Most liked posts in thread: Haringey Match abandoned after racist abuse

There is a tiny percentage of far left Labour Party members and supporters (mostly recent joiners) who believe crank ideas about Jewish global conspiracies etc and verbalise them online or in meetings. They are despised by the vast majority of LP members and supporters.
Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is real, but no worse than in the general population and certainly much less than the the endemic racism in Tory Party. The anti-Semitism issue in the LP has been blown out of all proportion. Of course, when it occurs it's very distressing to be on the wrong end of it and I totally condemn it.

I'm not going to defend Corbyn's utterly ineffectual response to dealing with the issue. His wish to avoid upsetting certain people who support him, but who hold anti-Semitic views that he does not, has caused the problem to grow out of control via the media. And it has played into the hands of the conservative British Jewish establishment who want to brand anyone that criticises Israel's repressive government as an anti-Semite.

But being slow and ineffective at dealing with anti-Semitism in the LP is a very far cry from making openly racist statements on multiple occasions as Johnson, Farage and Trump have done. Their open antipathy towards people with different skin, facial features, clothing and culture has emboldened racists, who would previously have felt constrained by modern civilised norms, to voice their hostility towards people of different ethnicity to them.
Do you really believe that it's coincidental that racist attacks, incidents and online abuse has increased since the referendum campaign, both within football and wider society?

 

I said that anti-Semitism in the LP is real. Of course you can read it. But it's a tiny proportion of the half million LP members perpetrating it.
Which bit of that didn't you understand?

 

There's no evidence that the kid on the floor was stage managed. But the obviously accidental 'punch' was a barefaced lie by the Tories attempting to defect the story away from themselves.

 

Jeez. How long have you been on here? It's hardly a secret that my political views are left of centre.

But I'm a centre lefty. I spent a lot of energy in the 1980s helping to get Militant out of the LP. I'm not happy that some of those Trots, and other hard lefties from the SWP and suchlike, have been allowed to enter the LP.
Most of the anti-Semitism in the LP comes from those people, or those with similar views, who are mostly relatively new members and whose hard left views really have no place in the LP. It only takes a few hundred determinedly vocal antisemites in a membership of 500,000 to get the party a bad name. The overwhelming majority of LP members are avowedly anti-racist and despise the anti-Semites.
By contrast, my experience of Tory Party members, and many of their supporters, is that many of them hold racist views. That's not 'one eyed', it's my personal experience. Yours may be different.

 

Nope. The photo wasn't faked or stage managed.
It's the fake news notion that the photo was bogus that has been stage managed.

Hospitals don't issue apologies for unacceptable levels of care unless something has gone badly wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/10/woman-says-account-hacked-to-post-fake-story-about-hospital-boy?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

 

People believe whatever they want to suit their own narrative. The faux outrage that ensues is pretty funny.

 

You may be correct about the 'punch'. Difficult to know for sure. Certainly the way it was reported on ITV news suggested they believed it was a deliberate attempt at misinformation designed to divert attention away from the photo and from Johnson's cringeworthy attempt to ignore it by pocketing the reporter's phone.

As far as the photo goes, I know from my own personal and professional experience (as well as many press reports) that hospitals are generally defensive and tend to admit mistakes very reluctantly indeed. Getting an apology for bad practice is usually like getting blood out of a stone and they only do it when they've exhausted all other excuses.
I find it hard to believe that the hospital would have issued so swift an apology unless the incident was genuine and they knew they were bang to rights.