In the park, two men sat on the ground under a tree necking lager, stand up unsteadily near the wreck of the horse chestnut tree blown down in last night’s gales.

A group of Romanian youth in their non church going casual Sunday best – brighter, lighter shirts than their more devout elder siblings, no big black bible under their arm – stand outside The Lodge wondering where to go after the secular delights of coffee and ice cream.

On the bus, an invisible child in the back seat is holding a fox faced metallic helium balloon – the face stares like a policeman carrying out surveillance.

A young woman in the distance is carrying a huge armful of flowers – as though she is driving a tractor in a 1975 copy of Soviet Weekly – which she has picked rather thoughtlessly from the wildflower trenches that the council has planted to attract and support bees.

 

 

In online debates there are always trolls and the victims of trolls.

A troll can be said to be someone who – with or without a personal investment in the issue under discussion – seeks to divert it from a reasoned exploration of whatever the issue is – in which both sides might learn something – by way of emotive statements to a series of escalating knee jerk reactions designed to reinforce existing prejudices and emnities.

The persona Donald Trump – as a front man for the team who write his tweets – is an archetypal troll. Nothing he writes leads to reflection or insight, everything leads to outrage, as he might say, “on both sides.” There is no commitment to any search for anything that might be objectively provable; the point is to construct a politically expedient narrative; “alternative facts” using “words as bullets”.

This might be seen as an expression of a ruling class in decline. The leadership of the United States, the most powerful country in the world, faced with the challenge of climate breakdown, simply denies that it is happening. This makes political debate increasingly delirious – because no reasoned discussion can take place when reality is denied.

While some trolls are true believers, some are operatives working for commercial interests, or agents for state intelligence services, or mercenary hacks hired by people like the Koch brothers to propagate their views.

This is the high tech equivalent of the way that the Labour Party relies on its members to get its leaflets out and the Conservative Party hires leaflet distribution companies. One reflects the power of conviction and voluntary commitment, the other the power of money.

There is a distinction in the most effective way to respond to these. The argument that “you should never wrestle with a pig because you both get dirty and the pig likes it” often applies, but sometimes you don’t have to get dirty. Three examples.

1. Tory boy. Some mercenaries – or political operatives – tend to write short, emotive mantras, rather like a verbal drive by shooting. They really dislike being asked to explain their premises or taken up on a paradox in their own argument and simply go quiet or tend to repeat their statement; as though they are far less sophisticated than they are making out. One, who commented that he loved his country and hated socialists, couldn’t really cope with the point that the country he supposedly loves contains quite a lot of socialists – and we are as legitimate a part of it as he is. The denial of national legitimacy to political opponents has a whiff of civil war about it. One liner shock statements that seem a bit off the wall can be effectively challenged with a question like “Could you explain this please?” They very rarely can or do.
2. Fossil Fule. The upsurge of justified concern about climate breakdown has led to a rash of sites targeted at for example, motorists – full of profiles – some of which might be people but some may be bots – all spinning variations on – climate change is natural, its just a money making scam etc etc – and commentators who pop up on campaigning sites with remarkably similar misleading claims about – for example -the lifespan of batteries for electric vehicles or the carbon footprint of manufacturing them. These claims are almost plausible and usually backed up with a battery of internet links to long scholarly looking articles to give them weight and are designed to intimidate people who are new to a movement and might be easily put off. The people posting these are often PR people for fossil fuel companies or foundations operating on their behalf. The best way to counter them is to research their claims and present them with the information that debunks them. There is always information that debunks them.
3. Angry victim. Last year a group of far right Alex Jones supporters – fresh from picketing the BBC in defence of their hero’s online rants -decided to round off their afternoon by trashing Bookmarks, the TUC bookshop in Bloomsbury. As raids go this was more F troop than A team, and – although threatening at the time -gave the shop a huge publicity and sales boost so, along with their online film – which among other things showed a guy with a Donald Trump mask explaining to camera that he was going to wear it so no one would recognise him before he put it on – made the whole thing a huge own goal for them. People who had never heard of the shop before made special trips afterwards to check it out. One education trade union leader put up a post in the immediate aftermath of the raid pointing out that trashing bookshops is a step on the path to burning books – and received an avalanche of abuse from supporters of the English Defence League, and similar organisations. These were all emotional and abusive. Given that anger is a secondary emotion deriving from fear, I asked one of them why he thought what he thought. This was a response to the man’s conviction. there was no question that he personally believed in what he was saying. No one was paying him to do it. This required some research, ignoring some personal abuse, working out that the issue underlying everything else for him was that of of sexual abuse in Rotherham. From his point of view, this issue was as it has been presented by Tommy Robinson and a lot of the mainstream tabloids. The sexual abuse of vulnerable young women – all white – by grooming gangs – all Muslim. When you dig into this, the reality is not so simple. The men at the heart of this were Rotherham’s leading gangsters. They ran prostitution, drugs and taxis. While most of the firm were Pakistani Muslims, one of the taxi drivers – convicted of multiple child abuse in the case – was white. The key role in grooming the girls was carried out by the taxi company’s radio operators – both middle aged white women. The argument that “they never go after their own” was blown away by figures from the helpline for abused young women that was operating in Rotherham while this was going on – which reported that 10% of the girls coming forward were from a Muslim background – exactly the proportion of the local community that is. 90% of the victims in Rotherham were white because Rotherham is 90% white. This was on top of the overall figures, which didn’t cut so much ice with him, that the overwhelming majority of people on the sex offenders register at national level are white men – but no more overwhelming than their proportion of the population as a whole. Putting these points to him led to silence at his end.

There is an additional element to this, when false narratives are deliberately created on an industrial scale by state or commercial or political actors. Part 2 to follow…

 

In any political conflict there is a tendency for heat to obscure light. Statistics quoted in a body of text are often not absorbed. So what follows is an attempt to set out the facts graphically and provide some interpretation which shows how they differ from misleading popular perceptions.

1. According to Pew Research antisemitism in the UK is very low; both as compared with the median level in Europe and as compared with the national level of Islamophobia and anti Roma sentiment. This does not mean that it is not happening nor that it is not deep rooted in some quarters.

2. Research carried out by MORI on behalf of Jewish Policy Research indicates that strong antisemitic sentiments were very low from the far left right across the political spectrum until you get to the far right; at which point it almost quadruples.

JPR’s central argument – that there is a direct correlation between antisemitic attitudes and hostility to Israel – is undermined by their own survey. This shows that there is indeed a direct correlation between antisemitism and hostility to Israel on the far right – where the figure overlap almost exactly – and almost complete disjunct on the far left – where there is significant hostility to Israel but almost no corresponding level of antisemitism. It would be hard to argue from these figures that the direct correlation between antisemitism on the right and hostility to Israel is not indeed a reflection of overall racism on the right; nor that the lack of such an overlap on the left can reflect anything another than  an anti racist position – which defends Jewish and other ethnic minority communities domestically – and extends this to the human rights of Palestinians in Israel.

3. Surveys carried out by the Campaign Against Antisemitism have shown that there is more of a problem with antisemitic attitudes among supporters of the Conservative Party than the Labour Party (Figures as original).

4. This is born out by research from The National Centre for Social Research which shows a very welcome overall decline in racist attitudes overall, that these are less commonplace among Labour supporters than those of other parties and, crucially, that these have declined very sharply since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party. It is worth noting that racism rose across the board after 2001, reflecting the “war on terror” and everything that went with it, and that racist attitudes are almost TWICE as prevalent among supporters of the Conservative Party than they are among Labour supporters.

5. It is also the case that it is the Conservative Party that has links at a European level with dubious Parties and movements that either deny or belittle the holocaust or celebrate the participation of their citizens in the Waffen SS. This was detailed in an article by Jonathan Freedland in 2009 in which he asked “where is the outrage?” An appropriate question.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/oct/20/conservatives-european-allies-holocaust-deniers

It is reported on Wikipedia that Jewish organisations quite rightly complained about these links to the Conservative Party in 2018. There have been, however, no marches on Conservative central office, no “enough is enough” placards, no weekly headlines in the Jewish Chronicle targeting them, no declarations of an existential threat. Instead, the greater incidence of antisemitism within the Conservative Party and right generally has been ignored in a single minded focus on making out that Labour has much more of a problem that it does – to the extent that the popular perception is now the inverse of reality.

The figures for Labour are quite revealing when you look at them graphically.

Figure 6. Number of Labour Party members accused of antisemitism as a proportion of the membership.

The ratio of 1:817 (1106 cases out of 550 000) is so small that the number of accused (the thin blue line) barely shows up on the graph.

Moreover,  4 in 10 of those accused turned out not to be Party members in the first place. Of the cases referred by Margaret Hodge, only 20 out of 200 were actually Party members.

Further, of the remainder, more than half had their cases dismissed for lack of evidence. Only 1 in 10 of those accused have either been expelled or resigned. Some of those who have been accused or expelled are Jewish.

A woman walks past in a mass produced T-shirt that reads “Dare to be Different.”

Another – with a red and angry face – is decked out in a purple shirt with the word LOVE in enormous letters.

A third on the bus, whose “Choose Cheerful” shirt does not make her smile.

This is not to denigrate the women wearing these, but simply to point out that the constant pressure to “be positive”, “keep calm and carry on”, “keep smiling” is a way of normalising the unbearable in a way that can make it worse. the impact of what might be called “compulsory happiness” regimes in workplaces creates a tension between outward appearance and inward feeling that destroys people’s souls.