Who's She, When She's At Home?

What the critics of Kate Osamor are really saying is that no one who lives in a council house should be an MP.

For 40 years, all three parties in government have run down social housing, flogged it off, refused to build any more, insisted that it was some kind of ambulance service for the extremely poor only, and stigmatised the people who lived in it.

That was the cutting edge of that approach to all public provision, for 40 years and counting, under all three parties in central government, and by all three parties in local government to this day, since the Right remains massively dominant of the municipal Labour Party.

And yes, of course the treatment of Osamor is racist. She is uppity, and must be lynched. The first purpose of racism is to pay politically black workers less, if anything. That is one of the two reasons why anti-Semitism, whatever else it may be, is not a form of racism, which is itself primarily a form of class oppression.

The other such reason is that Jews simply are not a race. Anyone can convert to Judaism, just as anyone can convert to Christianity or to Islam. Ivanka Trump is a convert to Judaism, and any Jew who "denies the God of Israel", classically by becoming a Christian, ceases to be Jewish according to the rabbis. But you cannot convert to or from being black.

Hating Jews as Jews is like hating Christians as Christians, or hating Muslims as Muslims. But it is not a form of racism.