Antisemitic daubing - who has the right to protest about it?

Every group, nation, or minority experiences struggles over what ideas dominate. However you see yourself - in terms of your group your nation, your minority, perhaps you've seen this process going on: people claiming, for example, that there is a 'right' way for your group to think, behave or act. Or that there is a 'mainstream' way and other ways are not legitimate. 

Part of what's gone on with Jews and the Labour Party, I believe, has running through it tensions about precisely this matter: who speaks for Jews? Who represents Jews? 

As it happens, the UK's 284,000 Jews make up a hugely diverse population whether that's seen in terms of lifestyle, employment, beliefs, religious practice, manifestations of culture or indeed along any lines of culture you would like to think of. One view of this is to acknowledge it and celebrate it. Another is to treat it as if this variety doesn't really exist. Another view is that the variety is awkward and that things should be done to get some kind of unity or homogeneity to it all. 

Here's how I think this applies to what's been going on recently, in particular on twitter where the vigil held in protest against the daubing in Hampstead in North London has provoked some bitter exchanges: 

(the paras that follow were originally tweets) 


If one’s view is that Corbyn is an antisemite and a Corbyn government would have been an existential threat to Jews, I speculate as to why a greater enemy than me isn’t the Jewish Lab candidates. All I do is sit on my tukkhes and tweet.

I’m beginning to wonder if something else is happening: some kind of unspoken struggle for hearts and minds over who has the right to speak. (We used to call it ‘hegemony’ in the ‘discourse’).

Antisemitic daubing is an attempt to intimidate Jews of all backgrounds and affiliations. North London is a place where this variation in Jewish culture and religion is very marked. Antisemitic daubing doesn’t threaten one kind of Jew more than another. Any Jew or group of Jews could/can show their resistance to that intimidation in whatever way they want.

One show of resistance by some Jews doesn’t exclude another group of Jews from showing their resistance in whatever way they want. Only if a group is seeking ‘hegemony’ (authority, domination) over others does it become an issue.

The discourse around me as being self-hating [there's been a lot of it going on on twitter!] is an attempt to delegitimise my type of Jew (however that’s perceived).There are many secular and radical traditions that are easily hidden, forgotten or sat on in this debate.

It’s no more relevant whether this is a ‘minority’ or ‘not mainstream’ than it is to say Philip Roth is not as mainstream as Alan Dershowitz. Cultural politics is not only about numbers. It’s also about attitudes and sharing thoughts and feelings.

The Tiger who Came to Tea - don't try to make a nuanced point about it.

This is a warning for anyone trying to say something nuanced about literature (or probably any of the arts) in the mainstream media outside of the arts pages. 

On BBC One's 'Imagine' I was asked to speculate about 'The Tiger who Came to Tea' - a book that I love and admire enormously. I tried to make the point that when we writers, artists create unreal or surreal images we don't know exactly what these represent. 

This is hardly a new or controversial point. Shakespeare nearly makes the point several times. This is a central point of Freud and many writers, psychologists since. So if you come to me and tell me - as some have - that a little poem I wrote - as I thought about the death of my mother, uses the image of a van going off because somewhere in my mind I have the image of vans or trains taking Jews away during World War Two, I'm not going to 'deny' this. I can say, 'I don't remember having that image when I wrote the poem', but this is not ultimately the 'truth'. The impact of history on our minds is not fully known to us. (I wrote a Ph.D about this, now published as 'The Author'!)

So, I suggested that when Judith Kerr created the tiger, I floated the possibility that this quite genial creature is in its own way just a bit threatening also. A tiger is a tiger is a tiger. Tigers, when they appear in children's books or as soft toys are indeed cuddly and giant-cat-like. But tigers are also at some level in our mind predators. So, I suggested that perhaps Judith had put into her image of the tiger some of her perhaps-repressed or hidden fears of the door knocking and someone dangerous being there. 

According to Freud and others we 'sublimate' our fears or we 'displace' them, we make them 'safe'. We are so successful at this, that we don't even know that we've done it. That's the argument.

Since I tried to make this point, the news media have had a glorious time, saying that I said that the tiger = the Gestapo. I didn't say that. I tried to make a more nuanced point. O foolish Rosen. 

(For people who don't know Judith's life: when she was 7, her family fled Berlin because the Nazis had just come to power, and Judith's father was under immediate threat of arrest for being both Jewish and 'subversive' (he was a left-wing theatre critic).)

It's being repeated all over the news media at the moment because the wonderful animation company Lupus, who made the animation of 'Bear Hunt' - have made an animation for this Christmas of 'The Tiger who Came to Tea'.

So if you see anywhere that Rosen said that the Tiger = the Gestapo', I didn't. 

The Enraged Centre finds its voice

It's the moment of the enraged centre, still furious with that tens of thousands of Labour Party members who elected Corbyn (twice), still furious that a Corbyn-led Labour Party increased the Labour vote to 12 million in 2017 and now in full throat certainty that they know why Corbyn 'lost the election'. 

He 'lost the north', he 'lost the working class', they say, which presumably, the assured centre would have won. Would it have, though? The assured centre was much more Remain than Corbyn - or so they kept saying - so presumably they would have alienated even more of the working class north, wouldn't they? 

Then again, the enraged centre keep pointing out that Corbyn is too 'north London', without noticing that more often than not, they are too. And after all, Tony Blair, won elections (apparently) because he was very smart, modern, and...er...north London. (Yes, I know he came originally from 'the North' but his pitch as an adult, was in part that he was Oxford educated and was in the smart north London set who had planned the whole New Labour project from a north London cafe. (I exaggerate, but you know what I mean.) 

The 'lost the working class' line of argument has to pretend that the 10 million who voted Labour this time either doesn't exist (as in 'don't mention the 10 million'), or that the whole 10 million came from Islington. As far as I know there aren't 10 million people living in Islington. And it's also necessary to pretend that no one living in north London is a worker, that none of the people living in north London works in offices, factories (they still exist), as shop-workers, in fleets of vans, trucks, there are no transport workers, no health service workers...you get the drift. Just keep up the pretence that a Corbyn-led Labour Party got all 10 million votes from 'students' and 'Trots'. 

So the enraged centre have a problem. They've got to find someone 'from the North' who is sufficiently centrist but presumably not over-infected by Remainer-ism and yet sufficiently popular with all those members of the Party who thought that a programme of supporting public services, better wages and a foreign policy that would avoid war was worth backing, but have now stopped thinking those things.  

Boris Johnson, Katie Hopkins - raving antisemitism

On October 29, 2018 the Jewish Chronicle ran a story which included this:


"Right-wing commentator Katie Hopkins has been condemned for blaming the "Chief Rabbi and his support for mass migration" into Europe for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in which 11 died.


Robert Bowers, the suspected shooter, is purported to have kept a social media account that sent antisemitic messages in the hours before the attack.


Two days after the mass shooting stunned the Jewish communty, Ms Hopkins tweeted she was “watching the pin-the-blame on the donkey".


“Look to the Chief Rabbi and his support for mass migration across the Med," she wrote."
----------------------------------------
Note from me:


Please look at the photo below. In the last few hours and days, various people have drawn attention to the fact that Katie Hopkins is making announcements about how enthusiastic she is that Boris Johnson has been elected. The photo seems to suggest something else: Boris Johnson is in no way bothered that he might appear in public with someone who has Katie Hopkins' views. Her views on Muslims are well known. Given the furore about antisemitism in the Labour Party, might the media not have drawn our attention to the fact that Boris Johnson has been friendly with someone who thinks that the massacre of 11 Jews was the Chief Rabbi's fault?


[I don't like explaining the logic of the minds of people like Katie Hopkins, but it's possible that she singled out the Chief Rabbi because he had visited a refugee camp in Europe. She was, then, supporting what is known as 'Replacement Theory' - that 'the Jews' are replacing white people in Europe or America with people of colour.]

Boris Johnson's voice.

Popular performing arts in theatre, stand-up comedy, spoken word and the like, mostly rely on a particular kind of 'vocal effort' and range. I know the differences between me chatting at home, talking on the phone, talking on the radio and performing to a thousand children in a theatre. Everyone who does any or all of these knows this too. Some of us study or teach it. Some of us pick it up as we go along, observing how others do it and imitating them.

Politicians find themselves in similar situations: speaking in public, on TV and radio and in the House of Commons. Some find the very performative side to speech-making a bit artificial and fear that as they 'put on' the speechifying voice that they sound false, so they try to find more 'authentic' ways of doing it.


I've watched several interviews with people who said that they had liked what they had seen of Boris Johnson. These haven't been public school educated people part of his milieu of toffs. I wonder is there some aspect of this that people watching TV, enjoying these popular performing arts techniques that they see in comedians, see something enjoyable in the way that Johnson performs. Did he find a way in the debating societies of Eton and Oxford the popular performative style that overlaps with the purely theatrical one?

Does this mean that politicians of the left should also work on developing this art? Or should they judge it as false and find another way of speaking in public, whether that's on TV, radio, public meetings or the House of Commons? Nicola Sturgeon for example has a style that is fluent, clear and assured that doesn't go in for any of the Johnson way of doing things. What other styles of speaking can be powerful without going down the Johnson route?

My advice to the media on how to handle the Labour leadership election

1. You choose the next leader of the Labour Party, so make sure that you set the agenda for who will or won't succeed. This means that you must do the interpretation of the election results. On no account leave it to rank and file Labour people to work things out and express them on air or in your papers, and don't leave it to Labour-supporting research groups. They're biased. You're not. 

2. You must start to favour one or two of the candidates. You can do this by interviewing these more often and in a particular kind of way,  challenging but essentially friendly. With the people you don't favour,   you must be challenging but remember to interrupt them more, show some contempt on your face or voice and keep saying 'But this failed last time' as if 'what failed last time' is a certainty. 

3. Make sure to bring into the studios or into your papers many, many people who have never had any interest whatsoever in voting or supporting Labour. Give them plenty of time to talk about what Labour should do. Encourage them to keep repeating that word 'should' or similar words like 'needs to', 'has to', 'must'. This helps drive the idea that the media choose the leader not the members. 

4.  You must keep going with vox pops. Keep on going to windswept, wet places and repeating the phrase, 'If Labour are to win, they must win here.' Then interview someone and give them time to say that every single thing about the cut in their standard of living over the last ten years was caused by the EU and immigrants.  On no account create a situation in which any of these ideas might be challenged. You have become at this moment the channel by which these ideas circulate unchallenged. If anyone points this out to you, get really furious and say that it's an attack on free speech. 

Ask the Labour leadership candidate several times, 'But what are you going to say to that person we just heard say that it's the fault of the EU and immigrants?'  The candidate will probably struggle because there is no immediate answer. This set of ideas has been cooking for decades, with false notions  (and lies) to do with what migrants actually do in the UK, the work they do, the tax they pay and so on. Remember again, it's never your job to challenge this, always repeat it under the guise that you are 'voicing people's concerns'. Always make it Labour's 'problem' and not the Tories' problem for having allowed, encouraged and fed these views. 

5. Leave your viewers and listeners with the impression that the whole Labour project is over, anyway.  There are now only two or three versions of Toryism left on the table. 

My 10-point Guide to Labour Leadership Candidates

1. The Economy: if you're asked about why 'Labour crashed the economy' - concede everything. Apologise profusely. Say, 'Yes we did.' Smile weakly. Agree if the interviewer makes out 'there was no money left.' Agree that it was 'necessary' to 'get things right' and 'tough decisions had to be made' and perhaps 'we were in the wrong place to put them right at the time.' 

Don't ever point out that in fact it wasn't the 'economy' (in the sense  of the government's finances) that had 'crashed'. It was the bankers' who wouldn't or couldn't lend money any more. Never point out that the UK is a currency-issuing economy. Never point out that the government has been issuing billions of what they call 'quantitative easing' which has the net effect of making the super-rich richer by increasing the value of their assets.

Don't make a big deal out of 'inequality'. Instead, cite the misleading statistics on the inequality of pay. These ignore the inequality of wealth which factors in 'assets' e.g. property. 

Never mention trade unions. It has been shown that a unionised workforce is able to squeeze a little bit more wages out of the system, alongside better work safety, guaranteed breaks, improvements of working conditions. Never ever mention this. Let interviewers talk about 'union barons' and smile weakly. 

Never mention 'nationalisation'. Give that up. All of it. Right away. If power firms, railway companies, water companies, the postal service or any other part of the economy is doing a rubbish job and ripping off people, on no account suggest that nationalisation might be a possible solution. Keep talking about 'responsible business' or some cack about 'a new kind of capitalist'. 

The amount of national debt in proportion to the GDP is worrying some economists. You can mention this but if anyone says that you talking about this is 'damaging confidence', clam up and smile weakly.  The amount of private debt created by the Tories in order to make up for weak demand is getting to a point where some in the financial community are getting a teensy bit worried that the old domino effect could strike again: a bank in some part of the world system might shut its doors and then another and another and we're back in 2008. The fact that this is finance capitalism being finance capitalism must never be mentioned by you. You must keep up the pretence that this is some kind of present difficulty in what is really a perfect system. Talk about 'regulation' and 'responsible banking' as if that could or would solve anything. 

If the whole financial system collapses, blame Russia, China, Iran and Jeremy Corbyn. 

2. Foreign policy. You are just allowed to say that perhaps the Iraq War was not ideal (don't mention the millions of deaths, rise and rise of terrorist groups)  but there are no other wars that you can say were wrong. You should talk as if 'Britain' (never say 'UK') has to 'help sort out' anything going on anywhere so long as the US thinks it's right to do so. Clearly, Iran needs to be 'sorted out' next,  so say so. Never question the right of 'Britain' to do so. When the media machine gets going explaining why some country (any country) is the greatest threat the world has ever known, agree with this. Smile weakly. Point out that this is 'patriotic'. Talk about something called 'Britain's standing in the world' as if you're talking about Queen Victoria being crowned Empress of India.  Talking of Queens, always say the Queen is wonderful. And so is the Royal Family. Nick Boris Johnson's phrase 'beyond reproach'. Mention that your mother loves Prince William.

3. The Election defeat. Make absolutely clear that there was only one cause for this: Corbyn. Never admit that any move over Brexit that he put forward came as a result of something your group pushed him into. On no account let anyone make comparisons of the popular vote: Brown (less than Corbyn), Miliband (less than Corbyn). Never make the point that the Labour Party hasn't actually disappeared and that 10 million people voted for a Corbyn-led Labour Party this time and 12 million last time. 

Keep saying the manifesto was a mistake. Don't go into details. Begin sentences with, 'I just think that...' 

43 out of the 59 constituencies that went from Labour to Tory were in Leave seats. On no account mention this. Don't mention the fact that probably, once Johnson came back with a deal, the game was up for Labour. 

What you have to keep saying is 'we're listening to people's concerns'. Be very clear that this isn't anything to do with poverty caused deliberately by the Tories. That's much too confrontational. 'Listening to people's concerns' means you visiting somewhere for the TV and  letting people on camera or on the radio ramble on at you for hours about how they aren't racist but the trouble is that immigrants have cut their wages, getting council houses, putting pressure on the national health and talking loudly on buses. On no account point out that poverty, housing shortage and an under-funded NHS were created by the Tory government through austerity as a deliberate part of cutting the role of the state and them (not immigrants) trying to create a cheaper labour force. You must never ever say this. 

4. Antisemitism. You will be asked about 'antisemitism in the Labour Party'. This is good. You will not be asked about 'antisemitism in society', or 'antisemitism in the Tory Party', so you must not mention these either. There is only 'antisemitism in the Labour Party'. Concede everything. On no account question whether any report or account was in any way exaggerated, distorted. You must not mention the fact that when Johnson was elected as leader of the Tory Party, every journalist in every newspaper knew that he had been editor of the Spectator and had edited 'Taki' who regularly poured out antisemitic jibes in his column for Johnson or on his own blog or other publications. Don't mention that not a single one of these journalists mentioned this. Don't say that  you are in any way concerned by Rees-Mogg and his antisemitic jibes about 'illuminati' and Soros, his retweeting of a tweet from the Alternativ für Deutschland or that he has hung out with far right groups. Don't on any account mention the links between the Tory MEPs and far-right groups in Europe. Don't mention that Boris and Orban (antisemite) appear to get along very nicely. On no account dig up anything on the way that Dominic Cummings talks about Goldman Sachs - it's almost identical to the way antisemites used to talk about Rothschild. Just keep saying sorry for 'antisemitism in the Labour Party' as if it's the first, last and only presence of antisemitism in the UK today. Always refer to 'the Jewish community' as if it is one monolithic entity all thinking and living in more or less the same way, even though it's a teeny bit antisemitic to say so. It's the kind of antisemitism that no one notices so it doesn't matter. 

5. Israel.  Remember Ed Miliband - he suggested that one way to get the 'Peace Process' going again was for the UK to recognise a Palestinian state before negations. He was immediately vilified, Maureen Lipman left the Labour Party and, apparently, thousands of Jews followed her. Miliband was, according to the Jewish Chronicle 'toxic'. On no account repeat Ed's proposal. Talk about the 'peace process' as if it's a real thing. You can frown in a caring sort of a way about the West Bank and Gaza but on no account propose anything concrete or useful. Accept that all problems in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza are caused by Palestinians. 

6. Brexit. You're stuffed. There will either be a very hard Brexit or a very very hard no-deal Brexit. Remember, no one understands trade deals, nor do you. Keep saying phrases like 'the very best for Britain'. It doesn't mean anything because something can be, say, the very best for bankers and it's absolutely no good for working people. The advantage of keeping going on about 'Britain' is that it feeds into people's sense of entitlement and special status as Brits in the world. 

7. Education. Don't disagree with the academy and free schools programme. Don't make a fuss about unaccountable academy management siphoning off millions. On no account oppose grammar schools. These offer the illusion that they are good for the poor because a tiny percentage of poor people go to them. Never describe the schools that are not grammar schools as  'Sec Mods'. Keep calling them High Schools and do the 'progressive' bit by saying that there are teachers in High Schools who are doing a fantastic job. This has the advantage of being both patronising and unnecessary and completely misses the point that the people you will call the 'disadvantaged' are disadvantaged by grammar schools.

8 Social mobility. This is going to be one of your big ones. Keep going on about social mobility. On no account mention the fact that there are 3 key motors that prevent social mobility: inherited wealth, private education and inherited wealth. To mention these is class war. Don't do it.  In fact, social mobility also accepts the idea that there must be and will always have to be the very poor, not quite so poor, the fairly poor, the not poor, the quite well off, the very well off and the eyewatering obscenely super-rich. All we can hope for, you point out, is that a few people might move up from one of these layers to another. On no account mention that someone must move down for someone else to move up - assuming the numbers stay the same. In other words, social mobility means society immobility. No change. Keep going on about social mobility as if it's a really progressive alternative radical idea. Mention the fact that your grandfather was poor, you are not and it's all down to 'social mobility'. Never mention the role of the expansion of the economy over the last 100 years as a factor. 

9. Immigration.  The best plan here is to agree with everything that the Tories do. They will probably fill the airwaves with anti-immigrant rhetoric mixed with how wonderful certain individual migrants have been. Just copy this. They will say that they're going to follow the Australian system, so you should either agree or find another country - Canada or New Zealand (somewhere with a largely white government and English-speaking) - and say that we could follow what they do. The election has shown that not challenging anti-immigrant rhetoric leads many people to think that immigrants have caused their poverty which then in turn leads them to vote for the very people who have made them poor.  You must not make this point.  

10. Housing. The last Labour Governments could have created a fantastic legacy of social housing. Gordon Brown muttered as much himself as he was leaving office. You could try to say one or two things about social housing but it generally reeks of 'old socialism', so avoid it.  In order to sound modern and forward looking, you need to say things like 'we're looking into exciting forms of shared partnerships' or 'we're talking with business about how to get more affordable homes on to the market'. The great thing about the word 'affordable' is that it sounds like anyone and everyone can 'afford' the housing that's 'affordable'. They can't. It's complete nonsense but you must go on using the word anyway.

PS That's all for now. Come back to me for more in a few days time.