Dr Ian Wellens letter is just a bit too polite. It lacks something like a necessary combativeness ! I am an uncouth American. On the rise of Keir Starmer, a look at part of an American context, might offer insights into British politics, via Helen Lewis’ carefully massaged essay in The Atlantic ?
Headline: Healing the Rift With Britain’s Jews
Sub-headline: The U.K. Labour Party’s new leader wants to disown Jeremy Corbyn’s toxic legacy.
Lewis is ‘ the former deputy editor of the New Statesman’ and ‘a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic’.
Also see The New Statesman essay by Patrick Maguire:
Headline: Keir Starmer: The sensible radical
Sub-headline: The former human rights lawyer aspires to unite not only the troubled Labour Party but the country. But who is he? And what does he really want?
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/03/keir-starmer-sensible-radical
Its telling that the Anti-Corbyn propaganda, that has been the business of Margaret Hodge, Jonathan Freedland,The Economist and The Financial Times etc. will now be imported via Helen Lewis’ essay in The Atlantic. To bring this advocacy/apologetic for Kier Starmer, to an American audience. Note too, that Lewis advertises herself as a Feminist, which will help sell the notion that she is on ‘the right side’ , as she embroiders on her theme of Corbyn’s Anti-Semitism. Tailored for an American audience, used to the hysterics of Rachael Maddow, Mika and Joe and the rest of MSNBC & CNN coterie of News Readers.
The central problem with both the Helen Lewis and Patrick Maguire, and their concept/practice of Corbyn’s Anti-Semitism, is that it ignores its roots in advocacy for Palestinian Rights, and it weapon of choice BDS. Much too inconvenient, to the campaign of defamation based upon the construction of a self-interested fiction. An ongoing investigation into Corbyn, leads Lewis to speculate, laced with hope, that Corbyn might well be expelled from the Party!
Mr. Maguire’s essay is more adroitly focused on Starmer’s political rise, with the Anti-Semitism issue seamlessly woven into his personal and political life, and there twin evolution’s . This essay tailored to a British audience. Helen Lewis’s essay is the purest kind of propaganda, for those familiar with Corbyn’s rise and fall, it is crude and lacks the journalistic style, the political/literary sophistication of Maguire.
Keir Starmer’s rise is simply the reassertion of New Labour, and its Neo-Liberal imperatives. The fight against Anti-Semitism, in the Party, is in fact about purging the Corbyn faction from the party. As reported by Maguire the numbers at Starmer’s appearances are not the numbers that Corbyn attracted.
Political Observer
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