Stephen Daisley

Ian Austin has become the ninth MP to quit Labour, blaming the party's culture of anti-Semitism. He tells the Express and Star: ‘The Labour Party has been my life, so this has been the hardest decision I have ever had to take, but I have to be honest and the truth is that I have become ashamed of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.’ He continues: ‘I am appalled at the offence and distress Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party have caused to Jewish people. It is terrible that a culture of extremism, anti-Semitism and intolerance is driving out good MPs and decent people who have committed their life to mainstream politics. The hard truth is that the party is tougher on the people complaining about anti-Semitism than it is on the anti-Semites.

And then there were eleven. The Independent Group has been enlarged today by the defection of moderate Tories Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen, who gave as their reason the Brexification of the Conservative Party. ConservativeHome's executive editor Mark Wallace and others might dispute many of the charges, but the splitters describe a mood in the Tory Party that many will recognise, and that mood was set by the unchecked belligerence of Brexit ultras. TIG is no longer solely about Labour anti-Semitism but a lurch from the post-1997 centre ground by both main parties. The latest YouGov poll puts TIG in third place on 14 per cent.

Manny Shinwell knew how to deal with anti-Semites. Born in London’s East End, reared in Glasgow, and once jailed for inciting a riot on Red Clydeside, the pipe-smoking pugilist was a tough, proud Jew. During a debate in parliament in 1938, Shinwell (then Labour MP for Seaham) was jabbing at the government when Tory MP Robert Bower heckled: ‘Go back to Poland’. Shinwell got up, crossed the floor and thumped Bower clean in the face, then turned to the Speaker and said: ‘May I make a personal explanation?’.  Eight decades later, his great-niece has delivered another bloody nose to the face of anti-Semitism.

It’s been a busy old week in Scottish politics. The SNP government is suffering a public backlash over plans to allow councils to levy a tax on workplace car parks. There has been a fatal infection outbreak at another hospital. MSPs are angry that the nationalists have installed one of their own as chair of the parliamentary inquiry into the government’s handling of the Alex Salmond affair. Best of all, the Scottish Government’s headquarters opened its first gender-neutral toilets.  Nicola Sturgeon, though, has missed it all. The First Minister is on a trade mission ‘promoting Scotland in North America’, according to the Scottish government. Scots have been settling Canada and the United States since the mid-17th century.

Is there a name for the moment something objectionable becomes so mainstream that those responsible can solemnly lament it as a fact of life? I propose that we call it the Formby Point. This week, Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby reportedly told a parliamentary party meeting that it was ‘impossible to eradicate anti-Semitism and it would be dishonest to claim to be able to do so’. Note the sly wording, the subtle distancing; you can almost hear the affected sigh of resignation. The woman who runs an institutionally racist party that refuses to challenge its institutional racism can, with a straight face, regret the inevitability of racism.  As a matter of fact, it is possible to eradicate anti-Semitism from a membership-based organisation.

They don’t have jobs, they can’t afford a house, but millennials have one thing going for them: They’ve finally found their Ronnie and Maggie, the political match-up to define their era. British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have held what the latter calls ‘a lovely and wide-reaching’ phone conversation and followed it up with some Twitter gushing about progressiveness and stuff. Quoth Corbyn: https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1092174819154710528?s=21 And the reply: https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1092210825228636161?s=21 One of the benefits of centrism collapsing is that left-leaning politicians no longer sound like human resources consultants.

Writing for The Spectator, I am already at grave risk of being expelled from the liberal elite, doubly so as a Remainer who (wearily, sceptically, fearfully) accepts the democratic mandate for Brexit. Soon I won’t be able to pick up breakfast at my local vegan food truck without the guy shrieking, ‘OH, DOES ROD LIDDLE LIKE SMASHED AVOCADO ON RYE TOO?’ So I embark on this, a thought experiment and not a serious proposal, with some trepidation. Here is the problem: the country voted to leave the European Union but MPs are not thrilled about the idea. They voted down the Prime Minister’s deal with the EU on the terms of our departure, some because it was too Brexity and others because it wasn’t Brexity enough.

I recently rewatched The Birdcage, Mike Nichols’ pleasing farce of clashing values, a Hollywood adaption of Jean Poiret’s lighter, sharper 1973 play La Cage aux Folles. The son of drag club owner Armand Goldman (a dialled-up Robin Williams) has proposed to the daughter of Republican Senator Kevin Keeley (Gene Hackman, almost camper than Williams) and tries to arrange a dinner for the two families without Keeley discovering that Armand is gay. In the end, everyone learns to get along and some riotous slapstick disrupts the mildly preachy tone. It’s not Nichols’ best work but in 1996 it was a step up from the Four Fucks and a Funeral movies that monopolised queer cinema.

If hell is other people, Twitter is the Devil’s noticeboard. Occasionally, though, its asteroid-inviting awfulness unearths a little insight into human nature, specifically when our instincts clash with our ideology. Take J.K. Rowling, author of the Cormoran Strike series who has also dabbled a little in children’s fiction. The Scottish novelist is a well-kent supporter of left-of-centre causes and has backed up her conscience with her coin. Her broadsides against Donald Trump and Brexit have made her an enemy of the intemperate right.

It seems only fitting, living as we do in the Banter Timeline, that Theresa May won an indecisive vote decisively and Jacob Rees-Mogg refused to accept the will of the electorate. The Prime Minister did not secure the confidence of her party last week; she confirmed their lack of confidence that there is any alternative. Mr Rees-Mogg and 116 of his colleagues know this. I dare say a sight more do too. The net result of last week’s melodrama is that the Prime Minister is both strengthened and weakened and those who want her gone have been defeated and elevated. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad but they are taking the absolute mick now. We are not back to square one because we never left.

It’s the lowest point in British espionage since Pierce Brosnan. A top secret cyber hit squad has been busted trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn through the medium of Twitter. At least that’s the claim from the Sunday Mail, a left-leaning Scottish tabloid, which has exposed the Institute for Statecraft as ‘a secret UK Government-funded infowars unit’.  The Institute is based in a grotty old Victorian mill in Fife and can be distinguished from every other building in Fife in that it’s a mill. It doesn’t look like a place where they knock back shaken-not-stirred martinis in between designing fountain pens that double as rocket launchers but, what with austerity, maybe From Auchtermuchty With Love is the best we can do.

‘Obsessed with Islam and Tommy Robinson.’ This is how Nigel Farage describes a cohort of Ukip activists he encountered at the party’s Birmingham conference earlier this year. Gerard Batten, the tenth leader of Ukip, has openly courted such elements in his calculated lurch to the farther-right. He has recruited as an adviser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson or St Tommy of the Uncollapsed Trials, the free speech martyr vilified by the establishment purely because he keeps imperilling court proceedings against Pakistani grooming gangs. Batten has called Islam a ‘death cult’ in which ‘they believe in propagating their religion by killing other people and martyring themselves and going and getting their 72 virgins’.