johnson and his ridiculous attempt to use this as an escape route
However, it is fair to ask when her appointment was discussed and for Starmer to answer
It is also apparent the civil service themselves have concerns over the appointment
It will no doubt be resolved in due course with her taking a period of gardening leave
It's irrelevant when her appointment was discussed, as long as it hasn't affected her work. And it hasn't. If the civil service have concerns ACOBA will raise them.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
You’re trying to make some stealthy and - to you at least - devilishly clever intellectual point but it just isn’t working. Makes you sound a bit mad. Which you aren’t. Desist
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
And here is the comedy gold bit. Rwanda's capacity to take asylum seekers. Go ask them - they aren't hiding the fact that they wouldn't have taken planeloads had we sent them.
So look at the hurdles to cross: 1. Catch all the refugees - itself not as easy as suggested 2. House the refugees - we need to build an awful lot of additional capacity according to the government's own projections. And nowhere they have tried to do so will accept this - HUGE local protests. Because of 3. Secure the refugees. They keep walking off or being abducted. So having forced a concentration camp into a locality over the raging protests of their MP / Council / Residents / Rent a Racist mob you now need to have a significant force to guard them 4. Illegalise the refugees. It isn't as simple as banishing them. Or extracting ourselves from our post-war obligations. All 3 steps so far will go to court and the government itself is likely to be threatened with international action for breech of conventions. More "Enemies of the People" tactics only likely to unlock media exposure of the catastrophic cuts to the criminal justice system 5. Fly the refugees. It won't be a domestic carrier. Assume a hire-in from somewhere far away at vast cost. Assume it actually is licensed and safe. And the first refugee flight actually leaves. Once it lands in Rwanda, that is Rwanda full up.
So another round of TORIES TO STOP THE FORRIN INVADERS headlines and another round of abject failure to deliver anything at all.
And @MoonRabbit thinks this wins the Tories the next election!
Their capacity is that they'll take what we pay them to take. They've had this arrangement with multiple nations previously, and the United Nations, before. Which is why its all the more amusing that people want to appeal to the UNHRC that this is "illegal" when the UNHRC has this arrangement with Rwanda and is part of the legal precedent.
If you want them to take more, then you need to pay more, everything has a price and they're no more "full" than the UK is "full". Racists saying the UK is "full" are full of shit and saying it about another country is no more tolerant.
You have to be serious though if you're going to do it, and put your money and law where your mouth is. So far, the Government doesn't seem to be willing to do either. If you get serious about it, then the journeys across the Channel would drop to zero almost overnight, and then Rwanda wouldn't actually need to take any more, since people wouldn't be making the journey anymore, since people don't want to pay people smugglers in order to end up in Rwanda.
Rwanda says they can take 200. How much are you prepared to take to get that up to 1,000? or 10,000? Or however many we need cumulatively?
"Send them to Rwanda" appeals to children. But if we can't send them to Rwanda because Rwanda won't take them, this isn't going to work is it?
"You need to pay more" FFS and LOL - you know better than the Rwandan government about the ability or willingness of Rwanda to do what you demand.
They'd better watch out. Or we'll get out the Big Guns and send HYUFD in his little tank to sort them out.
EDIT have @HYUFD and Lt Gruber ever been seen in the same room?
200 is what Rwanda agreed to for a trial, it doesn't mean they can't or won't take more with more cash. Like the old joke with the actress goes, we know what you are now we're just haggling over price.
Israel reached a similar agreement with Rwanda years ago and 4000 were sent to Rwanda under it, not 200, so yes Rwanda has the capacity to take thousands not hundreds. If you were to implement a policy that absolutely every migrant who arrived on a small boat would automatically be sent to Rwanda then I expect we'd end up sending fewer there than Israel did, since the number of crossings would dry up before you hit 4000.
Yes, they did x for country y at time z, so they will definitely do something different for us now.
The simplest solution is to just invade Rwanda. Then we can send anyone we like there.
No need to invade them. They took thousands only a few years ago from Israel, not a very long time ago, and have already agreed to take some from us too. Give them a fat enough cheque and what evidence do you have that they wouldn't follow past precedent and agree to take thousands if it came to it?
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
No. It is anti the way the Israeli Government treats the Palestinians which has got much worse recently. Many Jews are horrified by the latest developments and are protesting loudly.
There may be anti-Jews who also support the Palestinian cause just as there are many anti-Palestinians who support Netanhayu.
The way Palestinians are being treated by the Israeli government and the settler movement is an absolute disgrace. And no - I'm definitely not antisemitic.
Its actually pretty easy to criticise the settler situation for example without lapsing into anti semitic tropes. It wouldn't necessarily prevent accusations, but they would not be credible.
That certain activists think it is hard or impossible to do that is a key sign they are a wrong 'un.
I'm sure certain activists are wrong 'uns, just as Netanyahu and his crew are.
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
And here is the comedy gold bit. Rwanda's capacity to take asylum seekers. Go ask them - they aren't hiding the fact that they wouldn't have taken planeloads had we sent them.
So look at the hurdles to cross: 1. Catch all the refugees - itself not as easy as suggested 2. House the refugees - we need to build an awful lot of additional capacity according to the government's own projections. And nowhere they have tried to do so will accept this - HUGE local protests. Because of 3. Secure the refugees. They keep walking off or being abducted. So having forced a concentration camp into a locality over the raging protests of their MP / Council / Residents / Rent a Racist mob you now need to have a significant force to guard them 4. Illegalise the refugees. It isn't as simple as banishing them. Or extracting ourselves from our post-war obligations. All 3 steps so far will go to court and the government itself is likely to be threatened with international action for breech of conventions. More "Enemies of the People" tactics only likely to unlock media exposure of the catastrophic cuts to the criminal justice system 5. Fly the refugees. It won't be a domestic carrier. Assume a hire-in from somewhere far away at vast cost. Assume it actually is licensed and safe. And the first refugee flight actually leaves. Once it lands in Rwanda, that is Rwanda full up.
So another round of TORIES TO STOP THE FORRIN INVADERS headlines and another round of abject failure to deliver anything at all.
And @MoonRabbit thinks this wins the Tories the next election!
Their capacity is that they'll take what we pay them to take. They've had this arrangement with multiple nations previously, and the United Nations, before. Which is why its all the more amusing that people want to appeal to the UNHRC that this is "illegal" when the UNHRC has this arrangement with Rwanda and is part of the legal precedent.
If you want them to take more, then you need to pay more, everything has a price and they're no more "full" than the UK is "full". Racists saying the UK is "full" are full of shit and saying it about another country is no more tolerant.
You have to be serious though if you're going to do it, and put your money and law where your mouth is. So far, the Government doesn't seem to be willing to do either. If you get serious about it, then the journeys across the Channel would drop to zero almost overnight, and then Rwanda wouldn't actually need to take any more, since people wouldn't be making the journey anymore, since people don't want to pay people smugglers in order to end up in Rwanda.
Rwanda says they can take 200. How much are you prepared to take to get that up to 1,000? or 10,000? Or however many we need cumulatively?
"Send them to Rwanda" appeals to children. But if we can't send them to Rwanda because Rwanda won't take them, this isn't going to work is it?
"You need to pay more" FFS and LOL - you know better than the Rwandan government about the ability or willingness of Rwanda to do what you demand.
They'd better watch out. Or we'll get out the Big Guns and send HYUFD in his little tank to sort them out.
EDIT have @HYUFD and Lt Gruber ever been seen in the same room?
200 is what Rwanda agreed to for a trial, it doesn't mean they can't or won't take more with more cash. Like the old joke with the actress goes, we know what you are now we're just haggling over price.
Israel reached a similar agreement with Rwanda years ago and 4000 were sent to Rwanda under it, not 200, so yes Rwanda has the capacity to take thousands not hundreds. If you were to implement a policy that absolutely every migrant who arrived on a small boat would automatically be sent to Rwanda then I expect we'd end up sending fewer there than Israel did, since the number of crossings would dry up before you hit 4000.
Yes, they did x for country y at time z, so they will definitely do something different for us now.
The simplest solution is to just invade Rwanda. Then we can send anyone we like there.
I'm reminded of @kinabalu's comment yesterday, that Britain is a bit like a wellborn private schoolboy whose historic familiy privilege is worth increasingly little in the modern world. And is increasingly taking umbridge that "do you know who I am?" is met with a shrug.
'The day the enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In the face of the Jews' usurpation, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.' (Article 15)
The answer might be "several years ago" of course. These things don't tend to occur at the first time of asking, and are based on a long relationship. Which can be spun negatively.
In the interview he confirms the position became available in October so it is likely that sometime since then he contacted her
He also confirmed he knew her before he came into politics but that is not the issue
He has cultivated a narrative of integrity but looks evasive when I do not understand why he cannot just confirm the date and end the matter
You're trying to ramp this, like you did Beergate.
It's simple. Her day job in the Civil Service will be, unsurprisingly, a politically restricted post, ie it stops her taking part in political activity in her personal life. She has to provide impartial advice to whomever is in government. There's been testimony from Tory politicians that this is what she has done impeccably.
When she stops being a civil servant, she is free to get involved in politics. Ok, so she was very senior so there's a case for ACOBA to look at her appointment. But that doesn't mean she can't have discussions about taking up a new role whilst still being a civil servant - as long as she continues to do her day job impartially. If Starmer's known her for ages why shouldn't they talk about him giving her a job?
Other than those with swivelling eyeballs who have sold their souls to Johnson, there is no suggestion she has ever not been impartial and professional in her role in the civil service. Indeed, at the time her report was released many of those now attacking her praised the report, and her, for her fairness and balance, including Johnson himself.
The suggestion that because she has decided to work for Starmer means her previous work is somehow suspect, or biased, or part of a Labour plot, is poor. This is desperate stuff from Johnson's rotten cabal.
You need to read my posts
I have admonished @HYUFD on suggesting that her report was tainted which clearly it was not
I consistently reject Johnson and his ridiculous attempt to use this as an escape route
However, it is fair to ask when her appointment was discussed and for Starmer to answer
It is also apparent the civil service themselves have concerns over the appointment
It will no doubt be resolved in due course with her taking a period of gardening leave
It's irrelevant when her appointment was discussed, as long as it hasn't affected her work. And it hasn't. If the civil service have concerns ACOBA will raise them.
Actually it is a requirement of the civil service that they must be informed immediately any discussions to join an opposition political party commences and therefore it is relevant in this case
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
That is the greasy, term conflating response of a dishonest fud.
One of the unfortunate consequences of Corbyn/Labour being successfully defined as anti-semitic is that political discourse changed such that any criticism of the Israeli government in this country also became defined, by key stakeholders, as anti-semitic.
As a result, criticism of the current Israeli regime's despicable behaviour is very muted and not spoken of much in 'polite society'. To his credit, David Lammy has voiced some doubts about what they are up to.
Bollocks
It is very simple
“Netanyahu is a corrupt, racist shit” - not racist “Jews kidnap children to use their blood in secret ceremonies” - racist
Specifying actual people doing actual things is nearly never racist.
Conspiracies involving entire ethnic groups are always racist garbage.
I'm sure certain activists are wrong 'uns, just as Netanyahu and his crew are.
Netanyahu seems to be racist to me and his policies seem to reflect that.
It's hard to imagine a better Israeli PM than Netanyahu - if your wish is to see Israel defeated. I just cannot defend most (all?) of the decisions he makes, which seem designed just to p*ss off everyone else.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Fantastic you have answered the question of whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. In your mind it is neither; it is wholly understandable.
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
And here is the comedy gold bit. Rwanda's capacity to take asylum seekers. Go ask them - they aren't hiding the fact that they wouldn't have taken planeloads had we sent them.
So look at the hurdles to cross: 1. Catch all the refugees - itself not as easy as suggested 2. House the refugees - we need to build an awful lot of additional capacity according to the government's own projections. And nowhere they have tried to do so will accept this - HUGE local protests. Because of 3. Secure the refugees. They keep walking off or being abducted. So having forced a concentration camp into a locality over the raging protests of their MP / Council / Residents / Rent a Racist mob you now need to have a significant force to guard them 4. Illegalise the refugees. It isn't as simple as banishing them. Or extracting ourselves from our post-war obligations. All 3 steps so far will go to court and the government itself is likely to be threatened with international action for breech of conventions. More "Enemies of the People" tactics only likely to unlock media exposure of the catastrophic cuts to the criminal justice system 5. Fly the refugees. It won't be a domestic carrier. Assume a hire-in from somewhere far away at vast cost. Assume it actually is licensed and safe. And the first refugee flight actually leaves. Once it lands in Rwanda, that is Rwanda full up.
So another round of TORIES TO STOP THE FORRIN INVADERS headlines and another round of abject failure to deliver anything at all.
And @MoonRabbit thinks this wins the Tories the next election!
That’s a very weak response to what I am saying Dale. You haven’t actually addressed what I am saying at all.
I don’t want to come over all yes ministering, but, A policy doesn’t actually have to work to be an electoral success is the point I’m making.
To have any deterrent in place, those travelling need to know you have a deterrent in place. The deterrent being just how pointless their crossing is - because we have ripped up every agreement we had and initially led the way on with rest of world, about how humane humanity must be - but those making these journeys are never going to know that. All they will learn is the traffickers spin, they will never hear of our hard deterrent. That’s why deterrent factor won’t work, in reality.
But then, every Tory politician telling us there must be a deterrent and it will work don’t believe for a second it will, they really arn’t that stupid. This policy works because UK voters will get to know there’s a hard ball deterrent. That’s why it’s a strong policy, that’s where it works. Probably.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Fantastic you have answered the question of whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. In your mind it is neither; it is wholly understandable.
I mean some of the policies they've introduced were found in Nazi Germany, so erh yes? This Government is racist.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Frankly, who gives a toss about your twisted view of the world? I don 't.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
That is the greasy, term conflating response of a dishonest fud.
It is precisely the conflating of "Jews" and "Israel" that lead us here in the first place.
Hamas is anti-semitic because it was the Jews (not "Israel") that displaced the Palestinian people in whenever it was 1947.
@Chris is saying well who wouldn't be, frankly, given what the Jews/Israel did to the Palestinians. At least he is calling it as he sees it and this view also answers the Jezza question.
Jezza is legitimately anti-semitic because he supports the Palestinian cause. And supporting the Palestinian cause and its inherent anti-semitism is justified because look what the Jews/Israel did.
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
And here is the comedy gold bit. Rwanda's capacity to take asylum seekers. Go ask them - they aren't hiding the fact that they wouldn't have taken planeloads had we sent them.
So look at the hurdles to cross: 1. Catch all the refugees - itself not as easy as suggested 2. House the refugees - we need to build an awful lot of additional capacity according to the government's own projections. And nowhere they have tried to do so will accept this - HUGE local protests. Because of 3. Secure the refugees. They keep walking off or being abducted. So having forced a concentration camp into a locality over the raging protests of their MP / Council / Residents / Rent a Racist mob you now need to have a significant force to guard them 4. Illegalise the refugees. It isn't as simple as banishing them. Or extracting ourselves from our post-war obligations. All 3 steps so far will go to court and the government itself is likely to be threatened with international action for breech of conventions. More "Enemies of the People" tactics only likely to unlock media exposure of the catastrophic cuts to the criminal justice system 5. Fly the refugees. It won't be a domestic carrier. Assume a hire-in from somewhere far away at vast cost. Assume it actually is licensed and safe. And the first refugee flight actually leaves. Once it lands in Rwanda, that is Rwanda full up.
So another round of TORIES TO STOP THE FORRIN INVADERS headlines and another round of abject failure to deliver anything at all.
And @MoonRabbit thinks this wins the Tories the next election!
That’s a very weak response to what I am saying Dale. You haven’t actually addressed what I am saying at all.
I don’t want to come over all yes ministering, but, A policy doesn’t actually have to work to be an electoral success is the point I’m making.
To have any deterrent in place, those travelling need to know you have a deterrent in place. The deterrent being just how pointless their crossing is - because we have ripped up every agreement we had and initially led the way on with rest of world, about how humane humanity must be - but those making these journeys are never going to know that. All they will learn is the traffickers spin, they will never hear of our hard deterrent. That’s why deterrent factor won’t work, in reality.
But then, every Tory politician telling us there must be a deterrent and it will work don’t believe for a second it will, they really aren’t that stupid. This policy works because UK voters will get to know there’s a hard ball deterrent. That’s why it’s a strong policy, that’s where it works. Probably.
Priti Patel has said that legislation is not actually needed - the British Government already has the powers it needs to put these measures in place. That tells me that the Government aren't serious - they will run the clock down on this bill and then just say that the need an election victory to get it through, 'Get boats done' which conveniently, they won't get. Sorry to be so cynical, I don't like it but there it is - at least I'll be surprised 'on the upside' if they actually do something.
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
And here is the comedy gold bit. Rwanda's capacity to take asylum seekers. Go ask them - they aren't hiding the fact that they wouldn't have taken planeloads had we sent them.
So look at the hurdles to cross: 1. Catch all the refugees - itself not as easy as suggested 2. House the refugees - we need to build an awful lot of additional capacity according to the government's own projections. And nowhere they have tried to do so will accept this - HUGE local protests. Because of 3. Secure the refugees. They keep walking off or being abducted. So having forced a concentration camp into a locality over the raging protests of their MP / Council / Residents / Rent a Racist mob you now need to have a significant force to guard them 4. Illegalise the refugees. It isn't as simple as banishing them. Or extracting ourselves from our post-war obligations. All 3 steps so far will go to court and the government itself is likely to be threatened with international action for breech of conventions. More "Enemies of the People" tactics only likely to unlock media exposure of the catastrophic cuts to the criminal justice system 5. Fly the refugees. It won't be a domestic carrier. Assume a hire-in from somewhere far away at vast cost. Assume it actually is licensed and safe. And the first refugee flight actually leaves. Once it lands in Rwanda, that is Rwanda full up.
So another round of TORIES TO STOP THE FORRIN INVADERS headlines and another round of abject failure to deliver anything at all.
And @MoonRabbit thinks this wins the Tories the next election!
That’s a very weak response to what I am saying Dale. You haven’t actually addressed what I am saying at all.
I don’t want to come over all yes ministering, but, A policy doesn’t actually have to work to be an electoral success is the point I’m making.
To have any deterrent in place, those travelling need to know you have a deterrent in place. The deterrent being just how pointless their crossing is - because we have ripped up every agreement we had and initially led the way on with rest of world, about how humane humanity must be - but those making these journeys are never going to know that. All they will learn is the traffickers spin, they will never hear of our hard deterrent. That’s why deterrent factor won’t work, in reality.
But then, every Tory politician telling us there must be a deterrent and it will work don’t believe for a second it will, they really aren’t that stupid. This policy works because UK voters will get to know there’s a hard ball deterrent. That’s why it’s a strong policy, that’s where it works. Probably.
Priti Patel has said that legislation is not actually needed - the British Government already has the powers it needs to put these measures in place. That tells me that the Government aren't serious - they will run the clock down on this bill and then just say that the need an election victory to get it through, 'Get boats done' which conveniently, they won't get. Sorry to be so cynical, I don't like it but there it is - at least I'll be surprised 'on the upside' if they actually do something.
New legislation is often just a gimmick. Sounds better than 'we'll do a better job'
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Frankly, who gives a toss about your twisted view of the world? I don 't.
Indeed, who gives a toss. I meanwhile am far clearer on your view of the world.
You equate Israel with Nazi Germany and believe as a result that anti-semitism is justified.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Fantastic you have answered the question of whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. In your mind it is neither; it is wholly understandable.
I mean some of the policies they've introduced were found in Nazi Germany, so erh yes? This Government is racist.
🤨
No, just no.
Israel is not above reproach but even putting to one side that it was Jordan and Egypt not Israel which prevented the formation of a Palestinian state and even putting to one side that Israel is literally defending itself from enemies that openly proclaim they want to see Israel wiped from the map, and have tried to do so repeatedly . . . even putting all that to one side, they've never done anything remotely like Nazi Germany.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
Is the Ukrainian cause racist?
No, but Israel are the Ukrainians in this analogy.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
Is the Ukrainian cause racist?
No, but Israel are the Ukrainians in this analogy.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Fantastic you have answered the question of whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. In your mind it is neither; it is wholly understandable.
I mean some of the policies they've introduced were found in Nazi Germany, so erh yes? This Government is racist.
🤨
No, just no.
Israel is not above reproach but even putting to one side that it was Jordan and Egypt not Israel which prevented the formation of a Palestinian state and even putting to one side that Israel is literally defending itself from enemies that openly proclaim they want to see Israel wiped from the map, and have tried to do so repeatedly . . . even putting all that to one side, they've never done anything remotely like Nazi Germany.
So you don't think the current Israeli Government has introduced policies that were present in Nazi Germany? Ok
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Fantastic you have answered the question of whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. In your mind it is neither; it is wholly understandable.
I mean some of the policies they've introduced were found in Nazi Germany, so erh yes? This Government is racist.
Government ministers actively advocating the destruction of Palestinian towns is probably more comparable with the pogroms in central Europe and Russia. But even that is a poor historical analogy.
It is precisely the conflating of "Jews" and "Israel" that lead us here in the first place.
Hamas is anti-semitic because it was the Jews (not "Israel") that displaced the Palestinian people in whenever it was 1947.
@Chris is saying well who wouldn't be, frankly, given what the Jews/Israel did to the Palestinians. At least he is calling it as he sees it and this view also answers the Jezza question.
Jezza is legitimately anti-semitic because he supports the Palestinian cause. And supporting the Palestinian cause and its inherent anti-semitism is justified because look what the Jews/Israel did.
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
And here is the comedy gold bit. Rwanda's capacity to take asylum seekers. Go ask them - they aren't hiding the fact that they wouldn't have taken planeloads had we sent them.
So look at the hurdles to cross: 1. Catch all the refugees - itself not as easy as suggested 2. House the refugees - we need to build an awful lot of additional capacity according to the government's own projections. And nowhere they have tried to do so will accept this - HUGE local protests. Because of 3. Secure the refugees. They keep walking off or being abducted. So having forced a concentration camp into a locality over the raging protests of their MP / Council / Residents / Rent a Racist mob you now need to have a significant force to guard them 4. Illegalise the refugees. It isn't as simple as banishing them. Or extracting ourselves from our post-war obligations. All 3 steps so far will go to court and the government itself is likely to be threatened with international action for breech of conventions. More "Enemies of the People" tactics only likely to unlock media exposure of the catastrophic cuts to the criminal justice system 5. Fly the refugees. It won't be a domestic carrier. Assume a hire-in from somewhere far away at vast cost. Assume it actually is licensed and safe. And the first refugee flight actually leaves. Once it lands in Rwanda, that is Rwanda full up.
So another round of TORIES TO STOP THE FORRIN INVADERS headlines and another round of abject failure to deliver anything at all.
And @MoonRabbit thinks this wins the Tories the next election!
That’s a very weak response to what I am saying Dale. You haven’t actually addressed what I am saying at all.
I don’t want to come over all yes ministering, but, A policy doesn’t actually have to work to be an electoral success is the point I’m making.
To have any deterrent in place, those travelling need to know you have a deterrent in place. The deterrent being just how pointless their crossing is - because we have ripped up every agreement we had and initially led the way on with rest of world, about how humane humanity must be - but those making these journeys are never going to know that. All they will learn is the traffickers spin, they will never hear of our hard deterrent. That’s why deterrent factor won’t work, in reality.
But then, every Tory politician telling us there must be a deterrent and it will work don’t believe for a second it will, they really aren’t that stupid. This policy works because UK voters will get to know there’s a hard ball deterrent. That’s why it’s a strong policy, that’s where it works. Probably.
Priti Patel has said that legislation is not actually needed - the British Government already has the powers it needs to put these measures in place. That tells me that the Government aren't serious - they will run the clock down on this bill and then just say that the need an election victory to get it through, 'Get boats done' which conveniently, they won't get. Sorry to be so cynical, I don't like it but there it is - at least I'll be surprised 'on the upside' if they actually do something.
New legislation is often just a gimmick. Sounds better than 'we'll do a better job'
I agree, but if the intention was for the legislation to work and be seen to be working, it would have happened some time ago.
If you think the Palestine cause is anti-Semitic, do you not believe in the existence of a Palestinian state then?
Right, IMV:
The Palestinian 'cause' is not anti-Semitic: if that cause is for them to have a separate homeland.
Many (though by no means all) people supporting the Palestinian 'cause' do drop into anti-Semitism.
The answer is a two-state solution, where each state is viable. But we haven't even got to the 'collecting underpants' stage.
Sadly, the two-state solution is in the rear view mirror. Israeli government policy has - deliberately or not - rendered any such proposal a fantasy. There are too many Israeli settlers and settlements. Israel seems increasingly content to run a quasi-apartheid state for the foreseeable future, with the Palestinians living in a jigsaw puzzle of bantustans
Where the fuck you go from here - in the direction of peace - I do not know. Maybe the Palestinians will become rich enough they do not care about their obviously second class status. That’s probably the long term hope of Israel
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Fantastic you have answered the question of whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. In your mind it is neither; it is wholly understandable.
As someone who is Jewish enough to be on The List(s)…
- Not all Palestinians are anti-Semitic. Most don’t endorse the “drive them into the sea/kill them” thing. - Anti-semitism is very common in the Muslim and Arab worlds. - This is partly because the rulers of the countries in question use Israel as an excuse for all kinds of shit. It is preached by the state. - Netenyahu is a shit. A nasty, nasty shit. - Antisemite was the self given name for some racists in 19th cent Germany. - The “I can’t be an anti-Semite because I am Semitic” excuse tends to be used by extreme racists in the Middle East. The kind of people who tell you the Blood Libel is true. - Being pro Palestinian need have nothing to do with being anti-Semitic. Indeed, there are quite a few moderate politicians (and their parties) in Israel, who would be considered to have a pro-Palestinian outlook (self determination, 67 borders, aid and assistance etc etc)
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
Is the Ukrainian cause racist?
No, but Israel are the Ukrainians in this analogy.
Ukraine is occupying Russian territory?
Israel never invaded a country called Palestine and isn't occupying any land formerly owned by a country called Palestine either. Its occupying territory formerly belonging to Egypt and Israel, after those countries tried to genocidally wipe Israel off the map.
The people living there want to be a separate state and their leaders still say they want to wipe Israel off the map now just as in the Donbas the Russian-backed separatists say they want their own state and that Ukraine should be wiped off the map.
Egypt and Jordan were Russia. Israel is like Ukraine fighting for its survival. Hamas are the equivalent of the Donetsk People's Republic.
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
And here is the comedy gold bit. Rwanda's capacity to take asylum seekers. Go ask them - they aren't hiding the fact that they wouldn't have taken planeloads had we sent them.
So look at the hurdles to cross: 1. Catch all the refugees - itself not as easy as suggested 2. House the refugees - we need to build an awful lot of additional capacity according to the government's own projections. And nowhere they have tried to do so will accept this - HUGE local protests. Because of 3. Secure the refugees. They keep walking off or being abducted. So having forced a concentration camp into a locality over the raging protests of their MP / Council / Residents / Rent a Racist mob you now need to have a significant force to guard them 4. Illegalise the refugees. It isn't as simple as banishing them. Or extracting ourselves from our post-war obligations. All 3 steps so far will go to court and the government itself is likely to be threatened with international action for breech of conventions. More "Enemies of the People" tactics only likely to unlock media exposure of the catastrophic cuts to the criminal justice system 5. Fly the refugees. It won't be a domestic carrier. Assume a hire-in from somewhere far away at vast cost. Assume it actually is licensed and safe. And the first refugee flight actually leaves. Once it lands in Rwanda, that is Rwanda full up.
So another round of TORIES TO STOP THE FORRIN INVADERS headlines and another round of abject failure to deliver anything at all.
And @MoonRabbit thinks this wins the Tories the next election!
Their capacity is that they'll take what we pay them to take. They've had this arrangement with multiple nations previously, and the United Nations, before. Which is why its all the more amusing that people want to appeal to the UNHRC that this is "illegal" when the UNHRC has this arrangement with Rwanda and is part of the legal precedent.
If you want them to take more, then you need to pay more, everything has a price and they're no more "full" than the UK is "full". Racists saying the UK is "full" are full of shit and saying it about another country is no more tolerant.
You have to be serious though if you're going to do it, and put your money and law where your mouth is. So far, the Government doesn't seem to be willing to do either. If you get serious about it, then the journeys across the Channel would drop to zero almost overnight, and then Rwanda wouldn't actually need to take any more, since people wouldn't be making the journey anymore, since people don't want to pay people smugglers in order to end up in Rwanda.
Rwanda says they can take 200. How much are you prepared to take to get that up to 1,000? or 10,000? Or however many we need cumulatively?
"Send them to Rwanda" appeals to children. But if we can't send them to Rwanda because Rwanda won't take them, this isn't going to work is it?
"You need to pay more" FFS and LOL - you know better than the Rwandan government about the ability or willingness of Rwanda to do what you demand.
They'd better watch out. Or we'll get out the Big Guns and send HYUFD in his little tank to sort them out.
EDIT have @HYUFD and Lt Gruber ever been seen in the same room?
200 is what Rwanda agreed to for a trial, it doesn't mean they can't or won't take more with more cash. Like the old joke with the actress goes, we know what you are now we're just haggling over price.
Israel reached a similar agreement with Rwanda years ago and 4000 were sent to Rwanda under it, not 200, so yes Rwanda has the capacity to take thousands not hundreds. If you were to implement a policy that absolutely every migrant who arrived on a small boat would automatically be sent to Rwanda then I expect we'd end up sending fewer there than Israel did, since the number of crossings would dry up before you hit 4000.
Yes, they did x for country y at time z, so they will definitely do something different for us now.
The simplest solution is to just invade Rwanda. Then we can send anyone we like there.
No need to invade them. They took thousands only a few years ago from Israel, not a very long time ago, and have already agreed to take some from us too. Give them a fat enough cheque and what evidence do you have that they wouldn't follow past precedent and agree to take thousands if it came to it?
I think you're mixing up two sorts of capacity- how many in total and how many processed at a time. The size of the bucket and the width of the pipe, if you like.
Israel sent 4000 migrants to Rwanda over five years. That's 800 a year, less than 100 a month. And then gave up because it wasn't working.
Unless the UK is prepared to spend a lot of money (and it would be a lot of money) re-engineering Rwanda to be able to process a lot more migrants than it currently does, the processing part of the scheme is going to be nowhere near meeting demand. And then what?
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
And here is the comedy gold bit. Rwanda's capacity to take asylum seekers. Go ask them - they aren't hiding the fact that they wouldn't have taken planeloads had we sent them.
So look at the hurdles to cross: 1. Catch all the refugees - itself not as easy as suggested 2. House the refugees - we need to build an awful lot of additional capacity according to the government's own projections. And nowhere they have tried to do so will accept this - HUGE local protests. Because of 3. Secure the refugees. They keep walking off or being abducted. So having forced a concentration camp into a locality over the raging protests of their MP / Council / Residents / Rent a Racist mob you now need to have a significant force to guard them 4. Illegalise the refugees. It isn't as simple as banishing them. Or extracting ourselves from our post-war obligations. All 3 steps so far will go to court and the government itself is likely to be threatened with international action for breech of conventions. More "Enemies of the People" tactics only likely to unlock media exposure of the catastrophic cuts to the criminal justice system 5. Fly the refugees. It won't be a domestic carrier. Assume a hire-in from somewhere far away at vast cost. Assume it actually is licensed and safe. And the first refugee flight actually leaves. Once it lands in Rwanda, that is Rwanda full up.
So another round of TORIES TO STOP THE FORRIN INVADERS headlines and another round of abject failure to deliver anything at all.
And @MoonRabbit thinks this wins the Tories the next election!
Their capacity is that they'll take what we pay them to take. They've had this arrangement with multiple nations previously, and the United Nations, before. Which is why its all the more amusing that people want to appeal to the UNHRC that this is "illegal" when the UNHRC has this arrangement with Rwanda and is part of the legal precedent.
If you want them to take more, then you need to pay more, everything has a price and they're no more "full" than the UK is "full". Racists saying the UK is "full" are full of shit and saying it about another country is no more tolerant.
You have to be serious though if you're going to do it, and put your money and law where your mouth is. So far, the Government doesn't seem to be willing to do either. If you get serious about it, then the journeys across the Channel would drop to zero almost overnight, and then Rwanda wouldn't actually need to take any more, since people wouldn't be making the journey anymore, since people don't want to pay people smugglers in order to end up in Rwanda.
Rwanda says they can take 200. How much are you prepared to take to get that up to 1,000? or 10,000? Or however many we need cumulatively?
"Send them to Rwanda" appeals to children. But if we can't send them to Rwanda because Rwanda won't take them, this isn't going to work is it?
"You need to pay more" FFS and LOL - you know better than the Rwandan government about the ability or willingness of Rwanda to do what you demand.
They'd better watch out. Or we'll get out the Big Guns and send HYUFD in his little tank to sort them out.
EDIT have @HYUFD and Lt Gruber ever been seen in the same room?
200 is what Rwanda agreed to for a trial, it doesn't mean they can't or won't take more with more cash. Like the old joke with the actress goes, we know what you are now we're just haggling over price.
Israel reached a similar agreement with Rwanda years ago and 4000 were sent to Rwanda under it, not 200, so yes Rwanda has the capacity to take thousands not hundreds. If you were to implement a policy that absolutely every migrant who arrived on a small boat would automatically be sent to Rwanda then I expect we'd end up sending fewer there than Israel did, since the number of crossings would dry up before you hit 4000.
Yes, they did x for country y at time z, so they will definitely do something different for us now.
The simplest solution is to just invade Rwanda. Then we can send anyone we like there.
No need to invade them. They took thousands only a few years ago from Israel, not a very long time ago, and have already agreed to take some from us too. Give them a fat enough cheque and what evidence do you have that they wouldn't follow past precedent and agree to take thousands if it came to it?
I think you're mixing up two sorts of capacity- how many in total and how many processed at a time. The size of the bucket and the width of the pipe, if you like.
Israel sent 4000 migrants to Rwanda over five years. That's 800 a year, less than 100 a month. And then gave up because it wasn't working.
Unless the UK is prepared to spend a lot of money (and it would be a lot of money) re-engineering Rwanda to be able to process a lot more migrants than it currently does, the processing part of the scheme is going to be nowhere near meeting demand. And then what?
The processing part will primarily be resolved by people choosing to leave Rwanda and never step foot back in the country.
Even if the processing ends up backlogged, so long as you keep sending everyone there until the crossing's stop, the problem is then resolved.
Its draconian if you want to do that, but it works.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Frankly, who gives a toss about your twisted view of the world? I don 't.
Indeed, who gives a toss. I meanwhile am far clearer on your view of the world.
You equate Israel with Nazi Germany and believe as a result that anti-semitism is justified.
I already told you I didn't give a toss what lies you tell - no matter how transparent they are.
The more ludicrous stuff like that you post, the more ridiculous you make yourself look. Probably the best thing to do is to give you an absolutely free rein, just so that people can see how dishonest you are. But more importantly how absurd.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
Is the Ukrainian cause racist?
No, but Israel are the Ukrainians in this analogy.
Ukraine is occupying Russian territory?
Israel never invaded a country called Palestine and isn't occupying any land formerly owned by a country called Palestine either. Its occupying territory formerly belonging to Egypt and Israel, after those countries tried to genocidally wipe Israel off the map.
The people living there want to be a separate state and their leaders still say they want to wipe Israel off the map now just as in the Donbas the Russian-backed separatists say they want their own state and that Ukraine should be wiped off the map.
Egypt and Jordan were Russia. Israel is like Ukraine fighting for its survival. Hamas are the equivalent of the Donetsk People's Republic.
The establishment of Israel itself was, however, quite a crime against Palestinians
“The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, romanized: an-Nakbah, lit. 'the "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"'),[1] also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs.[2][3] The term is used to describe both the events of 1948 and the ongoing persecution, displacement, and occupation of the Palestinians, both in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the region.[4][5][6][7][8]”
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Fantastic you have answered the question of whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. In your mind it is neither; it is wholly understandable.
I mean some of the policies they've introduced were found in Nazi Germany, so erh yes? This Government is racist.
🤨
No, just no.
Israel is not above reproach but even putting to one side that it was Jordan and Egypt not Israel which prevented the formation of a Palestinian state and even putting to one side that Israel is literally defending itself from enemies that openly proclaim they want to see Israel wiped from the map, and have tried to do so repeatedly . . . even putting all that to one side, they've never done anything remotely like Nazi Germany.
So you don't think the current Israeli Government has introduced policies that were present in Nazi Germany? Ok
No, I don't.
If you mean policies that we associate with Nazi Germany like the Holocaust, then no I don't think Israel have done that.
If you mean obscure policies that nobody actually associates with Nazi Germany, like "Hitler was a vegetarian and these people were vegetarian" then you're just being silly.
Israel have done some nasty stuff, as people fighting to defend themselves against genocide tend to do, but nothing like Nazi Germany.
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
And here is the comedy gold bit. Rwanda's capacity to take asylum seekers. Go ask them - they aren't hiding the fact that they wouldn't have taken planeloads had we sent them.
So look at the hurdles to cross: 1. Catch all the refugees - itself not as easy as suggested 2. House the refugees - we need to build an awful lot of additional capacity according to the government's own projections. And nowhere they have tried to do so will accept this - HUGE local protests. Because of 3. Secure the refugees. They keep walking off or being abducted. So having forced a concentration camp into a locality over the raging protests of their MP / Council / Residents / Rent a Racist mob you now need to have a significant force to guard them 4. Illegalise the refugees. It isn't as simple as banishing them. Or extracting ourselves from our post-war obligations. All 3 steps so far will go to court and the government itself is likely to be threatened with international action for breech of conventions. More "Enemies of the People" tactics only likely to unlock media exposure of the catastrophic cuts to the criminal justice system 5. Fly the refugees. It won't be a domestic carrier. Assume a hire-in from somewhere far away at vast cost. Assume it actually is licensed and safe. And the first refugee flight actually leaves. Once it lands in Rwanda, that is Rwanda full up.
So another round of TORIES TO STOP THE FORRIN INVADERS headlines and another round of abject failure to deliver anything at all.
And @MoonRabbit thinks this wins the Tories the next election!
That’s a very weak response to what I am saying Dale. You haven’t actually addressed what I am saying at all.
I don’t want to come over all yes ministering, but, A policy doesn’t actually have to work to be an electoral success is the point I’m making.
To have any deterrent in place, those travelling need to know you have a deterrent in place. The deterrent being just how pointless their crossing is - because we have ripped up every agreement we had and initially led the way on with rest of world, about how humane humanity must be - but those making these journeys are never going to know that. All they will learn is the traffickers spin, they will never hear of our hard deterrent. That’s why deterrent factor won’t work, in reality.
But then, every Tory politician telling us there must be a deterrent and it will work don’t believe for a second it will, they really aren’t that stupid. This policy works because UK voters will get to know there’s a hard ball deterrent. That’s why it’s a strong policy, that’s where it works. Probably.
Priti Patel has said that legislation is not actually needed - the British Government already has the powers it needs to put these measures in place. That tells me that the Government aren't serious - they will run the clock down on this bill and then just say that the need an election victory to get it through, 'Get boats done' which conveniently, they won't get. Sorry to be so cynical, I don't like it but there it is - at least I'll be surprised 'on the upside' if they actually do something.
New legislation is often just a gimmick. Sounds better than 'we'll do a better job'
Or "We created the problem, but we don't know how to solve it"
Oh and I have a solution to the Israel / Palestinian problem.
It will cost a bit. But will definitely work.
Isle of Mull?
Simpler.
The problem is that Israel, with the 67 borders has no strategic depth.
So the moderate Israelis line up with the religious freak show.
So how to solve that?
Make more Israel. Around the choke point, fill in the sea, Dutch style. It’s deep water and will cost 10s of billions, yes.
Build another 50 miles of Israel. Which creates the strategic depth. With a defendable Israel, the moderate majority peels away from the religious types, and the two state solution is a go.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
Is the Ukrainian cause racist?
No, but Israel are the Ukrainians in this analogy.
Ukraine is occupying Russian territory?
Israel never invaded a country called Palestine and isn't occupying any land formerly owned by a country called Palestine either. Its occupying territory formerly belonging to Egypt and Israel, after those countries tried to genocidally wipe Israel off the map.
The people living there want to be a separate state and their leaders still say they want to wipe Israel off the map now just as in the Donbas the Russian-backed separatists say they want their own state and that Ukraine should be wiped off the map.
Egypt and Jordan were Russia. Israel is like Ukraine fighting for its survival. Hamas are the equivalent of the Donetsk People's Republic.
The establishment of Israel itself was, however, quite a crime against Palestinians
“The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, romanized: an-Nakbah, lit. 'the "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"'),[1] also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs.[2][3] The term is used to describe both the events of 1948 and the ongoing persecution, displacement, and occupation of the Palestinians, both in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the region.[4][5][6][7][8]”
And, no one would dispute that if the Arabs had won, in 1948, 1967, 1973, there would not now be a single Jew living in the place. Arab states responsed to the creation of Israel by ethnic cleansing of their Jewish populations.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Frankly, who gives a toss about your twisted view of the world? I don 't.
Indeed, who gives a toss. I meanwhile am far clearer on your view of the world.
You equate Israel with Nazi Germany and believe as a result that anti-semitism is justified.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
Is the Ukrainian cause racist?
No, but Israel are the Ukrainians in this analogy.
Ukraine is occupying Russian territory?
Israel never invaded a country called Palestine and isn't occupying any land formerly owned by a country called Palestine either. Its occupying territory formerly belonging to Egypt and Israel, after those countries tried to genocidally wipe Israel off the map.
The people living there want to be a separate state and their leaders still say they want to wipe Israel off the map now just as in the Donbas the Russian-backed separatists say they want their own state and that Ukraine should be wiped off the map.
Egypt and Jordan were Russia. Israel is like Ukraine fighting for its survival. Hamas are the equivalent of the Donetsk People's Republic.
The establishment of Israel itself was, however, quite a crime against Palestinians
“The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, romanized: an-Nakbah, lit. 'the "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"'),[1] also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs.[2][3] The term is used to describe both the events of 1948 and the ongoing persecution, displacement, and occupation of the Palestinians, both in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the region.[4][5][6][7][8]”
Why was no Palestinian state created in the 1948 borders assigned to Palestinians? Because the Egyptians and Jordanians took the land for themselves, not Israel. Who had the land that people claim should be Palestine from 1948 to 1967? Hint: Neither Israel nor "Palestine".
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
Is the Ukrainian cause racist?
No, but Israel are the Ukrainians in this analogy.
Ukraine is occupying Russian territory?
Israel never invaded a country called Palestine and isn't occupying any land formerly owned by a country called Palestine either. Its occupying territory formerly belonging to Egypt and Israel, after those countries tried to genocidally wipe Israel off the map.
The people living there want to be a separate state and their leaders still say they want to wipe Israel off the map now just as in the Donbas the Russian-backed separatists say they want their own state and that Ukraine should be wiped off the map.
Egypt and Jordan were Russia. Israel is like Ukraine fighting for its survival. Hamas are the equivalent of the Donetsk People's Republic.
Ukraine never ethnically cleansed people from its territory. The analogy fails.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Frankly, who gives a toss about your twisted view of the world? I don 't.
Indeed, who gives a toss. I meanwhile am far clearer on your view of the world.
You equate Israel with Nazi Germany and believe as a result that anti-semitism is justified.
I already told you I didn't give a toss what lies you tell - no matter how transparent they are.
The more ludicrous stuff like that you post, the more ridiculous you make yourself look. Probably the best thing to do is to give you an absolutely free rein, just so that people can see how dishonest you are. But more importantly how absurd.
Yeah. This is what you wrote:
"[The Palestinian cause is] About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron."
You equated any Palestinian anti-semitism with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. And therefore understandable, perhaps justified.
You also thereby equated Israel with Nazi Germany.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
Is the Ukrainian cause racist?
No, but Israel are the Ukrainians in this analogy.
Ukraine is occupying Russian territory?
Israel never invaded a country called Palestine and isn't occupying any land formerly owned by a country called Palestine either. Its occupying territory formerly belonging to Egypt and Israel, after those countries tried to genocidally wipe Israel off the map.
The people living there want to be a separate state and their leaders still say they want to wipe Israel off the map now just as in the Donbas the Russian-backed separatists say they want their own state and that Ukraine should be wiped off the map.
Egypt and Jordan were Russia. Israel is like Ukraine fighting for its survival. Hamas are the equivalent of the Donetsk People's Republic.
The establishment of Israel itself was, however, quite a crime against Palestinians
“The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, romanized: an-Nakbah, lit. 'the "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"'),[1] also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs.[2][3] The term is used to describe both the events of 1948 and the ongoing persecution, displacement, and occupation of the Palestinians, both in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the region.[4][5][6][7][8]”
And, no one would dispute that if the Arabs had won, in 1948, 1967, 1973, there would not now be a single Jew living in the place. Arab states responsed to the creation of Israel by ethnic cleansing of their Jewish populations.
Sure. But the Naqba happened. And it was really quite evil. Yet the Holocaust came before the Naqba, so the Jews probably thought ‘fuck it’ - and in a way who can blame them?
‘Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself’
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
Is the Ukrainian cause racist?
No, but Israel are the Ukrainians in this analogy.
Ukraine is occupying Russian territory?
Ukraine and Israel both face existential threats from those who would wipe their country and their people off the map.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
Is the Ukrainian cause racist?
No, but Israel are the Ukrainians in this analogy.
Ukraine is occupying Russian territory?
Israel never invaded a country called Palestine and isn't occupying any land formerly owned by a country called Palestine either. Its occupying territory formerly belonging to Egypt and Israel, after those countries tried to genocidally wipe Israel off the map.
The people living there want to be a separate state and their leaders still say they want to wipe Israel off the map now just as in the Donbas the Russian-backed separatists say they want their own state and that Ukraine should be wiped off the map.
Egypt and Jordan were Russia. Israel is like Ukraine fighting for its survival. Hamas are the equivalent of the Donetsk People's Republic.
Ukraine never ethnically cleansed people from its territory. The analogy fails.
Neither has Israel.
However Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab states, and would have been ethnically cleansed from the land of Israel had Israel not succeeded in defending itself.
To answer your question, because something is changing here. Labour are getting caught on the back foot, the Tories are grasping the narrative.
Anyone else sensing the current mood shift in tone and political narrative, as Tory’s on PB, in Con Home, out canvassing and just about Everywhere All At Once getting very bullish over how well this Tory fight back is going?
Maybe it’s been a mistake to watch polls so closely for signs of movement, maybe the first signs of the big polling shift and switcheroo in the polls actually indicated by a change of mood and growing confidence we pick up like this from party activists, canvassers and supporters?
It’s real. This is happening.
What - specifically - is happening. The big announcement is a non-policy. It cannot actually deliver even what it states, never mind the Sunak target.
I assume the plan is to pitch the Tories against the leftie establishment. "We would have stopped the boats had it not been for leftie lawyers, the courts, the Rwandans, the navy, the French, so vote for us and we promise to overcome all those enemies of the people in the way we utterly failed to do for the last 14 years" etc etc
"Stop the Boats" only has any prospect of being an electoral bonus if you actually stop the boats. Which you can't. So the group of people who still want the forrin to go home are hugely fed up with you, and the majority who have brains are hugely fed up with you.
Farage is going to demolish you over this policy failure.
Unfortuantely for all of us, the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner here.
Starting point is that, unless they are prepared to go even further than they have so far, this is one that the government can't win. Even if the lawyers let them. Because even if you can send anyone to Rwanda, the policy collapses the moment Rwanda fills up. Which would take about a day and a half.
If you can't win, the best thing is to minimise the loss. Shut up about the issue, whilst quietly doing what you can. Talk about something else, anything else. But the current Conservative voters won't even let them do that.
And here is the comedy gold bit. Rwanda's capacity to take asylum seekers. Go ask them - they aren't hiding the fact that they wouldn't have taken planeloads had we sent them.
So look at the hurdles to cross: 1. Catch all the refugees - itself not as easy as suggested 2. House the refugees - we need to build an awful lot of additional capacity according to the government's own projections. And nowhere they have tried to do so will accept this - HUGE local protests. Because of 3. Secure the refugees. They keep walking off or being abducted. So having forced a concentration camp into a locality over the raging protests of their MP / Council / Residents / Rent a Racist mob you now need to have a significant force to guard them 4. Illegalise the refugees. It isn't as simple as banishing them. Or extracting ourselves from our post-war obligations. All 3 steps so far will go to court and the government itself is likely to be threatened with international action for breech of conventions. More "Enemies of the People" tactics only likely to unlock media exposure of the catastrophic cuts to the criminal justice system 5. Fly the refugees. It won't be a domestic carrier. Assume a hire-in from somewhere far away at vast cost. Assume it actually is licensed and safe. And the first refugee flight actually leaves. Once it lands in Rwanda, that is Rwanda full up.
So another round of TORIES TO STOP THE FORRIN INVADERS headlines and another round of abject failure to deliver anything at all.
And @MoonRabbit thinks this wins the Tories the next election!
That’s a very weak response to what I am saying Dale. You haven’t actually addressed what I am saying at all.
I don’t want to come over all yes ministering, but, A policy doesn’t actually have to work to be an electoral success is the point I’m making.
To have any deterrent in place, those travelling need to know you have a deterrent in place. The deterrent being just how pointless their crossing is - because we have ripped up every agreement we had and initially led the way on with rest of world, about how humane humanity must be - but those making these journeys are never going to know that. All they will learn is the traffickers spin, they will never hear of our hard deterrent. That’s why deterrent factor won’t work, in reality.
But then, every Tory politician telling us there must be a deterrent and it will work don’t believe for a second it will, they really aren’t that stupid. This policy works because UK voters will get to know there’s a hard ball deterrent. That’s why it’s a strong policy, that’s where it works. Probably.
Priti Patel has said that legislation is not actually needed - the British Government already has the powers it needs to put these measures in place. That tells me that the Government aren't serious - they will run the clock down on this bill and then just say that the need an election victory to get it through, 'Get boats done' which conveniently, they won't get. Sorry to be so cynical, I don't like it but there it is - at least I'll be surprised 'on the upside' if they actually do something.
New legislation is often just a gimmick. Sounds better than 'we'll do a better job'
I agree, but if the intention was for the legislation to work and be seen to be working, it would have happened some time ago.
The legislation did work. It was challenged in the courts and the challenges failed. More legislation is proof positive of the gimmickiest nature of this. They want Labour to vote against it more than they actually want to get on with it.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Frankly, who gives a toss about your twisted view of the world? I don 't.
Indeed, who gives a toss. I meanwhile am far clearer on your view of the world.
You equate Israel with Nazi Germany and believe as a result that anti-semitism is justified.
I already told you I didn't give a toss what lies you tell - no matter how transparent they are.
The more ludicrous stuff like that you post, the more ridiculous you make yourself look. Probably the best thing to do is to give you an absolutely free rein, just so that people can see how dishonest you are. But more importantly how absurd.
Yeah. This is what you wrote:
"[The Palestinian cause is] About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron."
You equated any Palestinian anti-semitism with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. And therefore understandable, perhaps justified.
You also thereby equated Israel with Nazi Germany.
Which bit is my lies?
Obviously I "equated" nothing.
But please just try to get it through your thick skull that I don't give a toss what lies you tell about me.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Frankly, who gives a toss about your twisted view of the world? I don 't.
Indeed, who gives a toss. I meanwhile am far clearer on your view of the world.
You equate Israel with Nazi Germany and believe as a result that anti-semitism is justified.
I already told you I didn't give a toss what lies you tell - no matter how transparent they are.
The more ludicrous stuff like that you post, the more ridiculous you make yourself look. Probably the best thing to do is to give you an absolutely free rein, just so that people can see how dishonest you are. But more importantly how absurd.
Yeah. This is what you wrote:
"[The Palestinian cause is] About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron."
You equated any Palestinian anti-semitism with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. And therefore understandable, perhaps justified.
You also thereby equated Israel with Nazi Germany.
Which bit is my lies?
Obviously I "equated" nothing.
But please just try to get it through your thick skull that I don't give a toss what lies you tell about me.
How is
"About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron."
not equating? You literally set them up as being equivalent.
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
What’s your preferred term for the miserable condition that Palestinian people find themselves in?
Miserable.
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
The question wasn’t addressed to me, but in a generous effort to contribute to the idea that we’re all here to answer Topping’s questions, no.
So the Palestinian cause, as espoused by the government of, oh I don't know, say Gaza, is not anti-semitic.
Gotit.
Is the Ukrainian cause racist?
No, but Israel are the Ukrainians in this analogy.
Ukraine is occupying Russian territory?
Israel never invaded a country called Palestine and isn't occupying any land formerly owned by a country called Palestine either. Its occupying territory formerly belonging to Egypt and Israel, after those countries tried to genocidally wipe Israel off the map.
The people living there want to be a separate state and their leaders still say they want to wipe Israel off the map now just as in the Donbas the Russian-backed separatists say they want their own state and that Ukraine should be wiped off the map.
Egypt and Jordan were Russia. Israel is like Ukraine fighting for its survival. Hamas are the equivalent of the Donetsk People's Republic.
The establishment of Israel itself was, however, quite a crime against Palestinians
“The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, romanized: an-Nakbah, lit. 'the "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"'),[1] also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs.[2][3] The term is used to describe both the events of 1948 and the ongoing persecution, displacement, and occupation of the Palestinians, both in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the region.[4][5][6][7][8]”
Why was no Palestinian state created in the 1948 borders assigned to Palestinians? Because the Egyptians and Jordanians took the land for themselves, not Israel. Who had the land that people claim should be Palestine from 1948 to 1967? Hint: Neither Israel nor "Palestine".
You don’t get out much do you?
I’ve been to Israel many times. Fabulous country. Fascinating people. Tending to obesity now but the girls with the uzis used to be ooooh. Increasingly prosperous too, with quite fine food (and good red wine. Often from Golan)
But I have also seen the car parks in Tel Aviv that used to be Arab neighborhoods. The many lovely seaside homes that belonged to Arab families for generations - until 1948
Let us be honest about the utterly desperate and embarrassing position the Tory Party is in.
A PM fined for lying and then sacked by his own MPs for lying, is now being defended by the very people that sacked him on the grounds he was "stitched up". This is post truth, it is lies, they are playing the public for absolute fools.
The Tory Party needs to go and re-discover honesty and integrity as clearly right now it is completely bankrupt of it.
The problem is that Labour supporters tend to be the same. Look at all the Labour figures who defended Corbyn whilst he was leader - including Starmer. It's their team, so they'll defend it whatever.
Something needs to change. As I have admitted honestly, I did fall into this trap and intend never to do so again. So I say this as somebody who has come from that place, something has to be done.
IMV there are several aspects to this. I'd like to see a little more compassion. Politicians are people too, and make mistakes. Some mistakes can be forgivable, especially when acted on with limited information (see Covid etc), or in fraught circumstances. Persecuting people who make honest well-meant mistakes just causes people to hide stuff, and that's bad for everyone.
And that means as much for your opponents as your side.
I had been increasingly and vocally unhappy for a while. My naïve 'back the underdog' approach had led me to briefly back Corbyn followed by a rapid "what have I done" and then horror as what appeared to be a tidal wave of trots poured into the party both locally and nationally.
I went to the CLP antisemitism training session - a mandatory meeting imposed on all CLPs by HQ in response to the increasing furore about what Jeremy was saying and who he was associating with. The party training document had a strident definition of AS and why it was wrong signed by Jeremy. And as trots foamed on in anger at some good friends' contributions in the meeting, I read again the AS definition signed by JC, and looked at the photos of JC marching behind a clearly AS banner next to AS signs, which his own document said was AS, felt this cleansing calm, stood up and walked out of the meeting and the Labour Party.
You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. Replace Jeremy as leader and purge the trots. Had he not done so then we'd probably have Wrong-Daily as leader and Boris would be stepping corruption up to ever greater levels. I was a nobody, I could quit. Starmer could not.
"You can't say "ah but Keir Starmer" because for someone in his position the national interest is to stay and fight the cancer. "
That's not a very convincing excuse IMO. Starmer stayed in because he wanted to be leader.
Do you stay to reform an organisation or abandon it?
History says that leaving the Labour Party out of principal lengthened the period, in the 80s when Labour previous made itself unelectable. And didn’t get the leavers (ha!) into power either.
If Starmer & Co. had redone the Gang Of Four, Corbynism would have lasted much longer.
Would you stay in an organisation that had (to take a very extreme example) Hitler as leader, in hope of being able to reform it?
If your are against a wrong, or an evil, you get out. You do not become complicit.
Imagine if Corbyn had won in 2019 - as he might have done, with a few small changes. One of those changes are the brave people in Labour who did make a noise, who did leave, helped Corbyn lose.
Corbyn isn’t evil. Wrong, yes.
Is anti-Semtiism not just wrong, but evil?
Being Jewish enough to be interested in the result, personally.
Corbyn is an example of those in the left who can’t deal with the fact that minority groups can be racist. He can’t criticise or call our people in the Palestinian movement who are hard core antisemitic.
He himself is probably not anti-Semitic. Though several associates are.
This blindspot meant that anti-semitism grew in constrained where Corbyn and his associates were.
Simply abandoning the Labour Party to them would mean that anti-semitism would become “naturalised” there.
Yes, that sounds about right. Corbyn's sympathy for the Palestinian cause made him blind to the antisemitic views of some of those he supported, which was foolhardy and potentially dangerous. But calling him evil is setting rather a low bar for the definition of the word.
Do we think the "Palestinian cause" is in any teensy-weensy way anti-semitic.
Is that an ironic question?! The answer is No. The Palestinians have an historic, justified grievance against the state of Israel (and the powers that enabled Israel’s creation and ‘overlooked’ the excesses that followed)
Has that grievance often shaded into outright Jew-hatred? Yes, of course. And it is this line that Corbyn has crossed, many times, wittingly or not
I like it when you fervently agree with me.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Jesus Christ, what a complete and unredeemable prat you are!
Don't bring him into it ffs. But answer the question - is the Palestinian cause anti-semitic.
About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron.
Ah. So you are equating the Palestinians being anti-semitic with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. So you are equating the actions of Israel with those of Nazi Germany.
Fantastic you have answered the question of whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. In your mind it is neither; it is wholly understandable.
As someone who is Jewish enough to be on The List(s)…
- Not all Palestinians are anti-Semitic. Most don’t endorse the “drive them into the sea/kill them” thing. - Anti-semitism is very common in the Muslim and Arab worlds. - This is partly because the rulers of the countries in question use Israel as an excuse for all kinds of shit. It is preached by the state. - Netenyahu is a shit. A nasty, nasty shit. - Antisemite was the self given name for some racists in 19th cent Germany. - The “I can’t be an anti-Semite because I am Semitic” excuse tends to be used by extreme racists in the Middle East. The kind of people who tell you the Blood Libel is true. - Being pro Palestinian need have nothing to do with being anti-Semitic. Indeed, there are quite a few moderate politicians (and their parties) in Israel, who would be considered to have a pro-Palestinian outlook (self determination, 67 borders, aid and assistance etc etc)
It never really got the press it deserved, because pandemic and because Trump, but the 2020 Abraham Accords were really a ground-breaking set of agreements between Muslims and Jews, something that would have been considered totally unthinkable until just before it happened.
Comments
But that doesn't address my question. Do you think that the "Palestinian cause" is in any way anti-semitic.
I suspect Gray will already be having second thoughts based on quite how visible she will be*, and the level of scrutiny there will be on everything she does.
Fair? No, but life isn’t.
*She will have known the theory, but this is the practice.
Please quote the "BoD, JLM and EHRC" saying he did the right thing serving under Corbyn until 2019 when the British public, not Starmer, did the right thing in rejecting Corbynism and antisemitism. Had the public not done the right thing, Starmer was prepared to stand idly by doing the wrong thing until it became politically convenient.
That's opportunism not principles. Boris and other Tories are no better, they do the same, but many on here like to pretend that Starmer has more principles than Boris when Starmer's track record doesn't show that.
Priti Vacant demanded that the Navy do tow back on boats. The Admiralty protested - it isn't equipped for such an operation and it won't do anything as patently illegal as setting out to deliberately drown people.
For any number of reasons the Palestinians are anti-semitic (prize to the first person to point out that they are all semites).
And Jezza enthusiastically supports the Palestinian cause.
Comes back to @JosiasJessop's question as to whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. Or indeed right.
But the "Palestinian cause" (not every Palestinian I imagine) is anti-semitic.
Are we saying that anti-semitism is actually a worthy sentiment, eh, @Theuniondivvie.
Since there's no sign at all of that happening, and I'm not convinced that the Rwandan government would be up for it anyway, I feel confident in drawing conclusions about the seriousness of this plan.
The 25+% of die hard Borisites in the membership wont care, the telegraph wont care. Throw enough about to confuse and you've half won already.
Are there anti-Semites in the cause, yes. Is the cause itself anti-Semitic, no.
Otherwise literally every British leader for fifty years must be anti-Semitic as they all paid at minimum lip service to the thing.
What the reality is, is that the Jewish people have a state of their own, Palestinians do not. The Israeli Government at best isn't helpful, at worst they actively target and kill Palestinians. Their leader has said at best that he doesn't give a toss about them, at worst he has actively pursued racist policies.
But then Hamas don't help themselves either with what they do.
The simplest solution is to just invade Rwanda. Then we can send anyone we like there.
Had to read it twice - but then I properly laughed
Since the Rwandan government were prepared to take 4,000 from Israel I don't see any reason why they'd object to taking thousands if it came to it from this country either, so long as we gave them enough money which is to be brutally honest what this is all about for them. Especially since the thousands they took from Israel and any they'd take from us would almost all rapidly choose to leave the country voluntarily since nobody actually wants to move to Rwanda.
You have to be serious about it though, but if you are, the plan absolutely could work and has been proven elsewhere to definitely work.
That certain activists think it is hard or impossible to do that is a key sign they are a wrong 'un.
Gotit.
factarticle:'The day the enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In the face of the Jews' usurpation, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.' (Article 15)
No it is not Israel's fault one does not exist.
Yes many who espouse what they call the "Palestinian cause" are antisemitic.
No not all who espouse what they'd call the "Palestinian cause" are antisemitic.
It is very simple
“Netanyahu is a corrupt, racist shit” - not racist
“Jews kidnap children to use their blood in secret ceremonies” - racist
Specifying actual people doing actual things is nearly never racist.
Conspiracies involving entire ethnic groups are always racist garbage.
Fantastic you have answered the question of whether anti-semitism is wrong or evil. In your mind it is neither; it is wholly understandable.
I don’t want to come over all yes ministering, but, A policy doesn’t actually have to work to be an electoral success is the point I’m making.
To have any deterrent in place, those travelling need to know you have a deterrent in place. The deterrent being just how pointless their crossing is - because we have ripped up every agreement we had and initially led the way on with rest of world, about how humane humanity must be - but those making these journeys are never going to know that. All they will learn is the traffickers spin, they will never hear of our hard deterrent. That’s why deterrent factor won’t work, in reality.
But then, every Tory politician telling us there must be a deterrent and it will work don’t believe for a second it will, they really arn’t that stupid. This policy works because UK voters will get to know there’s a hard ball deterrent. That’s why it’s a strong policy, that’s where it works. Probably.
Britain is at risk of being sidelined as the US and EU set standards, tech and trade experts warn.
https://www.politico.eu/article/biden-united-kingdom-technology-rishi-sunak-cooperation-trade/
The Palestinian 'cause' is not anti-Semitic: if that cause is for them to have a separate homeland.
Many (though by no means all) people supporting the Palestinian 'cause' do drop into anti-Semitism.
The answer is a two-state solution, where each state is viable. But we haven't even got to the 'collecting underpants' stage.
Hamas is anti-semitic because it was the Jews (not "Israel") that displaced the Palestinian people in whenever it was 1947.
@Chris is saying well who wouldn't be, frankly, given what the Jews/Israel did to the Palestinians. At least he is calling it as he sees it and this view also answers the Jezza question.
Jezza is legitimately anti-semitic because he supports the Palestinian cause. And supporting the Palestinian cause and its inherent anti-semitism is justified because look what the Jews/Israel did.
The report of the Privileges Committee, OTOH, is well worth reading.
https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/34228/documents/188328/default/
You equate Israel with Nazi Germany and believe as a result that anti-semitism is justified.
No, just no.
Israel is not above reproach but even putting to one side that it was Jordan and Egypt not Israel which prevented the formation of a Palestinian state and even putting to one side that Israel is literally defending itself from enemies that openly proclaim they want to see Israel wiped from the map, and have tried to do so repeatedly . . . even putting all that to one side, they've never done anything remotely like Nazi Germany.
Hamas proclaim a one-state solution, with Israel to be exterminated. Is that racist?
But even that is a poor historical analogy.
Where the fuck you go from here - in the direction of peace - I do not know. Maybe the Palestinians will become rich enough they do not care about their obviously second class status. That’s probably the long term hope of Israel
Might even ‘work’, however amoral
- Not all Palestinians are anti-Semitic. Most don’t endorse the “drive them into the sea/kill them” thing.
- Anti-semitism is very common in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
- This is partly because the rulers of the countries in question use Israel as an excuse for all kinds of shit. It is preached by the state.
- Netenyahu is a shit. A nasty, nasty shit.
- Antisemite was the self given name for some racists in 19th cent Germany.
- The “I can’t be an anti-Semite because I am Semitic” excuse tends to be used by extreme racists in the Middle East. The kind of people who tell you the Blood Libel is true.
- Being pro Palestinian need have nothing to do with being anti-Semitic. Indeed, there are quite a few moderate politicians (and their parties) in Israel, who would be considered to have a pro-Palestinian outlook (self determination, 67 borders, aid and assistance etc etc)
The people living there want to be a separate state and their leaders still say they want to wipe Israel off the map now just as in the Donbas the Russian-backed separatists say they want their own state and that Ukraine should be wiped off the map.
Egypt and Jordan were Russia.
Israel is like Ukraine fighting for its survival.
Hamas are the equivalent of the Donetsk People's Republic.
It will cost a bit. But will definitely work.
Israel sent 4000 migrants to Rwanda over five years. That's 800 a year, less than 100 a month. And then gave up because it wasn't working.
Unless the UK is prepared to spend a lot of money (and it would be a lot of money) re-engineering Rwanda to be able to process a lot more migrants than it currently does, the processing part of the scheme is going to be nowhere near meeting demand. And then what?
Even if the processing ends up backlogged, so long as you keep sending everyone there until the crossing's stop, the problem is then resolved.
Its draconian if you want to do that, but it works.
The more ludicrous stuff like that you post, the more ridiculous you make yourself look. Probably the best thing to do is to give you an absolutely free rein, just so that people can see how dishonest you are. But more importantly how absurd.
“The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, romanized: an-Nakbah, lit. 'the "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"'),[1] also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs.[2][3] The term is used to describe both the events of 1948 and the ongoing persecution, displacement, and occupation of the Palestinians, both in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the region.[4][5][6][7][8]”
No one sane denies that this happened
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
If you mean policies that we associate with Nazi Germany like the Holocaust, then no I don't think Israel have done that.
If you mean obscure policies that nobody actually associates with Nazi Germany, like "Hitler was a vegetarian and these people were vegetarian" then you're just being silly.
Israel have done some nasty stuff, as people fighting to defend themselves against genocide tend to do, but nothing like Nazi Germany.
The problem is that Israel, with the 67 borders has no strategic depth.
So the moderate Israelis line up with the religious freak show.
So how to solve that?
Make more Israel. Around the choke point, fill in the sea, Dutch style. It’s deep water and will cost 10s of billions, yes.
Build another 50 miles of Israel. Which creates the strategic depth. With a defendable Israel, the moderate majority peels away from the religious types, and the two state solution is a go.
Why was no Palestinian state created in the 1948 borders assigned to Palestinians? Because the Egyptians and Jordanians took the land for themselves, not Israel. Who had the land that people claim should be Palestine from 1948 to 1967? Hint: Neither Israel nor "Palestine".
"[The Palestinian cause is] About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron."
You equated any Palestinian anti-semitism with the anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor. And therefore understandable, perhaps justified.
You also thereby equated Israel with Nazi Germany.
Which bit is my lies?
‘Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself’
As you well know.
However Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab states, and would have been ethnically cleansed from the land of Israel had Israel not succeeded in defending itself.
The analogy holds.
But sure "Israel genocidally wiped Arabs from its land" /sarcasm.
Jews were genocidally wiped out from Arab nations though and would be if Israel ever lost a war, which is what its fighting to prevent.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=7+up&sxsrf=AJOqlzXdeZo3oI0uk-kYMatDjzepAAFYAg:1678103328249&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjnhpuGnsf9AhXOEcAKHQ6MBCIQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=1396&bih=656&dpr=1.38#imgrc=C-dQRkZWhQGZ9M
But please just try to get it through your thick skull that I don't give a toss what lies you tell about me.
Welcome the analysis.
"About as anti-semitic as the "teensy-weensy" anti-German feeling of an Auschwitz survivor is anti-German, you bigoted moron."
not equating? You literally set them up as being equivalent.
I’ve been to Israel many times. Fabulous country. Fascinating people. Tending to obesity now but the girls with the uzis used to be ooooh. Increasingly prosperous too, with quite fine food (and good red wine. Often from Golan)
But I have also seen the car parks in Tel Aviv that used to be Arab neighborhoods. The many lovely seaside homes that belonged to Arab families for generations - until 1948
800,000 Arabs were brutally “evicted”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Accords