Don't Mention The War
Daniel Finkelstein writing in The Times captures brilliantly, if you ask me, the chaos of the Labour leadership in its efforts to deal with charges of antisemitism within the party's ranks.
As Daniel notes, there was a time when it was almost impossible to be expelled from the Labour Party:
"You could get a programme on Iranian state TV, vote against the party in parliament hundreds of times, and praise Hamas and they’d make you leader."
Not now, of course, and the truth of the matter is that while Comrade Corbyn was a serial Labour rebel for 32 years, the party leader is now much more intolerant of internal dissent than was ever the case under Tony Blair.
Which is very funny, whatever else.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/labour-chaos-would-be-funny-if-it-wasnt-tragic-w3rpkxrhx
Labour’s chaos over antisemitism is shameful
By Daniel Finkelstein - The Times
The arbitrary suspension of one of its most loyal supporters is a sign of the confusion at the heart of the party
Basil Fawlty: Is there something wrong?
German: Will you stop talking about the war?
Fawlty: Me? You started it.
German: We did not!
Fawlty: Yes you did. You invaded Poland.
When I heard last year that someone stood upon a chair in the middle of a Labour Friends of Israel reception and started shouting at the party leader, I immediately wondered if it might have been Michael. I didn’t even know whether he’d been there but it just sounded like the sort of thing he might do.
There are no half measures with Michael Foster, you see.
And now, his latest escapade has seen him suspended from the party and deprived of his right to vote in the leadership election and attend the party conference — a move that, as much as anything else in this past sorry year, shows that Labour has slipped anchor and is drifting, drifting, drifting.
About ten years ago I made a joke in one of my Times football columns about not having an agent, and I got an email from someone saying he represented Chris Evans and Trinny and Susannah and he’d like to represent me. We’d make a TV programme about the Fink Tank, he said, and he’d make me rich and famous.
We haven’t made a TV programme (yet) and I’m not rich and famous (yet) but I did become friends with the author of this unlikely email. Michael Foster is larger than life and always full of his latest charitable project to make life better for others.
He is also deeply political and deeply Labour. He’s always referred to as a Labour donor and so he is. Or was. But this description isn’t entirely fair to him. Before the last election, he gave up much of his entertainment work, moved to Cornwall and threw himself into the election campaign as a parliamentary candidate in a marginal seat. He’s much more than just a donor. He’s a proper Labour activist.
And when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader he did what activists do. He defended him, said things would turn out all right, believed the party would get by. And then came the Friends of Israel reception where the leader turned up but failed to mention either Jews or Israel. And Michael found himself standing on a chair, shouting.
Within a year he also found himself in court, contesting Corbyn’s ability to run for the leadership without proper parliamentary support.
It is this last act that has led, indirectly, to his suspension. While advancing his case in the media he wrote of “Corbyn and his Sturm Abteilung”. In the headline, the newspaper talked of “Jeremy Corbyn and his Nazi stormtroopers”. And that was it. Out he went. Suspended.
And this is an absurd, indeed outrageous, decision.
It is, just to begin with, entirely arbitrary. There was a time when it was almost impossible to be expelled from the Labour Party. You could get a programme on Iranian state TV, vote against the party in parliament hundreds of times, and praise Hamas and they’d make you leader.
Nowadays it seems hard to avoid being excluded. You might have purchased your membership on the wrong date, for instance. Or, like Michael, said the wrong thing without any clear rules about what the right thing is.
Yet even though it’s not remotely apparent what rule Michael broke, I think I can guess what it was that did it. It was the word Nazi. And this would be funny if the whole thing wasn’t so tragic.
When Ken Livingstone was suspended from the Labour Party there was a lot of comment about his inability to avoid mentioning Hitler every time he appeared on television. But this is what I call the Fawlty Towers Fallacy. The problem isn’t that he mentioned the war. It’s what he said about Jews.
Livingstone claimed that “before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews” Hitler supported Zionism. He continues to claim that this is true (which, just to be clear, it is not). With this statement he joined other Corbyn supporters who regularly make comparisons between Israel and Nazism.
The problem is not with mentioning Hitler, or generally using Hitler analogies, or loosely making Hitler comparisons. The problem isn’t being abusive or silly or hyperbolic. The problem is deliberately and systematically equating the Jews with their exterminators. The problem is with implying the Jews are authors of their own misfortune and as bad as their killers.
Israel isn’t being compared to the Nazis because of a want of tact. These people don’t compare Israel to Stalin, or to Pol Pot, or to Kim Il Sung. It is a deliberate and grossly offensive attack tailored specially for the Jews.
It is an attack that tells the survivors of the death camps that they should have learnt lessons from their suffering but haven’t. It is an attack that deliberately minimises Hitler’s genocide by comparing it to the conflict with the Palestinians. It is an attack that outrageously distorts Israeli policy and provides those who want it with a justification for the terrorist murder of Jews. It is shameful and has no place in a progressive party.
Nobody has a clue what they are doing or why they are doing it. The party is flailing
I thought, when suspending Mr Livingstone, that perhaps the Labour Party now appreciated this. Now it is clear they do not. In the grip of the Fawlty Towers Fallacy they haven’t decided to suspend antisemites, they had decided just to suspend anyone who mentions Hitler. Never mind if they are a Jew, whose grandparents were in Dachau concentration camp.
Instead of dealing with hatred of Jews, they are just running around in a panic. And when this leadership election is over, neither the panic nor the antisemitism will have gone away.
The Corbyn supporters who complain of a purge, the moderates who despair that there hasn’t been one, they are both correct. Maybe you are a member, maybe you aren’t; maybe that behaviour is OK, maybe it isn’t; maybe you will be out for ever, maybe we will let you back; maybe you can have a vote, maybe you can’t. Who knows?
Nobody has a clue what they are doing or why they are doing it. The party is flailing. Accuse someone of being a stormtrooper and goodbye, support the IRA and you can be shadow chancellor.
The only question I have for Michael now is an inversion of Groucho Marx’s famous quip. Why would he want to be part of a club that doesn’t want him as a member?
And if a party cannot retain someone like him — enterprising, full hearted, unpredictable, passionate, successful, excitable and exciting — it is doomed. Suspend Michael Foster and you are suspending the Labour Party on a rope.
