Zoe Strimpel
The hard Left are ready for ‘Blame the Jews’ round two
If the far Left despised us before, in the wake of defeat its animosity is even clearer
When Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the party in 2015, as both a Jew and a liberal
I felt queasy with a foreboding that did not abate until 10pm on Thursday, when the exit polls pointed to the wholesale rejection of his nasty, regressive and anti-Semitic version of Labour.
The blazing, unequivocal triumph of the exit poll and the sight of John McDonnell tersely, and not without dignity, agreeing with Andrew Neil that Labour had suffered a total, catastrophic defeat was worth thousands of pounds of therapy.
So was the vision of the courageous and beautiful Countdown star, Rachel Riley – an outspoken critic of Corbynite anti-Semitism, who has been subject to the grimmest abuse – tweeting her joy at the outcome. Her simple message, “Love You Britain”, was perfect.
Yet the sense of having excised a monster wasn’t entirely pleasant
– it was a reminder not only of how low politics had sunk for three long years, but also of how many dreadful Corbynites are still around. True to form, the recriminations of the hard Left began right away.
First they blamed the voters, who had stupidly clung on to the desire to dispatch Brexit and therefore broken party unity. “I’m so, so sorry guys,” tweeted Labour activist and columnist Owen Jones to his 938,000 followers. “Brexit just smashed us. Keeping together an electoral coalition of Remainers and Leavers as the country bitterly divided just became impossible.”
Labour’s bizarre policy of neutrality over Brexit certainly backfired. Driven on by its core elite of metropolitan activists, it opted for spinelessness and flim-flam over clear voter desire and was punished accordingly. But the reflex to blame Brexit voters, many of whom live in former Labour heartlands, rather than to look to itself and its leader for the worst defeat since 1935, was comically on-brand.
And the “so sorry guys, don’t blame us, blame Brexit” simpering soon gave way to the sinister, closed-ranks huddle of leader-worship, with inner circlers refusing to acknowledge the real problem.
When Ed Miliband suffered a defeat less catastrophic than this in 2015, he immediately fell on his sword, vowing to take full responsibility. One might have thought that having brought about the virtual destruction of the Labour Party would have forced even Corbyn and his acolytes to take a similar stand. No such luck: the party faithful demonstrated a pathological refusal to engage in selfreflection and criticism, and the end of the night saw Corbyn still in place as leader, presiding over a period of “reflection”.
One thing the party has been particularly resistant to comprehending is its problem with Jews. If it disregarded and despised us before, then now, in the wake of defeat, its animosity, conspiracy theories and insults are even more pronounced. Ken Livingstone, long-time friend and associate of Corbyn’s, set the tone when he noted that “the Jewish vote wasn’t very helpful”. Sorry, Ken, after years of anti-Jewish vitr vitriol, we do apologise for not having been bee of more electoral use to our tormen tormentors.
The Twitter of w woke young academics and me media types who pride themselves o on nuanced understandings of oppressed minorities was ano another shocking cesspit. Threads like lik those of Cambridge don Pr Priyamvada Gopal, one of the academic eli elite’s most committed woke warriors and Corbyn supporters, were chilling. She peppered her Twitter feed with r retweets of cretinous posts hardly befitt befitting the notice of a semi-literate teena teenager, let alone an expert in postcolo postcolonial theory. Take, for instan instance, her retweet of this post from Nap Napoleon Snow, who wrote: “The elec election taught me we don’t live liv in a democracy, when that tha democracy can be h hijacked by rich press b barons to create a percep perception of a rabid antiSemit Semitic monster from a ma man who’s worked agai against injustice and pov poverty his whole life.” T The esteemed Dr Go Gopal is presumably on one of many who ag agree that honouring th the outcome of a democratic vote by another democratic election is evidence that we “don’t live in a democracy”, which we know because “rich press barons” (code for Jews) have “hijacked” the news (d (ditto), and schemed an and schemed (ditto) to manu manufacture the spectre of anti-Se anti-Semitism in order to besmirch th the good and true Corbyn (and… d ditto). Thankfully there th are people in the civilised Left Le who are wise to all this. The writer Sathnam Sanghera put it brilliantly in the early hou hours of Friday: “Small thing for all the people messaging me, m telling me I egged on a Tory T victory by signing a le letter condemning anti-Semiti anti-Semitism in the Labour Party: YOU enabled it by throwing t the British Jewish community community, and basic morals, under the b bus.”
The prev prevalence of farLeft anti-Se anti-Semitism has been shocking bu but there is sweet satisfaction, at least, in knowing that it has no now – and for years to come – bee been pushed back to the disempow disempowered fringes from whence it cam came.