AIBU to be glad that Jeremy Corbyn won his seat?...

[Beeinalily]

...even though I'm not remotely left wing? I think he was treated appallingly by the Labour Party.

Yes years later when he was criticised for it. He didn't mention the antisemitism in the forward itself.

YANBA JC is an EXCELLENT constituency MP he was mine in late 90’s. Under his leadership there was an unprecedented number of people joining and like me rejoining the party, especially amongst the young.
The right wing of the Labour party have been witch hunting drumming up excuses and expelling actual socialists for 30+ years now, they were simply overjoyed to have the antisemitism row as another stick to beat JC with, he is right it did exist AND it was hugely overstated as a politicised weapon to attack the left. Left wing members were deselected left right and centre at this election. It’s brilliant that JC stuck up two fingers and ran and won. It sends a message to Starmer that his right wing dominance and failure to oppose the current genocide in GAZA is simply not acceptable to many voters on the left. JC has really sound compassionate equity based socialist ideals, he is thoroughly ideologically driven to campaign for positive change for fairer more equitable society of benefit to all not just a greedy elite. But like another unsuccessful Labour leader before Michael Foot he does not play the media game, refusing all media training and efforts to develop marketable charisma and therefore the right wing owned media absolutely go for him, they actively spent their time looking for ways to destroy his reputation and leadership. His lack lustre leadership in opposition to Brexit didn’t help he lost many on the soft left because of it. But he is STILL here because it’s not a job or career path for JC its’s about a passion for change through excellence representation and holding government to account and it’s about integrity. Our political landscape would be infinitely better if 1/2 our politicians had some of the integrity of JC. Labour didn’t “win” this election, the Tories rightly and thankfully really lost it. When you are elected on LESS overall votes as a party then JC got as leader in 2017 & 2019 simply because you know how to work the disproportional electoral system and concentrate your vote in key areas, you are a successful strategist, but your also completely ignoring the importance of building broad based support across the country to unite people, heal divisions in communities and help us come together for much needed change. The fact that some key Labour figures lost their seats, Rayner & Streeting scraped in with the narrowest of margins and Starmer saw his majority drop by 40/% is actually a damning indictment of people’s faith in this version of Labour, it’s a far clearer sign that people really really didn’t want the tories and Labour were the best option of getting rid of them. Labour needs to start listening to the left not abusing victimising and expelling because scary nasty right wingers are in the rise Reform have 5 MP’s mostly from Tory voters but working class people abandoned Labour before and voted for Brexit because they were so fed up of being completely excluded from the gains of economic growth, it was as always working class impoverished communities who suffered the most and they rebelled because Labour wasn’t providing the answers they wanted and needed to the growing income inequalities and social deprivation experienced, now they are highly likely to defect from Labour once more and vote reform if this government doesn’t make some really robust successful changes improving low incomes and public services asap, it’s a sad fact of political history than despite half of government in the past having PPE degrees like myself they ignored that when there is extreme hardship and austerity and it is disproportionately suffered by those worse of social divisions increase and people look for quick answers easily provided by the simplistic divisive always covertly racist & xenophobic mantras of the far right. If Starmer et al don’t get on with huge radical improvements the right is going to make major headway via reform and things will get a lot darker than they are now. They should be thankful that people like JC have won their seats as a clear message that this scary possibility isn’t underway as yet. It’s also very refreshing to have more independents in this parliament, not easy under FPTP so a clear sign that people are really really fed up.

He really is unlucky isn't he? He's had to also reflect on calling Hamas and Hezbollah friends and come to the conclusion that wasn't the greatest idea either ... you fucking think??

And then he had to reflect on whether complimenting the antisemitic mural was a good idea.

And then again when saying that 'Zionists' didn't understand British irony.

Oops I did it again...

I saw him chummily chatting with the Irish band Kneecap (ffs) a couple of months ago and when one of their members casually referred to October 7th as 'the resistance', he didn't say anything. Of course he didn't. It all washes over him until someone points it out.

The fact that some key Labour figures lost their seats, Rayner & Streeting scraped in with the narrowest of margins and Starmer saw his majority drop by 40/% is actually a damning indictment of people’s faith in this version of Labour

Hmm, how much scrutiny do you really want of the dirty campaigns run against people like Jess Phillips and Wes Streeting involving tyre slashing, intimidation, deep fakes and blatant lies? (I'm assuming that you meant Phillips rather than Rayner, btw, who resoundingly won her seat). That certainly exposes a nasty underbelly on the side of some of these 'independents' (Phillips' rival was actually standing for Galloway's workers party).

That's unfair regarding Leanne Mohammed, who almost unseated Wes Streeting. Her campaign was clean and decent. She seems genuinely lovely.
Re Jess Phillips - I don't have much time for her (she was awful to Jeremy Corbyn among other things) but nonetheless the campaign opposing her was terrible. I certainly agree with you there. The scenes when she delivered her speech were horrific.
They're two very different candidates - Leanne Mohammed stood as a local independent. The guy opposing Jess Phillips (don't know his name) was a candidate for Workers Party of Britain, George Galloway's outfit. I have no time for George Galloway. I can't bear it when people put him in the same camp as Jeremy Corbyn. They're two very different men.
So, anyway, the point is, to compare Leanne Mohammed's campaign with that in Jess Phillips' seat isn't fair. They were totally different.
I'd have loved it if Wes Streeting had lost his seat, not least because it could save the NHS. Wes Streeting is the embodiment of all that's wrong about the current Labour Party. I fear for our beloved NHS 😔

It was a book about another subject that had one antisemitic reference buried in hundreds of pages of text. Yes, he could have been more careful. No, when I read a book I don't carefully scrutinise every sentence in the light of things my crystall ball tells me I'm going to be accused of years later.

Corbyn was the one who stayed behind talking to the veterans at the cenotaph.

@TryingToSeeTheFunnySide I don't know anything about Leanne Mohamad's campaign but there certainly was a dirty campaign against Wes Streeting.

"It was just hours before the polls opened for the UK’s general election when I noticed the audio clip going viral on the social media site X.
It sounded like Labour politician Wes Streeting using foul and abusive language towards a member of the public who disagreed with him over the war in Gaza.
There were replies from other accounts, apparently reacting in shock: “Is this real???????”
It wasn’t. The incident never happened."

(In the clip, which appears to be of an encounter with traffic noise in the background, a voice asks “don’t you give a damn about innocent Palestinians getting killed?” to which a voice sounding like that of Mr Streeting is heard to reply: “No, I fucking don’t, now fuck off you little c**t.")

"The image, which appears to be taped to an advertising board at a bus stop “in Redbridge” reads in big red letters seemingly in reference to the war in Gaza – “permanent ceasefire?”
Below is an image of Streeting in a suit, handcuffed and with two strips of grey tape across his mouth. Writing beneath says – “a hostage to fortune”."

"The Labour Party has been targeted with a poster claiming a vote for Labour is a “vote for genocide” in Wes Streeting’s east London constituency.
A poster taped to a bus stop near Gants Hill tube station in Ilford depicted a box on a ballot paper with a black cross in it alongside the phrase “Vote for genocide, Vote Labour”.
It is unclear who was responsible for putting up the poster, which was displayed on the opposite side of the road to a Jewish bakery."

"Analysis from the Evening Standard has shown that a widely circulated video of Streeting appearing to insult Diane Abbott on an episode of BBC Politics Live is a fake.
The clip shows a social media post from Abbott on screen, over which a man’s voice – implied to be Streeting – can be heard saying the words ‘silly woman’.
While Streeting did appear on the June 3 edition of the show, those two words were not said in the actual recording, as the Evening Standardevidenced from iPlayer"

Leanne Mohamad said that she was standing on a platform that tapped into the anger against his stance on Gaza, so I suspect that these things were done in support of her.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/02/14/labour-wes-streeting-target-vote-for-genocide-poster-muslim/
https://fullfact.org/election-2024/wes-streeting-audio-clip-palestine/
https://labourlist.org/2024/06/labour-party-deepfake-video-streeting-akehurst/
https://www.ilfordrecorder.co.uk/news/24141793.ilford-north-mp-wes-streeting-hits-hostage-poster/

He is now what he always should have been an independent

Five years utterly wasted under his leadership, he led an ineffectual opposition and the shameful antisemitism that was largely ignored by himself

@noblegiraffe I can verify that Leanne Mohammed herself played totally by the book.
Wes Streeting is a Tory in all but name. He once called Jeremy Corbyn senile in the commons. That's ageism.
I don't have any interest in reading nonsense in the Torygraph

Wes Streeting is a Tory

how fascinating

As good/bad as. They don't call him 'the heir to Blair' for nothing.

Very illuminating response.

How so?
Most on the left are worried about Wes Streeting.
Most on the left don't trust the right-wing media.
I myself am quite young, but I think calling a senior politician and excellent constituency MP of several decades 'senile' in full view of colleagues and the public, is disrespectful at best; downright offensive and prejudiced at worst.
Nothing surprising about my post 😊
I actually do sometimes read articles in the right-wing press to see what's being said. But the Telegraph in particular is quite scary.
I didn't canvas for Leanne, but I know that New Green Deal people, who canvassed for progressive candidates everywhere did. They wouldn't have done so if it was in any way an aggressive campaign. They're lovely gentle people 😊

Absolutely West Streeting was wrong calling Jeremy Corbyn senile, he apologised but it should not have happened.

The left of the party are worried about Labour being in power full stop they started Friday morning. This shall always be the case when we have a Labour government. We shall hear that Labour are no longer left enough, supporters are red Tories, calls of abandoning real Labour policies, being secret Tories etc etc

The country does not want a left party, how many times do voters have to reject this. Voters will not vote for a left wing Labour party they will only vote for a centre left party to be in power and you can only make changes once you are in power. Its something the left of the party can not seem to grasp

And I am well aware of the number of voters in the previous elections being higher but the point is they were also much higher for the Tories there was a much larger turn out.

Yes meant Phillips. And two things can be true at the same time, the intimidation she faced was disgusting, there are a lot of people who want to attack her having made links with her funding and pro Israeli groups. Of course this isn’t acceptable. Some of the independents running were clearly without integrity. That is not the case all over there were many excellent independent socialists and social democrats challenging the mantra of Labour that itself does feck all to challenge the status quo.

Absolutely completely agree with all of this well said!

Well if there was only one measly bit of antisemitism and he didn't know he would be called out on it, I suppose that makes it okay.

The current Labour party is not ideologically positioned on the centre left at all, after 30 years of lecturing in politics I can assure you. The centre ground of British politics shifted so far to the right during the advent of neo-liberalism under Thatcher and Major that the Labour party shifted seismically on response. When you fully accept a neoliberal economic structure, are not interested in really tackling income inequalities though substantial redistributive taxation aimed at curtailing the hoarding of wealth of the elite and when you are not committed to the renationalising of public services in the interests of public accountability and value, when you fail to even want to challenge the dominant ideology that keeps the current exploitative extractive and abusive economic system intact with no substantive challenge you are very far from centre left. This is a simple fact of understanding the central tenets of socialism, European style social democracy, liberalism, conservatism and fascism and the subsequent public policy strategies they inevitably lead to. The fact in Scandinavian style social democratic governments are centre left and way to the left of the Labour party currently under Starmer or how it was under Blair. The other fact is that the overwhelming majority of the British public do not understand the complexities of our political system, what ideologies argue for in practice in terms of public policy or how much manipulation and bias there is through the mainstream media through which they learn what they think they know. They therefor think they don’t want left wing governments because they have been conditioned by an inherently right wing dominated and elitist owned media leading and influencing debate which inflames fears about radical left wing perspectives and economic and social policies, without themselves really understanding substantively what these actually entail. And yet when the same public are asked about what kind of policies they support without knowing whether they fell into a left/right party political position study after study over decades has show that a majority of people actually do support the kind of policies that the left maintains its position on and argues for. The right wing media have committed a huge amount of time and resources over the past 40 years to demonising the left as part of its political agenda in order to corrupt the mass of the electorate’s perception of left wing politics. Most people then who have not formally studied in this area or do not come from a politicised left leaning background end up completely uninformed and confused as to what a left wing political project would actually entail and yet they say yes to those very policies it advocates for when they are asked what they support. The right wing media is a huge billionaire supported vested interest with a very clear agenda which it is winning because the type of critical thinking needed to cut through it is not taught in the mainstream. The current Labour Party sits at best in the centre ground there is nothing remotely left about it nor and not even close to the centre left of Scandinavian social democratic parties and governments. The fact is neo-liberalism completely reoriented the central locus of politics to the right and now people inaccurately perceive parties who sit to the left of that locus as “left-wing” but in actual fact you need to evaluate their ideological position, policy manifestos and track records in order to make that assessment, in which case Labour absolutely does not come out as Centre Left. Its currently more right wing that the Conservatives were in the 1970’s!

@TryingToSeeTheFunnySide it's illuminating because I posted 5 links from a variety of sources and your response was 'I don't have any interest in reading nonsense in the Torygraph'

So dismissing what I posted about the dirty campaign against Wes Streeting as 'nonsense' without even looking at it properly, and suggesting it's Tory because it doesn't suit you. One of the sources was a fact checker.

Enjoy your echo chamber.

Would you prefer centre left for the UK

….politics world wide shifts in position even in Scandenavia