No room for antisemitism in the Labour Party etc....

In 2016 we wrote about Maxine Peake, when she played the feisty heroine in “Three Girls” 

“I can’t imagine hard leftie, pro-Palestinian Maxine Peake playing anything other than a passionate Social Justice Warrior. It will probably be all about the struggle against those heartless authorities who wouldn’t listen. Not about the grooming gangs with a warped attitude to females.”

Peake has also played a feisty character in “Shameless” and a feisty barrister in Silks and she is a real-life feisty agitator in that hypocritical, “literally a communist” (and probably well-remunerated thank you very much) feisty, actressy, opinionated way that is prevalent amongst actors whose careers the BBC disproportionately promotes. Unlike, say, Laurence wrongthink Fox, whose career has plummeted. (apparently) 

Several references to Peake in the Spectator have greeted the connected news of Rebecca “Wrong-Daily’s” sacking (for retweeting Peake’s innuendo-laden remark that blames the IDF for putting that nasty ‘restraint technique’ into the innocent little heads of the US police) by declaring that they’ve never heard of Maxine Peake or that she’s a rotten actress. 

I beg to disagree with such a mean spirited sidetrack.  I’d say she’s as good an actress as any of the other hard-left, opinionated Corbynista actresses that abound in “BBC drama” circles, and perhaps better than some. However, her political opinions certainly don’t do much for her image, and by association, certainly don’t do much towards redressing the BBC’s reputation as a lefty echo-chamber.

In which not only does Maxine Peake blame the death of the George Floyd on Israel, but the Independent sees fit to tell readers that this might indeed be the case. https://t.co/0tsDmqpGY8

— Nick Timothy (@NJ_Timothy) June 25, 2020

I jumped to the conclusion that Starmer had been looking for an opportunity to sack Long-Bailey, and I think he has taken advantage of that ill-judged tweet rather prematurely. It might come back to bite him on the bum, because, unfortunately, the argument that there was nothing actually “untruthful” in Peake’s accusation in the Independent article will gain traction, simply because the elasticity within left-wing antisemitism stretches in a wider and more complex and convoluted manner than (the typically superficial) public opinion can cope with.

It doesn’t matter if the allegation that the  IDF ‘trained’ George Floyd’s killer has been debunked. It doesn’t matter if the only link between the IDF and US cops was that “100 officers attended a conference hosted by the Israeli consulate eight years ago” or that it was for “a seminar about counter-terrorism”. No-one who’s got the bit between their teeth cares one jot about such a trivial discrepancy. The current antisemitism within the BLM movement and within the left-wing establishment is so ingrained I’m increasingly pessimistic about the future.

I’ll just assume Starmer doesn’t think much of Long-Bailey, (and I don’t blame him) but if he claims sacking her was done to demonstrate his virtuous determination to rid the Labour Party of antisemitism, I simply don’t believe him.

Update:

Hard-hitting article in the Spectator. Does Israel train America’s police forces? by Dominic Green.

“…… the bigger the big lie is, the more believable it becomes. So of course rioters in Los Angeles smash Jewish stores and spray ‘Free Palestine’ on a synagogue in the name of George Floyd. Of course Twitter seethes with ignorant and malicious claims that Israel trains American police in how to kill black people. The radical left have been teaching hatred of Jews and Israel for decades, and the mainstream left has pandered to those groups and their obsessions.”

About Three Girls

If you heard Jane Garvey on Woman's Hour tiptoeing around the ‘Asian’ question when interviewing the actress Maxine Peake and the character she’s playing in the forthcoming “Three Girls” trilogy, Sara Rowbotham, you’d have noticed the care Garvey took to stress that white males were responsible for most of the cases of child sexual abuse before tentatively mentioning that in this particular instance the perpetrators were…. just happened to be……Asian.

It’s perfectly valid for the BBC to dramatise the authorities’ unforgivable and misguided attitude to the victims and their refusal to listen to the social workers who reported it, but if they fail to emphasise that the reason the powers that be behaved this way was their fear of being thought racist, then the writers and the BBC will look guilty of exactly the same thing.

“We need a coup!!”

Craig wrote about the upcoming 3-part drama “Three Girls.” (It’s about the grooming scandal in Rochdale) 

It stars Maxine Peake, undoubtedly a terrific actress (sorry, “actor”) who first came to our attention playing the comedic role of “Veronica” in Channel four’s early series of Shameless. 

She’s a communist by the way, and a pretty vocal one with it. 

 She does manage to get herself cast in dramas that have a distinctly ‘lefty’ message, the most cringeworthy of which was “Silk”  (God, that was bad) and she is proud to be known as socialist/ communist and a pro-Palestinian activist 

So I look forward to her portrayal of “Sara Rowbotham, the sexual health worker who repeatedly reported her concerns to the police that the girls were being abused – and was repeatedly ignored”  and I couldn’t help wondering how she would cope with a script that would confront, head-on, the religion of the perpetrators; but I don’t think it will be an issue. By the looks of it they’ll avoid dealing with it  altogether.The Guardian explains:

“It does not focus on the abusers, but the abused: three working-class girls betrayed by the council, the police, and the Crown Prosecution Service, as well as the men who stole their lives. The girls were written off by the agencies that should have protected them, because their lives were chaotic and they did not present as ideal victims.”

Out of the shadows

Norman Smith got very excited today. He couldn’t fathom why Sarah Champion MP (Lab) has written to Jeremy Corbyn to unresign and Jeremy Corbyn has accepted her unresignation. She’s to get her old job back on the front benches. What was her role again? The MP for Rotherham was shadow home office minister for preventing abuse and domestic violence.” 

That appearance on the Victoria Derbyshire show must have whetted her appetite for more of the adulation to which she has become accustomed. 

Norman Smith thought her mysterious capitulation would herald an avalanche of returning MPs, as in the domino effect. Someone had compared the Labour Party’s resignees to the striking miners. Norman Smith thought the miners’ strike had lasted about a year, whereas Ms Champion’s spell in the sidelines has only lasted for about two weeks. 

Wot no Flying pickets? Now that Corbyn looks set to stay indefinitely, deciding to ‘blackleg’  looks like a good career move. Get in quick so no-one else can nick your seat.. 

Sarah Champion is campaigning about raising awareness of bullying and online abuse, which is all very well. But it’s a bit like protecting synagogues rather than addressing antisemitism. Shouldn’t Ms. Champion prioritise raising her male constituents’ awareness of the modern, British, enlightened attitude to girls and women?

Talking of child sexual abuse, the BBC is to dramatise the Rochdale abuse scandal.

Filming begins this week on Three Girls, a new three-part BBC One drama based on the true stories of victims of grooming and sexual abuse in Rochdale.The drama will look at the way in which these girls were groomed, how they were ignored by the authorities directly responsible for protecting them, and how they eventually made themselves heard. A BBC Studios production in association with Studio Lambert, Three Girls is made by the team behind the multi-award winning BBC drama Five Daughters. 

Maxine Peake (Silk, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Lesley Sharp (Scott And Bailey, Capital) will play two women who were instrumental in getting the girls’ voices heard.Other cast includes Paul Kaye, Lisa Riley and Jill Halfpenny as parents of the girls, alongside Ace Bhatti as Nazir Afzal, former Chief Crown Prosecutor for the North West. They will be joined by Olivia Hill, Ria Zmitrowicz, Molly Windsor, Simon Nagra, Qas Hamid and Wasim Zakir. 

Written by Nicole Taylor (The C Word), Three Girls is produced by the same team as the acclaimed and award-winning BBC Drama, Five Daughters including director Philippa Lowthorpe (Call The Midwife, Jamaica Inn), producer Simon Lewis and Executive Producer Susan Hogg.

I can’t imagine hard leftie, pro-Palestinian Maxine playing anything other than a passionate Social Justice Warrior. It will probably be all about the struggle against those heartless authorities who wouldn’t listen. Not about the grooming gangs with a warped attitude to females.