JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

quote:

Official JVL Statement
Unravelling the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey
Thu 25 Jun 2020

Photo used recently to illustrate an article in Middle East Eye (see below)
Thousands of Labour Party members were shocked to learn that Rebecca Long-Bailey has been sacked from her position in the Shadow Cabinet based on her retweet of an interview with Maxine Peake, who is, incidentally, one of her own constituents. The allegation was that she had engaged in a “conspiracy theory that Israel was responsible for the death of George Floyd”

Is that what she did? Is that what she said? Was that even what was in the article that she retweeted? No, no and no.

Keir Starmer said this to the BBC “The sharing of that article was wrong… because the article contained anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and I have therefore stood Rebecca Long-Bailey down from the shadow cabinet.” And “I’ve made it my first priority to tackle anti-Semitism and rebuilding trust with the Jewish community is a number one priority for me.”

Where was this antisemitic conspiracy theory? Within a wide ranging interview, including discussion about her new film, what highly respected actor Maxine Peake, actually said was:

“Systemic racism is a global issue … The tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services.”

How is it antisemitic to refer to this tactic of control? We know that knee on neck is used by Israeli (and we know it, not least because this has been photographed on many occasions). We also know that some US police forces have sent officers to Israel and/or welcomed officers from Israel as part of their training. The extent of that training has been attested to by Amnesty USA. And we do know the Minneapolis Police, responsible for the death of George Floyd was one such police force.

What we can’t know is whether that particular technique was taught to US police, and specifically to members of the Minneapolis force. Independent witnesses are not available. A spokesperson for the Israeli Police has even denied that Israeli police use it domestically – despite profuse photographic evidence to the contrary.

Despite these disputed and in some cases unknowable facts, there is enough evidence to support Maxine Peake’s inference that the knee on neck technique has an Israeli origin, with a plausible even probable transmission mechanism to the US. Coming to such a conclusion based on the available evidence is one that many people would share with Ms Peake. It is not antisemitic. It doesn’t hold Israel responsible for the death of George Floyd in any way. Many people will see such collaboration as deeply problematic. But it too is also not antisemitic.

The ongoing and widespread allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party do not have to be based on fact, and this is guilt by association to the nth degree. Yet again, this nonsense, this sending prominent Corbyn supporters to the wolves, masks the serious antisemitism in our society, some of which, does exist in the Labour Party. Pledging to address this is right, pledging to punish people (and it is almost always leftwing people) for something that only those determined to interpret every statement that refers to Israel in the slightest negative way as antisemitism is wrong and dangerous.

Vera Lustig

Mugsbaloney posted:

Can one of you big-brained rlb-blamers please address Lady Astor, thanks

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

JVL official statement on RLB:

https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/statement/unravelling-the-sacking-of-rebecca-long-bailey/

The Question IRL posted:

Because if you punish someone for mentioning Lady Astor, who can MP’s hold up as the first female MP? An Irish-woman?
That would be the worst possible outcome.

JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

Miftan posted:

A nazi??? Like sure she's all those things but more importantly she's an actual nazi who liked Hitler's approach to 'the jewish question' so maybe it's okay to say she is the worst and we shouldn't be looking up to her. (She's also not the first female MP)

sebzilla posted:

Forwarded that image to my partner. Their response?

"I've noticed"

Feeling good today, friends. The forums are saved and apparently I'm hanging some kind of summer megadong. It's gonna be alright.

sebzilla posted:

Forwarded that image to my partner. Their response?

"I've noticed"

Feeling good today, friends. The forums are saved and apparently I'm hanging some kind of summer megadong. It's gonna be alright.

Miftan posted:

I disagree with that statement. I think that linking the kneeling technique to Israel without proof is a load of crap and she shouldn't have done it. Other than that, I don't think there's any antisemitism involved here. Yes, sometimes people use criticism of Israel to mask their antisemitism, but that's really hard to prove and doesn't mean that all criticism of Israel should be suspected antisemitism unless 100% accurate and verified. People get poo poo wrong all the time.

quote:

there is enough evidence to support Maxine Peake’s inference that the knee on neck technique has an Israeli origin, with a plausible even probable transmission mechanism

OzyMandrill posted:

I got to this bit and thought 'hang on, that's a bit of a loving leap':

sebzilla posted:

Forwarded that image to my partner. Their response?

"I've noticed"

Feeling good today, friends. The forums are saved and apparently I'm hanging some kind of summer megadong. It's gonna be alright.

The Question IRL posted:

Because if you punish someone for mentioning Lady Astor, who can MP’s hold up as the first female MP? An Irish-woman?
That would be the worst possible outcome.

XMNN posted:

so any idea when that ham-faced prick will have finished speaking to MPs? I'm guessing he will just tell them that "tough poo poo, I'm in charge" but who knows

Eararaldor posted:

Good news friend!

With Global Warming happening at an increase speed, you should have no worries about your losing your megadong!

Junior G-man posted:

Who knows, more power to them if they can stay awake through his droning. I tried to listen to this and felt the animating spirit leave my body.

https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1276114922884280321?s=20

XMNN posted:

so any idea when that ham-faced prick will have finished speaking to MPs? I'm guessing he will just tell them that "tough poo poo, I'm in charge" but who knows

forkboy84 posted:

Thought he'd explicitly refused to talk to the SCG?

spiderbot posted:

I stand with Miftan on chocolate oranges

Junior G-man posted:

What's the Lab equivalent of the 1922 comittee?

Jose posted:

https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1276417816388874240?s=19

Pesky Splinter posted:

*Relaxing as the sea boils, my megadong increases in girth.*

spiderbot posted:

I stand with Miftan on chocolate oranges

forkboy84 posted:

Thought he'd explicitly refused to talk to the SCG?

quote:

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is speaking to MPs concerned about the sacking of former shadow education secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey.

Mrs Long-Bailey was asked to stand down on Thursday after retweeting an interview which Sir Keir said contained an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

The interview with actress Maxine Peake suggested US police learned violent tactics from Israeli secret services.

Mrs Long-Bailey later said she did not agree with all aspects of the article.

"In no way was my retweet an intention to endorse every part of that article," she said.

Jewish groups and some MPs welcomed Sir Keir's decision but Mrs Long-Bailey's allies on the party's left said it was an overreaction.

The row began when the Salford and Eccles MP tweeted "Maxine Peake is an absolute diamond" with a link to an interview with the actress and Labour supporter on the Independent website.

Sir Keir is via zoom speaking to Labour MPs including those in the Socialist Campaign Group, who have expressed concern about Mrs Long-Bailey's sacking. The group's membership includes former leader Jeremy Corbyn, and other prominent left-wingers such as Diane Abbott and Richard Burgon.

Spangly A posted:

I think the fracturing into smaller tribes idea holds up quite well alongside the results you occasionally get from e.g yougov's big dive into the coordination and contradictions of various loose ideologies among the british public, and it's both expected by everyone except structuralists and happens to quite handily predict exactly what just happened in the uk - a completely unified left/liberal pact can possibly beat away the tories but it's also a ridiculous nonsense idea because they're not compatable beliefs or ruling ideologies. Unless the ethnonationalists win so absolutely that they can come for your global industries, it's back to "man I hope the massive over50 ethnonationalist contigent die slightly before the nice over50s do"

But, bluntly, "social spending remains up" doesn't even pass inflation checks since austerity, and it's never withstood scrutiny under neoliberalism either. The evolution of beaurocratic labour to such dominance in the UK isn't a coincidence, it's because we have half a million loving lawyers and accountants and they're obviously better at lawyer and accountant poo poo than everyone else, which is the only acceptable method of protest and organisation to both the people being protested and the people leading the opposition. You cannot seperate this from what liberalism wishes to do economically, to create value out of thin air because all alternatives require challenging global capital, because that "spend" has to now deal with CoL increase and general inflation and subcontractors and fees and new avenues for corruption and the naked excess of c-level culture and visible and obvious damage to services, both in function and viability. You create the beurocrats to push the paper because you already lost the multikulti/race to the bottom dilemna and can't actually create meaningful jobs without loving up landlords. And the beurocrats are expensive, and they are powerful, and your services die, and the beurocrats have a decades long row about whether it not it's immigrants fault while the "it's not" campaign, yeah, refuses to talk about anything but cultural sensitivies, and does this badly. Your spending doesn't mean anything and the differences of the lived experiences of your tribes have now become irreconcilable. Nobody who bought their house before neoliberalism can actually "get it" for the same reasons American billionaires do not understand how people could even think union busting is bad. It didn't happen to them. It doesn't matter to them. They cannot actually identify the problem to deal with it. I'd honestly rather anyone just tried to refute Graeber himself than my rehash, I've not really seen much success there though.

You can keep your argument that beurocratic reformism has actually achieved some things but it's absolutely not willing to deal with criticism of how and why it became dominant, and whether that serves everybody, without booting itself hard in the face and continuing the lob free ammunition to "anti-beurocratic" penpushers and capitalists alike for their racially inflammatory campaigns. If beurocratic reformism can't do that, and it clearly does not tolerate other avenues to power, then what are you left with? and if the beurocratic reformists power originates inside global capital, and their existence cannot be reconciled with internationalism (because of the boot-face thing), then what implentations are there other than the destruction of the middle class in Badiou's terms, and the embracing of the migratory proletariat, of Kerala, of Cuba, of eastern and southern europe, or a nationalist economic liberalism and subcontracting bonanza?

I should read Mészáros I guess, another thanet lad with good opinions

quote:

... Our concern is in any case with substantive policy questions. The changes in party structure brought about by the left however, will no doubt have no doubt have effects upon policy in the course of time but they did not in themselves produce any immediate effects. The left was too preoccupied with the constitutional battles to spend much time on policy questions. That could wait until the constitutional battles had been won. The fact that the constitutional struggle was largely won by the left, however, does indicate a changing balance of power within the party and undermines arguments that the party is fundamentally oligarchic in character. Drucker has argued that the party is now very difficult to control. No one section or grouping controls it - leadership, unions or Executive.

One reason for this is the changed character of much of the membership and particularly the activist membership. They are more middle class, better educated, articulate, ideological and strongly motivated to participate in the process of policy formulation . Surveys have shown them to be not the doctrinaire, Marxist militants of the far left that the media tends to portray them as. They are idealistic, certainly left-wing and strongly committed to a democratic, participatory ethos. Drucker has rightly argued that this democratic ethos has always been there. It is part of the traditional ethos of the party. Recently, however, it has become predominant, and has been successfully utilised by the left. Even union leaders have to pay far more careful attention to the wishes of their delegate conferences as a result of the emphasis on this side of the party's ethos in recent years. In the constituencies this new membership has come to dominate largely as a consequence of the decline in overall membership of the party and particularly in the working class activist membership.

Whiteley has argued that this decline in members is due to the party's poor performance in office from the point of view of working class instrumental attitudes. The middle class activist is less easily deflected since his aims are ideological rather than instrumental. The middle class radical members tend to be much more activist while the working class members do not. Even if it is not the case that local Labour parties are now largely middle class in membership, the activist element does tend to be middle class and much more insistent on playing a central role in policy formulation. The party, then, is more left in terms of its activist membership and it is ironic that it is so precisely because of the growth of, if not embourgeoisement, then at least, instrumentalism. The effects can also be seen in the electoral base of the party. Workers are increasingly less likely to vote for a party on grounds of class loyalty and more on instrumental grounds. They are not inclined to support a party that does not seem to be capable of delivering concrete benefits, and increasingly ready to switch their vote to other parties. The Labour Party, on the other hand, has enjoyed increasing support among the middle classes...

ronya posted:

The rise of 'bureaucratic labour' and gloomy forecasts of a society run by expert paper-pushers isn't new, but it... 2020 is a strange decade to begin advancing it?

mrpwase posted:

You should also feel good about your new album, because it slaps.

Guavanaut posted:

In the grim darkness of the distant future, there is only dong.