Afaiu, the solid truth was that higher-up admin people of the Parliamentary Labour Party HQ, which is separate from the office of the Leader Of The Opposition, failed to do the investigating, partly due to the fear and hate of Corbyn in the PLP, but then LOTO took the blame (partly cos Corbyn isn't the greatest of communicators). Novara did various detailed videos on the whole saga, including looking at the PLP WhatsApp leaks. https://youtu.be/G02ZZY_KE4Ehttps://youtu.be/ZjNB7fGc1-A etc
Yes, and there is also now proof of sabotage by the right of the Labour party specifically in order to create the narrative you are repeating.
"The 860-page document claims that “an abnormal intensity of factional opposition to the party leader” had “inhibited the proper functioning of the Labour Party bureaucracy” and contributed to “a litany of mistakes” in dealing with antisemitism, which it admits was a serious problem in the party."
Whether or not the draft dossier of uncertain providence is all legit, I agree it looks like Labour’s issues ran deep. However, I’d still argue there’s an issue around Corbyn’s leadership.
You’re the leader of Labour; your party is being criticised in very damaging ways and (for the sake of argument) it’s because your internal processes are being sabotaged. What do you do? Maybe... look into it? Fix it? Change the people responsible if that’s what it takes? At best, it was weak leadership. At worst, it was a reluctance to discipline political allies.
It would have been derided in those terms if you had guessed all these Labour staffers were actively sabotaging their own party's candidate while it was happening.
And there clearly was a conspiracy, you can even read excerpts from the chats where they planned a lot of it!
Yeeees, PM lies and obfuscates, and lies some more and tells half-truths and hides behind an investigation to find out what HE was was doing (rather than just simply say if he went or not).
Attempting to spread the blame like that is frankly a ridiculous stunt to try to pull - the Tory MPs weren't party to the execrable backroom shenanigans that we are now all very well aware went on.
I'm still shocked that nothing really came of the report that the anti-Corbyn activities within the Labour party. It should've rocked the party to the core and caused heads to roll.
A real shame they didn't put into law the findings of the Leveson inquiry. Shadowy figures in the establishment clearly didn't like the implications of the inquiry and sat on it. Eventually they will have to - look at what's happened already.
There needs to be far more transparent accountability for wayward ministers and prime ministers - otherwise what's the point?
The Labour leaks prove that Labour did try to fix it - Corbyn should've booted all the neo-liberals out of his party via mandatory reselections. Unfortunately, he's too decent to play dirty - but that's what's needed right now.
I think it's pretty clear that Rachel Reeves, Ian Austin et al are not allies when they are funnelling money and faking ad spend, and leaking lies to the press specifically to stop labour from winning.
(I'm not referring to all claims of antisemitism here as lies by the way, but many of the stories that broke in the Guardian were later redacted as bunk)
Seems a bit odd to accuse Corbyn supporters of not doing anything useful when they were being undermined from all angles. Smeared as anti-semites, hit pieces on state media, constant bashing in tabloids; sneakily undermined by a faction of their own party, as here, and even undermined by state security services (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/06/22/jeremy-corby...).
This wasn't because Corbyn's side didn't have policy positions or wasn't getting things done - it's because wealthy vested interests were fucking terrified of what he would do.
Blair is a full-on war criminal btw, so presenting the two as somehow equivalent is staggeringly dishonest.
A straw man. It wasn’t exposed by saboteurs. It was exaggerated with false news stories to add to the legitimate and real concern and to keep the story in the news. The antisemitism is real. So is the outrage about how labour staffers conspired to destroy Labours electoral success. Your blindness to this obvious point is very revealing.
Edit: you seemed to have silently edited your comment to change your argument, so I’ll do the same:
> No. The "real solution" is to oppose anti-semitism with all due expediency.
And the labour leaks show that a faction of the party was purposefully undermining labours ability to do this against the wishes of the leadership. Do you accept this?
> I don't care if it was exasperated by "saboteurs". If Corbyn can't adopt this basic moral position that all humans ought to adopt, I don't care to hear any excuses at all.
That makes no sense: are you really arguing that Corbyn’s political enemies’ actions lead you to hate Corbyn’s moral position, even when it ostensibly matches your own?
Maybe you should have another think before you reply
Well, they did bury it. First, there were media figures (the wife of the editor of the Sun, for instance) at the parties, so obviously they didn't report on it at the time, and I remember when the first leaks started coming out, Laura Kuennsberg presented it as a 'Westminster drama' kind of story. It's impossible to imagine that media figures did not know the parties were happening at the time: Allegra Stratton is married to James Fortsyth (the editor of the Spectator), for instance.
I think the point is, british people generally have a lot of tolerance for amateurism, well-intentioned muddling through, and honest mistakes. That's a deep part of the culture. What they cannot stand is people who behave as if they are too important to follow the rules everybody else follows. That's why queue jumping is sort of like human sacrifice in the UK. When you combine an instance of this trope, with a traumatic national moment, it's going to have way more psychological impact than simple incompetence, no matter how much more damaging incompetence actually is.
When corbyn's facebook profile was first linked to some AS post, a party that was functioning would have gone through all the groups he's a member of, and all past comments and removed anything that would ahve potentially been a problem.
They did not. After the first incident where he was tagged in a some post raving on about the "banking elite" or some other trope, there was at least a 6month time lapse before the press discovered his comment on the famous banking mural.
Add that to the backdrop of Livingston being a total tool, and not being censured at any speed, you begin to form a narrative.
mix in the total lack of press control, planning or indeed engagement, you get this mess. Thats without the total perversion of the discipline system (where you can be Richard Burgon, caught lying on national TV about what you said about Zionism, and not be disciplined, but admit you voted for another party and you are instantly expelled.)
All of this could have been managed, if the corbyn "brain trust" had actually bothered to think about the outside world.
Now, Let us not for a moment think that labour are alone in having a *ism problem. The conservative can't stand islam, anyone with an accent, or someone with a "whiff of the colonies". The Libdems can't abide gay marriage (which is deeply ironic)
Look, I voted corbyn the first time, because I thought he was actually competent. He however is not, has shrank back from the press, surrounded himself with posh boys who think they are working class, or dinosaurs from the 80s.
To blame this AS stuff on Isreal is just peak bullshit. If they had simply audited Corbyn's facebook pages, and kicked out the noisy unhinged twats banging on about the jews, we'd never have got here.
There's something wild going on there, too. Leaked documents have shown how their best chance at real Labour-style governance (Corbyn) was intentionally smeared from within as an antisemite, among other things, in order to torpedo his popularity. Instead, Labour has the hugely ineffectual Tory-esque Keir Starmer now. Feels very much like a managed opposition.
> In April 2020, an 860-page report into the handling of antisemitism by the party concluded that there was "no evidence" that antisemitism complaints were treated any differently than other forms of complaint, or of current or former staff being "motivated by antisemitic intent.”
I don't like conspiracy theories, but the ruling Tory party jumping on to this as a blame match against Labour (for the scandal dating to their reign) and their leader (being head of CPS during some of the prosecution period) and taking swift action to legislate something to overturn and compensate the victims of this great injustice and this whole thing being timed right before an incoming election that was more or less guaranteed to be a disaster for Conservatives implies either 1) a massive conspiracy orchestrated by the greatest British minds 2) or an incredibly opportunistic move to capture the public mood.
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