Political Observer traces the poitical evolution of Freedland from Corbyn defamer, to Trump would be diagnostician !

stephenkmacksd.com/

May 02, 2025

One of Mr. Freedland’s talents is to self-present as a political chameleon, who changes political hues at conveient political moments:

Fri 13 Dec 2019 11.41 EST

Headline: This is a repudiation of Corbynism. Labour needs to ditch the politics of the sect

Sub-headline: A 1970s hard-left clique led the party into a dead end – and it’s the poor and vulnerable who will pay the price

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/corbynism-labour-left-party

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Labour knew it and Corbyn knew it. Those appalling numbers were not state secrets. His admirers always describe him as a selfless, almost saintly man, devoid of ego. So why didn’t he take one look at his own ratings and say, “I am clearly a drag on this party’s prospects. Those who need a Labour government have a better chance of getting one if I step aside.” Not a chance.

Corbyn’s own vanity was too great for him even to consider such an act of self-sacrifice. Instead he was encouraged by his own devoted legions of supporters, for whom the idea of a change of leader was heresy. In their mind, it was better to lose under Corbyn than to have a shot at winning with someone – anyone – else.

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Of course, this relates not just to Corbyn but Corbynism. For the last four years, Labour has been in thrall to the notion that it’s better to have a manifesto you can feel proud of, a programme that calls itself radical, than to devise one that might have a chance of winning. Some even argued that, “win or lose”, Corbyn achieved much simply by offering a genuinely socialist plan – in contrast with Labour’s 1997 offer, which was so boringly modest and incremental.

Well, guess what. Labour’s “radical” manifesto of 2019 achieved precisely nothing. Not one proposal in it will be implemented, not one pound in it will be spent. It is worthless. And if judged not by the academic standard of “expanding the discourse”, but by the hard, practical measure of improving actual people’s actual lives, those hate figures of Corbynism – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – achieved more in four hours than Corbyn achieved in four years. Why? Because they did what it took to win power.

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Editor: Mr. Freedland provides a severable diganosis of the Corbyn political mentality ?

Wed 5 Sep 2018 08.53 EDT

Headline : Jewish concern over Corbyn is not all about Israel. It’s about antisemitism

Sub-headline: The IHRA row focused on the Middle East conflict. But that’s not the heart of the matter

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The IHRA controversy has also distorted and obscured what the tension over Labour and antisemitism is really about. Because of the focus on the four IHRA examples that Labour dropped back in July, it’s often looked as if the disagreement is entirely about Israel/Palestine – as if, when you get right down to it, the Jewish community cannot tolerate criticism of Israel and that its problem with Corbyn is that he is just too passionate a campaigner for Palestinian rights.

Of course that might be true for some. But for many Jews, especially within Labour, the picture is very different. Witness Sunday’s conference in London of the Jewish Labour Movement, many of whose members have been most vocal in criticising Labour over antisemitism. A curious thing happened when Gordon Brown addressed the conference. At one point, he called for the establishment of a Palestinian state, the sharing of Jerusalem and the withdrawal of settlements – going on to denounce Donald Trump for cutting off funding of Palestinian refugees. He was interrupted by loud applause.

Later Margaret Hodge, the same Margaret Hodge who called Corbyn an antisemitic racist to his face, condemned Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent nation state law as “despicable and abhorrent”. The room erupted in a thunderous ovation. To state the obvious: these are not the reactions of people who cannot stomach criticism of Israel.

Where, then, lies the grievance with Corbyn? At that meeting on Sunday, Jewish Labourites were not opposing the party leader for championing the Palestinians. They were opposing him for, to take one example, his 2013 attack on a group of “Zionists” he’d encountered, where he tackled them not on their arguments but on ethnic grounds, noting that despite “having lived in this country for a very long time, they don’t understand English irony”.

The implication of that remark is clear – and it has nothing to do with defending Palestinians. It’s that Corbyn sees Jews as fundamentally alien, foreigners who might live here a long time, might even be born here, but are still essentially other. People who will never be truly English.

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Editor: Friedland offers Corbyn in the guise of : ‘Corbyn sees Jews as fundamentally alien, foreigners…’ This viewed from the political present of the ongoing Gaza Genocide, renders Mr. Freedland’s ‘fundamentally alien’ claim, refracted in the lens of the political present, of unabated Zionist Mass Murder reads like prescience of a very high order?

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Fri 2 May 2025 11.39 EDT

Headline: One hundred days in, Donald Trump faces a problem: he can rage, but he can’t govern

Sub-headline: Americans are beginning to worry about their future amid a shrinking economy, warnings of empty shelves – and the president’s failed promises

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/02/donald-trump-first-100-days-tariffs-us-economy

Mr. Friedland’s commentary is awash in ‘Liberal Distaine’ of Trump and Trumpism: yet the Political History of Britain, is marked by notorious political incompetence: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak , Keir Starmer!

Editor : The final paragraphs of Freedland’s diatribe offers…..

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So it’s fair to say the 100 days have not gone as Trump would have wished. And thanks to those serial failures, you can see the first, small signs that his power to terrify is fading. Witness the handful of senate Republicans who voted with Democrats against his tariff policy. And note how the reliably rightwing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is now a fierce critic, slamming Trump as a “bully” and denouncing tariffs as “the biggest economic policy mistake in decades”. For a few short hours, even Jeff Bezos seemed ready to take a stand, amid reports that Amazon was about to itemise the cost of tariffs to US customers, before the company backed down.

Of course, none of this should be a surprise. Trump’s conman promises and delusional dreams of turning the clock back were always bound to fail. This is the nature of nationalist populism, whether it wears a red cap in Michigan or a turquoise rosette in Runcorn. It is expert at turning grievance, division and nostalgia into votes. But when it comes to governing, it will always fail. It offers an outlet for complaint – and has no answers at all.

Political Observer.