True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 344: The Labour Files
Aired: 2024-01-04
Duration: 01:24:22


=== Killing Bully XLs (03:23) ===

[00:00:00]  Should we just start?
[00:00:01]  Get bricks done.
[00:00:02]  Get.
[00:00:03]  Oh, wait.
[00:00:04]  Leave all that in.
[00:00:05]  No.
[00:00:06]  We should.
[00:00:06]  You know what?
[00:00:07]  Here's a 2024 resolution.
[00:00:09]  What?
[00:00:10]  We're killing them fucking bully XLs.
[00:00:13]  What is that?
[00:00:13]  No, don't worry about it.
[00:00:15]  What is up?
[00:00:16]  What's your resolution?
[00:00:17]  Resolution is complete transparency.
[00:00:22]  Complete transparency.
[00:00:28]  In that vein, I have to announce that I will be taking a leave of absence from the podcast.
[00:00:36]  I have my NGO has been contracted by the British government, by Rishi, to go over there.
[00:00:44]  And we are doing the, they are conducting the euthanizations of the bully XLs that they're rolling out this year.
[00:00:51]  I know that a lot of you are probably confused because obviously I run an anti-racist NGO that charges $20,000 to have dinner with me and to have me explain, usually through half-remembered stuff, just about the entire history of racism from the cavemen to now.
[00:01:07]  But we are going over there and we are we're gonna kill those dogs.
[00:01:12]  I mean, I think that's great for you, but I was just talking about like, you know, maybe a little more just transparency of like talking about how we're feeling and what we're doing with the audience.
[00:01:19]  But I think what you're talking about sounds great.
[00:01:22]  I'm really excited to kill those dogs.
[00:01:49]  I'm a little puppy.
[00:01:51]  My name is Bryce.
[00:01:52]  No, that's awful.
[00:01:54]  Fine.
[00:01:55]  I'm a big bully XL.
[00:01:56]  Where's your fucking baby?
[00:01:58]  Wait, so is Billy XL just like big fat fucker?
[00:02:01]  Like, was it big fat dog?
[00:02:03]  Big fat fucker.
[00:02:05]  I think that.
[00:02:06]  Is he just like big boy, big boy season?
[00:02:09]  I think he's just killing big dogs in England.
[00:02:11]  I think it's a bull.
[00:02:12]  I think it's just like a, I don't know, one of them fucking dogs, right?
[00:02:15]  It's like the dog that crackheads have.
[00:02:17]  Big, well, I don't know about that, but big fat, big fat pit bull, right?
[00:02:22]  It's like a big ass pit bull.
[00:02:23]  I think bully XL, to me, bully XL means one of those like inbred dogs that they have.
[00:02:28]  I think a lot of dogs.
[00:02:29]  A lot of dogs are inbred.
[00:02:30]  A lot of dogs are fucking inbred.
[00:02:32]  Difficult to maintain a purebred species and popularity without inbreeding.
[00:02:37]  Is that what purebred means?
[00:02:39]  No.
[00:02:39]  Just like no inbreeding, no.
[00:02:42]  No, because I'm sure that.
[00:02:43]  You're thinking no crossbreeding.
[00:02:45]  No crossbreeding.
[00:02:47]  This gets weird with the dogs.
[00:02:51]  I feel like if they wanted to deter people from having big pit bull, big, big bully pit bulls, what are they called?
[00:03:00]  Bully XLs.
[00:03:02]  Yeah, don't call them bully XL.
[00:03:03]  That sounds cool.
[00:03:04]  It sounds kind of like a streetwear jacket company.
[00:03:08]  It is well, interesting because I feel like the word bully XL brings to mind, first of all, the biggest bully XL of them all, Cartman.
[00:03:17]  Why is everyone dressing like Ali G again?
[00:03:21]  What?
[00:03:22]  What?

=== Fun Board Game Rules (03:49) ===

[00:03:23]  Hi, everyone.
[00:03:24]  My name's Liz.
[00:03:25]  My name's Brace.
[00:03:26]  What does that mean?
[00:03:27]  And we are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:03:30]  And the podcast is called True Non.
[00:03:33]  Hello.
[00:03:34]  Welcome to 2024.
[00:03:36]  It is 2024.
[00:03:37]  Do you feel different?
[00:03:40]  No.
[00:03:40]  Do you?
[00:03:42]  Yeah, weight of the world's on my shoulders.
[00:03:43]  Really?
[00:03:45]  Well, no.
[00:03:47]  But it could be.
[00:03:48]  Maybe it should be.
[00:03:50]  No, you know, I was New Year's Eve was wonderful as usual.
[00:03:53]  You know, I love Bacchanal, usual.
[00:03:59]  Light orgy, obviously, opium and incense.
[00:04:02]  Yeah, both dudes.
[00:04:04]  Incense.
[00:04:05]  You were going to say incest.
[00:04:08]  Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
[00:04:09]  I don't check the fucking.
[00:04:10]  I'm not checking IDs at the door, dude.
[00:04:12]  I mean, it could be anybody in there.
[00:04:14]  It's a puddle.
[00:04:15]  Like, you don't, you don't check the fucking game.
[00:04:18]  No, stop, stop, stop, stop.
[00:04:20]  Crazy wet in that motherfucker.
[00:04:22]  So hello.
[00:04:23]  But no, I went to a party and it was fun.
[00:04:26]  Everyone, as you all should be aware, because you listen with bated breath to all of our announcements, we had an announcement earlier this week, and we're going to reannounce it right now.
[00:04:37]  We are launching a board game.
[00:04:42]  Yes.
[00:04:43]  It's called Storm the Capital.
[00:04:45]  It's based upon the events, upon the event.
[00:04:47]  It's based upon the events.
[00:04:49]  It's based on the events of January 6th, 2021, where you can take the role of one of six patriots trying to, you know, pull over desks, get ballots, take hostages, and fight the police in order to get to the roof with 100 ballots to win the fucking game.
[00:05:07]  Or you can play as the pigs trying to prevent them from doing that by 10, the end of 10 turns.
[00:05:12]  I don't know, I'm like getting into the rules here.
[00:05:14]  When the National Guard tank comes and presumably kills everybody in the building, that is left unclear.
[00:05:20]  It is a semi-complicated board game.
[00:05:23]  I'm going to be honest, I keep saying it's semi-complicated because even though I came up with a lot of rules, I haven't really played other board games.
[00:05:34]  Other people who've played it have, and so it's not like it's like completely made up.
[00:05:40]  So I think it's complicated to me.
[00:05:42]  It's like much more complicated than like Monopoly or something like that.
[00:05:45]  There's a lot of different ways you can play it.
[00:05:47]  There's a lot of different ways you can play it.
[00:05:49]  It's fun.
[00:05:50]  It is fun.
[00:05:51]  It's a board game.
[00:05:52]  It's fun for all people 18 and over, we'll say.
[00:05:57]  And every side of the political spectrum, too.
[00:06:00]  Yeah.
[00:06:01]  Left, right, center, above, below, all different angles that don't exist in this dimension.
[00:06:07]  All are welcome.
[00:06:09]  And it's super fun.
[00:06:10]  We've all played it.
[00:06:11]  We are putting it out with our good friends Creamhound, this exclusive TrueAnon edition, which will be available January 6th.
[00:06:20]  Isn't that cute?
[00:06:21]  2024 at 9 a.m. Pacific, 12 Eastern, only at Truanon.com.
[00:06:31]  That's our website.
[00:06:31]  It's called Truanon.com.
[00:06:33]  You can buy Tranon.
[00:06:34]  Truanon.com.
[00:06:36]  And it's, I think it's going to sell out, you guys.
[00:06:38]  So we really want you to be able to get a copy before it's gone.
[00:06:43]  Much like what?
[00:06:46]  Like the Trump hopes of turning over the election in 2020.
[00:06:51]  But maybe in 2024, new resolution, you can turn the election tides once again and deliver Trump the hundred ballots he needs and win the game and affection of all your friends as you play Storm the Capitol exclusive True Anon edition available January 6th at truanon.com.

=== Talk Pretty to Me (02:30) ===

[00:07:12]  So you like that?
[00:07:14]  Important caveat.
[00:07:15]  You do need three to preferably six friends to play this game with.
[00:07:19]  Yeah.
[00:07:20]  But also, who's using Craigslist anymore?
[00:07:23]  Who's using Craigslist?
[00:07:24]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:07:24]  You know what?
[00:07:25]  That's a good question.
[00:07:26]  Hit the line.
[00:07:27]  Hit the line.
[00:07:28]  If you don't know who to call, hit the line.
[00:07:30]  I saw you on the bus.
[00:07:30]  You look fucking beautiful.
[00:07:33]  Yeah, try it.
[00:07:34]  See what happens.
[00:07:35]  So fucking hot on the board.
[00:07:36]  Hey, want to play this Trump game with me?
[00:07:41]  See who comes by.
[00:07:44]  Cool.
[00:07:44]  Well, yeah, please buy it.
[00:07:48]  We'll link to it in the notes.
[00:07:49]  We'll link to some other things in the notes because we have an interview.
[00:07:52]  There we go.
[00:07:53]  That's a transition.
[00:07:54]  You like that one?
[00:07:55]  I do.
[00:07:56]  Actually, wait, real quick.
[00:07:57]  I have one quick thing that I have to say.
[00:07:59]  A little personal announcement, but it's not personal.
[00:08:01]  And then I'll let you enter the episode because this is our show and we can do what we want, right?
[00:08:06]  Facts.
[00:08:06]  Especially in 2024.
[00:08:10]  I want to give a little shout out to some people who I think are listening, which is the lovely staff at a little bookstore called Labyrinth Books in Princeton, New Jersey, who just recently voted to unionize, which is very cool.
[00:08:22]  And if you are ever in the, I don't know, New Jersey or tri-state or New York area, you should stop on by.
[00:08:32]  It's a great bookstore.
[00:08:34]  Everyone who works there is lovely and extremely helpful and just great to talk to.
[00:08:43]  And I really like them.
[00:08:44]  And I just want to give them a little shout out because it's tough to do that.
[00:08:47]  It's tough to do that, especially right before the holidays.
[00:08:51]  But they all voted unanimously to unionize.
[00:08:56]  And so, yeah, you should stop by the store, support them, tell them good job.
[00:09:01]  And you can say I sent them.
[00:09:04]  A little transparency thing here is a lot of listeners don't know this, but if you go to Liz's house, it is filled with copies of the book Me Talk Pretty Someday.
[00:09:15]  And because Liz loves saying that out loud.
[00:09:17]  She's always like, me talk with you someday, meeting someday.
[00:09:19]  And so I know for a fact that she has dropped about five what they call racks at this now unionized bookstore for copies of Me Talk Pretty Someday.
[00:09:29]  So if you want to talk pretty someday, do exactly what Liz said.
[00:09:33]  But you know how Who Talks Pretty Someday, in fact, most days, but in fact, only some of them, it's British people, one of which we have on this episode.

=== Who Talks Pretty Someday? (03:16) ===

[00:09:43]  To give a little context here, the war on Gaza, Israel's sort of relentless bombing campaign and invasion of the Gaza Strip has affected things far outside just the immediate issue of support for Israel from almost unanimous support from most Western governments.
[00:10:05]  It is a huge issue and it is affecting.
[00:10:08]  I mean, we talked, we had to fucking talk about the president of Harvard, who has, as of, I think, like an hour ago, stepped down.
[00:10:16]  But, you know, it is something that is kind of getting on everything.
[00:10:21]  And as a sort of side consequence of that, it has been a very big flashpoint for a lot of people who might be opposed to left-wing causes in general,
[00:10:35]  who see this as a sort of opening to strike at what they perceive as a vulnerability on the left, because they have learned from basically what happened to Jeremy Corbyn in the post-seven 2017 Labor Party that there are certain issues which you can push and pull and prod on that are very difficult to come back from.
[00:10:56]  And one of those was the so-called labor anti-Semitism crisis, which we have talked about a little bit on this show before.
[00:11:05]  And I think I've actually even shouted out this documentary series.
[00:11:09]  But Al Jazeera's investigative unit did a five-part documentary series called The Labor Files based upon a huge leak of trove of leaked documents, a tranche, a tranche, you might say, of leaked documents from the Labor Party that show that the media narrative that was concocted was, first of all, expertly done, but second of all, a narrative that was concocted.
[00:11:36]  And it has been an event with, as we go into in the episode, a huge fallout that continues to affect things today and would probably even affect maybe what's going on in Gaza this moment.
[00:11:51]  The consequences of this may, it may sound like an internal matter for a Western political party, but it actually has pretty far-reaching consequences.
[00:12:01]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:12:02]  And for whatever reason, I'm going to put my hands up in the air right now, transparently putting my hands up.
[00:12:11]  Not a lot of media has covered Al Jazeera's investigation into this.
[00:12:18]  In fact, it's been basically radio silence from all British media.
[00:12:24]  Yeah, it really has gotten like no traction.
[00:12:27]  Yeah.
[00:12:28]  So do your duty, putting your hand up to your head and not only listen to this interview we have, but watch the documentary.
[00:12:39]  It's fantastic.
[00:12:40]  It's eye-opening.
[00:12:41]  It's disturbing.
[00:12:42]  It's upsetting.
[00:12:43]  All of those great, horrible emotions that you have when you watch a good film.

=== Militant Takeover Shock (15:16) ===

[00:12:59]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Truanon and welcome with our greatest compliments and good tidings to 2024.
[00:13:11]  We have with us today, going back in time in the time machine, which will be also going forward once we get in it to the present day, we have Richard Sanders, producer of Al Jazeera's, or one of the producers of Al Jazeera's The Labor Files,
[00:13:26]  here to talk with us about that series, about specifically the second episode, and more broadly about the claims of anti-Semitism and the great lengths at which certain forces in British society went to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from becoming prime minister.
[00:13:47]  Richard, welcome to the show.
[00:13:49]  Hi, Bryce.
[00:13:50]  Hi, Liz.
[00:13:50]  Thank you for having me.
[00:13:52]  Thanks so much for coming on.
[00:13:54]  You're welcome.
[00:13:55]  So this has, I mean, I think our listeners will be a little, will be pretty familiar with the rise and then, you know, of course, unfortunately, subsequent fall of Jeremy Corbyn, who it seems now in 2024 has been almost erased from British political history and certainly labor history.
[00:14:16]  I mean, I remember it wasn't that long ago, maybe like six, seven, eight months ago.
[00:14:21]  I remember Bryce and I having a conversation where we were like, oh my God, Keir Starmer might actually become prime minister.
[00:14:28]  This is crazy.
[00:14:29]  This was completely unthinkable in, I don't know, 2016, let alone 2017, and then became, unfortunately, more and more thinkable post-2019 and 2020.
[00:14:43]  So here we are, and we should talk about how and why some of Jeremy Corbyn's political career has been kind of erased from history.
[00:14:52]  Because back in 2017, he was an extremely popular politician within the Labour Party.
[00:15:01]  Maybe we can start from there.
[00:15:03]  You can walk us through what happened.
[00:15:05]  And he actually remains a fairly popular politician within the Labour Party, within the Labour Party's shrinking membership.
[00:15:13]  If we go back to the beginning, I mean, you're absolutely right.
[00:15:16]  2017, it has to be remembered, Jeremy Corbyn almost won the general election of 2017.
[00:15:22]  He suddenly deprived the Conservatives of an overall majority.
[00:15:26]  He got the best result the Labour Party had got since Blair.
[00:15:30]  He got a better, even in 2019 when he lost, he got a better result than the Labour Party had in 2010 and 2015, which you would not think to listen to and read British media now.
[00:15:41]  You would think it's just taken as given.
[00:15:43]  He's the greatest catastrophe that ever occurred in British politics.
[00:15:46]  Now, if you go back to the beginning with Corbyn, the obvious parallel with American politics is Bernie Sanders.
[00:15:53]  Now, there's a difference.
[00:15:54]  Firstly, I think Jeremy Corbyn is a slightly more radical politician than Bernie.
[00:16:01]  He's also, in a way, not quite as substantial a figure.
[00:16:06]  It's hard, you have to stress how much of a shock it was when Corbyn won the leadership contest in 2015, in September 2015.
[00:16:15]  Jeremy Corbyn was a man who'd spent his life on the back benches.
[00:16:18]  He'd never held ministerial position.
[00:16:20]  He was a serial rebel.
[00:16:22]  I think he'd voted against the Labour whip, that is the sort of instruction of how the party should vote over 500 times.
[00:16:29]  He was a very passionate constituents AMP, very popular with the constituency that elected him.
[00:16:35]  He was very interested in foreign affairs, had his own sort of causes that he'd always espoused, going all the way back to Chile in 1973, particularly the Palestinian cause.
[00:16:47]  A deeply principled man, but a man who didn't appear ever to have been especially interested in power.
[00:16:53]  Now, the way it happened on what's called the hard left of the Labour Party is they used to take it in turns whenever there was an election for the leadership of the Labour Party.
[00:17:02]  The very small group of them would get together and say, all right, your turn, your turn.
[00:17:07]  I think Jeremy Corbyn rather resents this interpretation, but the story that is told is that it was simply his turn and he stood.
[00:17:15]  Now, you have to get a certain number of votes to even be allowed to run, and he wasn't going to get them.
[00:17:21]  And various politicians of the sort of center of the Labour Party actually proposed him simply for the sake of there being a debate and there being a range of candidates.
[00:17:30]  Now, he clearly tapped into some sort of zeitgeist.
[00:17:34]  And it was a particular moment in politics.
[00:17:36]  It was the moment that threw up Bernie.
[00:17:38]  It was the moment that threw up Trump.
[00:17:40]  It was the moment that would shortly lead to Brexit in Britain.
[00:17:44]  It was a moment of profound discontent with the status quo.
[00:17:48]  And anyone who appeared to be outside of the status quo and appeared to be, quote, authentic, but people were obsessively searching for this thing called authenticity seemed to have some sort of kudos.
[00:18:01]  Anyway, so Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader of the Labour Party.
[00:18:04]  And the entire British establishment is in a state of shock about this because it's sort of unthinkable.
[00:18:11]  And the Labour Party is the Labour Party's parliamentary party and its bureaucracy is in a state of shock.
[00:18:17]  And what happened with the Labour files with our series is we were basically handed the party's server.
[00:18:24]  We had everything.
[00:18:25]  We had the entire internal correspondence of the Labour Party, which is why we made the series.
[00:18:31]  So that's internal documents, chat logs.
[00:18:34]  Yeah, everything.
[00:18:35]  WhatsApp.
[00:18:36]  I mean, everything that it's quite embarrassing for a lot of people.
[00:18:39]  It's pretty embarrassing, particularly the WhatsApp groups.
[00:18:42]  You have this strange phenomenon of government by WhatsApp these days, where people set up these WhatsApp chats and I don't know, somehow think they'll never see the light of day and then they do, which is very embarrassing.
[00:18:54]  I mean, you have these extraordinary chat rooms, which are the senior management of the Labour Party talking about Jeremy Corbyn in the most appalling terms.
[00:19:02]  I mean, I think, you know, what we all know and knew was that the sort of the press, the establishment had it in for Corbyn from the first and went for him.
[00:19:14]  What the documentation revealed was that one of the enormous problem he had was that not just the parliamentary Labour Party, but also the bureaucracy of the Labour Party had it in for him.
[00:19:28]  Now, there's obvious parallels here with Hillary and Bernie in 2016 and with the whole Russia thing.
[00:19:34]  Everyone forgets what it was that the Russian things revealed, which was the party bureaucracy, which should have been impartial, was clearly inclining towards Hillary.
[00:19:44]  Yeah, we had a similar issue with like, you know, a lot of the people, yeah, again, in the party bureaucracy, but with like the superdelegates and these sort of like, I guess a big parallel to kind of like the chicken coup style of trying to take out Corbyn of these internal wranglings and maneuverings to try to try to undercut Bernie, which they didn't end up, well, they needed the superdelegates, but yeah, it's very similar in that way.
[00:20:09]  Yes, and with the difference, of course, that Corbyn did win the leadership election and became the party's leader.
[00:20:15]  And even so, they continued to maneuver against him.
[00:20:18]  One of the great problems Jeremy Corbyn had, and this is one of the great ironies of the story, is that although he's portrayed as this appalling sort of hardline Trotskyist, you couldn't encounter a less ruthless politician.
[00:20:33]  And one of the paradoxes of this whole story is that the people who behave like a ruthless Trotskyist sect are the right of the Labour Party.
[00:20:42]  And Corbyn is just, you know, he's just taken to the cleaners, really.
[00:20:45]  He's just not ready for this level of political ruthlessness.
[00:20:50]  He's assassinated, really.
[00:20:51]  Speaking of ruthless Trotskyite sects, there is a great deal of attention paid by the internal Labour Party bureaucracy and in the first part of the documentary series to militant, which was in the 1980s, the sort of left-wing side of the Labour Party, which took over the Liverpool City Council and was a pretty potent force within the Labour Party before being crushed by the right-wing of the party,
[00:21:20]  which sort of gave birth to, I guess, the modern right of the Labour Party, which, as you guys point out in the documentary, was a pretty formative moment for a lot of people on the right wing of Labour.
[00:21:32]  And when Jeremy Corbyn came in, you know, the Labour Party functions in a very strange way where there's these sort of constituent groups within it.
[00:21:41]  But the broad membership was actually, you know, there was not that many people who were sort of rank and file members of the Labour Party.
[00:21:48]  And one thing that Corbyn did within his leadership is he really opened up membership and a ton of people joined.
[00:21:56]  And something that becomes very clear is that a lot of the people who joined under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership were fans of Jeremy Corbyn, were proponents of his policies.
[00:22:07]  And with that as the backdrop, it became so blindingly obvious that kind of whatever the internal party bureaucracy and their friends in the media and the Tory Party and elsewhere did was they realized that they had a growing force on their hands and they had to tamp it down by any means necessary.
[00:22:26]  Yes, you're right.
[00:22:27]  I mean, bringing in militant is very relevant.
[00:22:33]  You're right.
[00:22:33]  The right of the Labour Party is shaped by memories of militant in the 1980s.
[00:22:38]  Militant was a ruthless Trotskyite sect.
[00:22:42]  And it was fairly small.
[00:22:44]  That was the thing about militant.
[00:22:45]  Now, it was quite clear when you read the internal documentation of the Labour Party that as momentum appeared, momentum being the sort of grassroots movement which supported Corbyn, when that appeared, they simply thought they were seeing militant again.
[00:22:59]  They equated momentum with militant.
[00:23:01]  Now, the huge difference was that momentum was a mass movement, which militant never was.
[00:23:06]  Militant was a sort of activist movement of the type we're sort of more familiar with.
[00:23:11]  And so they had this mass movement.
[00:23:13]  You had this extraordinary surge in the membership of the Labour Party.
[00:23:17]  The Labour Party soared to over half a million members.
[00:23:20]  It became the largest political party in Western Europe.
[00:23:24]  And one of the very sad elements of the whole story is that you have this almost a visceral reaction, certainly from the right of the party, which appears to be very uncomfortable with large numbers of new members and reacts to this surge in membership by seeking to sort of expel or repel as many of them as possible.
[00:23:45]  I mean, again, to look at the American parallel, I'm always very struck with the Democratic Party, which again is, you know, rife with factionalism and where the right tends to be in control.
[00:23:55]  But it seems to me that Democratic Party leaders and candidates never do what Starmer has done and what Blair did before him, which is to define themselves against the left, to positively court the electorate by performatively beating up the left wing of their own party.
[00:24:15]  Now, you know, correct me if I'm wrong.
[00:24:17]  I don't really see Biden or Clinton or people doing that in the same way.
[00:24:24]  I would say they don't really necessarily need to.
[00:24:26]  I mean, the left of the Democratic Party, such as it is, is vanishingly small and extremely disorganized.
[00:24:36]  Extremely disorganized.
[00:24:37]  And the fact is, is that they can pretty much count on those people's votes come election time, no matter what, just by ramping up like the fascism card or something like that.
[00:24:48]  I mean, I will say, like, there is, it's much less organized, I guess, in the way that like, you know, there's these sort of like organizations like Justice Democrats or whatever.
[00:24:59]  But again, they only have like four or five people.
[00:25:02]  You have the squad, though, who are fairly impressive.
[00:25:04]  I mean, the left of the Labour Party is not organized either, which is why it was such a shock when they suddenly took control of the party in 2015.
[00:25:15]  But it is quite extraordinary, and you see it most clearly in the WhatsApp groups, the absolute loathing the right has for the left of the party.
[00:25:26]  And once Corbyn in control was in control, that meant for the leader of the party.
[00:25:31]  And it doesn't seem to occur to people that they, you know, they shouldn't really be drawing their salaries and continuing to work for the Labour Party if they so viscerally loathe its leader.
[00:25:43]  Now, you know, some people would say they used their positions to actively undermine him.
[00:25:48]  I mean, certainly it's the case that they weren't working for him.
[00:25:51]  We have this extraordinary exchange on election night in 2017 in these WhatsApp chats where one of the senior officials in the Labour Party says, you know, they're all cheering and whooping and we're ashen faced.
[00:26:04]  And I think she actually says something like precisely the opposite of what I've been working for for the last two years.
[00:26:11]  So you're referring to here is that Corbyn almost winning is what's making.
[00:26:15]  That's right.
[00:26:16]  Exactly.
[00:26:17]  They reacted to Corbyn almost winning with absolute shock.
[00:26:21]  There's a very good book actually called Left Out by two Times journalists, so two men who ultimately work for Rupert Murdoch.
[00:26:28]  And they have a very good account of McNichol, the general secretary of the party, the head of the bureaucracy, turning up for work the following day after the general election of 2017.
[00:26:39]  And he's, you know, he's got a face like thunder and he disappears into his office, shuts the door, and they hear this great crash, and he's dropkicked a vase across the room.
[00:26:48]  I mean, that's his reaction to the Labour Party almost winning.
[00:26:52]  Everyone assumed that the Labour Party would be absolutely wiped out.
[00:26:58]  And what these people were doing by their own lights was trying to preserve a core of right-wing politicians.
[00:27:04]  I mean, they were actually diverting funds secretly from the main election pot to prop up certain right-wing MPs and so on.
[00:27:12]  And it was a huge, and I have to confess I was stunned as well.
[00:27:17]  Corbyn is being daily annihilated by the press, daily annihilated by his own parliamentary party.
[00:27:24]  We now know by his own party bureaucracy, he was being completely undermined.
[00:27:28]  And yet, once the election campaign starts and the British public gets to encounter him directly, as opposed to through the sort of prism of the British media, he just goes up vertically in the polls.
[00:27:43]  He starts the election campaign at 24, 25%, and on election day hits 40%, you know, which is quite a lot in British electoral terms.
[00:27:53]  And it's a catastrophic miscalculation by the Prime Minister, Theresa May, who has called an election precisely, who hadn't had, she had an overall majority.
[00:28:02]  She didn't need to do this.
[00:28:04]  She called it precisely because she thought Corbyn's now leader of the Labour Party and I'll be able to build up this enormous majority for myself.
[00:28:11]  And it was the opposite.
[00:28:13]  It was absolutely the opposite.
[00:28:14]  And you're right, absolutely right.

=== Brexit's Dividing Force (15:16) ===

[00:28:16]  At that point, the British establishment really takes fright.
[00:28:21]  And the sort of get Corbyn campaign seriously goes into overdrive at that point.
[00:28:26]  And, you know, this is where we might bring in the whole anti-Semitism thing.
[00:28:30]  Yeah.
[00:28:30]  I mean, basically, you go from him being this, you know, having this massive surge to shocking everyone, including the sitting prime minister with his popularity in 2017, to then like two years later, I mean, I think that by the end of the summer of 2019, you could just say what you could say that Jeremy Corbyn had killed, you know, entire families in a rampage with no proof or whatever, and everyone would run it in any tabloid, whatever.
[00:28:56]  You could say whatever you wanted.
[00:28:57]  Corbyn knife crime.
[00:28:58]  Yeah.
[00:28:59]  I mean, and any politician, any person, any media member could say anything they wanted about Jeremy Corbyn.
[00:29:06]  And it was a total free-for-all.
[00:29:08]  And he was completely disgraced.
[00:29:09]  So how do we go from that in such a short span?
[00:29:13]  There are two things that happen.
[00:29:14]  There are two things that destroy Jeremy Corbyn.
[00:29:16]  The more important, of course, is Brexit.
[00:29:19]  The thing that dominates British politics in this period is Brexit.
[00:29:23]  And the Labour Party, they have this enormous problem.
[00:29:25]  Britain votes for Brexit in 2016.
[00:29:27]  It then becomes blindingly clear that all the people who have pushed Brexit have no idea how to introduce, how to actually implement Brexit.
[00:29:35]  We really don't want to go into the details of this, but we have this problem of the Irish border.
[00:29:39]  Well, we can't have a border, but if you're going to reclaim your borders, you've got to have a border.
[00:29:44]  That would be like a four-hour podcast.
[00:29:45]  Yes, we really don't want to go into that.
[00:29:48]  We really don't want to go into that.
[00:29:49]  You're going to tell me there's two different Irelands?
[00:29:52]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:29:54]  So we really don't want to go into that.
[00:29:55]  But anyway, where the issue of Europe in the past had always divided the Conservative Party, it now divided the Labour Party.
[00:30:02]  The enormous problem he has, and I actually don't think any Labour leader could have solved this problem, was that while 80% of the Labour membership was pro-Remain and anti-Brexit, 70% of the Labour Party is primarily working-class constituencies had a Brexit majority.
[00:30:21]  There was a disconnect between its working-class voters and its now very large membership.
[00:30:29]  And what Corbyn tries to do is he introduces various pretty illogical fudges, but I'm not quite sure what else he could do, to be honest.
[00:30:37]  I mean, it was a very interesting thing.
[00:30:38]  I remember this at the time and being like, wow, this is truly like an unsolvable puzzle because it was exactly, I agree, I don't think that any Labour leader or anybody could have done anything differently.
[00:30:50]  And of course, the Conservatives have their problem, but they can't resolve this issue of the Irish border.
[00:30:55]  So in the end, Boris Johnson comes along and, you know, frankly tells a series of lies and everyone is so exhausted.
[00:31:01]  Well, lying always works.
[00:31:02]  Yeah, well, it did.
[00:31:03]  It certainly worked in the autumn of 2019.
[00:31:07]  And he does a deal with Nigel Farage, who's the leader of the sort of Brexit party.
[00:31:11]  And so basically the right pro-Brexit forces are united.
[00:31:15]  The left anti-Brexit forces are divided.
[00:31:17]  And you get this overwhelming majority.
[00:31:20]  That's the core reason.
[00:31:22]  The anti-Semitism thing, although it played an enormous role, is actually subsidiary to that.
[00:31:27]  If you actually look at the polls, the polls are reacting to the Brexit stuff.
[00:31:32]  Through 2018, Corbyn is being absolutely crucified over the anti-Semitism thing.
[00:31:37]  Doesn't really affect the polls.
[00:31:40]  It's a thing that obsesses the political media class.
[00:31:44]  The evidence is that the general public is less concerned, but it does inevitably undermine him.
[00:31:49]  It undermines his moral authority and it also distracts him.
[00:31:52]  It means he's having to, rather than pushing this bold social democratic vision, he's endlessly on the back foot, having to defend himself against the charge that he's an anti-Semite, a charge that he proves peculiarly ill-equipped to defend himself against.
[00:32:07]  Ideologically, he doesn't seem to be able to do it.
[00:32:09]  But I think emotionally, it's enormously painful for him.
[00:32:12]  Here is a man whose whole career is built on anti-racism.
[00:32:15]  And suddenly everyone's telling him he's a racist.
[00:32:17]  And it just sort of disarms him in a strange sort of way.
[00:32:32]  Well, let's talk about where that comes from, because I think that's a big part of this story, right?
[00:32:37]  I mean, you know, the claims of anti-Semitism proved to be shockingly effective.
[00:32:44]  I think even caught some Corviknights, by surprise, who, you know, maybe wanted to be generous in ways that maybe they shouldn't have been to some of those claims because it seemed to be so, on its face, absurd.
[00:33:01]  And yet it made an incredibly lasting impression on the British public and was deployed very, very, very effectively.
[00:33:10]  Yes, I mean, I think where do they come from?
[00:33:11]  They come from the Israel lobby, which is, you know, as in America, surprisingly powerful, disproportionately powerful.
[00:33:19]  In Britain, very disproportionately powerful.
[00:33:21]  I mean, Britain's Jewish community is very small, really, even proportionally compared to America.
[00:33:26]  But while the Israel lobby is powerful, it isn't that powerful.
[00:33:31]  The problem that happens is that all sorts of other groups alight on this as the perfect weapon with which to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.
[00:33:43]  So you have the center ground.
[00:33:45]  The BBC is disgraceful on this issue, as is ITN, the supposedly impartial broadcast media, obviously the right-wing press.
[00:33:54]  So you have the spectacle of the Daily Mail, which actually supported an apologist certainly for Hitler in the 1930s, leading the great campaign against, rather like Marine Le Pen leading the recent anti-anti-Semitism demos.
[00:34:09]  Some of the people who were jumping on the bandwagon, one would have thought people would smell a rat, really, but anyway, they didn't.
[00:34:16]  Well, it became sort of rather unfashionable to be anti-Semitic among circles that had previously embraced it after World War II.
[00:34:24]  And they sort of groped around in the dark for a long time.
[00:34:27]  I mean, they could hate Jamaicans and then the Asians and the Asian grooming gangs came in.
[00:34:34]  They're like, all right, well, we can just transfer all of our whatever, you know, ethnic and maybe religious enmity from Jewish people onto Muslims.
[00:34:44]  Yes, I mean, Islamophobia is certainly a very strong force.
[00:34:47]  And it's very, very, that's one thing that runs as a through line throughout all of this, is that you can say whatever you want about Jeremy Corbyn.
[00:34:56]  And indeed, whatever you want about also, in addition to any Muslims that he might be in any way allied with, whether they're politicians or Palestine, the issue or the, that's all fine.
[00:35:12]  But, you know, Jeremy Corbyn commenting on Mural is.
[00:35:16]  Yeah.
[00:35:17]  And also I think there's a difference here.
[00:35:18]  You know, I'm not suggesting for a moment there's no such thing as anti-Semitism in Britain, or even that it lingers in certain parts of the left.
[00:35:27]  Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I always sense that it's much stronger in America where it turns, it ties into the whole center against the peripheries thing.
[00:35:39]  And when I look at the evidence that was being touted around within the Labour Party for people's anti-Semitism, invariably, you know, rather stupid or naive people had somehow ended up with some meme that they'd have picked up from an alt-right website in America.
[00:35:54]  That's where most of these memes came from.
[00:35:56]  And in looking into this, it strikes me that there is a virulent right-wing anti-Semitism in America?
[00:36:02]  Certainly.
[00:36:03]  In America.
[00:36:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:36:05]  There's also just like we have a large degree of like right-wing phylo-Semitism, which is indistinguishable at points from anti-Semitism as well.
[00:36:17]  I mean, it's just, yeah.
[00:36:19]  I mean, so we, one of the things we did was to look in enormous detail at the Labour Party's disciplinary files.
[00:36:25]  And so, you know, what are we dealing with here?
[00:36:27]  So I think the first thing to say is there is such a thing as left-wing anti-Semitism and it does sometimes masquerade as anti-Zionism.
[00:36:35]  I think as a force, if one is concerned about racism, it pales into insignificance next to the problems of Islamophobia, anti-black racism, and so on.
[00:36:46]  There's perhaps then a slightly larger number of people who are rather unsophisticated and might fall into rather lazy tropes, particularly when one is talking about the power of the Israel lobby, because in unsophisticated hands, that can definitely start to sound like and perhaps even become traditional conspiracy theories about Jewish power, blah, blah, blah.
[00:37:06]  So you have unsophisticated people.
[00:37:11]  And you've got to remember that the Labour Party's membership had swelled enormously.
[00:37:14]  And one of the things that had happened is that a lot of people had joined the party who hadn't been involved with politics before and so on.
[00:37:22]  So was this entirely smoke without fire?
[00:37:27]  No.
[00:37:28]  I mean, there's an element of truth to it.
[00:37:30]  But when you really looked carefully at the disciplinary folders, what had happened was the triumph of what's called the new anti-Semitism, which is basically to define anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism.
[00:37:45]  And I think that's all the more effective because my own experience of liberal Zionists is frequently that in their heart of hearts, they sort of do think anti-Zionists are probably at the very least a bit suspect.
[00:37:57]  Because to be clear, what we're talking about here, in Britain anyway, it's not actually the case that you can't criticize Israel.
[00:38:04]  You can, and people do.
[00:38:05]  No, you have to be a bit careful about it, and you have to be careful about the words you use, and people should criticize it more, but you can.
[00:38:13]  What you cannot do is to articulate the core Palestinian position, basically, that creating an ethnically defined homeland or an ethnically defined state. in a territory which at the beginning of the process is entirely populated by people of a different ethnicity can only be done through ethnic cleansing, through the subjugation of through apartheid and so on, which is of course precisely what's happened.
[00:38:39]  Now, pointing out what Palestinians might call the bleeding obvious is what you're not allowed to do.
[00:38:47]  And the whole thing actually came down to that, that we have to maintain this pretense that Israel is a Western democracy, a flawed Western democracy, one that's got increasingly unpleasant people in government, blah, blah, blah.
[00:39:00]  What you cannot do is to say Israel is South Africa.
[00:39:04]  Israel is a racist ethnic state.
[00:39:06]  That is the thing you're not allowed to do.
[00:39:08]  And to a degree, the whole thing that happened can be seen as people just determinedly tugging that veil and keeping it in place.
[00:39:17]  So, I mean, what happened, at least in my view from an American, what I saw happen was this enormous surge of the left that was backing Jeremy Corbyn.
[00:39:26]  And Jeremy Corbyn, who had very vocal pro-Palestinian views.
[00:39:31]  I mean, you include this bit in the documentary, but he said he would immediately recognize Palestine as a state, you know, when he came into office.
[00:39:38]  And all these different forces that were arrayed against him within British society, some of which were, you know, heavily, heavily Zionist, but then some of which were just, you know, against him for the usual reasons that, you know, political forces in advanced Western capitalist countries would not want a social democrat like Jeremy Corbyn in office.
[00:39:59]  But they saw that this issue was in particular very effective.
[00:40:04]  And how did that, and, you know, you mentioned the complaints too, which is a large part of what the labor files and indeed like the labor anti-Semitism crisis sort of arises out of.
[00:40:13]  And that was something that was sort of like repeated ad nauseum.
[00:40:16]  It was a really good way to kind of see how the media worked because you saw this kind of manufactured crisis, right?
[00:40:21]  Like, oh, this number comes out.
[00:40:23]  There's been, you know, tens of thousands of complaints about anti-Semitic abuse within the Labor Party, you know, with the implication that it's coming from these pro-Corbyn people who joined the party.
[00:40:33]  And then the, you know, the right-wing press or the BBC or the, you know, the press in writ large runs with those complaints.
[00:40:41]  And then all of a sudden the story is that Jeremy Corbyn has under his coattails of his frocked coat brought along these hordes of screaming, raging anti-Semites, many of whom are Muslim, along with him in the Labor Party.
[00:40:58]  Many of whom are Jewish, more to the point.
[00:41:00]  Well, that was actually an inconvenient fact for the press in a lot of ways.
[00:41:06]  They're more likely, I mean, Muslims as a general, in my experience, are intimidated into silence on this issue.
[00:41:13]  You know, the problem here was so many of these people were Jewish.
[00:41:16]  Well, yes.
[00:41:16]  And then.
[00:41:17]  So one thing that the labor files reveal is that, like the total, just bankrupt quality to these this this uh, complaints process, and how much of that was steered by this unelected labor bureaucracy uh, who were able to manufacture this crisis, feed it to the media and then have the media feed it back to the public until it becomes the the reality.
[00:41:44]  Yeah, and for me, that was what was terribly disappointing.
[00:41:46]  You have the BBC and ITN, which are obliged to be impartial, the Guardian, which is the great organ of the English liberal middle classes and um they, they just totally swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
[00:42:00]  It was disgraceful and in a way, that was partly what motivated me.
[00:42:02]  I mean, I was either slamming my head against the wall every morning, for you know, or actually you know doing some work on this and writing about it, because the thing is going back to what I was saying about Anti-Zionism.
[00:42:14]  If you decide, if your view is that Israel is not a racist ethno-state, it's just one that makes some mistakes and it's already, on the one hand this, on the other hand, that issue then people's anger and passion becomes rather incomprehensible to you and it's very easy to start interpreting that level of anger and passion as being in some way sinister.
[00:42:37]  It becomes twisted and turned in on itself as hate, as hate yes, and hate marches as the, as these things are called.
[00:42:44]  I mean, you know, imagine fighting the anti-apartheid struggle in south Africa and and you're surrounded all the time by people are saying no no no it's, it's Mandela and Tutu who are the racists.
[00:42:56]  I mean, the whole thing becomes completely tangled and and and you know it's important to remember that all of amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Betsellim, the Israeli human rights group, all have now judged Israel to be guilty of the crime of apartheid.
[00:43:11]  So we have this bizarre situation for five years where the entire media political establishment is turning its anti-racist spotlight ferociously, relentlessly, not on the apartheid state and its supporters, but away from the apartheid state and towards its victims and their supporters.

=== Lacking Concrete Examples (15:28) ===

[00:43:32]  It's quite odd, really, when you step back and think about it.
[00:43:36]  But it was very, but the, you know, you can look at the characters involved here, Laura Kunzberg, Emily Maitlis, Robert Heston, the people who are the political correspondents of the BBC and ITN, who carry enormous weight because they are the sensible, nice, probably a bit liberal white middle class people.
[00:43:58]  And they clearly, you know, totally bought into this narrative and just didn't.
[00:44:07]  I mean, they ran with it.
[00:44:08]  Oh, they ran with it.
[00:44:09]  They ran with it.
[00:44:10]  It was appalling.
[00:44:11]  It was dreadful.
[00:44:12]  It was dreadful to watch.
[00:44:14]  I mean, it's, you know, one of the few examples where you see the fuzzy middle ground just getting it completely wrong.
[00:44:23]  And I've no doubt at all that in 30, 40 years' time, people will be writing university theses about this bizarre, you know, bizarre episode in British political history and how it could have happened.
[00:44:35]  Well, it was so strange to watch at the time because it seemed so blindingly obvious what was happening.
[00:44:41]  I mean, you had Jeremy Corbyn, who, as his supporters quite rightly, you know, would reinforce when giving statements to the press is somebody who has been a lifelong campaigner against racism in all its forms.
[00:44:54]  There's famous pictures of him being arrested at anti-apartheid struggles.
[00:44:59]  He is somebody who has completely dedicated his life in a very real way to this form of struggle.
[00:45:06]  And just to be completely tarred as probably Britain's biggest racist by not only the rest of his, not the rest of his party, but a lot of people and MPs within his own party, but by the conservatives and by the more, I guess, National Front descended groups that were prevalent and renamed themselves every few years, EDL or Britain First or whatever.
[00:45:34]  Who are all very pro-Israel.
[00:45:36]  Yes, and that was actually one of the really astounding things that I learned from your documentary.
[00:45:42]  You know, there's a famous incident in the pantheon of Jeremy Corbyn's anti-Semitic incidents where he accused a group of pro-Israel people of not understanding British irony.
[00:45:56]  And correct me if I'm wrong, but one of those people was a member of Britain First.
[00:46:03]  Sharon Clapper.
[00:46:04]  Well, no, no, no, she, she, she had, no, it was the English Defence League.
[00:46:09]  But not a member, but she'd voiced very active support and continuing support for them.
[00:46:12]  And the other two had previously sort of, you know, effectively worked with the English Defence League for a period.
[00:46:17]  It was very interesting, this, these three characters, or two of them in particular, were right at the heart of all this.
[00:46:23]  They were providing a lot of the stories.
[00:46:24]  There were a lot of the energy bubbling away at the heart of it.
[00:46:27]  Now, you know, back in 2010, there had been this sort of furo where these activists, these pro-Israel activists, which is what they are, had been working with the English Defence League, with Tommy Robinson and so on.
[00:46:41]  Can you explain to our American listeners who the English Defence League might be?
[00:46:44]  They're a racist or, you know, a racist sort of nativist organization.
[00:46:48]  They're an overtly racist organization that would normally be regarded as unacceptable, beyond the fringe of Israel.
[00:46:56]  But sort of in the following in the footsteps of like the big 1970s, 1980s, like National Front.
[00:47:02]  National Front, British National Party.
[00:47:04]  Yeah, absolutely in that sort of tradition.
[00:47:05]  They're very much fringe, not the sort of people who ever win seats in parliament, very much fringe.
[00:47:10]  And they'd clearly work with them.
[00:47:11]  Now, what was interesting in around 2010 to 2011, you can actually see in the Jewish press, you know, all the nice liberal centrist people coming out and saying, hang on, we really mustn't be demonstrating with these people.
[00:47:23]  This is wrong.
[00:47:25]  You know, and they were quite clear about that at the time, you know, that we reject this strategy.
[00:47:29]  But it means that when it came to 2016, 17, 18, they knew damn well who these people were.
[00:47:35]  They'd argued with them previously.
[00:47:37]  And there was just a sort of conspiracy of silence.
[00:47:39]  We were all going to pretend that these were nice champions of anti-racism.
[00:47:44]  whereas they, you know, they've got to be careful of my words legally, but they'd certainly been in bed with people who were absolutely overt and aggressive Islamophobes.
[00:48:05]  So how does this all start shaking out?
[00:48:07]  I kind of want to still walk through the timeline here.
[00:48:11]  Yeah, because there's a kind of a big, not a turning point, but it hits a fever pitch with a BBC program that airs on BBC Panorama, which I don't think our, I think our American audience might not understand exactly the kind of weight that that program had.
[00:48:31]  Maybe you can explain a little bit.
[00:48:33]  Yes, I mean, would PBS 60 Minutes be an equivalent?
[00:48:36]  I'm not sure.
[00:48:37]  I mean, you know, the BBC is this unique and rather strange phenomenon, this publicly funded beer myth that sits at the heart of the British media landscape and carries enormous influence, particularly with nice, you know, white middle class people.
[00:48:53]  But it's enormously powerful, the BBC.
[00:48:55]  And so it really does have to be very responsible in how it exercises this power.
[00:49:01]  And really this panorama, it's its main news and current affairs strand.
[00:49:05]  Normally it does hour-long documentaries, but it extended to an hour, half an hour long documentaries.
[00:49:10]  It extended to an hour on this occasion.
[00:49:13]  This was July 2019.
[00:49:15]  And it really was the final nail in the coffin of Corbyn's reputation on this issue.
[00:49:22]  And it was called, is Labor anti-Semitic?
[00:49:26]  And the answer was fairly clear.
[00:49:29]  I know, what an incredible question.
[00:49:32]  I'm just really going for it with that one, by the way.
[00:49:35]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:49:35]  Richard, I will say, the entire Corbyn anti-Semitism saga has been one of the greatest examples of the have you quit beating your wife question that I think I've ever, which is, by the way, one of my favorite questions.
[00:49:48]  I won't be asking you, but I do usually ask our guests.
[00:49:50]  It's an incredible question, really hard to get out of.
[00:49:53]  But this, the panorama title was fantastic in terms of, if that's the metric.
[00:49:59]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:00]  No, no, exactly.
[00:50:02]  And it really did absolutely destroy him.
[00:50:07]  Now, you know, as I watched it at the time, I remember thinking, well, hang on.
[00:50:12]  I'm not sure about this.
[00:50:13]  I mean, it operated on two levels.
[00:50:16]  One was, again, if you actually picked it apart, it was taking it as given that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
[00:50:24]  Yes.
[00:50:26]  But even if you accepted that logic, a lot of the journalism was very questionable.
[00:50:32]  Now, it rather looks to me as if they had a problem that as they got into the final stages of the edit, they noticed that they were rather lacking in concrete examples of people being anti-Semitic.
[00:50:44]  And so in our program, we pick this panorama apart.
[00:50:48]  I could have spent longer picking that panorama apart, but there's only so much time I could dedicate to it.
[00:50:53]  But we show that two of the stories of people being hideously anti-Semitic were simply untrue.
[00:51:00]  They were simply not true stories.
[00:51:03]  And not even, I've watched this program.
[00:51:05]  I know what you're talking about, but it's not even for our listeners.
[00:51:08]  It's not untrue from like a, oh, well, you maybe interpreted this different.
[00:51:12]  They are clear and like pretty easily identified.
[00:51:17]  This Labour Party investigator claims to have gone to Liverpool.
[00:51:19]  This is one of them.
[00:51:20]  He claims to have gone to Liverpool.
[00:51:22]  He's conducting an investigation into a constituency there, which there have been complaints about.
[00:51:27]  And he says, you know, he's doing these disciplinary interviews.
[00:51:30]  And he says, as this woman leaves the room, and there are almost tears in his eyes.
[00:51:33]  It's quite a performance.
[00:51:35]  She turns and says, are you from Israel?
[00:51:37]  And he says, what can you do?
[00:51:38]  What can you say?
[00:51:39]  It's this anti-Semitism that bubbles up the whole time.
[00:51:43]  Now, anyway, these two little old ladies, two little old Jewish ladies in Liverpool, are watching this program and they're thinking, hang on, I recognize that conversation.
[00:51:52]  He's talking about us because all the details fit precisely with it's clearly about them.
[00:51:58]  And fortunately, these two elderly ladies, Rika and Helen, had had the very good sense, like all the other people that were interviewed on Mersey's side, had had the very good sense to record the interview.
[00:52:11]  And they dug out the recording.
[00:52:13]  And she doesn't, of course she doesn't say, are you from Israel?
[00:52:16]  Why would she say, are you from Israel?
[00:52:18]  Apart from the else, they had no idea this fellow was Jewish.
[00:52:22]  What she says is, which branch are you from?
[00:52:25]  As in which branch of the Labour Party are you from?
[00:52:27]  Which constituency are you from?
[00:52:30]  So it clearly, you know, just wasn't true.
[00:52:32]  They hadn't mentioned that the two people in question were Jewish and they completely misquoted them.
[00:52:39]  There was another one where this woman said, the anti-Semitism I received in the Labour Party was every day people saying to me, Hitler was right.
[00:52:48]  Hitler didn't go far enough.
[00:52:50]  Okay.
[00:52:50]  Now, if you're watching this, you're thinking, hang on.
[00:52:53]  There is no Labour Party environment in the world.
[00:52:56]  I mean, it's just about conceivable that a mentally ill individual might stand up at a Labour Party meeting and say that.
[00:53:04]  It's just about within the bounds of conceivability.
[00:53:07]  The idea that it would be said every day without people taking action, without something being done about it, it's just ludicrous.
[00:53:14]  It's just patently ludicrous.
[00:53:16]  Listen, I've been in a lot of freak show political meetings in my life.
[00:53:19]  I think I've spent about 50% of my fucking life in freak show political meetings with, I will say, at least identifiable by me, crazy people in them.
[00:53:29]  And I've never heard someone say something that, even remotely approaching, Hitler was right, let alone every day.
[00:53:35]  And people said a lot of crazy shit.
[00:53:37]  Yeah.
[00:53:38]  And also it was very easy to check.
[00:53:40]  You googled and we did it and it's there immediately.
[00:53:44]  You show the Googling.
[00:53:45]  You Google this woman's name and you put Hitler was right.
[00:53:47]  And there was an instant when she was at university before Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party where some revolting individual had put up posters around the university campus saying Hitler was right.
[00:53:58]  She had campaigned against this and got them removed.
[00:54:01]  I mean, presumably they were just removed anyway.
[00:54:04]  But it was quite clear that it was the far right.
[00:54:07]  It was nothing to do with the Labour Party.
[00:54:09]  Now, this is the one area where the BBC has sort of held its hand up.
[00:54:12]  It said her comments became mixed up in the editing.
[00:54:16]  Oh, class.
[00:54:17]  We do that.
[00:54:17]  I hate when interviewees' comments get mixed up in the editing.
[00:54:22]  An editor just famously always getting mixed up with their edits.
[00:54:26]  I've sucked that dude's fucking dick once.
[00:54:29]  Could I just say that I know the editor on that film?
[00:54:32]  I've worked with him.
[00:54:33]  He's a decent, good professional.
[00:54:35]  And I certainly hope they weren't throwing him to the wolves on this because it won't have been his initiative.
[00:54:42]  You know, an editor puts the words together as he's told to.
[00:54:45]  So it would have been the producer will have mixed the words up in the editing, not the actual editor.
[00:54:51]  I won't make you do that, but I'll say that I do think that, yes, they were throwing the editor under the bus there because the BBC, I mean, just with those two examples, it's so obvious that any journalist would have checked, would have like called those, you know, interviewees and been like, is that what you said?
[00:55:13]  And then had it and, you know, would have seen it wasn't.
[00:55:18]  It comes back to what you were saying, Brace, about by the summer of 2019, you could say what you liked about Jeremy Corbyn.
[00:55:24]  I mean, it's like dealing with North Korea.
[00:55:26]  You could have said he'd strapped his sister-in-law across the mouth of a cannon.
[00:55:29]  It's very similar to the pieces that isn't to him.
[00:55:32]  He killed his cousins, every cousin in the world or whatever.
[00:55:35]  Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, they make us do, you know, exactly.
[00:55:40]  No, it was literally how this passed through the BBC's editorial and legal processes is, I mean, really, it's quite disgraceful the BBC is not having an internal soul searching about this because it's disgraceful.
[00:55:53]  Now, the BBC is still defending the story about are you from Israel?
[00:55:58]  It's line of argument.
[00:56:00]  And this is, bear with me here.
[00:56:02]  This is seriously the line of argument that the BBC.
[00:56:04]  I read the letter in The Guardian, so I'm familiar with how silly this is.
[00:56:08]  Our story is not definitely untrue because these two elderly Jewish ladies might be a pair of brazen liars.
[00:56:16]  Their defense is that they ask the Israel question after the recording is switched off, which, you know, you listen to the closing section of the recorded interview.
[00:56:28]  It's absurd.
[00:56:29]  You know, it wouldn't make any sense for them to return to the subject.
[00:56:31]  But also, most importantly, the two of them absolutely flatly and firmly deny it.
[00:56:37]  Which you would think would make it into the reporting.
[00:56:40]  Oh, the people that we're reporting on deny this ever.
[00:56:42]  Yeah, but they were never asked.
[00:56:44]  The thing is, the thing that's odd about that program, if you're making telly, and I think this is true even more of telly than most journalistic mediums, you crave the tangible, okay?
[00:56:54]  You'd crave the concrete.
[00:56:55]  It's what television loves.
[00:56:57]  You drift off the minute people are talking in generalities.
[00:57:00]  All right.
[00:57:00]  So when I'm interviewing people, I'm very irritating.
[00:57:03]  I am always stopping them saying, no, no, tell me what happened to you.
[00:57:07]  Tell me what you experienced, what you saw.
[00:57:10]  And this panorama is very odd because if you actually watch it, it contains very, very few examples of named people being anti-Semitic to other named people.
[00:57:22]  It does this very odd thing, the program.
[00:57:24]  It has a whole bunch of interviewees who are talking directly to camera in a sort of testimonial way.
[00:57:30]  Young Jewish people, very articulate, often on the verge of tears and very upset about things and so on.
[00:57:37]  They're all anonymous.
[00:57:39]  Okay.
[00:57:39]  They're all anonymous.
[00:57:41]  One of them, I think, gives her name, but she says it as she's talking.
[00:57:47]  But other than that, they're all anonymous.
[00:57:48]  And you're certainly not told that they are in fact the board of the Jewish labor movement, which is the sort of group within the Labour Party, which was leading the sort of charge against Corbyn.
[00:58:00]  Now, these people's points of view are perfectly, you know, they have a right to their point of view and a right to give their point of view.
[00:58:09]  But if people are officers in an organization, which has a crucial part in the story, is a crucial player in the story.
[00:58:19]  You have to tell the viewers that.
[00:58:21]  It's basic journalism.
[00:58:23]  I mean, the only one who wasn't, or virtually the only one who wasn't a past or present board member of the Jewish labor movement, was the head of public communications at the Jewish Board of Deputies.
[00:58:34]  I mean, to present that person as an anonymous Vox pop is fascinating.
[00:58:39]  And it matters all the more because there was a rival Jewish group within the Labour Party, Jewish Voice for Labour, who we interviewed people from.
[00:58:48]  Now, watching the Panorama programme, you would have had no inkling that there was a Jewish group in the Labour Party that supported Corbyn and rejected this narrative.

=== Critiques of BBC Coverage (03:31) ===

[00:59:01]  And so those two things together, the exclusion of Jewish Voice for Labour, which is similar to Jewish Voice for Peace, I think, in America, the exclusion of that group and the anonymizing of the Jewish Labour Movement interviewees, it was, I think, profoundly misleading.
[00:59:19]  Now, the BBC has decided it's comfortable with that.
[00:59:22]  I've made over 20 films for Dispatches, which is the Channel 4 sort of rival to Panorama.
[00:59:28]  So I know how these programmes are made.
[00:59:29]  And, you know, I've spent much of my life sitting in sweaty edit rooms with lawyers, having extremely painful conversations with lawyers about dots and commas.
[00:59:39]  My blood runs cold at the thought of what Channel 4 lawyers would have done to me if they'd turned to me and said, who are these people?
[00:59:45]  And I'd said, well, this is who they are.
[00:59:47]  They'd have gone, well, obviously you have to tell people that.
[00:59:50]  You can't just anonymize them.
[00:59:52]  And the other issue in the program, of course, was the editing of an important email, which was just absolutely gutted and edited in a way that seemed to us anyway, entirely misleading.
[01:00:07]  So anyway, we made four very concrete critiques of the program, which is always the way to do it.
[01:00:12]  I mean, if you go into a sort of scattergun, this is a horrible, unfair program, whatever, you know, you have to be very specific in what you're accusing them of.
[01:00:21]  So we made four very specific critiques, which I don't feel they've ever satisfactorily responded to.
[01:00:29]  The BBC seems to have taken the view, look, no one's talking about this.
[01:00:32]  So if we just keep quiet, no one will notice.
[01:00:34]  No, I absolutely think that that.
[01:00:36]  I mean, if you read their responses to your pieces, to the segments, They're all very like, you know, very broad, very vague.
[01:00:51]  Usually, I think when I've seen publications respond to claims of like, you know, misrepresentation or, you know, even going further into like plagiarism, whatever, like anything that like a journal, you know, a journalistic outlet would respond to very, would take very seriously, right?
[01:01:11]  They're usually very specific in their responses, very like, where you say this, we have, you know, you make this claim.
[01:01:20]  This is how we're refuting it.
[01:01:21]  This is where our editors come in.
[01:01:23]  We have this, we have that, you know, backing up all of this stuff, especially when you're talking about something as potent and, you know, wild as is the Labour Party anti-Semitic.
[01:01:33]  You know what I mean?
[01:01:34]  Like the leader of Her Majesty's opposition.
[01:01:36]  I mean, it couldn't be that.
[01:01:37]  Yes.
[01:01:38]  And it does seem that the BBC, and I would, you know, I just, I'd argue, as we kind of were saying at the beginning of this interview, the kind of British, you know, political hive mind or media, you know, conglomerate in general wants to sweep this whole thing under the rug.
[01:01:55]  And, you know, if people aren't talking about it, if no one's paying attention, then it didn't happen.
[01:02:00]  And that actually all of these maneuvers and insane kind of, you know, right-wing usurping that was happening within the party that we all have evidence of through these chat logs, through these, you know, all of these internal memos and files, none of this happened, actually.
[01:02:17]  You know, there was just a kind of clear sort of, you know, the history of the Labour Party is sort of, who was just Tony Blair and then and then Kirst Armer.
[01:02:28]  And it's very, you know, what everyone kind of has decided on.

=== Purge of Radical Voices (15:09) ===

[01:02:32]  And it's very alien.
[01:02:34]  It's very unhealthy democratically, because whether you agree with the radical left or not, I mean, it's entirely up to you.
[01:02:40]  But, you know, there was this huge upsurge of enthusiasm.
[01:02:43]  40% of people voted for Corbyn.
[01:02:46]  And basically the British political and media establishment said, your engagement with the political process is not welcome.
[01:02:54]  Go away, please.
[01:02:55]  We'll carry on running things.
[01:02:57]  And that seems to be enormously unhealthy.
[01:03:00]  And I think, you know, we'll pay a price for that in years to come, particularly since it's been said in particular to people of color and in particular to Muslims.
[01:03:10]  For young Muslims, they have been told very clearly, you do not engage with the British political process unless you are prepared to make a series of compromises, which particularly at the current time, many would find unacceptable.
[01:03:26]  So, I mean, just to go back very quickly to the panorama, to be fair, the program's presenter, we do seem to have struck a nerve with him because he writes enormous, endless articles, being extremely rude about myself.
[01:03:42]  Yes, that's what I was going to mention.
[01:03:44]  You have some personal beef there.
[01:03:46]  Well, yeah, well, there you go.
[01:03:47]  I rise above these things.
[01:03:48]  But anyway, most recently, he wrote an extraordinary 30,000-word piece in Fathom.
[01:03:56]  Oh my God.
[01:03:57]  Which is a series of articles.
[01:03:59]  30,000 words.
[01:03:59]  If I have to spend 30,000 words defending something I've done, I'm thinking I'm probably on slightly weak ground.
[01:04:05]  But anyway, 30,000 words.
[01:04:06]  And he wrote it for Fathom, which I think probably most of your readers are unfamiliar with.
[01:04:10]  Fathom is the in-house journal of BICOM, which is an Israeli lobbying organization.
[01:04:16]  It's an interesting choice in itself.
[01:04:19]  And he writes, I mean, please, John Ware, Fathom, if any of your readers are listeners are really interested in this, go away and read it.
[01:04:27]  I mean, I'm one of the principal subjects of it, and I only skim read it.
[01:04:33]  But this is the interesting thing.
[01:04:34]  This is the interesting thing.
[01:04:37]  This enormous and powerful echo chamber that was built to destroy Jeremy Corbyn, just poof, in a puff of smoke, disappeared the day he was gone.
[01:04:48]  And I think I sense it's very frustrating for John Ware because he writes these things and there is no pickup whatsoever.
[01:04:58]  He's a man howling into the void.
[01:05:01]  I think there are two reasons for that.
[01:05:02]  One, you know, people look at these clips about his film and think, well, hang on.
[01:05:06]  That does sound rather dodgy.
[01:05:08]  And I'm not sure I really want to go up to the ramparts to defend that.
[01:05:11]  But two, because it has served its purpose.
[01:05:14]  It's disappeared.
[01:05:15]  Now, you know, I know to a degree, you know, and one of the things with the labor files, and I really want to impress this on your listeners, is absolute conspiracy of silence in the British media about it.
[01:05:27]  Absolute determination never to mention the labor files in British media.
[01:05:33]  So I would say to your listeners, you can see it on YouTube, the labor files.
[01:05:39]  My program on the anti-Semitism thing was the second program of the crisis.
[01:05:42]  Please, please, please do go and watch it and share it because it's like some sort of subversive subterranean book this that is only going to spread by word of mouth.
[01:05:52]  Please, please, please do watch it.
[01:05:57]  But we're trapped in a bubble.
[01:06:00]  We're trapped in a left-wing bubble, but it's a pretty big bubble and it's a pretty loud bubble.
[01:06:04]  And it's a bubble that's growing.
[01:06:08]  Whereas John Ware in defending his film, absolute silence, deathly silence.
[01:06:13]  So it's quite interesting, the contrast.
[01:06:14]  Yeah.
[01:06:15]  And as our listeners probably know, Corbyn was not only replaced by Kier Starmer, but he is no longer under the whip of the Labour Party, right?
[01:06:26]  Has he been expelled or suspended from the Parliament?
[01:06:28]  Well, he's been suspended from the parliamentary party.
[01:06:31]  He's had the whip withdrawn.
[01:06:32]  They did expel him from the party, but they realized they simply couldn't do it.
[01:06:36]  So he is strictly speaking still a member of the Labour Party, but he won't be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate at the next election.
[01:06:42]  It is almost certain he will stand as an independent, and everyone tells me he will win in that constituency.
[01:06:48]  Everyone I know, of course, is a friend of Jeremy's.
[01:06:50]  So, you know, whether that's true or not, we should see.
[01:06:54]  But certainly he's a very popular, he's a very popular constituency MP.
[01:06:58]  But now he has been replaced by Keir Starmer.
[01:07:00]  And there has been this, as sort of also a through line throughout these three episodes, a purge of not only Jeremy Corbyn's allies, but anybody who might be sort of sympathetic to that mode of politics.
[01:07:12]  And particularly a tool in using this, just similar in the way that the anti-Semitism crisis was this kind of manufactured, convenient tool for many opponents of Jeremy Corbyn.
[01:07:25]  The intermingling of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism's definitions and the blurriness, the purposeful sort of smudging of the borders between those two things has been a really effective tool for cleansing the Labour Party of anybody who might not be a Kirstarmer legionnaire.
[01:07:44]  And they seem like to have been extremely effective in basically just demolishing the ranks of the left from the Labour Party.
[01:07:54]  I mean, basically, it seems like it's a complete non-entity, an entity now.
[01:07:58]  It's absolutely ruthless.
[01:08:00]  It's extraordinary.
[01:08:01]  I'll come on to that in a second.
[01:08:02]  Just to very, in a way, quickly finish off with Corbyn.
[01:08:07]  One of the interesting things that happens is right at the beginning of Starmer's reign, he appoints this man called Martin Ford to look into all this.
[01:08:16]  Let's really pick apart what happened in the Labour Party with racism, anti-Semitism and factionalism and so on.
[01:08:24]  And Martin Ford is black.
[01:08:28]  He's Barbadian.
[01:08:31]  And they don't seem to have considered that with the black face came a black sensibility and also integrity.
[01:08:38]  So Martin did what we did.
[01:08:42]  I actually now know Martin quite well.
[01:08:44]  And, you know, he looked at all the internal documentation as we did and said, hang on, this isn't quite how it was being reported, is it?
[01:08:53]  And rather to the annoyance of the Labour Party, I produced this report, which was, you know, it does a fair old bit of both sidesism and blah, blah, blah.
[01:08:59]  But it essentially says these people aren't, you know, there was a disgraceful demonization of what went on of these people.
[01:09:06]  It wasn't fair.
[01:09:07]  And crucially, it rejects the idea that the leadership under Corbyn intervened in the disciplinary process to protect anti-Semites.
[01:09:16]  It rejects that fairly clearly.
[01:09:18]  And that was the core accusation against Corbyn.
[01:09:23]  So, and of course, you know, Martin eventually gave an interview to us for the Labour Files.
[01:09:29]  sort of became it's a very short one but it's the fifth episode of the labor files as it were entirely ignored again it entirely ignored he suffered the same fate we did sort of cast into the outer outer darkness where we're all just sitting around talking talking to each other but anyway yes so kier starmer takes over the labor party and it is quite extraordinary the the centralization the the rigid lack of democracy in the party yes they they they've destroyed the Corbynite left, but it goes rather beyond that.
[01:09:59]  I mean, you know, some of the people who are being expelled and whose lives are being destroyed, you know, weren't really even on the Corbynite left.
[01:10:07]  They've done this extraordinary thing.
[01:10:08]  They came up with a group of organizations which they prescribed, left-wing organizations, which if you were a member of them or if you expressed support for them, it was incompatible with membership of the Labour Party.
[01:10:20]  So if you express support for Labour Against the Witch Hunt or something, then you were booted out of the party.
[01:10:29]  Now, they did a very clever thing.
[01:10:31]  They said this would happen even if you had expressed support for this organization before it was prescribed.
[01:10:37]  So people who might have tweeted something vaguely favourable to some obscure left-wing group in 2016 suddenly found themselves expelled from the Labour Party.
[01:10:45]  It was extraordinary.
[01:10:47]  Whole swathes of people could be expelled.
[01:10:50]  Now, this was so patiently unjust that the Labour Party took the trouble to introduce a new rule in its rule book that says that in its disciplinary processes, the principles of fairness and natural justice do not apply.
[01:11:06]  I mean, I must be the only political party in the world which takes the trouble to actually express that.
[01:11:12]  But I think it's, you know, if the starting point of this conversation was this moment in 2015, 16, 17 of profound discontent with the status quo and unhappiness with politics as it was.
[01:11:28]  And you now have a situation where we're going into the election with an entirely discredited government.
[01:11:34]  I mean, the Conservatives are going to lose whatever happens next time around, quite clearly.
[01:11:40]  But an opposition which is just sort of slavishly adhering to all the political conventions that got us in the mess in the first place, that is, you know, ferociously rejecting anything radical or original.
[01:11:53]  And, you know, a few journalists, more mainstream journalists have written recently about how this process, the process of selection of new MPs, means that all sorts of the most interesting characters you've had in the Labour Party in the past would never be selected this time around.
[01:12:08]  Anyone who is remotely radical or free thinking is being weeded out.
[01:12:13]  I mean, the Labour Party, and God knows that the Parliamentary Labour Party was hardly a radical, interesting body beforehand.
[01:12:18]  But, you know, it's very depressing the thought of what the Parliamentary Labour Party will actually consist of after the next election.
[01:12:26]  And that next election should be probably coming sometime in 2024.
[01:12:30]  I mean, Britain, as Americans might know, they do it a little bit different over there.
[01:12:36]  But in 2024, at the very latest, it seems like 2025.
[01:12:40]  And from what I understand, the smart money is on Kier Starmer becoming prime minister.
[01:12:45]  Oh, yeah, he will, and with an overall majority, yeah.
[01:12:48]  What are some of the key differences between him and Corbyn?
[01:12:51]  Oh, God.
[01:12:51]  I mean, where do you start?
[01:12:54]  I mean, you know, Starmer is a managerialist.
[01:12:57]  He's a profoundly sort of establishment figure.
[01:12:59]  He was director of public prosecutions, which means he's sort of the head of the head of the sort of, you know, the legal service for five years, during which period he developed a very close relationship with his sort of contemporaries in Washington.
[01:13:19]  You know, very much an Atlanticist, very, very much tied in to the conventional Western security establishment.
[01:13:32]  And one of the great things Corbyn did after the great crash of 2008, in Britain, the Conservative government imposed austerity.
[01:13:40]  It said the only way out of this mess is to have austerity.
[01:13:43]  Now, Obama at the time was tearing his hair out about this because he very much reached different conclusions.
[01:13:49]  And there's economic debates to be had about this.
[01:13:52]  If you're in a hole economically, stop digging.
[01:13:55]  Often spending is precisely what you need to do in that situation.
[01:13:58]  Anyway, whatever.
[01:13:59]  Corbyn blew away the sort of consensus on austerity.
[01:14:05]  That's now come back with a vengeance.
[01:14:07]  Starmer takes it as given that you mustn't promise any sort of radical spending.
[01:14:13]  The great anti-inflation thing that Biden introduced couldn't happen here because Starmer's tied himself into all sorts of financial pledges and so on.
[01:14:27]  And again, again, the disappointing thing is you see him interviewed on the BBC and ITN and by The Guardian and everyone says, well, hang on, hang on.
[01:14:36]  These things aren't given facts.
[01:14:38]  There's an entirely different way of doing things.
[01:14:40]  Why are you slavishly adhering to this?
[01:14:42]  And also, we're back to the politics of triangulation.
[01:14:44]  You know, the assumption that for a left-wing party, the further right you move, the more support you get.
[01:14:52]  The further left you lose, the less support you get.
[01:14:56]  Now, one thing that 2017 did was blow that out of the water when Corbyn almost wins the election.
[01:15:04]  That's not to say that what the Labour Party should do is move radically left and more people will vote for it.
[01:15:10]  I don't think that's the case at all.
[01:15:11]  But we're clearly in a much more complex and less linear political era now.
[01:15:16]  But Starmer's just gone straight back to the more you're in the center, the more people will vote for you.
[01:15:22]  And again, this is just entirely unquestioned.
[01:15:24]  You see them interviewed by the BBC and they all sit there nodding sagely as if only sort of immature student radicals believe anything different.
[01:15:30]  It's all very, we've all retreated straight back into the straitjacket of the politics that got us all in this mess in the first place.
[01:15:39]  Yeah, it feels like a weird pantomime of a status quo from the past.
[01:15:44]  It doesn't even feel like it's committed to getting back to that.
[01:15:47]  It just feels like it wants to kind of, it's like a weird political theater of it, if that makes sense.
[01:15:55]  It's repeating history as fast, isn't it, whatever that quote is.
[01:15:58]  I mean, it's very interesting because what Starmer clearly, you know, what their role model is, is Blair.
[01:16:02]  Okay.
[01:16:03]  Right.
[01:16:03]  Now, you know, Blair, whatever.
[01:16:05]  The economy is in such a different place.
[01:16:07]  Everything is in such a place.
[01:16:09]  It's just a completely different social context.
[01:16:12]  And given the precariousness of the British economy, I mean, it just seems.
[01:16:17]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:16:18]  And also...
[01:16:19]  Very dangerous.
[01:16:19]  And, you know, I think the Labour right knows they have a problem with this.
[01:16:22]  Blair, whatever one thinks about Blair, was a great political performer.
[01:16:26]  He's like Clinton.
[01:16:26]  He was a great communicator.
[01:16:28]  He was a great performer.
[01:16:28]  He had sparkle and pizzazz and what have you.
[01:16:31]  Starmer so doesn't.
[01:16:33]  You know, I'm talking about charisma bypass.
[01:16:35]  He is extraordinarily wooden.
[01:16:38]  He's lacking all the qualities.
[01:16:40]  He looks like a nutcracker.
[01:16:42]  He does.
[01:16:42]  He does greatly resemble a nutcracker.
[01:16:44]  Yeah.
[01:16:46]  And he's unpopular.
[01:16:48]  He's remarkably unpopular, given the totally free ride he gets in the press.
[01:16:54]  That's what's so ironic.
[01:16:55]  No, it's like the Labour Party under Starmer, after all of his purges, is smaller than ever.
[01:17:01]  It's more like, I mean, if we want to talk about how wildly, how, you know, big and flourishing and wide the Labour Party was under Corbyn.
[01:17:12]  Keir himself is incredibly unpopular.
[01:17:16]  No one likes him.
[01:17:17]  Everyone feels kind of stuck with him, it seems like.
[01:17:20]  And yet, Labour will be elected in a landslide.
[01:17:24]  So this is very weird contradiction, both within the party and then sort of like kind of how the party is sort of situated to just the sort of general politics of Britain at the current moment.
[01:17:38]  And I think many around Starmer are aware of the dangers of this.

=== Weird Labour Contradiction (02:49) ===

[01:17:41]  I mean, okay, everyone loathes the Conservatives at the moment, but the party gets into power and it needs to make things different.
[01:17:48]  Yeah.
[01:17:49]  You know, and it's tied itself absolutely rigidly to all these fiscal and financial rules and goals and so on.
[01:17:55]  And I think they know that the great challenge they've got is what they can't have is after four years, everyone looks around and says, well, everything's as crap as it was when you arrived.
[01:18:04]  Four years ago, you're lucky.
[01:18:06]  Yeah.
[01:18:06]  And if you actually look at their selling points to the British public at the moment, it's entirely managerialism.
[01:18:14]  We'll be less corrupt and useless than the Tories, which I should hope they will be.
[01:18:17]  I mean, it would be hard to be less, you know, not be less corrupt and useless than the Conservatives are.
[01:18:23]  But yes, and I think they know they've got a problem here that, you know, what are they actually going to do to make anything different?
[01:18:28]  Well, if the Western Europe in the past two decades has been any indication, I think that a sort of centrist liberal former social democratic party taking the reins of power in a Western European nation will go very well for everybody in that country.
[01:18:49]  Yeah, I mean, if they're taking the example of like, yeah, it's, it's, it's, I, I, I feel, I have no idea what's going to happen, but uh, it has just been, it's astounding to see just how effective they are when they want to, you know, purge people from the party, when they want to completely change the course of where things are going in the body politics in general, right?
[01:19:16]  And sort of revert to this facsimile of this like early 2000s, 1990s kind of technocratic liberalism.
[01:19:25]  I mean, they were really astounding.
[01:19:27]  And I think they're deeply valuable lessons to be learned from how they went about this.
[01:19:33]  No, I think you're absolutely right.
[01:19:34]  I mean, for me, there were two things driving me really.
[01:19:37]  One was, you know, if you know, I'm not at all convinced how good a prime minister Jeremy Corbyn would have been.
[01:19:45]  And if people don't like Jeremy Corbyn and don't want to vote for him, fine.
[01:19:49]  And if people on the right of the Labour Party want their faction to be in control rather than his, fine.
[01:19:54]  But people, do you need to, the press needs to be honest?
[01:19:58]  You can't just lie about people and then trust the press to lie about them for you.
[01:20:03]  You know, in a functioning democracy, you need a competent and honest press.
[01:20:07]  And you can't just do this to any radical, any radical politician.
[01:20:13]  I think the left also, you know, having waded my way through these disciplinary documents, the left also has to confront one or two things.
[01:20:25]  The blueprint for how Blair, how Corbyn was destroyed can be wheeled out again and again.

=== Feeds Dehumanization (02:50) ===

[01:20:30]  It's like a sort of weapon battle tested in Gaza, you know, because it was incredibly effective.
[01:20:37]  And what clearly failed was to take it as being in good faith and to try and argue back rationally.
[01:20:45]  If you actually look at how the human rights organizations deal with this when they, you know, Israel and its lobby goes for them and says you're an anti-Semite, they just rigidly stand their ground.
[01:20:55]  They root it in international law.
[01:20:57]  You know, they say Israel is an apartheid state.
[01:21:00]  This is wrong.
[01:21:01]  We oppose it.
[01:21:02]  And they just don't allow themselves to be knocked off course.
[01:21:05]  And Corbyn went down a very slippery road of sort of apology and appeasement, which I think was absolutely disastrous.
[01:21:13]  And effectively, and I think this is the other reason it mattered beyond the sort of internal politics of Western political parties.
[01:21:22]  The Palestinian people were just thrown to the wolves in all this.
[01:21:26]  And if you want to look at why the British political media class is in such a morally obscene position about the current wholesale slaughter of small children in Gaza, you have to look back to that period when they allowed any clear articulation of the Palestinian cause to be sort of demonized.
[01:21:52]  And, you know, which all feeds into the dehumanization of the Palestinian people.
[01:21:57]  If you are tainting the Palestinian cause with the toxicity of anti-Semitism, which has such dreadful resonances in the sort of Western mind for, you know, for very good and obvious reasons, you are opening the door to the dehumanization of those people.
[01:22:13]  And you can't understand the West's complicity in what is done to the Palestinian people unless you understand that.
[01:22:23]  So the consequences of this are enormous.
[01:22:25]  It's, you know, what are we at now?
[01:22:26]  30,000 people dead in Gaza.
[01:22:28]  You know, these things matter.
[01:22:31]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:22:32]  Absolutely.
[01:22:32]  These things matter.
[01:22:35]  Well, Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show.
[01:22:38]  I want to implore our listeners to watch all five episodes of the labor files.
[01:22:44]  I mean, I think probably the easiest way to find it is just Google Al Jazeera labor files.
[01:22:48]  They're all available on the website.
[01:22:49]  It's on YouTube.
[01:22:50]  It's all on YouTube.
[01:22:51]  I'll link to it directly from the show notes.
[01:22:53]  So you can just click right there.
[01:22:55]  That's the easiest way to do it.
[01:22:56]  I don't even know why.
[01:22:57]  We always do it.
[01:22:57]  I don't know why anybody else is doing it.
[01:22:58]  But it's always good to get to, you know, hone your Google skills.
[01:23:01]  So it's a good thing against what we've got in the description.
[01:23:06]  The interesting thing about it, although it was entirely ignored, the second film in particular, you know, got hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
[01:23:13]  But then when the assault on the Gaza Strip started, it just took off again.
[01:23:19]  It's, you know, it's been shooting up in terms of views.

=== Watch All Five Parts (01:01) ===

[01:23:21]  My son tells me this is all to do with algorithms.
[01:23:23]  I don't really understand these things, but it's very interesting.
[01:23:25]  There's clearly a large new audience that's finding it relevant in the wake of the attack on the Gaza Strip.
[01:23:32]  Well, I think our audience will definitely find it relevant if they haven't watched it.
[01:23:35]  Thank you so much for coming on the show.
[01:23:37]  Thank you for having me.
[01:23:51]  Okay, so you, ladies and gentlemen, you have two tasks to do right now.
[01:23:55]  One is to watch all five parts of the labor files in the link below.
[01:24:00]  And two, it's to sign up for the Truanon January 6th board game, also at the other link below.
[01:24:07]  You should be able to differentiate the two.
[01:24:12]  With that being said, my name is Brace.
[01:24:14]  I'm Liz.
[01:24:15]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:24:18]  And this has been Trunon.
[01:24:19]  Happy 2024.
[01:24:21]  We'll see you next time.