A lot of chatter at Westminster at the moment about the fact her performances have improved. They have - but the script is still dreadful.

At the risk of turning what will be a selective set of anecdotes into data, a lot of 1960s and 70s working class parents absolutely busted a gut to get their kids to university and were dead proud their kids had become middle class but I suppose they dont count?

Glasman: 'We will keep fighting the 1955 general election until you give us the RIGHT answer!'
The newspaper of British Conservativism: 'What a necessary voice!'

Also just utterly wild that the Telegraph is treating this guy like a seer. The man opposes every serious Conservative domestic policy victory!

Westminster political commentary repeatedly tells the tale of a a northern industrial working class without *ever* recognising there is a large northern middle class or acknowledging the desirability of class mobility - of people being given opportunities to find better work than their parents.

It's a sad world where getting arrested for protesting Apartheid doesn't buy you lifetime immunity against accusations of racial insensitivity/incompetence.

Likewise how Corbyn can see Cable Street and other examples of standing up to fascists - including and particularly when they directly threaten Jews - as part of his own antiracist lineage and also ignore or even echo antisemitic tropes himself in critiquing capitalism or imperialism.

That Starmer was for example willing to take antisemitism in the party seriously, racism against people who the Labour right see as a model minority, while simultaneously disregarding egregious evidence of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia within that faction, is par for the course, unfortunately.

The fact that both Corbyn and Starmer have at various times in their careers and in different ways engaged in anti-racist acts which were also entirely in keeping with their political projects and professional objectives does not discredit those instances but it does not give them a pass!

I suppose the difference is Starmer’s social media team are actively producing this type of content (e.g. images of dehumanised Black and Brown people as stand-ins for illegals immigrants) rather than he himself offhandedly condoning someone else for producing it but there is the same root.

Excellent thread by Dion on this.

Good for him, Corbyn was “arrested for anti-apartheid activism”. Keir Starmer did legal work to bring Stephen Lawrence’s murderers to justice! It doesn’t make what he is *also* doing any better. (Or in both cases, it doesn’t make the earlier stuff any less worthwhile!)