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Daniel Finn Profile picture
Daniel Finn
@DanFinn95
Features Editor, @jacobin. Author of One Man's Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.
May 5, 2024 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Ireland's ambassador to Israel puts our name to a statement that doesn't mention the mass murder of Palestinians since October 7, while approvingly quoting von der Leyen's claim that "Europe stands with Israel" in whatever it chooses to do to the civilian population of Gaza. 1/ Von der Leyen's statement was clearly intended and clearly understood to offer a blank cheque to Netanyahu for war crimes, with no mention of international law. It was a license to kill that she had no authority to dispense on the EU's behalf. 2/

irishtimes.com/world/middle-e…
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Nov 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"Again vindicated" implies that it has been vindicated even once. Martin Forde found that its central claims were "wholly misleading"—and indeed turned reality on its head—in a report that Keir Starmer immediately accepted without any reservations or demurrals. Ware hasn't sued Martin Forde, or Jeremy Corbyn for that matter. He targeted a little-known blogger for making claims about his motives, rather than his actions, that would be difficult if not impossible to prove, especially under English libel law.

jacobin.com/2022/07/forde-…
Jul 19, 2022 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
The Forde report supplies useful corroboration of what was clear by autumn 2018 at the latest: the media narrative about Labour & antisemitism was detached from reality & reflected the political needs of Corbyn's party opponents rather than the evidence.

jacobin.com/2018/09/labour… We didn't need Forde to tell us that the standard media framing—"does Labour have a problem with antisemitism?"—was a bait-and-switch game that diverted attention from the real question: what kind of problem—marginal or pervasive, episodic or systemic?

jacobin.com/2018/04/jeremy…
Apr 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Once again, the JC confirms precisely what this has always been about for their editorial staff: keeping the boot on the necks of the Palestinians. Starmer is apologizing because Corbyn indicated that he might suspend a few deliveries of boot polish. The JC editor who conducted this interview compared protests against an especially nasty, bigoted Israeli ambassador, who brazenly denies the right to Palestine to exist, to Kristallnacht, simultaneously slandering the protesters and trivializing Nazism.

jacobinmag.com/2021/11/britis…
Dec 21, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
In the latest edition of Catalyst, I've an essay on the Brexit crisis, showing how Britain's centrist bloc in politics and media consciously chose to facilitate the hardest form of Brexit in order to defeat the left. It's all there on the public record.

catalyst-journal.com/2021/12/how-br… Tom Baldwin's interview for the Brexit Witness Archive includes a frank statement of what actually motivated the campaign leadership (not just "people" as he puts it here—Roland Rudd, who certainly saw things this way, owned the People's Vote campaign lock, stock and barrel). Image
Dec 9, 2021 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I was trying to avoid this earlier in the week but here it is again. FWIW, I had completely forgotten that George Monbiot said positive things about Lisa Nandy back in 2020, which probably tells you how frequently it is brought up in what you might call "Corbynite circles". 1/ By way of contrast, I don't think I've gone a week on Twitter in the last 18 months without seeing someone share Paul Mason's tweet about Starmer, Marxism and social democracy, which is only fair because it was both wildly wrong-headed and very, very funny. 2/
Dec 7, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Not being a habitual Spectator reader, I'd missed this until its author's latest outburst. Barely concealed by euphemisms ("restore credibility"), he confesses—indeed, boasts—that his role as EHRC COO was to turn it into a tool of the Conservative Party.

spectator.co.uk/article/david-… Image "The original fox in the EHRC henhouse"—well, that was Trevor Phillips, but the rest is admirably straightforward. The only people "routinely denied their rights" he mentions are "young white working-class males," & it's clearly not exploitative employers that he blames for that. Image
Oct 11, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
On reading the article, “populism” turns out to mean “anything to the left of Tony Blair.” You’d think that absolutely nothing had changed in the world since 1997. Other, more relevant models for a left government in Europe are completely ignored. Syriza’s “failure”, referred to here so serenely, was really a triumph for brute force and economic illiteracy: the Troika crashed the Greek banking system and threatened more financial “waterboarding” if Syriza didn’t accept another disastrous austerity programme.
Sep 20, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
If only there had been some clues in the EHRC's record to date ... If only there had been some clues (1) ...

newsweek.com/equality-race-…
Jul 23, 2021 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
Too much you could say here, but let's start with this: in 2008, the US authorities arranged the overnight extradition of Colombian death-squad leaders because they were about to start talking about Alvaro Uribe's support for their campaign of mass murder. 1/ Image The paramilitaries thought Uribe had betrayed them when a Colombian court ruled they would have to serve actual jail time for their crimes, so they were about to sing like canaries. The US legal system stuffed their mouths with gold in the form of absurdly light sentences. 2/ Image
Jul 8, 2021 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
This article is all spot-on as far as Starmer is concerned. But the reluctance of journalists to interrogate the standard, grossly misleading narrative about how Corbyn "disastrously dealt with Jewish claims about antisemitism" helped bring us to this point. In reality, Corbyn removed officials who were provably incompetent in handling antisemitism complaints and brought in people who dealt with them properly. His reward was to have the ex-officials lionized as "whistleblowers" by the national broadcaster.

buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/le…
Jul 6, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This decision is obviously a disgrace, but so is the Guardian's absurd description of Phillips as an "anti-racism campaigner." This isn't journalism: it's ideological warfare against the concepts people need in order to talk about and understand politics.

theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/j… This is what Phillips does for a living: he writes articles for the Tory press, denouncing anyone who questions a whitewash of racism in Britain by another Tory stooge (complete with ridiculous lies about "Mandingo fighting" being a widely used term).

thetimes.co.uk/article/silenc…
Jun 21, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I guess we all have our threshold for cringe. Being a Lib Dem means you can stomach this kind of thing; being a socialist means you're comfortable with the word "comrade." Each to their own.

tribunemag.co.uk/2019/11/debunk… The Lib Dems ran a deliberate wrecking campaign in the constituency where Grenfell happened, lying about Grenfell, lying about their own chances, to ensure it would have a Tory MP who could vote against implementing the Grenfell report's recommendations.

mirror.co.uk/news/politics/…
Jun 8, 2021 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Four years to the day since Jeremy Corbyn & his allies obliged columnists such as Jonathan Freedland to write columns like this. The ferocity of the backlash that followed—and is still following—surely owes a great deal to feelings of wounded pride.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/… No guff here about May being a uniquely awful campaigner (although he did squeeze in a line about the "weakest Tory campaign in at least 40 years" towards the end—a taste of the narrative to come). Corbyn "deserves credit for this astonishing performance", said Freedland. Image
Jun 4, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
I see Margaret Hodge is hamming it up for the cameras like the world's worst soap actress, and journalists are pretending to believe a word she says. It's like the summer of 2018 all over again, albeit without the sunny weather.

jacobinmag.com/2018/09/labour… Frankly, anyone who believed that Hodge was sincere in any of her claims that summer should atone for their gullibility by wearing clown make-up in public for a full year. Every part of her protracted temper tantrum was planned out on a grid with her factional allies.
May 17, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Latest Long Reads podcast is up now, with Paul Buhle talking about the life and work of C. L. R. James (and a few clips from James himself talking about cricket, Haiti, Marxism and more):

blubrry.com/jacobin/772553… Great interview with James by Studs Terkel from 1970 here:

May 12, 2021 • 20 tweets • 8 min read
This article is worth reading, not because it has any positive merits, but because it condenses the sheer malevolence of Blair’s role in public life. No constructive ideas, just a remorseless drive to smash and wreck any progressive political force on behalf of his paymasters. 1/ Labour under Corbyn bucked this trend, increasing its vote share by 10% in 2017. Its 2019 performance was still vastly better than recent elections for the SPD, which averaged nearly 41% of the vote from 1994 to 2005, or the PS, which won the presidency as recently as 2012. 2/ Image
May 2, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
There's a steady trickle of these unverifiable anecdotes before the Hartlepool by-election has even happened, getting their excuses in early, but no discussion of what this "breach of trust" actually was—and certainly no mention of Labour's change of line on Brexit after 2017. Hartlepool voted 70% Leave in 2016. The following year, Labour pledged to accept the referendum result and increased its vote by 17%, two years into Corbyn's leadership. When Labour promised a second referendum in 2019, its vote dropped by 15%.

democraticdashboard.com/constituency/h…
Mar 31, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
He's right, of course. But I can't help recall that Sanghera signed an open letter telling people not to vote for Labour because of alleged concerns about antisemitism in 2019. It said nothing at all about the racism of Johnson or the Tories, and several Tories signed it. The implicit but unmistakable message of this letter was: a vote for Johnson is morally permissible in a way that a vote for Corbyn is not. No wonder the likes of Tony Parsons, Frederick Forsyth and indefatigable Saudi apologist Ghanem Nuseibeh signed it.

theguardian.com/politics/2019/…
Mar 11, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
I came across this piece for the first time the other day, from the height of pre-election madness in 2019, and it's quite a good summary of the sheer dross that passes for commentary on world affairs in the British media—always geared towards having a pop at the left. 1/ The claims of "serious irregularities" and "clear manipulation" from the OAS were complete bunk, as was clear at the time, not merely in hindsight. 2/

thenation.com/article/archiv…
Feb 17, 2021 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
This is a very good and depressing piece, and really drives home the point that Uber isn't so much a company as a latter-day version of the Pinkertons, lavishly subsidized by venture capital through its multi-billion losses to smash up workers' rights.

bloomberg.com/news/features/… With opponents like these, who needs friends?

"Despite signing the bill [to regulate Uber], Newsom was still trying to negotiate an agreement that would ultimately shield them from it."