Melanie Phillips
The JC, June 30, 2024
“Starmer may have rid the Labour party of its most egregious antisemites. But as in the progressive world in general, he has drawn a wholly artificial line between Jew-hatred and the demonisation of Israel that is now de rigeur on the left.”
According to received opinion, the question is not whether Labour will win next week’s general election by a huge majority. The only question is how huge.
The party’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has reportedly purged it of the antisemites, jihad-enablers and terrorism supporters who infested it under his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. As a result, Starmer has apparently turned it from a hard-left, Jew-baiting nest of vipers into a party of decent, principled moderates. Yet when asked why he had campaigned for Corbyn to win the 2019 general election and had even said he thought Corbyn would make “a great prime minister”, the best Starmer could come up with was that he had been certain that Corbyn couldn’t win and he’d wanted to support the good people in the party.
If that was lame and evasive, worse was to come. During the special edition of the BBC’s Question Time last week, Starmer said Corbyn would have been a “better prime minister” than Boris Johnson, “a man who made massive promises and didn’t keep them”.
What a marmalade-dropper! In Starmer’s moral universe, a man who failed to deliver what it said on the tin was worse than a man who described terrorists as “friends” and those who want to murder Jews, destroy Israel and conquer the world. It suggests that Starmer doesn’t understand why Corbyn was totally beyond the pale. And that suggests Starmer doesn’t understand what the pale in this case actually is. … [To read the full article, click here]