But these rules are selectively applied, hence Len McCluskey can be confidently accused of antisemitism. The problem is not that the media assume good faith on the part of everyone, but that they are particularly tolerant when it comes to the right. How did we get here?
The premise of the dogwhistle is that politicians are constrained to speak in code by a watchful media. But that's a relatively recent centrist construct. The term only gained currency in the 1990s. Before then, language was less ambiguous (e.g. "Rivers or blood" or "Swamped").
The 90s were when the problematic of immigration & asylum became hegemonic, as New Labour bought into the right's traditional narrative. The dogwhistle helped distinguish between an imputed racist motivation (bad) & a "legitimate concern" (good).
But this distinction was never neat (hence Brown's "bigoted woman" outburst). The boundary was increasingly pushed back & racists assumed to have special insights into the working class. The result is now a blithe indifference to a carpenter's Nazi face tattoos.
As the media have increasingly tolerated the far-right, they have simultaneously become sensitive to dogwhistles on the left, ever watchful to spot covert antisemitism or anything that might smack of sympathy for Russia or China (despite neither being actually "left").
This is not simply anti-left bias but the structural need to define boundaries of the acceptable & thus maintain the media's policing role. The more they tolerate and groom the right, the more they will come down hard on the left.

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More from @fromarsetoelbow

21 Oct
Claiming white privilege doesn't really exist ironically embodies white privilege (which can be articulated by a black MP as much as anyone). The error the right make is that white privilege is not something you possess but something you lack (i.e. the disbenefits of racism). Image
Some on the right obviously recognise this, hence the trope of the disadvantaged white working class which attempts to extend the disbenefits of classism to include reverse racism: the idea that some white people are the victims of (the liberal elite's) racial prejudice.
Critical race theory is not an ideology but a way of approaching ideology. This is not to say that it can't embody ideological priors, but that treating it as an ideology in its own right is a category error, like calling a football commentator a professional footballer.
Read 5 tweets
21 Oct
Andy Burnham isn't a politically impressive figure, largely because he is essentially backward-looking & lacking real vision - a little bit Blairite, a little bit old Catholic Labour, a little bit Wilsonian soft-left - but he has often been lucky in his enemies.
Opposing further NHS privatisation after 2008 caught the mood within the party; he was palpably sincere about the Hillsborough campaign, which cemented his regional popularity; & he couldn't have wished for a more comically "posh southerner" opponent today.
But he has lacked judgement & a sense of timing, most obviously when he abstained on benefits cuts in 2015. In the current struggle, he has the advantage that the metro mayor role has little power, so he has few hard choices to make & can fairly blame the govt.
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18 Oct
What with the Tom Bower bio of Johnson & O'Brien's latest self-help book, it looks like the damaged public schoolboy is back in fashion as an explanatory trope for the sociopathic behaviour of our leading figures.
This will be a disappointment to Matthew Goodwin in his crusade to rescue white working class boys from liberal condescension through scholarships at character-building public schools. I guess he'll just have to stick to patronising Stormzy & misrepresenting white privilege.
I'm not expecting O'Brien to join the dots and wonder whether the real problem of bullying in British society might not be jeering on social media but something to do with the performative contempt of those who were quick to sneer at "a kinder, gentler politics".
Read 4 tweets
11 Oct
Johnson's skills, or lack of them, are irrelevant. We've had inept PMs before (Churchill was practically gaga in his later years). The failures over Covid & Brexit are a) deliberate (the cronyism, the brinkmanship) & b) the result of a state capacity attenuated by neoliberalism.
It's unlikely any other mainstream politician would have done better. They would either be equally committed to 'a' or would believe that 'b' limited their options. What we needed was not a different skillset but a different mindset: an aversion to *both* crony capitalism & TINA.
The only politician who fitted that bill, whatever his other limitations, was Corbyn, but the establishment spent 4 years doing it's level best to cast him as illegitimate. The idea that our saviour now might be a non-crony neoliberal (Starmer or the other Milliband) is naive.
Read 4 tweets
7 Oct
Paul advocates a NATO socialism that no longer has a base in Labour, even if it appeals to the red wall. His bet is that Starmer will push the socialism once he's got the patriotism nailed, but that would require support not just by the left but by a pro-socialist right & centre.
Starmer has provided plenty of evidence that he is sincere about the patriotism & social conservativism, but the left are right to be sceptical that the socialism train is about to come round the corner, given the largely anti-socialist PLP & new party apparat.
The spycops legislation is an attack on the labour movement & civil campaigns (i.e. the traditional targets), not just on a human rights principle. Abstention is not a tactical misjudgement by Starmer but a red line that shouldn't have been crossed (like benefit cuts in 2015).
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6 Oct
So it appears the problem lay with a consolidation process, whereby CSV data was auto-manipulated by Excel templates to create rolled up stats. The architectural flaw in this is that the raw data wasn't condolidated first in an RDBMS.
bbc.co.uk/news/technolog…
If it had been, Excel (even an antique version) would have been perfectly fine for producing the aggregate analysis & dashboard presentation. Hancock's comments about a "legacy system" are partly blame-shifting, but they also suggest PHE hadn't envisaged a pandemic of this scale.
That will be held up as yet more evidence why PHE needed replacing, & the non-involvement of Serco & other 3rd parties will probably now increase the demand for reporting to be outsourced (my assumption yesterday was that it already had been).
Read 4 tweets

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