Old Socialist comments.
Jul 24, 2025
Editor : This is what the Independant offers its readership on the new party of Corbyn & Sultana!
Headline: Jeremy Corbyn confirms plan to create new political party with Zarah Sultana
Sub-headline: Ex-Labour leader said it was ‘time for a new kind of political party’ to take on Starmer – but Labour grandee warns it will only help Tories and Reform
Editor: This 535 word essay ends with these paragraraphs:
Mr Corbyn led the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020 before being suspended following a row over a report into antisemitism in the party.
He was expelled in 2024 and successfully contested the summer election as an Independent candidate.
Ms Sultana had the Labour whip withdrawn after rebelling against the government to vote to scrap the two-child benefit cap. She resigned her Labour membership in 2025.
Editor: not to forget this from political fabulist, or in more telling terms, the Party Hack Jonathan Freedland, of Wed 1 May 2019.
Headline: Jeremy Corbyn is either blind to antisemitism – or he just doesn’t care
Sub-headline: Labour’s leader may claim he didn’t see the racism in JA Hobson’s book. But can the party indulge that delusion?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/01/jeremy-corbyn-blind-antisemitism-hobson
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In today’s Times, the columnist Daniel Finkelstein has dug out a 2011 reissue of JA Hobson’s 1902 work, Imperialism: A Study. The foreword was written by Jeremy Corbyn in 2011. Across eight pages, the then Labour backbencher lavishes praise on the book. His very first sentence describes it as a “great tome”. Among other things, he calls it “very powerful,” “brilliant”, as well as “correct and prescient”. The trouble is, Hobson was not just an accomplished analyst of international politics – for the Manchester Guardian, as it happens – but an egregious anti-Jewish racist.
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No one is arguing that Corbyn was obliged to denounce the whole book. He could simply have nodded to the problem with a tiny caveat: something like, “Despite some passages that read uncomfortably to the modern ear …” But there is nothing like that. He might have made the move Finkelstein himself made when writing recently about Churchill, in a column headlined: “Winston Churchill was a racist but still a great man”. Corbyn could have said something similar about Hobson or his book. But he didn’t do that either. A Labour spokesman has said that: “Jeremy completely rejects the antisemitic elements of [Hobson’s] analysis.” But if that’s true, why did he not say so when he wrote about it?
Perhaps the Labour leader’s explanation will be the same one he offered for his defence of a mural depicting hook-nosed, Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the poor: that he simply did not see the racism. But in the Hobson text, it’s there in black and white. It would be very hard to miss, especially if you’re a “lifelong anti-racist” as Corbyn always insists he is. But perhaps that will be what he’ll say: that he couldn’t see the racism even when it stared him in the face. Because the only other explanation available is that he didn’t object to this part of Hobson’s analysis – as he did to other parts, describing one element of the book as “strange” – because he didn’t see anything wrong with it.
We all know that it’s painful to admit flaws in those we admire. Corbyn should have done it about Hobson, but did not. Now that task falls to Labour MPs, members, supporters and voters. The Labour leader may tell himself that he is the victim here, a serially unlucky anti-racist who means well, but keeps overlooking racism against Jews even when it’s right in front of him, whether on the platforms he shares or the books he praises. Now the rest of the Labour family have to decide how much longer they are willing to indulge that delusion.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/01/jeremy-corbyn-blind-antisemitism-hobson
Editor: In sum Corbyn has deviated from the acceptable definitional frame! One thinks of Isaiah Berlin, and his sub-rosa attacks on the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, as a telling object lesson of the how of academic politicking, Mr. Freedland pratises this in the light of day!
June 28, 2013
The Dishonesties of Isaiah Berlin
Editor: Reader look to The Economist of July 23, 2025 as to this publications willfull tone deafness, as to what is of actual political moment! The Re-animated Ghost of the long dead Bagehot, serves the political purpose of a usable political frame, by which to measure the political present through an aperition?
Britain | Bagehot
Headline : The peril of trying to please people
Sub-headline: Compromise rarely leads to contentment. But it nearly always leads to costs
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/07/23/the-peril-of-trying-to-please-people
Under the rubric : ‘To govern is to soothe’ offers the reader
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Compromise on planning speaks to a deeper crisis of confidence. The planning bill sailed through the Commons. Harsher amendments tabled by a Labour rebel (since booted out of the party) were voted down overwhelmingly. Yet now Labour’s planning reforms have been watered down before the government has even lost a vote. At times this Labour government behaves as if it is illegitimate. Elections become a mere starting point to negotiate with the actual powers in Britain, rather than a mandate to do anything. Consultations must be run; inquiries held; stakeholders engaged. If well-organised groups oppose a policy, who is His Majesty’s Government to argue otherwise?
Come autumn, if the weakened planning bill sails through the upper house without complaint from the larger environmental charities, perhaps it will have been worth it. The faster it passes Parliament, the quicker people can start building. The Office for Budget Responsibility has always priced the bill into its growth forecasts, arguing that planning changes will make the British economy about 0.2% bigger in 2029 than it would otherwise have been. It is not much, but it is much needed.
That is not the only possible path. After all, the government has been here before. Environmental ngos had initially praised the government’s plans. A month later they labelled them “cash to trash”. The same incentives are in play again. Why stop at the current concession if more can be squeezed? Less politic environmentalists are already grumbling. “The fight goes on,” declared one association of ecologists. Larger groups may join them. If they do, all that will be left is a less effective law, a public scrap and a government that will wish it had held its ground and won.
That Labour Rebel might be Jeremey Corbyn?
Old Socialist.
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