You know that old joke about the hunter hunting for a bear which outfoxes him, sneaks up behind and sexually abuses him? The one where the hunter keeps coming back for revenge and the bear keeps outfoxing him, sneaking up and sexually abusing him, until on the fourth time round the bear whispers in his ear ‘you’re not really here for the hunting, are you?’.
Well Labour isn’t really here for the socialism, is it? Racism isn’t a reluctant tactic necessary to give it the chance to implement socialist policies, is it? I can show you quite simply that that doesn’t tally with any of the facts. Racism is the point, is it not? To my amazement and despite its many remaining anti-racist members, Labour is now a racist party for racists, right?
Let me show you what real racism looks like. You’re a Zionist Supremacist. You have a well-established hierarchy of racism in which racism for you is really a tool to suppress Muslims in favour of Jews. You know, like the independent Barrister who was invited to look at antisemitism in the Labour Party concluded (the Forde Report).
You have gone way past dog-whistling racist sentiment and you’re now making speeches about ‘islands of strangers‘ and your staff are referring to Muslims as ‘the fleas‘ without consequence. Inspired by Trump, you video yourself on immigration raids and watch on delighted as desperate young men are cuffed on camera to titillate the anti-immigration brigade.
And your immigration policy is now one lengthy One Minute Hate process in which your goal is to humiliate people with brown skin while your Scottish representative (Joani Reid) is decrying the idea that Glasgow should be a sanctuary for asylum seekers (away and check ‘sanctuary’ and ‘asylum’ in the dictionary will you Ms Reid).
Given all that, what would you imagine happens when the whole sordid, racist lot of them hear that a team from their beloved Israel is being prevented from bringing fans to Birmingham for a match based on warnings of danger from the police? What do you imagine Team Starmer does?
Just for context, they got vague, unspecified advice from security services and moved with alacrity to ban a non-violence pro-Palestine protest group. So they’re going to take the police advice, right? Nope. Before even talking to the police – or anyone – they’re on the warpath to overturn a decision they didn’t understand.
Real, ideological racism isn’t so much about what you say but about how you see
To get why this happened, you need to understand racism. When you hear a young man saying some lazy racist statement, you would do well not to assume that he’s definitely a racist, just that he said something racist. We all work from what are known as ‘social cues’, things we think we’re meant to say, things we think we’re not meant to say.
There is a difference between holding an ideologically racist world view and saying racist things. The latter may be the result of permissive social cues pushing the idea that what you are saying isn’t racist at all. It may not mean you hate people of a different skin colour.
Real, ideological racism isn’t so much about what you say but about how you see. It is an ideology. It defines how you categorise the world, how you actually think human relations should work. A true racist may not say racist things that much, they just act consistently as if people with darker skin are of less value.
It is about what you see when you see a picture. If you see someone with blood on their face and there is a crowd and there is one black person in the photo – if you find yourself assuming that it must have been the black person who is responsible for the assault, you are trapped in a racist frame. You didn’t calculate your racism, you just saw the world that way.
So when Starmer said ‘this is outrageous antisemitism and we’re going to prevent this happening’, what we know is that he couldn’t see any alternative configuration of the facts. He saw this plainly and clearly as an issue of needing to protect Jews from Muslim hate. There was no other possible configuration of the facts that could be taken into consideration.
There is a very clear alternative configuration of the facts that could have been considered. It could be that this advice wasn’t about protecting Jews from Muslims but protecting Muslims from Jews. Birmingham has Britain’s largest Muslim population. It is a very Muslim city by British standards. Those are Keir Starmer’s constituents, not Israelis. I need actually to explain that here, which tells you a lot.
The Jews in question are not here representing Judaism (they’re not some sort of faith group or church group or something), they are football fans with a long track record of violence at home and away. It just so happens their team is in a Jewish country. And there is copious evidence of extreme racist behaviour and violence.
No-one but no-one is disputing that this is a group of people who have walked through heavily Muslim areas chanting ‘Death to Arabs’ en masse. That is only one of 77 racist chants the team’s supporters are recorded as having engaged in last year, all anti-Muslim.
And yet it gets worse; there is a track record of violent attacks on Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses across Europe. Amsterdam, Athens, Cyprus – assaults (some really brutal) on Muslims are common when they travel abroad. They were fined by Uefa for anti-Muslim racism in 2013. (All info in links above.)
Starmer doesn’t take ten seconds to even ask Muslim community groups whether they feel fear about aggressive, violent anti-Muslims coming to their community – because they don’t count
Right, so let’s loop back – knowing this, there is a pretty good chance that the police have a pretty solid reason not to enable these fans to come to the city with Britain’s largest Muslim population. This is routine behaviour – violent football fans are regularly banned from places they might be predicted to incite violence.
Now I do not have access to the police intelligence, so perhaps the evidential basis for this ban is weak (though, really?). My point is that if you are a concerned politician you’d ask, and if the evidence is not solid then you might challenge. But if you are a racist then it will never have occurred to you that it was Muslims who were being protected in the first place.
Because if you’re a racist then you probably buy into the idea that Muslims are violent and not properly civilised whereas Israeli Jews are. And so you wouldn’t pause to look at the picture and not assume that the antagonists are the ones with the dark skin. You would certainly do so without speaking first to local community groups representing the British people concerned.
Reverse this; the supporters of a football team have been chanting ‘Death to Jews’ and attacking Jewish people and property wherever they go. The police call them to be banned from a heavily Jewish area of London. What does Starmer do? Give me an answer to that question which does not lead inexorably to the only possible interpretation that Starmer is an out and out racist.
For him, if a Jewish community group expresses ‘fear’ then he thinks that domestic anti-war protestors should be banned. But he doesn’t take ten seconds to even ask Muslim community groups whether they feel fear about aggressive, violent anti-Muslims coming to their community. Because They Don’t Count. They aren’t Proper People.
Anyway, as our bear ravishes our hunter for the fourth time, how can he not at that point conclude that the hunter is doing this for reasons other than that he thinks he’s actually going to win this time. The evidence says otherwise.
Likewise, the more racist Starmer becomes, the deeper he falls into the category of ‘least popular Prime Minister in recorded history‘. I could link you to mountains of evidence that shows socialist parties which tack right to triangulate racists get eviscerated at the polls. If you know anything (I read about political strategy every day of the week) you know the evidence on that has been conclusive for some time.
But you don’t need to believe me. At the moment the Labour Party will cease to exist as a significant parliamentary force in the next three or four years unless something changes. Starmer is killing Labour dead. It is over. He’s finished them. Don’t bother remembering their names because in a couple of years you will never have to. Joani Reid? Was she something to do with Enoch Powell?
That’s what I spent my Friday thinking. I nearly thought ‘the bastards, they’re back at their racism again’. And then I thought ‘hold on Robin, this is fucking magic – they lost another five per cent of their vote again today and will never be elected in Birmingham again’.
Whatever it is Starmer, McSweeny, Mahmoud and the rest of the race hate team are up to, it ain’t the hunting. The outcome for them will be similar (metaphorically) to that of our poor, bedraggled hunter. I can’t wait.