Anti-semitism claims and the general public: conversations on a trainArchived Message
Posted by SueC on February 26, 2019, 1:30 am
Last week I found myself taking a long train journey through a large slice of rural England. Sitting opposite me was a couple in their late 60s or early 70s, farmers I later learned, conservative with a small 'c' and probably a large one too. The husband was reading snippets of news from his paper aloud and discussing them with his wife and eventually he read out Derek Hatton's alleged anti-semitic tweet.
The guy thought Hatton's remark was 'fair enough' while his wife queried why it was considered anti-Semitic. Both made the point that Israel cannot have it both ways - if it is the state of all Jews, regardless of where they live, it's not unreasonable to expect Jews to have an opinion on the actions of the Israeli government. I asked them what they thought about all the claims of anti-semitism and, at this point, a few other people sitting nearby joined the conversation. They were all country folk, living all their lives in small market towns or on farms; I doubt any of them would ever think of visiting a site like this. None of them were what you could call Jeremy Corbyn's core constituency. All of them, however, thought the endless claims of anti-semitism were absurd. Several made the point that even where MPs had received abuse it probably came from a looney extremist fringe which is then used to deflect attention from the real problem - that the average person has become totally disillusioned with the whole political system.
I think the message to those Labour MPs who have done nothing other than trumpet the anti-semitism meme as a way of ridding the party of Corbyn, those forces standing behind them and the MSM echo-chamber is this: it isn't working. The British public isn't buying.