A Free Left Blog

I must say I have found it a little strange seeing so many 'moderate' Labour MPs and activists getting angry about anti-Semitism in the party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. Where was this anger and upset during two leadership elections which re-elected Corbyn in 2015 and 2016? This sort of stuff is not new. It was well known and covered widely on blogs such as Harry's Place  and Rob Marchant's Centre-Left blog  in 2015. I also wrote about it  on this blog . The right-wing press covered it extensively. Even the Guardian published a piece by James Bloodworth setting out the charge sheet against Corbyn and his many known associations with anti-Semites. But in both elections, as I recall, none of the leadership candidates dared to raise it as a reason not to elect Corbyn as leader. Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham in 2015 and Owen Smith in 2016 instead fought dull, dry campaigns trying to tell the membership what they wanted to hear while talking in...

Labour hasn't won the General Election, but it feels like it has, and has good reason to feel that way. Theresa May called the election believing that she would batter Labour into virtual irrelevance. But circumstances - and the voters - had other ideas. I try to avoid predictions, but like most people I was pretty confident that May would win a decent majority yesterday even after all her wobbles of recent weeks. Her weaknesses certainly have a lot to do with the result. Early on after she called the election she was way ahead of Labour in the polls, but the campaigning has found her out. She is clearly not a happy campaigner and not a people person. Her strengths seem to be in making carefully calibrated and calculated political interventions, as she has done with a handful of impressive speeches on Brexit. During the campaign she came across as wooden and fearful, which isn't a good look for a leader, let alone one running a quasi-presidential campaign saying 'Vote f...

The idea that British foreign policy somehow caused Salman Abedi to go and kill children in Manchester is so stupid that on one level it seems offensive to even discuss it. Yet this idea is strongly present in our public life, promoted by Islamist organisations like CAGE and recycled by countless left-wingers, including – in diluted form – by Jeremy Corbyn in a speech he is to deliver today. As Corbyn will put it, “That assessment in no way reduces the guilt of those who attack our children. Those terrorists will forever be reviled and held to account for their actions.” It is a fair point to make that there is a difference between causation and blame. That basic distinction applies also to immigration, for which we can say runaway housing costs and pressure on public services are partly caused by increased numbers of people but this does not mean that incomers are in any way to blame. The trouble is politically, whereby figures like Corbyn highlighting this link feed...

Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his 6th Symphony partly in reaction to the land mine that fell on the Café de Paris in London during the Second World War, a bomb which killed Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and members of his West Indian Dance Band Orchestra who were performing there. Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 6, played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Roger Norrington Click here t o create a new window for the video. In a reference to the victims of that tragedy of war we hear in the symphony’s third movement the snaky, sinuous but ethereal sound of a saxophone backed up with a pulsing jazz beat. But it is framed by a piece which is tumultuous and angry, broken with a few moments of introspection and a short window of radiant beauty towards the end of the first movement. The fourth and final movement rounds the symphony off with a feeling of drifting and desolation, the strings evoking a gasping, uneven breath dying out to nothingness. ...

One of the curious things about this curious Labour Party conference for me looking from the outside has been the self-congratulation on display. The first thing I saw when I switched on BBC Parliament on Monday was a local party delegate from North London boasting about beating the Lib Dems during the last election, praising how amazing everyone was and saying what a terrible state the economy is in due to austerity. (i.e. ‘We’re great and right, that lot the public preferred over us are wicked and evil’, and ergo said public – except for the righteous denizens of North London – are wicked and evil too). That’s maybe a bit harsh; after all you can’t expect ‘hardworking’ ordinary Labour folk to turn up to a conference in an expensive town like Brighton to moan and be negative and have a crap time telling each other how deluded they are. Nevertheless, the self-congratulation looks a bit off given Labour’s successive election defeats to a Conservative Party which is ...