Kate Osamor and her council house
Recently the Labour MP for Edmonton, Kate Osamor, has come under criticism for still occupying a council property despite having a job that pays her a £77,000 annual salary. This is the same MP...
Category: Racism
What’s Alice Walker doing reading David Icke?
Yesterday there was much indignation on Twitter and elsewhere that the New York Times had published an interview with the novelist and poet Alice Walker which contained a recommendation of a book by David...
Should this racist thug be behind bars?
A 29-year-old man who attacked a young boy because he thought he had bumped into his child's buggy while running for a bus received a suspended sentence (twelve months, suspended for two years) at...
Are Jews really “wandering again”?
Earlier this week an article appeared on Unherd by Douglas Murray, titled "Why are Jewish people 'wandering' again?". It was an interview with a Jewish lawyer called Mark Lewis, who along with his partner...
Against the “liberal elite” media trope
A favourite claim of the alt-right, populist right, whatever you want to call them, is that their liberal opponents (whether they be in the Labour party, the Lib Dems themselves, the pro-European wing of...
Why do we house refugees in hostile areas?
This week a video was circulated on social media of a Syrian refugee boy, named Jamal, with his arm in a cast being attacked in a park in Huddersfield by a group of boys...
Pittsburgh and anti-Semitism in context
Last Saturday, a racist gunman attacked a synagogue near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and killed 11 worshippers, including four Holocaust survivors, a married couple and two disabled brothers in their fifties; also killed was a doctor...
Is Britain really the most tolerant country in Europe?
Last Thursday, on the BBC's Question Time programme (a weekly late-night political panel show in which a panel of politicians and an academic, writer or other lay 'expert'), there was a contribution from an...
Why “Jewish fears”, even if genuine, are misplaced
Last week I saw two blog articles published by self-described left-wing Zionists, one of whom I know through disability activist circles, about why they are concerned about the "rising tide" of anti-Semitism in the...
Boris Johnson’s latest insult (and the Muslims who unwittingly side with him)
Yesterday, in one of Boris Johnson's new columns for the Telegraph (which you may recall the paper made a big announcement of after he resigned as foreign secretary), he registered his half-hearted opposition to...
Corbyn and Anti-Semitism versus Brexit
The Labour anti-Semitism crisis has not disappeared from the headlines after yet another week. It is noticeable now that the issue has moved on from any specific incident of anti-Semitism by any Labour politician...
Existential threat? What?
In the latest chapter of the Labour anti-Semitism row, three British Jewish newspapers have published a similar front page and editorial condemning the Labour leadership for refusing their demand to adopt an international definition...
Labour and the IHRA: Listening does not mean submitting
This past week, the Labour Party's National Executive Committee adopted a modified version of a definition of anti-Semitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, modified in the sense that four 'specific' examples of...
Who says the Left hates the white working class?
I saw a post on Medium last weekend, "Burning Down the House: Identity Politics and its Discontents", which posited that white working-class voters who had voted for politicians like Donald Trump had faced "a...
Racist da’wah (and “crazy British Muslims”)
Over the weekend a video surfaced of an Asian Muslim street preacher telling his fellow local Muslims (also mostly Asian) that as well-brought-up people who come from respectable families, they should not be talking...
The Wadsworth affair and the “anti-Semitic trope” gambit
So, today a Labour and Momentum activist (and film-maker and co-founder of the campaign for justice for Stephen Lawrence) named Marc Wadsworth was expelled from the party by the National Constitutional Committee (NCC) for...
Animal rights are no excuse for racism
The other day the 80's pop star Morrissey, best known for being the frontman for the Smiths, gave an interview in which he backed the far-right party called For Britain, set up by a...
Why Egyptian TV covers American police violence
Earlier today I saw a tweet by Shaun King, an American race activist, about Egyptian media coverage and popular interest in American police shootings and resulting protests: I am in Egypt. The murder of...
When racists rage against racism
The controversy that started last week when someone dug up a five-year-old Facebook comment by Jeremy Corbyn on a picture of an anti-Semitic mural by an obscure London artist has not gone away. What...
Why Aditya Chakrabortty (may have) called himself Paul
This morning I saw a Twitter thread (starts here, ends here) from Haringey councillor Joe Goldberg, purporting to expose the middle-classness and inauthenticity of the pro-little-people and anti-establishment stance of the Guardian columnist Aditya...