SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY WIN BATLEY & SPEN BY-ELECTION DESPITE RIGHT WING SUPPORT
(just . . . . . . by 320 votes)
From Facebook page 'Just Jews'
The Batley and Spen By-Election Showed Britain’s Political Class Holds Muslims In Contempt
by Daniel Finn:Keir Starmer’s Labour Party narrowly avoided a second successive by-election defeat to the Tories yesterday. But the most important story of the campaign was the alienation of British Muslims from a political mainstream that openly despises them.
It is a sign of how badly Keir Starmer’s leadership has been performing that it came as a huge relief to his allies when Labour held on to the Batley and Spen constituency by the skin of its teeth. The party’s candidate, Kim Leadbeater, saw off her Conservative rival by just over three hundred votes — less than 1 percent. Labour’s vote share dropped by over 7 percent compared with its 2019 performance, which Starmer’s outriders like to characterize as the worst since the 1930s.
As a rule, opposition parties do not lose by-elections to the government — especially not one that has been in power for more than a decade. After the fiasco in Hartlepool at the start of May, when the Tories routed Labour by a huge margin, Team Starmer feared a second humiliation. As it turned out, support for the Conservatives dropped as well as Labour’s, though not to the same extent. The only candidate to have gained support was a maverick outsider, George Galloway, who came from nowhere to win more than a fifth of the vote.
The Batley and Spen result has clear implications for Keir Starmer’s leadership and Labour’s future election prospects, which will no doubt receive ample attention. But the internal politics of the Labour Party are much less important than what Batley and Spen tells us about Britain’s political mainstream and its shameful treatment of ethnic minorities — in particular Muslims. This by-election campaign plumbed new depths, with the Muslim population of the area branded as homophobic antisemites because they didn’t find Labour’s pitch appealing. Labour’s dominant right-wing faction is fully complicit in that collective monstering.
“The internal politics of the Labour Party are much less important than what the Batley and Spen by-election tells us about Britain’s political mainstream and its shameful treatment of ethnic minorities — in particular Muslims.”
Supporters of that faction have made a habit of blaming Starmer’s difficulties on a so-called “long Corbyn” phenomenon, even though Labour’s performances in Hartlepool and Batley and Spen were much worse than Jeremy Corbyn’s weakest result in 2019, let alone his high point two years earlier. But there is a grain of truth buried in this mendacious special pleading.
British public life is still paying the price for a toxic cross-party campaign to block the election of a left-wing government after Labour’s surprise result in June 2017. That campaign deliberately stoked fear and prejudice, pitting Jews against Muslims and Muslims against Hindus, without the slightest concern for the well-being of anyone in those communities. It is still going on today, long after Corbyn’s departure from the scene. Its after-effects are far more significant than the question of how long Keir Starmer will endure as his party’s leader.
Two Planks
The campaign of the Labour right against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership between 2017 and 2019 rested on two main planks. The first was Brexit. Labour politicians and their media outriders worked tirelessly to undermine Labour’s Brexit policy, aiming to create a situation where the party would have to choose between antagonizing pro-Leave or pro-Remain sections of its electoral base. This gambit proved to be devastatingly effective in the 2019 general election, handing victory to Boris Johnson and his hard-Brexit platform.
The second plank was a false narrative that presented Corbyn’s Labour Party as an “existential threat to Jewish life in Britain.” According to the people who confected this story, Labour had suddenly become infested with antisemitic prejudice from top to bottom, all enabled and encouraged by the party leader and his associates. The narrative relied upon fabrication of evidence and the wholesale redefinition of antisemitism so that the term no longer had much or indeed any connection to bigotry against Jews. The majority of people in Britain may not have absorbed all the details of this rolling meta-controversy, but it certainly hobbled Corbyn’s leadership and deprived it of the space needed to put forward a positive agenda.
As soon as Keir Starmer became Labour leader, the party’s right wing dropped anti-Brexit maximalism like a hot stone. By the end of the year, Starmer was whipping his MPs to support Johnson’s hard-Brexit deal with the EU, without a murmur of protest from those who had repeatedly accused Corbyn of “enabling Brexit.” Starmer and his allies have spoken incessantly of the need to recover lost ground in the so-called “Red Wall” seats that went Tory in 2019. They have left the disciples of Continuity Remain to fend for themselves.
However, Starmer has continued to lean heavily upon the second plank as part of his factional war against the Labour left. His leadership has depicted its most eye-catching maneuvers on this front, from the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey to the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour Party, as principled moves against “left antisemitism.”
Most British media outlets, from the right-wing tabloids to the liberal broadsheets, have cheered on this insulting charade. Team Starmer clearly believed they could keep pressing the button indefinitely without paying any political price. Then the latest by-election came along.
A Laundering Operation
Batley and Spen is a northern English constituency with a mixture of ethnicities: white British people are by far the largest group, but there is a substantial minority with South Asian heritage, both Indian and Pakistani — about one-fifth, according to the local council. As the by-election campaign gathered momentum, reports started filtering back that Labour was taking flak from Muslim voters over its positions on Kashmir and Palestine.
Those reports were anecdotal, of course, but they came from people with no incentive to lie, and Labour produced a special leaflet in an attempt to respond. Then an opinion poll suggested that the party was on course for defeat. What happened next showed just how low the British political establishment is willing to stoop in its campaign against the Left.
In this case, the principal vector of that establishment was the Labour right. It began with an article for the Mail on Sunday by columnist Dan Hodges that included the following off-the-record quote from a “senior Labour official”:
We’re haemorrhaging votes among Muslim voters, and the reason for that is what Keir has been doing on antisemitism. Nobody really wants to talk about it, but that’s the main factor. He challenged Corbyn on it, and there’s been a backlash among certain sections of the community.
It’s easy to imagine a “senior Tory official” trying to explain away the party’s low support among Muslim voters in similar terms, claiming that it was a “backlash” against steps taken by the Conservatives to protect the British public from religious extremism. In reality, Muslim voters distrust the Tories because, among many other things, they falsely branded a British imam, Suliman Gani, as a supporter of ISIS so they could smear a Labour election candidate as a “terrorist sympathizer.”
The quote fed to Dan Hodges by a Labour official involved a similar process of rhetorical laundering. There’s every reason to believe that Starmer’s leadership has alienated many British Muslims because of actions that it purported to be taking as part of the struggle against antisemitism. But those actions had no more to do with combating prejudice against Jews than the defamation of Suliman Gani had to do with combating terrorism.
Hostile Environment
Take the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey, almost exactly a year before the Batley and Spen by-election. The Labour leadership claimed that she was ousted for helping to propagate an “antisemitic conspiracy theory.” In fact, she had shared an interview with the actress Maxine Peake in which Peake said nothing whatsoever about Jewish people, while briefly referring to the well-documented relationship between US police forces and the Israeli state. She also repeated a suggestion by the Israeli activist Neta Golan that this relationship was the source of a particular restraint technique used by the officer who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Neta Golan subsequently explained that this was an “unverified assumption” on her part, which she now believed to be mistaken, rather than an established fact:
Weapons used on Palestinian protests are sold as “battle-tested,” and Israeli forces train security forces around the world, including the Minneapolis police. This is fact. I assumed that the kneeling-in on handcuffed detainees that I experienced was one of the tactics they shared. I have since learned that chokeholds have been systematically practised by the US police long before I experienced them in the West Bank.
She went on to attack the Labour leader for branding Peake’s comments as an attack on Britain’s Jewish community:
This denies the existence of many Jews who, like me, oppose Israeli apartheid, including many Jewish members of the Labour Party, and a growing number of young anti-Zionist Jews who also represent and are part of the Jewish community. Jews are not a homogeneous group with the same views — far from it. The assumption that Israel represents Jews and that all Jews are Zionists is in itself a false, anti-Jewish assumption.
Starmer and his team were in no mood to listen. They spent the next year repeatedly conflating the Israeli state with British Jews. In October 2020, Starmer’s shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, rounded on the Labour MP Stephen Kinnock after he called for a ban on the products of illegal West Bank settlements. A Labour source drove home the message she wanted to convey: “Lisa made no secret of the fact that she and the leader were angry with Kinnock — especially after all the work that has been done to try to restore Labour’s relationship with the Jewish community.”
A report published soon after Nandy made those comments revealed widespread distrust of Starmer’s leadership among Muslim members and supporters of the Labour Party. While Palestine was not the only factor behind this, Starmer’s orientation on that issue was clearly symptomatic of wider attitudes, as he made abundantly clear in April of this year. Starmer pulled out of an online fast-breaking event during Ramadan because one of the organizers had called for a boycott of Israeli dates. He also declined to answer an letter from British-Palestinian Labour members that accused him of creating a “hostile and unwelcoming” atmosphere for them in the party.
When Starmer refuses to share the same virtual space as a man who supports a perfectly legal form of protest against the oppression of the Palestinian people, it requires a lot of effort not to see what is going on and who is being told to take their place at the back of the bus. Journalists may find it professionally vital to make that effort, but they cannot expect British Muslims to ignore what is staring them in the face.
It’s important to remember what the motivation behind Starmer’s conduct in this area actually is. It may sometimes appear as if his leadership is taking direction from groups like the Board of Deputies of British Jews, but that is an optical illusion. The demands of pro-Israel campaigning groups harmonize neatly with the geopolitical interests of the British state and its ruling class, which is what really matters.
The campaign against all meaningful support for Palestinian rights that has now dominated British public life for several years is a convenient way of targeting anyone who deviates from the wider foreign-policy consensus. Corbyn’s rise to prominence threatened to punch a hole in that consensus: the memory of his speech after the 2017 Manchester bombing clearly still haunts the gatekeepers of conventional wisdom. The ongoing attacks on his reputation and that of the movement he led are a response to that threat....'
DANIEL FINN
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/batley-spen-byelection-labour-starmer-muslim
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