I read the news today (oh boy) - Current world events | Page 159 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Since the UK media has either completely ignored this news or covered it in an unbelievably dishonest way, I thought I might as well make a post about it – a few days ago, an internal Labour Party report commissioned to investigate the party’s lacklustre response to issues of anti-semitism was leaked. Those who follow UK politics might remember this being a pretty big talking point around the time of the election in December. It was pretty distressing to be a party member with all that going on – the party is supposed to stand against racism and bigotry wherever it can, so the thought that such abhorrent views and stereotypes could persist within our membership is just depressing. 

Anyways, the report was leaked (frustratingly, not in an un-redacted form, so unfortunately the names and details of the victims of anti-semitism have been exposed) and it has ended up unearthing some pretty appalling realities. Firstly, there was/is an anti-semitism problem within the party which went largely unaddressed, and secondly although the leadership under Corbyn did try to take steps to improve its handling, their efforts fell short. We pretty much knew that stuff already. What is more shocking is that the report revealed that a faction to the right of the party of unelected positions working at the party HQ, who were opposed to Corbyn’s leadership right from the beginning, actively worked to sabotage (through creating a “litany of mistakes” designed to obstruct any meaningful solution to the issue) the party’s handling of the anti-semitism issue in order to present the leadership in a bad light and thus be able to oust Corbyn from his spot following a general election defeat. The report confirms that the party failed to act on the majority of anti-semitism complaints, something which was at the time blamed on Corbyn and the left, but was actually largely due to deliberate incompetence – after Jennie Formby took over as general secretary from Iain McNicol (one of the most prominent anti-Corbyn actors involved) in April 2018 there was already a huge backlog of un-dealt with anti-semitism cases, and the report details examples of HQ officials giving inaccurate information to the leader’s office and even outright lying about the progress of dealing with complaints. 

That isn’t all though – it appears this pattern of behaviour runs deeper than the anti-semitism issue, and was indeed a co-ordinated approach to sabotage the party’s electoral chances overall. Leaked WhatsApp messages from a chat containing numerous right-faction staffers at the party HQ show that in the run up to the 2017 election (one in which Labour was less than 2,500 votes away from being able to form a government), they stopped sending the spending budgets for individual constituency campaigns towards a Corbyn ally who was supposed to approve them in order to manipulate funds by taking money away from key marginal seats and diverting it to ensuring that MPs aligned with their faction, like then-deputy leader Tom Watson, were re-elected. As well as diverting funds, they also refused to share information with the leader’s office and engaged in a collective tactic of, in their own words, “coming into the office and doing nothing for a few months”. 

In the run up to the election, the WhatsApp messages show this group complaining every time a poll showed Labour rising in the polls (with one person commenting that a poll showing the party up to 36% made her feel sick) and celebrating polls that showed the Conservatives with a strong lead. Another commenting that she didn’t think she’d be able to “cope with the idea” of Corbyn becoming Prime Minister. After the election result was announced, which had the party’s strongest popular vote share since 1997 and eliminated the Conservative parliamentary majority, members of the group described themselves as in need of counselling and one person said it was “opposite to what [they] had been working towards for the last couple of years”. They put on a brave face to not reveal their disappointment, though, saying that “everybody needs to be very upbeat”, later describing their feelings about the election as “post-traumatic stress”. 

Furthermore, the report shows that amongst these unelected staffers, there was a widespread culture of bullying and personal insults. Apparently referring to the left of the party as ‘Trots’ was endemic to this faction, with them referring to their regular purges of left wing activists as “Trot bashing” and similar. More disgustingly, one person said they hoped a young left-wing activist with documented mental health issues “dies in a fire”, with another one adding tastefully “wish there was a petrol can emoji”. On an occasion where MP Diane Abbot was crying in the buildings toilets after receiving abuse from the press, members of the WhatsApp group posted comments about how Abbot “literally makes me sick” and another posted that they had informed a Sky News reporter of where to find her, no doubt with the hope of extending Abbot’s humiliation. 

As a party member, I’m shocked and disgusted with this behaviour. I want to believe that I’m part of a party based on solidarity and common decency, but the existence of a well organised, high up and extremely nasty faction within the party actively dedicating itself to sabotaging the party’s electoral chances in order to further its own ambitions, is just appalling, especially to consider the incalculable amount of effort that the membership puts into election campaigning every time. I personally spent hours and hours in the freezing cold and rain knocking on doors and speaking to often unfriendly strangers, so I’m sure you can imagine how it feels to know all of that effort was undermined by some smug careerists who apparently couldn’t even stand the thought of their own bloody party winning an election. I voted for Keir Starmer for leader in the hopes that he’d be able to unify the party and improve our standing in the polls, and I’m glad he doesn’t personally belong to this specific faction or ideological subset, but so far I’ve been disappointed with his response to this issue. If he wants to improve, he’d better start acting quickly. 

Blergh, rant over. I would post a link to the report, or offer to share my own copy I have downloaded, but the former has been removed from the UKLabour subreddit and the latter is unfortunately the un-redacted version of the report, which I don’t feel comfortable sharing. You can find an excellent piece describing the behaviour of this faction here, and an Independent article on the whole affair here. There’s also a very comprehensive, though admittedly opinionated overview of the whole issue here. 

To be fair, the DNC essentially did the same thing with Biden, although it was due to his cognitive decline as opposed to encouraging people to do things that can kill them.

As for Kim Jong Un, i have no sympathy for a bloodthirsty dictator who kills anyone who gets in his way. Sadly, his sister likely won’t be any better so North Korea is screwed either way.