Baltimore: ALL Confederate Statues Have Now Been Removed

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Westminster City Council is conservative majority, by a wide margin, and has been since it was first instituted in the 1960s.
The relevant planning committee is chaired by a conservative, and has nine conservative members including the chair, and four labour members.
So I suspect it would’ve rather hard for the decision to have been made under the auspices of left-wing antisemitism, even if all the labour members were to be guilty of holding such attitudes.

The details of the decision and the reasoning behind it have not been published (I’ve done a search for them on the councils website).
I think I should note that the campaign against the memorial has several Jewish members, and one of the witnesses against the application was a holocaust education specialist who’s surname leads me to suspect that they are either Jewish or of Jewish descent.
The focus of the campaign against the memorial seems to have been the desire to maintain the park as a happy outdoors space for the local residents and their children: something that the campaign asserts would no longer be possible were the park to contain a holocaust memorial.

I’m also going to note that Ed Balls, co-chair of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation referenced in the article, is a former labour mp: Indeed was the labour finance spokesman during Ed Milliband’s period (2010-15) as party leader.

So... I may get flamed for this...
Yes, there are definitely cluster of antisemitic attitudes and ideas on the British left.
This has come to public attention during the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, himself guilty of several antisemitic speech act whilst he was leader of the party.
There was also an internal investigation which I personally regarded as a self-evident whitewash.
I also noticed that party members accused of antisemitism did not all get the same treatment: the accused who were opposed to Corbyn’s leadership were summarily dismissed, whilst his allies within the party were, at least initially, shielded and excused... even if some were unwillingly sacked later.
There was also the panorama documentary on the bbc which asserted that members of the disciplinary committee of the party who were trying to do their jobs in a competent non-partisan fashion were bullied out of the party by Corbyn’s aides: who also took to putting it about that the whole thing was a propaganda plot without foundation cooked up by the Board of Jewish Deputies to prevent Corbyn from becoming Prime Minister.
Which usage of an antisemitic conspiracy theory to deflect from accusations of antisemitism leaves my thinking that effectively the case is closed: Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite, as are many of his closest political allies.

However... I have some other observations:
When Ed Milliband was leader of the Labour Party two elements of the right-wing press criticism of him stick out in retrospect: the first was mocking him, a man of Jewish descent, for looking uncomfortable and ill at ease whilst eating a bacon sandwich for a photo-op.
The second was making much of his father having been born in Germany and questioning his loyalty and patriotism on that basis.

I also remember the rumour across the British press (both left and right) from when Tony Blair became Prime Minister that Peter Mandelson, also a man of Jewish descent, was secretly controlling the government and all it’s decisions from behind the scenes... they gave him a nickname: “The Dark Prince”.

Third observation: I’ve moved around a few times within this country, and I’ve noticed that amongst people of all ages and political persuasions jokes which play upon stock antisemitic characterisations of Jews go without challenge or confrontation...

So, I’m currently thinking that English, if not British, culture at large has an antisemitism problem... and the Labour Party has been the institution through which this has been made manifest.

I speculate that the British left’s tendency to focus on the banking industry as the main problem with capitalism, and their obsession with Palestine, make it all too easy for British leftists to succumb to antisemitic thinking without realising that they are doing so (my thinking is that if they were self-aware about it, they’d probably be more circumspect).

The British right seems to have more of a Germanophobia problem at present, what with all the fantasy talk of Brexit being easily sorted by one phone call to the Chancellery in Berlin and openly talking of the EU as the concealed fourth reich that’s keeping Britain down etc etc etc...

Can you tell I’m worried about where my country’s going?

Here,
Have an integrity star.
You have earned it.