Sound The Ram's Horn

Rather than defend in court the only two specific examples cited in its entire report into anti-Semitism in Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has settled with Ken Livingstone and Pam Bromley. So that's that, then.

The EHRC alleged only those two cases, neither of them was taken up by the Police or by the Crown Prosecution Service, and now even the EHRC itself has given up trying to substantiate either of them. As of today, its report contains no instance, not a single one, that anyone, anyone at all, was still attempting to pretend had ever really happened.

All other suggestions, about murals and wreaths and what have you, were submitted to the EHRC at the time and forensically dismissed. Anti-Semitism is unlawful by definition, the EHRC only ever purported to have found those two unlawful acts, and facing humiliation in the courts, it can no longer be bothered to keep up even that pretence.

It turns out that it is not anti-Semitic after all to oppose the two-child benefit cap, or to support the Triple Lock, or to want to ban fire and rehire, or to want to ban zero hours contracts, or to want to renationalise the railways, or to want to renationalise the utilities, or to want to renationalise the Royal Mail, or to oppose the privatisation of the NHS in England, or to support free prescriptions in England, or to support free eye and dental check-ups in England, or to support free hospital carparking in England, or to support universal free school meals in England outside London, or to support the universal free broadband that the whole of Europe and the Old Commonwealth apart from England (but very probably including London) will have in 10 years' time and which may even exist in the United States by then, or to support the taxation of unearned income at the same rate as earnings, or to think that taxation ought not in principle to be voluntary for the rich, or to support democratic political control over monetary policy, or to oppose the war machine, including its attacks on civil liberties at home. It turns out that none of that makes you Hitler after all.

Shana tova.