JOE BIDEN, JEREMY CORBYN & THE US ELECTION: MY ARC DIGITAL ESSAY

I did another piece for Arc Digital on Joe Biden's claim that being 'too far' left cost Labour
the election in the UK and would cost Democrats the election in the US. Is he right? Use this link
and you can read the article on Medium without enrolling....
https://arcdigital.media/american-corbyns-does-labours-electoral-catastrophe-disqualify-the-american-left-ecc7033ad70?source=friends_link&sk=05b48ee257a3c1b585e350a07c78f4f7

MAYDAY, MAYDAY! BRITISH ELECTIONS & THOSE WHO DON'T REMEMBER HISTORY....AGAIN

Listening on BBC Radio 4's Today programme to Theresa May's rationalizations for calling a snap election, it was obvious that they were so transparently false even young Tory boss Nick Robinson had trouble remaining properly obsequious. The election does two things for Mrs. T2.

First is to establish a crucial cushion against her own party's far right wing. Realistically, the EU could give a shit about the size of her majority; they hold the cards in their divorce negotiation regardless of what British voters say or think. Once again Tory party divisions dictate British national policy disastrously.

Second, a 2017 election means the next vote won't come in the immediate aftermath, but some three years after, May's inevitable failure to deliver a positive result in those Brexit divorce talks. Win or lose, she's in the clear, and she will anyway attempt to blame her failure on the'saboteurs', in chilling echo of Mrs T1's 'enemy within'. She made a feeble effort to distance herself from the rhetoric of the rabid Tory press, but even young Nick was able to see through that.

And while elections are always a risk, with Corbyn 'leading' Labour, she knows she can cripple them, and the rest of the opposition, for a generation, or at least a few electoral cycles, and that's just icing on the red white and blue British gateau.

AFTER THE LABOUR ELECTIONS: WHAT THE FUTURE SHOULD HOLD

Listening to predictions and reactions from the Labour leadership election, I've been impressed by the many weasel words explaining how British 'democracy' needs an effective opposition. Nowhere in any of those discussions did I hear anyone even mention that the current government, with its Parliamentary majority, commanded the support of 36% of the voters in the last general election, and that the other 64% opposed them.

Look (to borrow a form of address oozing sincerity from the former Labour PM): Bliar won three elections because he could be sure of the Scottish vote and the vote (albeit decreasing in each election) from the Northern Industrial Wasteland (aka Powerhouse), and then he was able to draw away some (again, a decreasing number) of the disaffected voters in the otherwise solidly Tory English south.

Neither Brown nor Miliband could hold that English vote, and lost (Brown) the NIW and ('Red' Ed) the Scots. Labour's first task now, regardless of the leader, has to be to win back their core support from the SNP and UKIP/Tories, not try to become a more serious LDP. There is little middle ground available for them in southern England outside the cities.

They have to do this with policy first, presented in unity, fighting the Tories on areas where they should be vulnerable: offshore wealth, Brexit, the NHS, schools. By time the next fixed election comes (thanks again Nick Clegg for that one), to be fought on newly gerrymandered boundaries, and  without proportional representation (thanks again Nick Clegg for that one) Labour ought to know not only if they are in with a chance, but also who should lead them....

THE SELF DESTRUCTION OF THE LABOUR PARTY

I don't care whether youre a Corbynista, Blairite, Millibandito, Blue Labour or whatever. The UK has just gone through the most turbulent three weeks in 70 years. 52% of the country has voted to leave the European Union; the leaders who lied and played the fear card to engineer that triumph have jumped ship; the prime minister who gave the country a referendum as the price of placating his own MPs and holding off a UKIP who gained at Labour's expense, not his, is gone.

There is a new Tory prime minister, chosen by a handful of grandees; there is the most frighteningly ideological and inept cabinet I have seen in my 40 years in Britain. In the face of all this, the Labour party has been silent, not even a squeaking opposition, being more concerned with ousting their own leader and marginalising their members who elected him. This is a godsend to the largely Tory media, who play Labour's internal division up above all the other problems, but don't blame the media for their biases, they are something you have to live with.

Labour achieved power under Tony Blair with a Bill Clintonesque third-way strategy based on Clinton's core precept: where else do they have to go? Thus you focus your appeal on the undecideds, swing voters, independents, marginal seats, and you treat your core voters with a kinder gentler version of the abandonment of a conservative government. Which worked until Labour's tepid response to six years of austerity under the Liberal Democrat/Tory coalition allowed the SNP and UKIP to give those ignored voters alternatives. Tory scare mongering on immigration worked a treat in pushing Labour votes to UKIP in England and letting Tories win parliamentary majority with barely more than 1/3 of vote, but it invited the no vote that won the Brexit referendum.

Labour has been waiting for someone to stand up and marshal the opposition to what was going on--offer the country a viable alternative, help the country make sense of the disaster that is going on. Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader by party members who saw that traditional Labour values and policies were an answer, but, villfied in the press as a nutter and abandoned by many in his party as a, uh, socialist, he was not the leader to marshal the sane part of the country, not the person who could gather opposition and perhaps force a vote of no-confidence once the public schoolboys (and girls) have finished ruining the country they see by right as their playground.

My guess is a figure who was able to do that with any level of articulation and energy might have been chosen Labour leader by acclimation once the dust had settled. If a majority of the parliamentary party and their big donors wanted Corbyn out, the sensible way to do it would be for someone to step up and lead opposition to Tories, not opposition to Corbyn. Filling the gulf of leadership for the country outside Westminster, and indeed outside the party, would make the point self-evident. But who stepped forward? Who presented a vision of anything for the country, anything except a party not led by Corbyn? 

By abrogating their responsibility to the country in a cheap effort to re-establish their control, they have moved Labour closer to a split, and nullified themselves not only as an opposition but as a potential government. The lesson of the Gang Of Four in 1982 was two more election wins for Thatcher, and political wilderness until Nick Clegg's craven deal with Offshore Dave Cameron. Putting self before party, putting party before country, and ignoring the best opportunity to present a united face of sanity in the wake of the past three weeks of chaos was the only sane thing to do, and the opportunity has been pissed away. Like a pack of rabid hyenas they turned on themselves, while a lame sheep strolled past uneaten. Shame on you, Labour.

NOTE: I don't often use this platform for political party broadcasts, but this morning I wrote a quick angry rant on Facebook, & it stayed with me through the day. So I've filled out the thoughts a little, trying hard not to let my despair poke through too far. 

ANTI-SEMITISM AND ELECTION POLITICS: THE LABOUR 'SCANDAL'

The current conflagration over 'anti-semitism' in the Labour party has been particularly well-timed, and incredibly effective. I say well-timed because it came, as if by coincidence, just as polls revealed the great distance by which Zac Goldsmith, the Etonian candidate for mayor of London, trailed Sadiq Khan in the polls, and also just after polls showed, for the first time, Labour's Jeremy Corbyn with a higher approval rating than David Cameron. I say effective because it has transformed the debate and worked in favour of three interests: the Tories, with Cameron on the attack and Goldsmith's mayoral campaign thrown a lifeline; the anti-Corbyn New Labour faction of the Labour party; and supporters of Israel. These groups are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Goldsmith had been running a cynically racist campaign against Khan, sending out leaflets targeted to various ethnic groups with names apparently originating in the sub-continent, trying to inflame them against a Moslem candidate. Those always linked Khan with Corbyn. Goldsmith (and his proxies in the Tory Parliamentary party) spent much time playing guilt by association with Khan and any number of Moslem figures, including one, Suliman Gani, who actually canvassed for the Conservatives against Khan in the general election! This was a classic 'Sir' Lynton Crosby campaign: full of Lee Atwater style coded appeals to fear and hatred.

Then came the Naz Shah scandal, as raised by the Tory blogger 'Guido Fawkes'. Shah had retweeted a meme 'calling for the forced transportation of Jews of of the Middle East'. Really? If you bothered to check, the meme actually said that 'an easy solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict' would be to 'relocate Israel into United States', showing a map of the US with Israel seemingly carved out of part of Nebraska and Kansas. The words 'forced transportation' never appear in the text, nor indeed does the word 'repatriation (also used by critics), nor indeed 'Jews'. But the word 'solution' does, which was manna to Cameron, as we shall see later. To anyone who uses the internet, the meme is obviously a comment on Israel's dependence on the United States and the US's unquestioning support for Israel. It is supposed to be a satirical political cartoon; it was originally posted, apparently, by Norman Finkelstein, an author and prominent critic of Israel, and himself the child of Holocaust survivors. You may not agree, you might think it heavy handed, you might not find it clever, but you would have to be either myopic, idiotic, or have another agenda entirely to mis-characterise its point as being to call for the 'forced' move of an entire country to another continent to eliminate a conflict. Taking it literally is like arguing Jonathan Swift supported cannibalism as a cure for famine in Ireland.

Shah had retweeted this meme a couple of years ago. Of course it's theoretically possible she might also have been taking it literally, who knows, she doesn't show much imagination. She has also been highly critical of Israeli policy in the occupied territories, and often combative, once refusing to admit an Israeli child had indeed been killed by Palestinians throwing stones. Now that she is actually an MP, she might have been more cautious. But she issued a seemingly sincere apology to those offended by the meme, which, as we've seen, would require both a very thin skin and an impossible sense of literalness. That should have been the end of that. It might have been, but of course the point was not to embarrass Shah, the point was the agenda outlined above. It was to force all Labour party members to repudiate, disavow and condemn something that they may not have seen and something which was being deliberately misinterpreted out of all proportion. Step forward Ken Livingstone, ready to pour oil onto what was still a simmering flame.

By a seeming coincidence of a sort, there was an extended piece on Goldsmith and Khan by Simon Hattenstone in Saturday's Guardian magazine. It rehashed much of the Goldsmith racism campaign noted above, but it also quoted Livingstone saying it was 'the dirtiest campaign he'd ever witnessed' and also condemning anti-semitism, albeit as practised by the Daily Mail in, uh, 1906. 'Never forget the headline in 1906: "Jews bring crime and disease to Britain"' 'Red' Ken was quoted as saying. 'And it's been selling papers, and unprincipled politicians have been using fear, throughout time immemorial'.

Between Livingstone giving the hyperbolic quote to Hattenstone and the piece appearing, the Naz Shah story had broken, and Livingstone had jumped into the fray. Not content to expose the 'anti-semitic' slurs for what they were, he upped the ante, reminding people that 'Hitler was a Zionist', because the Nazis had done deals with Zionist groups to buy Jews passage to Palestine in the early 1930s. Equating the desperate efforts to free Jews from Germany and the cynical confiscation of Jewish assets by the Nazis to making Hitler a Zionist was indeed insulting, as grossly inaccurate as Guido Fawkes, and incendiary. Kind of like Bibi Netanyahu claiming Hitler got the idea for cremating Jews from the Moslem Mufti of Jerusalem. Livingstone has already got into trouble evoking Nazis with Jewish people, and had he been concerned with the elections or his party you would think he'd think twice and/or keep his mouth shut. Instead Ken gift-wrapped some quotes for neo-con Labour MP John Mann, giving the man who's called Gerald Kaufman an anti-Semite for seeking a balanced solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma, another chance to posture for the cameras and cry anti-Semitism.But John is no doubt an honourable Mann.

Conspiracy theorists might see Livingstone as a Laurence Wainwright type character from A Very British Coup, but the reality seems to be he's halfway down the slope to becoming George Galloway, following a personal agenda increasingly deluded and bent on the self-destruction of all around him. 

Hattenstone's piece was prophetic in describing Lynton Crosby's classic technique called 'the dead cat', whereby the dead cat thrown on the dinner table distracts the guests and becomes all anyone at the table discusses. Crosby borrowed this from Roger Ailes, advisor to Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes and mastermind of 'fair and balanced' Fox News. Sure enough, Labour's 'anti-semitism' led all the papers and bulletins, none of whom bothered to walk back the cat on the table and even look at, much less analyse, the original cartoon Shah retweeted. The result was that after all the anti-Semite smoke and mirrors, the nastiest Tory slur yet against Sadiq Khan, led by the Evening Standard, attracted no negative attention at all. Of course I need to point out that, as Hattenstone's piece made ironically clear, Crosby had nothing to do with Goldsmith's campaign, which is being run by Mark Fullbrook, the 'F' in the political consultants CTF Partners. That's CTF where the 'C' stands for, um, Crosby.

Even more tellingly, this brilliant political riposte bore the classic hallmarks of another Atwater disciple: Karl Rove, who ran the Bush campaigns. Rove's signature ploy was to turn his opponent's strength, and his candidate's weakness, against him. Shrub Bush is an elitist preppie who was eased through the Ivy League, the armed force  and business by family connections? Call him 'Dubya' like a good ol boy and make Al Gore a 'liar'. Bush dodged the draft and went AWOL on his cushy National Guard gig? John Kerry's a decorated war hero who turned against the Vietnam War? 'Swift Boat' Kerry, again make him a 'liar', question his 'patriotism'.

So consider: you've got a campaign based on coded racism, trying to stir up racial fear and hatred. You're accusing your Moslem opponent of at least supporting terrorists. You're fading fast in the polls.  Jeremy Hunt's lust to privatise the NHS and Dave Cameron's spinelessness over Europe are killing you. What do you do? You follow Karl Rove's precepts and make the entire Labour party anti-semitic villains, using something you can twist out of context to make it appear indefensible. . Make the Labour Party the story, accuse THEM of racism, of antisemitism, the most heinous racism of the past century, turn the attention to them. Which three-quarters of the media will do with glee, because they make no pretense of balance, and the other quarter will do because Labour, unlike the Tories in power, are powerless to affect them; they make a pretense of balance, but they fear more than anything being branded fellow-travellers.

Here's a moment from Prime Minister's question time: 'The Prime Minister told the Commons: "Anti-Semitism is racism and we should call it out and fight it wherever we see it. The fact that we have got a Labour Member of Parliament with the Labour whip who made remarks about the transportation of people from Israel to America and talked about a 'solution' is quite extraordinary." No one will ever claim Cameron's duff at following a script.

Beyond the utter ruthlessness of the Tory party and its press, there's another bonus in this strategy: you can conflate any criticism of Israel or Zionism with anti-Semitism, a conflation which becomes more pronounced as Israel's policies become harsher and harsher in the occupied territories. Indeed, even the leader of the opposition in the Knesset has just supported the building of more walls around illegal settlements. We've seen that referring to the walling off of Palestinians as part of an 'apartheid' state has got Jimmy Carter called an anti-semite. In the midst of the US presidential primaries, where walls are also an issue,  Hillary Clinton used coded language to accuse Bernie Sanders, a Jew, of anti-Semitism, because he won't join her whole-hearted doubling-down in backing Netanyahu. And no one in America, while castigating Donald Trump's Mexican wall, has dared to even mention, much less compare it to, the one in Israel.

It's here a perfect storm meets, the neo-cons and neo-libs looking to support Israel and marginalize the left get both wishes in one package. But there is a real danger here in using antisemitism to try and remove issues from debate. One leading neo-lib columnist attacked the BBC for left-wing politically correct bias for calling ISIS 'so-called Islamic state'. He conveniently forgot how that it was David Cameron himself who complained about BBC's calling ISIS 'Islamic State' on the grounds it gave them 'credibility'. It was on his command to jump, not some secret left-wing strategy, that the BBC rebranded ISIS 'so-called' Islamic state.

Extremism in the defense of Israel knows no limits. Using the anti-semitic slur with reckless abandon cheapens it, dilutes it, and renders it harder to deal with real anti-semitism, and with other forms of real racism. Another internet meme went around last week, quoting Dr. Hajo Meyer, a physicist and Holocaust survivor who died in 2014, around the time Naz Shah was retweeting that now-notorious meme. He said 'an anti-Semite used to be a person who disliked Jews. Now it is a person who Jews dislike'. In this context, Dr. Meyer doesn't seem to have anticipated the British right.