How could this possibly have happened to Jeremy Corbyn, the least racist person ever?
None of this is Jeremy Corbyn’s fault, of course – he has been fighting racism all his life, don’t you know
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Don’t want to tempt fate, but it could be turning into a historically bad week for the self-proclaimed least racist people ever.
Though they have, in fairness, tempted fate a touch themselves. When, last summer, Donald Trump described himself as “the least racist person ever”, the journalist Owen Jones pointed out that, “Anyone who says, ‘I’m the least racist person ever’ is almost invariably always a racist.”
Mr Jones is rarely wrong about anything, and never has he been more vindicated than when, on Thursday morning, Jeremy Corbyn’s son Tom said his dad was “as far away from a racist as it’s possible to be”. Two hours later, Corbyn senior was suspended from the Labour Party – over racism.
We’ll come to the details shortly, but the first thing to make clear is that none of this is Jeremy Corbyn’s fault. He has been fighting racism all his life, don’t you know, and in all its forms as well. With so many battles on the go at once, he can hardly be blamed for taking his eye off the ball for just a second, specifically in the anti-Jewish fight, which, come on, let’s be honest, isn’t really proper racism anyway.
Follow live: Labour plunged into civil war after Corbyn suspended over antisemitism report
It’s not even that the news itself was so utterly damning. The Equality and Human Rights Commission had spent 16 months investigating allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party on Jeremy Corbyn’s watch, and its conclusions were bleak. It was not merely that the party had been found in breach of the law for three separate offences, and one of those, clear in black and white, was “political interference” in antisemitism complaints.
It was, as ever, Corbyn’s trademark refusal to accept anything less than his own complete moral infallibility. Yes, he said in a statement, there was a problem with antisemitism in the Labour Party, but it was no wider than the problem in society as a whole.
Yes, OK, there are racists in the Labour Party, but there are also racists in Britain, so to blame Labour for it was, if anything, unpatriotic.
“The scale of the problem,” Mr Corbyn said, “was dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media. That combination hurt Jewish people and must never be repeated.”
A heady cocktail, that. Not only was the problem exaggerated, but it was those doing the exaggerating that had hurt Jewish people, and that exaggerating must never be repeated.
Later in the day, the Jewish former MP Luciana Berger, who was hounded out of her party by racist trolls, was on the television, talking of the unimaginable pain and suffering inflicted upon her and others by an antisemitic online hate mob, which had involved her having to employ private security.
Of course, it’s possible she’s just making it all up to attack Saint Jeremy, but it’s worth at least considering the possibility that not all hurt to Jewish people was necessarily caused by the media.
What was especially unfortunate for Corbyn was that, within 20 minutes of issuing his non-apology, Keir Starmer was giving a press conference of his own. “Those who pretend it is exaggerated or factional are part of the problem,” he said. “There is no room for them in the Labour Party.”
This meant, in clear terms, that there was no room in the Labour Party for Jeremy Corbyn, and within a couple of hours, there wasn’t.
His suspension was announced, and within minutes he was pledging to contest the “political decision” that had been taken against him. Absolutely nothing became him, in his political life, and certainly not the ending of it.
There will, of course, be a hellish fight to come. Starmer can’t pretend that he didn’t see others walking out of the party, like Mike Gapes, Chuka Umunna and Ms Berger. And he can’t pretend he didn’t see others, like Stephen Kinnock and Ed Miliband, essentially refusing to serve in a Corbyn shadow cabinet. Starmer made no such refusal.
The debate over whether to walk out or stay and fight is as old as politics itself, and it has no right or wrong answer. But politics is a rough business, and those who prize absolute moral purity above all else rarely get very far.
Just ask Jeremy Corbyn who, at the end of it all, doesn’t even have his reputation intact.
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