Politics

There’s a very funny moment in Jon Ronson’s book Them: Adventures with Extremists, part of which follows the New Age mental case David Icke on a tour of Canada. All the way across the great plains, Icke has been promulgating his thesis that we are the unwitting subjects of shape-shifting reptilian alien overlords. Aside from Ronson, a protestor has been following Icke, too — demonstrating outside each venue —convinced that when Icke says ‘shape-shifting reptilian overlords’ he really means ‘Jews’. Eventually, having heard Icke speak on perhaps a dozen occasions, Ronson asks the protestor, ‘Do you still think that when Icke says lizards, he means Jews?’ And the protester replies,

Over the past few weeks, Mr S has detected the faint whiff of May-mania on the horizon. The Prime Minister’s handling of the poisoning of a former Russian double agent on British soil has seen her popularity rise again. What’s more, she learnt a new trick – recently fist-bumping a Salisbury resident. Now she can add cracking jokes to that list. At her appearance before the Liaison Committee this afternoon, May was asked about the importance of the agriculture industry in Wales to the community. Here she pointed out that she had seen this herself on her many walking trips in Wales – only not everyone would appreciate this: ‘I’m

Oh dear. It’s no great secret that the Parliamentary Labour Party has struggled to get to grips with Jeremy Corbyn’s response to Russia over the poisoning of a former Russian double agent on British soil. However, up until now they had refrained from criticising him directly in the Chamber. Today John Woodcock decided to go there following Theresa May’s statement on Russia. After Jeremy Corbyn claimed in his response that he had always been an outspoken critic of Russian aggression, the Labour MP decided he ‘could not let that remark go by’: ‘I’m sat here reading his article in the Morning Star after Russia annexed part of Ukraine where the

Jeremy Corbyn this evening said he was ‘sincerely sorry’ for the pain caused by ‘pockets of anti-semitism’ in his party, and is arranging to meet representatives of the Jewish community this week. Tonight the Labour leader has had something of a preview of how that meeting might go, with the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council publishing a furious letter in which they accuse him of ignoring the ‘mainstream majority of British Jews’. The letter, entitled ‘enough is enough’, says Corbyn personifies the form of politics that repeatedly fails to take antisemitism seriously, and says that ‘again and again, Jeremy Corbyn has sided with antisemites

Joseph Goebbels said fascists should not worry about their propaganda being too rough or too mean. ‘It ought not be decent nor ought it be gentle or soft or humble; it ought to lead to success.’ No one could accuse the anti-Semitic propaganda in London’s East End of being ‘soft’. The Los Angeles graffiti artist Kalen Ockerman, who calls himself ‘Mear One’ to sound more street, painted a mural on the side of a house near Brick Lane showing bankers sitting round a monopoly board resting on the backs of suffering humanity. The bank that crashed the British economy almost a decade ago was the Royal Bank of Scotland. But

This evening Owen Smith has been unceremoniously sacked by Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour front bench after he called for another EU referendum. However, given that the Labour frontbench aren’t exactly known for sharing a coherent Brexit position, some are questioning how fair the move is. After all, when it coms to calling for second referendums, Diane Abbott actually beat Smith to it. Back in November, the Labour frontbencher was reported, by the Guardian, to have written to two constituents pledging she would argue in favour of a referendum on the final Brexit deal – a policy that had been ruled out by the party: ‘I will argue for the right