Are Labour sitting on the fence over Ken Livingstone?

They’ve really dragged their feet with this, why another years suspension? Either he is right or he is wrong, a suspension implies he has done wrong so therefore why simply a suspension.

They really can’t win on this I know and he has go them in a right state but they should have the balls to come of the fence and go one side or the other.

For me its the context not the historical point, was he trying to be anti Semitic? That is the issue, I don’t think from what I have seen it can be proved either way.

I’m not sure either but I’d just love to read a few dozen pages on the subject.

11 Likes

Fair play.

Sit tight and make yourself comfortable then.

1 Like

Topical, relevant and in the news, surely it is worth a comment or two?

1 Like

Absolutely.

Well, there’s two reasons he has been suspended, rather than expelled.

The first is that he said nothing wrong. Impolitic perhaps, but he was responding to the already simmering issue of Naz Shah, who’d been called out for sharing one of Norman Finkelstein’s memes on Facebook. Chucking him out of the party at this stage would just invite more scrutiny of the issue.

The second is that any re-entry to the party will happen ahead of next year’s local elections, so that’ll be Labour going into three sets of local elections with ridiculous but loudly vocalised accusations of anti-semitism within three years.

At the same time, it’s the soft party that loves foreigners and (heard on doorstep last year) “lets all the fucking immigrants in”

Do you get it yet, @barry-sanchez ?

May I be the first to congratulate Barry on a comprehensible thread title - we’re really making strides here guys!

6 Likes

So is Livingstone in the worng party or has the party moved from the traditional base? If so why isn’t there a split?

I’m a bit slow so I’m not sure why what he said is anti Semitic.

some ppl are on the Protected List, and if you criticise them or their actions that is automatically a Hate Crime. That is just way of world, fatso.

If someone as clued up about politics as you is on the fence Barry, why cant the Labour Party be also?

I am no fan of Our Ken and he does like a wind up, but on this occasion it is a storm in a teacup. I dont think he has been anti-semitic in this instance, although I also dont think his choice of words in making his point was very wise.

1 Like

You can accuse Livingstone of historical inaccuracy, you can accuse him of being crass and insensitive, you can accuse him of inflaming the whole thing over the past few days. All of those are, at the very least, arguable. I’d certainly take issue with his suggestion that Hitler “supported Zionism” because of what it suggests. And the phrase “before he went mad” could very easily be construed as trivialising events that really can’t and shouldn’t be trivialised. He also does seem to be drunk on his own notoriety at present, but then he always has had a super-sized ego.

But, like others, I can’t see how what he said (and I’d think we’ve all heard it many times by now) can be construed as anti-Semitic. I can see how his words would have upset and/or offended Jewish people, but where is the anti-Semitic content here? I can’t see any.

Further, if he’s been found guilty of defaming the party then he should have been expelled, surely? I’m not commenting here on the rights and wrongs of the finding, just on the punishment handed down given that finding. All in all, it’s a fucking mess.

6 Likes

@fowllyd the mess is going to get bigger. Don’t think for a second this won’t drag on and on.

It’s almost as if they don’t want it to end.

2 Likes

Then why hasn’t the Labour Party dropped the suspension? Fear of upsetting the powerful Jewish lobby?

Livingstone is not getting flak for what he said. He’s getting flak for what others said he said. Even at the time, his Labour critics had trouble pointing out the offence, taking to Twitter with vague sentiments like “Ken’s comments have no place in the Labour Party”.

Why? Because they’re true?

I won’t even take issue with what Livingstone said regarding Hitler supporting Zionism. To do so both obscures the truth of the matter, a big enough truth to fell an Israeli government in the 1950s, so poorly was it received. My bigger issue is that any condemnation plays into the hands of those seeking to obscure today.

The zionist project involved setting up a state for Jewish residents in Palestine. There was no Israel in Hitler’s time, so every Jew, by definition, was part of the diaspora, scattered across civilisations. Agree that “before he went mad” complete downplays the pre-1941 persecutions, but that year is when most historians generally concur is the time that mass extermination was proposed as the Final Solution, and most of those point to it not only being a crime against humanity, but also a crime of opportunity.

It could not have been done without the police state and crucially, the size of Nazi holdings at the time. Fatherland, the alternative history book in which the Germans win the war, is all about how that secret was kept and the effort to bring it to the world’s attention. The policy of mass extermination was also meted out to the Russians. Hitler wanted 30 million dead there for his lebensraum in victory. He achieved the former and fell way short of the latter.

It took the Nazis a few months to get all their sweeping legislation in gear. Moreover, many of the crimes that we like to think of as uniquely Nazi were practiced by other countries. Eugenics _still _exists today, with forced sterilisation in many countries, a concept Winston Churchill supported back in the day. We were putting homosexuals in asylums until the late 60s. When assessing the madness of the Nazis, I think we need to discount the stuff their contemporaries did, and not forget that we once did some of the same stuff too.

Even today, I’d argue that we’ve watered down versions of the same legislation. It might not be forced sterilisation, but when poor people are terrified of a third child because their benefits won’t extend to them, I think you can reasonably term that a form of eugenics.

Back to “before he went mad”. I think Ken meant mass extermination, and I think that a fairly decent differentiator between the Nazis and their contemporaries. Every other thing you might want to pull them up for someone else had done recently, or was still doing it.

1 Like

that’s a fkn stretch m8

It is, and perhaps social engineering would be a better way of terming it, but if the net result is people don’t get born that might be born, while the rich can procreate with abandon, then I reckon I just about get there. Hanging by my fingertips.

Is it fair for people to have more children than they can afford?