Yesterday, on a day when a government minister was under intense pressure, the lab party decided to sacrifice that for a swing at the left. This, for any of you still giving Sir Haircut the benefit of the doubt, is a sign of things to come.

It tells you many things:
1) there are ppl within the lab party not yet done with using antisemitism for factional purposes

2) that the new labour leadership is just as reactive under pressure as the previous leadership it criticised for the same flaw

3) the new lab leadership is terrified to the point of panic at the thought of bad press

4) the new lab leadership has (wrongly) calculated that there’s enough “Red Wall” & “shy Tory” vote in the country to make it worth sacrificing its dominance of the ethnic minority vote

5) this current labour leadership operates a hierarchy of racism dependent on proximity to good press. It will only speak out on that which the press accepts as legitimate racism.

6) Labour, the press & sections of wider public are still working under the faulty assumption that large swathes of the Jewish vote can be won back to labour merely by changing leader. This complete erasure of 2010-2015, when the sizeable shift in the labour vote obscures any...

possibility of an honest assessment of the relationship between The Labour Party and British Jews. Every attempt has been bungled, and when not bungled has stopped short of venturing where the conversation needs to go.

The idea that a shadow secretary can or should be fired for someone else’s misunderstanding is neither a serious approach to tackling antisemitism nor to leadership. But it’s the kind of decision you reach when you’re more worried about The Telegraph than anti-racism.

Circling back to Point 4 - the centrist leadership Labour Party has no real plan to win back the voters they lost because they seek short term solutions for long term decline. This is a feature not a bug.

One reason Tory/Lib Dem austerity was able to take hold and do so much damage so quickly is because so many of the 13yrs of previous lab govt was grandstanding about policy that only solved problems in the interim, but could be unpicked and scrapped at any time.

The belief these voters, much like the Jewish vote, are clamouring to get back to Labour is illuminating of how centrism views society.

Communities - black, Asian, Jewish, white working class, Scottish, Wales, northern etc - are all fixed demographics with no fluidity of thought or nuance. They are viewed as datasets to be analysised and manipulated as opposed to humans with complex & contradicting thought.

Therefore, if the Jewish community has largely stopped voting labour it stands to reason that they must just be ~waiting~ to come back to labour. It’s very egotistical because it presumes Labour has some predetermined right to these voters, and they can be “won” back.

There’s no room for the analysis that maybe communities change and grow. The idea that maybe British Jews are actually happy enough to be Tory voters, or that the Red Wall voters want something that is incompatible with the city voters, is never considered.

Labour, currently, face multiple issues that are the result of long term decline. Once again, centrists are seeking short term solutions. Purging the left might give British Jews more comfort to vote labour in 2024, but you still need to address why they abandoned the party under

it’s first Jewish leader. You can appeal to the red wall with overtures to dogwhistle anti-immigration and a “strong state” push, but you will still have to address that the NRS social grades is no longer able to properly analyse the class standing of someone who works as an...

electrician on £50-60k a year in Redcar has more in common with a London banker than your Deliveroo delivery guy, yet both are classified as “working class”.

Centrism offers no solutions to the overlaps and nuances of society because it simply does not see them, can not see them and has no real desire *to* see them unless it has an electoral advantage. Which is how it lost all its voters to begin with.

And it’s how Starmer will lose city seats to Tories in 2024.

Ugh so many typos and accidentally’d verbs this is why I asked you all to wean me off threads and into articles