From: "Israel Shamir adam@israelshamir.net [shamireaders]" <shamireaders-noreply@yahoogroups.com>

 

Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2016 22:42:11 +0200

 

Subject: [shamireaders] Jews against Corbyn

 

 

The Jewish Millionaire Trying to Oust Labour's Jeremy Corbyn

 

Michael Foster is leading the drive to unseat the U.K. Labour Party leader, calling his supporters ‘Nazi storm troopers.’ But while every anti-Semitic utterance in Britain has caused a furor recently, why was the ex-showbiz agent’s comment allowed to slip through?

 

Yakir Zur Aug 27, 2016 2:08 AM

 

The campaign being waged by Jewish millionaire Michael Foster against Jeremy Corbyn is one of the most fascinating stories in the ugly battle to lead Britain’s Labour Party.

 

For some reason, it hasn’t been adequately covered by the British media — perhaps because both of the involved parties are perceived as being on the wrong side of the story. One is a Labour donor who, up till recently, controlled Rights House, a literary and media agency that represented prominent actors like Sacha Baron Cohen and Hugh Grant, as well as authors such as Simon Schama and Jeanette Winterson. Foster’s empire also controlled TV production companies such as Carnival Films, which was behind the TV series "Downton Abbey."

 

The other person is Corbyn, the man most of the media loves to hate.

 

If you asked people on the street who Corbyn is, you’d most likely hear opposing views. His supporters believe he’s the right person to head the British Labour Party, a man of integrity and principles who fights for his views, not a chameleon who changes colors according to public opinion. In their eyes, he’s the right person to stand up to the Conservatives and fight for the rights of the working and disadvantaged classes in Britain, in contrast to the policies of austerity and cuts of the present government.

 

His opponents, however, see him as a dangerous man with extremist positions, and whose stubbornness could lead to the breakup of the venerable left-wing party.

 

For the ex-media agent, Corbyn is a reviled figure, the leader of a "group of thugs" Foster terms the Sturm Abteilung (Nazi storm troopers).

 

The struggle within Labour is an ideological one concealed behind a personal battle. Behind the personal arguments against Corbyn for his lack of charisma and inability to lead, there are power struggles from the party’s right, trying to preserve the hegemony it attained during the rule of Tony Blair. Opposing these are thousands of Labour members who joined the party after Corbyn’s 2015 election as leader. These are new members, or ones who’d left and are now returning to the fold. They view Corbyn as the person who can restore the socialist hue the party lost during Blair’s tenure (1994-2007).

 

Foster’s campaign against Corbyn links together personal frustration and ideological considerations. He left the world of show business in 2013, selling his shares in Rights House and deciding to try his luck in politics. In the 2015 general election, he unsuccessfully ran for parliament in the Cornish constituency of Camborne and Redruth, losing out to the Conservatives.

 

He is known for his fiery temper and angry outbursts. In a public debate between the electoral candidates last year, a rival candidate drew laughter after she mentioned that Foster lives in a fancy house worth $2 million, in an area considered one of the poorest in Britain. According to some reports, Foster approached her after the debate and said, "‘You c***! If you pick on me again, I will destroy you." Foster denies the allegation.

 

The first public confrontation between Foster and Corbyn occurred last September (shortly after Corbyn was elected leader), when Corbyn appeared at an event held by the Labour Friends of Israel parliamentary group during the annual party conference. Corbyn talked about the need for dialogue in the Middle East in order to reach a just solution of two states for two peoples. At the end of his eight-minute speech, Foster heckled him, urging him to "say the word Israel, say the word Israel."

 

The second confrontation came after last month’s failed parliamentary attempt to depose Corbyn. Labour MPs who tried and failed to bring about Corbyn’s resignation after a resounding vote of no confidence then tried to prevent him from running for the leadership, with the argument that, like every other contender, he should present a minimal number of MPs who support him. They assumed Corbyn would be unable to garner the required number of nominations. However, the party’s National Executive Committee ruled, in a majority vote, that Corbyn does not have to gather nominations in order to run again.

 

Foster didn’t like that decision. He appealed to the courts in an attempt to overturn the ruling, but lost both prestige and a lot of money.

 

Venting his frustration

 

Michael Foster is a person who doesn’t like losing. He vented his frustration in an article in the Daily Mail two weeks ago, headlined "Why I despise Jeremy Corbyn and his Nazi stormtroopers."

 

In that article, he heaped venom on the "Corbyn Circus," called his supporters "Corbynistas" and alluded to the fact that they’re more like followers of a religious cult than members of a legitimate political party. He also criticized the courts for giving an advantage to Corbyn and his cronies.

 

In the atmosphere now prevailing in Britain, in which any anti-Semitic expression or use of Nazi analogies causes a storm, Foster’s article passed relatively calmly. Marie van der Zyl, vice president of The Board of Deputies of British Jews, halfheartedly condemned the use of a Nazi analogy because of its potential to incite, while simultaneously expressing her concern at the language and behavior of some Labour Party members.

 

Jewish newspapers reported briefly on the incident, while online newspaper the Jewish News provided Foster with a further platform, in which he stated he had "no regrets, none" about his controversial choice of words. Many British dailies, which in recent months have been dealing extensively with anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, made no mention of the incident.

 

David Rosenberg, a veteran left-winger and member of the Jewish Socialists’ Group in Britain, returned to the Labour Party after an absence of 30 years following Corbyn’s election. He views the Foster incident as a classic example of the hypocrisy of the British media with regard to anything connected to Corbyn.

 

In a recent blog, Rosenberg cited the irony of Foster choosing the Daily Mail as a platform for his attack on Corbyn: That newspaper’s then-owner, Lord Rothermere I, was a supporter of Hitler in the 1930s — he even sent him a congratulatory telegram when the Nazis took over the Sudetenland. Six months after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Rothermere published an article praising them for managing to root out "‘alien elements’ in the German government," including members of the Jewish faith and members of international organizations who had succeeded by manipulating their way into key positions in Germany. Hitler managed to rid Germany of such exploitation, Rothermere wrote.

 

Rosenberg also mentioned that the Rothermere family still owns the tabloid newspaper, which "as we know (and Michael Foster knows) ... spends most of the year stirring up hatred against migrants and refugees, and whipping up Islamophobia."

 

The writer is an Israeli journalist and photographer living in London.

 

 

 

Labour Jewish leader: Jeremy Corbyn is ‘rubbish’

 

Posted on December 30, 2015

 

Last week, UK’s Labour Party’s vice-Chairperson of Friends of Israel Rebecca Simon speaking at a forum entitled, Re-examining the community’s relationship with the Labour party, called her party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Rubbish.

 

"People are not going to know how to vote. They will on the one hand want to support their party, one they have been card-carrying members for all their lives, but then no one wants to vote for a leader they think is rubbish. And he is rubbish – never mind about the Israel stuff, he is just not a credible opposition," she was quoted saying by Rosa Doherty at Jewish Chronicle, December 30, 2015.

 

The forum was attended by over a hundred Jewish members of Labour party. She told them that the relationship had fractured because of hostile attitudes towards Israel. Under Corbyn, she said, Israel has fundamentally been delegitimized.

 

However, she told her Jewish colleagues they can burn brass and drop their pants, but urged them not to burn party membership cards, because that would leave the Labour party in the hands of anti-Israel members who support Corbyn.

 

Rebecca Simon also lamented that there wouldn’t be an anti-Corbyn coup in the party and the Friends of Israel have no other choice but bear Corbyn until 2020.

 

She said Jews in the party would have to become more active to counter such a strong anti-Israel force that was going out there to knock on doors. Corbyn is not a credible leader, but she don’t expect him to step down at any point.

 

The Zionist Jewess also predicted that based on Corbyn’s anti-Israel record, Labour party has no hope of winning the next election.

 

I certainly share Rebecca Simon’s ‘Jewish pain’. After the disappearance of paedophile Jewish Lord Greville Janner, the Friend of Israel cannot afford to lose another leader of country’s Jewish Lobby.

 

Jeremy Corbyn is not a 9/11 truther as accused by the UK’s Jewish Lobby.

 

 

 

Jeremy Corbyn accused of being 'anti-semitic' as Labour grandees round on hard Left leadership frontrunner

 

Lord Hattersley, the former Labour deputy leader, told The Telegraph that Mr Corbyn would have no right to 'impose' his views on the party as he called on MPs to openly rebel against his policies should he win

 

By Ben Riley-Smith, Political Correspondent

 

10:00PM BST 14 Aug 2015

 

Jeremy Corbyn was accused of being an anti-Semite by one of Labour’s most senior politicians last night as a series of party grandees rounded on the hard-Left candidate.

 

Ivan Lewis, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, attacked Mr Corbyn’s "anti-Semitic rhetoric" and said the party must have "zero tolerance" for such views.

 

Mr Lewis said he was "saddened" that people on the Left of the party had failed to take a "no ifs, no buts" to anti-Semitism.

 

It came as both Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper called on their supporters to pick anyone but Mr Corbyn as second and third preferences as other grandees spoke out.

 

Lord Hattersley, the former Labour deputy leader, told The Telegraph that Mr Corbyn would have no right to "impose" his views on the party as he called on MPs to openly rebel against his policies should he win.

 

Meanwhile Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, announced he would be making his first intervention in the race on Sunday in a speech expected to be heavily critical of Mr Corbyn.

 

Writing on the Left-leaning website Labour List, Mr Lewis said: "Some of his stated political views are a cause for serious concern. At the very least he has shown very poor judgment in expressing support for and failing to speak out against people who have engaged not in legitimate criticism of Israeli governments but in anti-Semitic rhetoric.

 

He added: "It saddens me to have to say to some on the left of British politics that anti-racism means zero tolerance of anti Semitism, no ifs, and no buts. I have said the same about Islamaphobia and other forms of racism to a minority of my constituents who make unacceptable statements."

 

It comes after the Jewish Chronicle raised concerns about Mr Corbyn's pro-Palestinian views as they demanded he urgently answer questions about his links to controversial Middle Eastern figures.

 

Mr Corbyn, now accepted by all sides as the front-runner to become Labour leader, has faced a growing backlash this week since a YouGov poll put him of 53 per cent - more than double the support of any other candidate.

 

While Mr Corbyn spent another day in Scotland justifying why he could win back dozens of seats lost to the SNP there were signs that the Labour Party machine was moving against his candidacy.

 

Whispered briefings from his rival campaigns saw Mr Burnham urged to be stronger in his attacks on Mr Corbyn in an attempt to ensure no moderate voter names him as a second or third preference.

 

There is growing belief that the only way Mr Corbyn can be stopped is if he wins less than 45 per cent of first preferences - leaving another candidate to win overall once second and third preferences are distributed through the alternative vote system.

 

Lord Hattersley told The Telegraph the hard-Left candidate had no right to "impose" his ideology on MPs if he won and urged moderates to continue opposing Mr Corbyn if he becomes leader.

 

The Labour peer urged MPs to fight Mr Corbyn’s proposals to take Britain out of Nato, nationalise the railway and energy companies and scrap the country’s nuclear weapons.

 

"MPs have to follow their consciences and if the consciences are different to Corbyn’s, that is what they have to follow. That is what he has done on 500 occasions over the last 20 years," Lord Hattersley said.

 

"If that means a Parliamentary Labour Party voting in favour of continuing Trident when the leader of the Labour Party doesn’t want it, too bad. The leader of the Labour party would be out on his own."

 

He added: "I don’t regard it as a rebellion. If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader that doesn’t give him a mandate to impose his view on the Parliamentary Labour Party."

 

Meanwhile in an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Burnham warned that the party is in danger of splitting even if Mr Corbyn does not become leader.

 

He pointed to private polling suggesting many voters' second and third preferences will go to him to prove that he is the only moderate candidate that can defeat Mr Corbyn.

 

 

Public Banking Institute<info@publicbankinginstitute.org> 16 September 2015 at 06:46

 

Public banks and pay caps: the thoughts of UK Labour's new economy chief

 

By REUTERS

 

PUBLISHED: 22:46 EST, 14 September 2015 | UPDATED: 22:47 EST, 14 September 2015

 

Sept 14 (Reuters) - John McDonnell, the man who could be Britain's next finance minister if the opposition Labour Party wins power, is a critic of the capitalist system which he has said he wants to overhaul by nationalising banks and capping executives' pay.

 

McDonnell was named as Labour's top spokesman on economic policy by newly-elected party leader Jeremy Corbyn, adding to Labour's sharp shift leftwards since its heavy defeat in May's parliamentary election.

 

Below is a summary of economic proposals and ideas put forward by McDonnell, a former trade union official and a member of parliament since 1997:

 

BANKS - McDonnell wants public ownership of the banking system to take control of "our casino economy". This would include full separation of retail and investment banking and the introduction of a financial transaction tax. He has also proposed capital controls on banks if they oppose the tax.

 

BANK OF ENGLAND - A Labour government should reclaim the power to set interest rates from the Bank of England, reversing a reform made by former prime minister Tony Blair in 1997 that helped to persuade investors the economy was safe under Labour.

 

PUBLIC FINANCES - McDonnell said in August that a Labour government led by Corbyn would be committed to eliminating the budget deficit but not at the expense of cuts to tax credits for lower earners and to public services, or a public pay freeze.

 

HIGHER TAXES - Instead, the money to balance Britain's books would come from higher taxes on the rich and corporations as well as from tougher enforcement of tax payment. This would also help to pay for investment in housing and infrastructure.

 

In an article written in 2012, McDonnell said the income tax rate should be raised to 60 percent for people earning more than 100,000 pounds ($155,000) and 70 percent for those earning more than 1 million pounds a year.

 

INEQUALITY - In the same article, McDonnell called for a cap on wages of no more than 20 times the lowest paid in any company. He also wants legislation to tackle the gap between pay for men and women, and to restore trade union rights. He opposes welfare spending cuts.

 

RAILWAYS, UTILITIES - McDonnell says the rail industry should be renationalised, with workers and passengers given a role in its management. The energy sector would be "socialised from below" through a huge expansion of renewable energy production and supply, following Germany's model. McDonnell is opposed to nuclear power which Britain plans to expand.

 

MEDIA - Laws on the media would be reformed to prevent "the monopoly ownership and control of our media by rich individuals and corporations," McDonnell says on his website, an apparent reference to the British media interests of Rupert Murdoch. (Compiled by William Schomberg; editing by David Stamp)

 

 

  Kelvin Heslop<keljohn01@gmail.com> 15 August 2015 at 06:50

 

 

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn plan to isolate Commons critics

 

 

The Australian

 

August 15, 2015 12:00AM

 

Jeremy Corbyn has set out his plan to contain and marginalise MPs who oppose his drive to make Labour more left-wing.

 

Mr Corbyn’s position as the frontrunner in the race to be Labour leader has been strengthened further by the late surge of voters joining the contest, pollsters said yesterday.

 

According to an updated analysis by YouGov, the hard-left MP is now on course to win 57 per cent of the vote, which began yesterday and will be announced on September 12.

 

In the most detailed explanation to date of how he intends to run the party, the hard-left candidate said he was preparing to mobilise his new army of supporters by giving them many more votes on policy and party direction.

 

Mr Corbyn was denounced by The Jewish Chronicle, which accused him of associating with Holocaust deniers. He previously has denied a link to Paul Eisen, a Holocaust denier.

 

In a front-page editorial, the newspaper said it was certain it spoke for the vast majority of British Jews in "expressing deep foreboding at the prospect of Mr Corbyn’s election as Labour leader".

 

According to a pamphlet for the Fabian Society published yesterday, they would be pitted against the party’s representatives in Westminster, many of whom are hostile to his objectives.

 

Mr Corbyn used the pamphlet to set out his plans for running the Labour Party, making it a priority to swell the number of new members further beyond the 299,755 announced on Wednesday.

 

He also wants to change the membership fees structure to convert registered supporters and affiliates — the new Corbyn army — into full members with voting rights on the direction of the party. He will then hold regular votes on policy issues and organisational changes with a newly expanded left-wing membership, most of which he is likely to win, while arguing that MPs who oppose him are part of an out-of-touch Westminster bubble. "Labour has drifted into a presidential model of politics in which the leader and their office comes up with all the policies. I want to change that," Mr Corbyn wrote.

 

"In the past when Labour party conference voted for something the leadership didn’t like, senior MPs were wheeled out to tell the press that it would be ignored. That alienates our support and undermines our principles as a democratic socialist party. That top-down behaviour has to end."

 

Mr Corbyn also hopes to persuade figures from unions to the left of Labour to rejoin.

 

 

 

Jeremy Corbyn will 'sack' Bank of England governor if they refuse to print free money

 

Richard Murphy, architect of so-called 'Corbynomics', issues warning to Bank of England over Jeremy Corbyn's quantitative easing plans

 

By Michael Wilkinson, Political Correspondent

 

10:37AM BST 24 Aug 2015

 

Jeremy Corbyn could sack the Bank of England governor if they refused to print money to fund his spending projects, the leftwinger's economic adviser has suggested.

 

Richard Murphy, who is seen as the architect of Mr Corbyn's economic agenda, the so-called 'Corbynomics', warned that there was "no such thing" as an independent Bank of England.

 

He said that if Mr Corbyn's government wanted to use the cheap money from the Bank any governor who refused to carry out the plan for "people's quantitative easing" should be "on the next plane" out of Britain.

 

Tax expert Richard MurphyRichard Murphy is Jeremy Corbyn's economics guru

 

Under the proposal, Mr Corbyn would create a national investment bank to fund infrastructure projects which would issue debt to be bought by the Bank of England - effectively meaning the Bank would fund government spending on housing, energy, transport and other projects.

 

Mr Murphy said current governor Mark Carney has said it would be possible but other experts have warned the Labour leadership frontrunner’s plans would fall foul of EU laws intended to avoid runaway inflation.

 

Asked if Mr Corbyn would sack a Bank governor who refused to carry out the plans, Mr Murphy told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Bank of England governors are responsible to democratically elected politicians. If we have governors who think they are over and above the rule of democratically elected politicians, then I'm afraid to say, yes they should be on the next plane."

 

Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney speaks during a news conference upon the release of the Monetary Policy Report in Ottawa October 26, 2011Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, says quantitative easing is possible  Photo: Reuters

 

"There is no such thing as Bank of England independence, there never has been, it's a fiasco put together, a facade created to appease people to put forward a presentation of something that doesn't exist."

 

Mr Murphy also suggested that the Bank takes its cues on setting interest rates from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, which he claimed was in fact influenced by the Chancellor because it is based in the Treasury.

 

He said: "The Office for Budget Responsibility has issued a forecast which says at the end of this year it is expecting interest rates to rise.

 

"If you were sitting on the Monetary Policy Committee, might you take that as some steer that the Chancellor would be happy if that's what you did?"

 

 

 

Politics Upended in Britain and America

 

AUG. 24, 2015

 

Roger Cohen

 

Very little appears to link Jeremy Corbyn, who has emerged from nowhere to become the favorite to lead the British Labour Party, with Donald Trump, the equally surprising front-runner for the Republican nomination.

 

Corbyn is a slight, quiet, parsimonious radical leftist who is anti-money, anti-meat, anti-war and pro-nationalization of banks. He has, to put it mildly, deep misgivings about America. Trump is a large, loud, self-promoting businessman who is pro-money, pro-market and wants to "Make America Great Again" by unleashing its animal entrepreneurial spirit and putting the red meat back in political discourse clogged by political correctness. He has spoken approvingly of John Bolton, hawk of neocon hawks among Republican foreign policy officials.

 

But the two men do have a couple of things in common. Both opposed the Iraq war (Trump thought Mexico might be a more sensible target). More importantly, both speak their minds at a time when a lot of people in Britain and the United States have had it with politics as usual and the mealy-mouthed, finger-to-the-wind calibration of the political persona.

 

Rupert Murdoch recently tweeted that Corbyn would probably triumph in the Labour Party leadership election for this reason: "Corbyn increasingly likely Labor winner. Seems only candidate who believes anything, right or wrong." The result is to be announced Sept. 12 (elections in Britain are not multiyear affairs as in the United States).

 

This is a season of radical discontent. People believe the system is rigged. They have good reason. Rigged to favor the super-rich, rigged to accentuate inequality, rigged to hide huge increases in the cost of living, rigged to buy elections, rigged to put off retirement, rigged to eviscerate pensions, rigged to export jobs, rigged to sabotage equal opportunity, rigged to hurt the middle class and minorities and the poor. Increasingly unequal societies have spawned anger, an unsurprising development. The anger is diffuse, in search of somebody to articulate it, preferably in short declarative sentences.

 

It’s the same anger, in many respects, that produced the leftist Syriza government in Greece and the rise of the rightist National Front in France. Enter Corbyn and Trump and, of course, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

 

Corbyn has been described as "attractive in a world-weary old sea-dog sort of way." He’s against everything Tony Blair stood for: the slick, centrist makeover of the Labour Party that allowed it to win election after election, and also allowed Peter Mandelson, a guru of New Labour, to declare that he was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich." Corbyn wants to go back to socialism. So does Sanders, a socialist in America who is drawing huge crowds.

 

As my colleague Jason Horowitz wrote of Sanders: "For someone who has always had a sweepingly macro, if not entirely Marxist, critique of America, having the largest crowds of the election cheering each description of income inequality, and each proposal to eradicate it, amounts to the validation of a career spent in relative obscurity. Mr. Sanders’s grumpy demeanor, his outsider status and his suspicion of all things ‘feel good’ are part of the attraction."

 

On both sides of the Atlantic, grumpy is good in politics. Outsider is good. Plain talk is good. Trump’s "Deal with it," is the phrase du jour.

 

Sanders wants to expand Social Security, take America to a single-payer European-style national health system, invest massively to restore America’s crumbling infrastructure, make public college tuition free, get rid of "starvation wages" for workers, tax Wall Street trading, end America’s wars, and break up banks that are too big to fail.

 

His message is important. It’s resonating because it precisely reflects the current unease. Hillary Clinton cannot ignore it.

 

Trump is not going away. His base of support is broad. America always wants to dream of some riveting reinvention; he’s captured that longing for now. In polls of Republicans he leads among women, despite his denigration of them; he leads among evangelical Christians; and he leads among the college-educated, not an obvious constituency for his populist anti-immigrant message. He has people nodding their heads, as when he calls his rival Jeb Bush a "low-energy" guy.

 

Corbyn, however, may well be the only one of the three outsiders who wins anything. He’s likely to be the next Labour leader. That would be a disaster.

 

He has almost no support among Labour members of Parliament; no experience of running anything; has called Hamas and Hezbollah "our friends" (but says he was misunderstood); forgot (before remembering) that he’s socialized with a Lebanese extremist who called 9/11 "sweet revenge" and has since been banned from Britain; wants Britain out of NATO; and has a European leftist’s de rigueur view of America as the source of the world’s problems. If he’s chosen, Labour could disintegrate. It certainly won’t win an election.

 

But Corbynmania shows no sign of abating. It’s a new season in politics. Anything could happen, either side of the pond.

 

 

 

18 August 2015 | Nick Everett

 

A flurry of articles in the UK Guardian has poured scorn on Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the leadership of the British Labour Party. The Guardian, a liberal newspaper with an online readership of 30 million worldwide, has provided a platform for the deep angst that has now taken hold within the British establishment.

 

Winning the prize for most ridiculous is columnist Jonathan Jones, who claims to represent "the truly ethical wing of the left". Jones also claims to have once flirted with membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but decided against the idea after a stay at the hostel of the Komsomol – a now defunct Stalinist youth organisation – in Moscow just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 

In an opinion piece on 8 August, Jones asserts that "Marxist ideas", which he holds responsible for "human suffering almost unequalled in the history of the world", have come alive "in some spectral form in Corbyn’s runaway campaign and the enthusiasm of his supporters for a truly socialist Labour party".

 

On 12 August, former PM Tony Blair, who led Britain into the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003, pleaded with Guardian readers, "It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the left, right or centre of the party, whether you used to support me or hate me … please understand the danger we are in".

 

Asserting that UK Labour "is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched, over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below", Blair urged his Labour colleagues to launch "a rugby tackle" to save Labour not only from defeat at the next election, but from a "rout" and "possibly annihilation".

 

Needless to say, Blair’s bleating has fallen on deaf ears, or perhaps driven his audience into Corbyn’s arms. Since Corbyn entered the leadership contest on 15 June, 200,000 voters have either joined Labour, or become supporters eligible to vote in the September poll. A YouGov poll, commissioned by the Times on 11 August, suggests that Corbyn is set to gain 53 percent of first preference votes, 32 percentage points ahead of his next closest rival, Andy Burnham.

 

Blair protégé Liz Kendell, who is trailing a distant last among the four leadership contenders, told the Guardian on 10 August: "We can’t turn back and be the unelectable party of protest. I don’t want to protest. I want to get into power". A Guardian editorial praised Kendell on 14 August for having "shown courage in telling Labour audiences what they don’t want to hear about the need to win Tory votes".

 

A conga line of right wing Blairites – including former home secretary Alan Johnson, former health secretary Alan Miliburn and Labour financier John Mills – has railed against the prospect of a Corbyn victory in the pages of the Guardian. Miliburn warned Guardian readers on 23 July: "I’m afraid history tells a very brutal lesson about what happens when Labour lurches to the left.

 

"You are out of office, not for five years or 10, but for very many years to come. Now, if the Labour party really does have a death wish, then that is where it will go."

 

Former foreign secretary Jack Straw and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, another leadership contender, have described Corbyn’s infrastructure investment plan as "economic illiteracy" and "bad economics".

 

"Printing money year after year to pay for things you can’t afford doesn’t work – and no good Keynesian would ever call for it", Cooper told an audience in Manchester on 13 August. "History shows it hits your currency, hits investment, pushes up inflation and makes it harder not easier to get the sustainable growth in a global economy we need to tackle poverty and support our public services."

 

Cooper’s argument for "sustainable investment" (i.e. ongoing privatisation and squeezing of funding to public services) has won her the Guardian’s backing. A 14 August editorial described her as the only candidate who could unite the party.

 

But Labour voters are not looking for a leader to hold the left in check. Corbyn’s campaign has shaken up British politics and given voice to the discontented. Just as a revolt against austerity has found political expression in Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, albeit within the limitations of electoral politics, "Corbymania" is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise desultory political atmosphere.

 

 

 

Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist who’s tearing Britain’s Labour Party apart, explained

 

Updated by Zack Beauchamp on August 13, 2015, 3:30 p.m. ET

 

The United Kingdom's Labour Party has a big problem, and that problem is named Jeremy Corbyn.

 

This Friday, the Labour Party will send out ballots for its leadership election. Corbyn, a member of Parliament from Islington North, is ahead by pretty large margins in some of the polls. And that's an absolute shock: Corbyn is best known for his radical left-wing views and comments, which include, for example, once referring to "our friends from Hezbollah." Labour's center-left establishment is terrified.

 

"If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader it won’t be a defeat like 1983 or 2015 at the next election. It will mean rout, possibly annihilation," former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair warns in a Guardian op-ed.

 

Yet Corbyn continues to do well in polls. "Corbynmania," as the British press has dubbed it, is sweeping the UK, with Corbyn's poll numbers remaining steady. He very well might still lose — but no one expected him to be doing this well. Here's why Corbyn is where he is, and what it tells us about British politics.

 

Why are people so freaked out about Corbyn?

 

To put it very simply: Corbyn's policy views are way out to the left of the Labour mainstream. Not all of his ideas are extreme, but enough of them are that the party chiefs fear they'd be unelectable if he led the party.

 

The BBC has an excellent rundown of Corbyn's actual policy platform. It includes, among other things, renationalizing Britain's railroad system and energy companies, abolishing tuition for British universities, and imposing rent controls to deal with Britain's affordable housing problem. He's even open to reopening the coal mines that used to be a big part of Britain's economy. It's essentially a throwback to the unreconstructed socialism — the real thing, way beyond Bernie Sanders — of the old-school British Labour Party, which used to be way more into the idea of the government controlling huge sectors of the economy.

 

Some of Corbyn's ideas are more appealing than others. Most importantly, he wants to end Britain's austerity spending cuts, which damaged the UK's recovery from the Great Recession. He also proposes something called "people's quantitative easing," in which the Bank of England would print money to invest in infrastructure projects. This won him praise from the Financial Times's Matthew Klein, who described it as a good way to get money into the hands of ordinary Brits and thus stimulate the economy.

 

Corbyn's positions on foreign policy are more extreme. He wants to withdraw from NATO, abolish the UK's nuclear arsenal, and has suggested that Blair could face a war crimes trial for his role in the Iraq War. His position on Ukraine echoes the Kremlin's: He's written that Russian expansionism "is not unprovoked" and that "the obsession with cold war politics that exercises the Nato and EU leaderships is fueling the crisis."

 

Notoriously, Corbyn once referred to members of Hamas and Hezbollah as "friends," and invited Hamas representatives to speak in Parliament. Here are the comments, from a 2009 speech he gave as a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign:

 

   It will be my pleasure and honor to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I’ve also invited our friends from Hamas to come and speak as well. … So far as I’m concerned, that is absolutely the right function of using Parliamentary facilities.

 

Corbyn has tried to play down the "friends" comments, arguing that he was just saying all parties to a conflict should be involved in peace negotiations. But they play into an all-too-well-founded belief that Corbyn is a real extremist on a number of important policy issues. What happens if he actually wins?

 

No one's actually sure. But the Labour establishment is freaking out: They think a Corbyn victory would render the party unelectable, potentially forever. To understand why, you need to understand the internal ideological fights that have plagued the Labour Party for the past several decades.

 

Around the 1980s, Labour was repeatedly trounced by the Conservatives. Two Labour Party leaders — Tony Blair and Gordon Brown — blamed their party's left-wing platform for its losses, and became the leaders of a movement called New Labour. Think of it like a British equivalent of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council: a force that pulled the party to the political center, particularly on economic issues, in the name of electability.

 

New Labour initially succeeded. It took over the party in 1994, when Blair was elected leader, and controlled the premiership from 1997 to 2010. But in 2010, the brand was retired after the Great Recession led to electoral defeat. However, New Labour's ideological influence is far from gone: Labour's mainstream and its leadership are still far more free market–oriented than they were in 1983, the year a landslide electoral defeat began the shift toward New Labour.

 

Corbyn's socialism, particularly his support for nationalizing chunks of the British economy, is a direct threat to Labour's current centrism. His critics accuse him of wanting to take the party back to the 1980s, or even the 1970s. A spokesperson for Yvette Cooper, a Labour MP and one of three leadership candidates competing against Corbyn, warned of "returning to the dismal days of the 1980s, with internal party warfare and almost two decades of [being in the] opposition."

 

Corbyn's fans, by contrast, see his candidacy as proof that today's Labour Party can finally renounce its centrist pretension and embrace its left-wing roots. "The Corbyn Surge, whatever it is, is a resounding comment on what has become of the worst of New Labour; an unflinching belief that Britain is a 'conservative country' and a 'centre' that must [be] chased not shaped," Neal Lawson writes in the New Statesman.

 

So the question of "what happens" if Corbyn wins really depends on your ideological read of the UK: Do you think Britain is ready for a hard-left Labour party? Or will moving Labour to the left just hand victory to the Conservatives?

 

Why are Labour voters turning to Corbyn?

 

The interesting thing about the Corbyn surge is that Labour, in a recent election, had tried moving to the left, and it got trounced. Its last candidate for prime minister, Ed Miliband, was sometimes called "Red Ed." Labour lost so badly that Miliband was forced to resign, and Conservatives won a surprising victory. So moving the party even further left seems like an odd political strategy.

 

That said, Labour also lost seats to the Scottish National Party, whose platform was distinctly to Labour's left. And in any case, the Corbyn surge is about something deeper than that: It's part of the backlash to austerity happening across Europe, which in the UK has combined with simmering anger at the New Labour years finally boiling over.

 

In more economically distressed countries, such as Greece and Spain, you've seen left-wing parties surge as part of a populist reaction to austerity cuts. The UK's economy has fared much less poorly. But Prime Minister David Cameron's spending cuts have been pretty painful for much of the population. They've also set back the British left's core political project, of expanding the welfare state to protect the vulnerable and promote equality. Cameron is with the Conservative Party, not Labour, but the backlash against his policies may have grown the support for a left-leaning Labour.

 

But Labour has been relatively timid in challenging the austerity cuts. Corbyn represents a real alternative: a full-throated rejection of austerity. That's an appealing vision to a lot of Labour voters frustrated with the direction their party has gone.

 

Indeed, Corbyn appears to have energized a newer wing of the Labour party. "People who joined the Labour party between 2010 and 2015 are more pro-Corbyn, [and] people who have signed up since 2015 are extremely pro-Corbyn," YouGov's Anthony Wells writes. Can he win?

 

It's impossible to say at this point, but the polls seem to indicate he has a serious chance. The most recent poll, from YouGov, shows Corbyn with 53 percent support. The next most popular candidate, Andy Burnham, showed 21 percent support. Corbyn has support from the strongest labor unions, a critical constituency in the Labour leadership race. And UK betting markets have him as the odds-on favorite.

 

"Corbyn's odds have collapsed from 100/1 into 1/2 in the space of a few weeks," Matthew Shaddick, the odds compiler for the Ladbrokes betting agency, told City AM. "It now looks as if the Labour Party is going to deliver the biggest shock result in the history of political betting."

 

But it's far from over. Earlier in the election, polls other than YouGov's have shown Burnham leading. And the party's establishment, which pretty clearly opposes Corbyn, may find some way of blocking him.

 

The structure of the election also could hurt him. The vote uses something called the Alternative Vote, where voters are asked to rank the four candidates in order of preference. If no one gets an outright majority on the first ballot, then the person with the least votes is eliminated, and everyone who voted for that candidate gets their votes shifted to the next candidate. If there's still no majority, the second-to-last candidate gets eliminated, and his or her votes get distributed to the remaining two candidates, where someone has to have a majority.

 

Presumably, most of the people voting for Burnham, Cooper, or Liz Kendall — all more mainstream candidates — will rank Corbyn last. So even if Corbyn gets close to a majority on the first round, the Alternative Vote procedure could end up allowing "anyone but Corbyn" sentiment to carry the day.

 

But whatever happens after ballots go out on Friday, one thing is certain: Jeremy Corbyn represents the biggest ideological threat to the Labour establishment, and by extension the mainstream consensus in British politics, in the past 20 years. That's a really big deal.

 

 

 

What does the "Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon" represent?

 

By Chris Marsden and Julie Hyland

 

15 August 2015

 

British political life is dominated by speculation over whether Jeremy Corbyn will win leadership of the Labour Party.

 

A new "one member, one vote" system for the leadership contest was meant to help consolidate the party’s right-wing course, based on the assumption that the electorate—or, more properly, the narrow social layer to which all the parties pitch their rotten wares—shared the party’s concerns and prejudices. This appears to have backfired.

 

The decision to open up the contest to anyone defining himself as a Labour supporter on payment of just £3, and to allow individual affiliation through the trade unions, has drawn sufficient numbers supporting Corbyn’s anti-austerity appeal to potentially tip the balance in his favour.

 

For the media and most Labour Party parliamentarians, this prospect is regarded as a threat to the neo-liberal agenda pursued by Labour and the entire ruling elite for more than three decades. On what passes for the "left," it has been hailed as opening the way for Labour’s renewal as a party for working people. It is, in fact, neither.

 

What is alternatively described as "Corbyn-mania" and the "Corbyn phenomenon" certainly reflects broader leftward sentiment. The hysterical attacks on the veteran Labour "left" MP as a relic of a failed socialist utopia has little traction, especially among young people who know only too well the failures of capitalism and are looking for an alternative.

 

The more Corbyn comes under attack, the more attractive he becomes to working people. Two interventions by the former Labour prime minister Tony Blair warning against Corbyn’s victory only prompted a surge in applications to back Corbyn. Registered and affiliated supporters now outweigh Labour Party members, though Corbyn records majority support in all three categories.

 

Corbyn is also helped by comparison with the self-serving scoundrels he is contesting—Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. He has a record of voting against the worst excesses of New Labour, has called for Blair to face war crime charges for aiding the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, and was the only leadership candidate to vote against the Conservative government’s latest package of welfare cuts. [...]

 

 

Feminism a Neo-Con Tool

 

by craig on January 7, 2016 6:01 pm in Uncategorized

 

   UPDATE

   Minutes after I posted this article, the ludicrous Jess Phillips published an article in the Guardian which could not have been better designed to prove my thesis. A number of people have posted comments on the Guardian article pointing this out, and they have all been immediately deleted by the Guardian. I just tried it myself and was also deleted. I should be grateful if readers could now also try posting comments there, in order to make a point about censorship on the Guardian.

 

Catching up on a fortnight’s news, I have spent five hours searching in vain for criticism of Simon Danczuk from prominent or even just declared feminists. The Guardian was the obvious place to start, but while they had two articles by feminist writers condemning Chris Gayle’s clumsy attempt to chat up a presenter, their legion of feminist columnists were entirely silent on Danczuk. The only opinion piece was strongly defending him.

 

This is very peculiar. The allegation against Danczuk which is under police investigation – of initiating sex with a sleeping woman – is identical to the worst interpretation of the worst accusation against Julian Assange. The Assange allegation brought literally hundreds, probably thousands of condemnatory articles from feminist writers across the entire range of the mainstream media. I have dug up 57 in the Guardian alone with a simple and far from exhaustive search. In the case of Danczuk I can find nothing, zilch, nada. Not a single feminist peep.

 

The Assange case is not isolated. Tommy Sheridan has been pursuing a lone legal battle against the Murdoch empire for a decade, some of it in prison when the judicial system decided his "perjury" was imprisonable but Andy Coulson’s admitted perjury on the Murdoch side in the same case was not. I personally witnessed in court in Edinburgh last month Tommy Sheridan, with no lawyer (he has no money) arguing against a seven man Murdoch legal team including three QCs, that a letter from the husband of Jackie Bird of BBC Scotland should be admitted in evidence. Bird was working for Murdoch and suggested in his letter that a witness should be "got out of the country" to avoid giving evidence. The bias exhibited by the leading judge I found astonishing beyond belief. I was the only media in the court.

 

Yet even though the Murdoch allegations against Sheridan were of consensual sexual conduct, Sheridan’s fight against Murdoch has been undermined from the start by the massive and concerted attack he has faced from the forces of feminism. Just as the vital messages WikiLeaks and Assange have put out about war crimes, corruption and the relentless state attack on civil liberties have been undermined by the concerted feminist campaign promoting the self-evidently ludicrous claims of sexual offence against Assange.

 

As soon as the radical left pose the slightest threat to the neo-con establishment, an army of feminists can be relied upon to run a concerted campaign to undermine any progress the left wing might make. The attack on Jeremy Corbyn over the makeup of his shadow cabinet was a classic example. It is the first ever gender equal shadow cabinet, but the entire media for a 96 hour period last September ran headline news that the lack of women in the "top" posts was anti-feminist. Every feminist commentator in the UK piled in.

 

Among the obvious dishonesties of this campaign was the fact that Defence, Chancellor, Foreign Affairs and Home Secretary have always been considered the "great offices of State" and the argument only could be made by simply ignoring Defence. The other great irony was the "feminist" attack was led by Blairites like Harman and Cooper, and failed to address the fact that Blair had NO women in any of these posts for a full ten years as Prime Minister.

 

But facts did not matter in deploying the organised feminist lobby against Corbyn.

 

Which is why it is an important test to see what the feminists, both inside and outside the Labour Party, would do when the leading anti-Corbyn rent-a-gob, Simon Danczuk, was alleged to have some attitudes to women that seem very dubious indeed, including forcing an ex-wife into non-consensual s&m and that rape allegation.

 

And the answer is …nothing. Feminists who criticised Assange, Sheridan and Corbyn in droves were utterly silent on the subject of Danczuk. Because the purpose of established and paid feminism is to undermine the left in the service of the neo-cons, not to attack neo-cons like Danczuk.

 

Identity politics has been used to shatter any attempt to campaign for broader social justice for everybody. Instead it becomes about the rights of particular groups, and that is soon morphed into the neo-con language of opportunity. What is needed, modern feminism argues, is not a reduction of the vast gap between rich and poor, but a chance for some women to become Michelle Mone or Ann Gloag. It is not about good conditions for all, but the removal of glass ceilings for high paid feminist journalists or political hacks.

 

Feminism has become the main attack tool in the neo-con ideological arsenal. I am sceptical the concept can be redeemed from this.

 

 

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