I watched Sky’s version of the Labour leadership hustings.
The set looked familiar and the host(ess) was Soppy Ridge. (See, I told you I’d leave her name auto-incorrected)
The most annoying bit of the programme was during the part where they did their bit to address the party’s antisemitism problem, which they all (rightly) condemned as ‘racism’; all three insisted that the worst offenders had to be rooted out of the party. They all spoke as if antisemitism had nothing to do with Islam. Lisa Nandy even managed to assure us that she was so anti-racist that she had no time for the “racist Tommy Robinson”(!) The chairperson confused the matter still further by bringing in an extra questioner, whose somewhat equivocal question on the same subject virtually negated the original unequivocal one.
Rather awkwardly (though it amused me) one extremely earnest and passionate member of the audience got his knickers in a terribly uncomfortable twist, trying to defend Jeremy Corbyn by insisting that he wasn’t racist at all and refusing to concede that there was any such a thing as antisemitism in the Labour Party. His enthusiasm for the party as a whole and his misguided attempt to support all three contenders effectively negated everything they’d just said. In fact, it exposed their duplicitousness.
