But it was a pogrom that came to Israel last weekend, multiple pogroms in fact, as lethal as any that cut down the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the early… - Jonathan Freedland

[Referring to Jeremy Corbyn, M]any Jews do worry that his past instinct, when faced with potential allies whom he deemed sound on Palestine, was to overlook whatever nastiness they might have uttered about Jews, even when that extended to Holocaust denial or the blood libel – the medieval calumny that Jews baked bread using the blood of gentile children. (To be specific: Corbyn was a long-time backer of a pro-Palestinian group [Deir Yassin Remembered] founded by Paul Eisen, attending its 2013 event even after Eisen had outed himself as a Holocaust denier years earlier. Similarly, Corbyn praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah even though, as a British court confirmed, Salah had deployed the blood libel.)

[Concerning a 2011 reissue of J. A. Hobson's 1902 work, Imperialism: A Study.] The foreword was written by Jeremy Corbyn in 2011. Across eight pages, the then Labour backbencher lavishes praise on the book. ... The trouble is, Hobson was not just an accomplished analyst of international politics – for the Manchester Guardian, as it happens – but an egregious anti-Jewish racist. ... And yet across the eight pages Corbyn wrote, there is not so much as an acknowledgment of the racism within that text.
On the contrary, the bit Corbyn praised as "correct and prescient" was, in his words, "Hobson’s railing against the commercial interests that fuel the role of the popular press," which appears squarely in the section where Hobson’s target is "this little group of financial kings", these "cosmopolitan" men who he had already identified as Jews. (The chapter, incidentally, is called "Economic Parasites of Imperialism," with "parasites" an image recurrent in anti-Jewish propaganda.) This is not a mere aside by Hobson that might accidentally be overlooked in a skim-read by a busy politician. There are pages and pages of it.
No one is arguing that Corbyn was obliged to denounce the whole book. He could simply have nodded to the problem with a tiny caveat: something like, "Despite some passages that read uncomfortably to the modern ear ..." But there is nothing like that. ... A Labour spokesman has said that: "Jeremy completely rejects the antisemitic elements of [Hobson’s] analysis." But if that’s true, why did he not say so when he wrote about it?

[Keir] Starmer's message was that he knew the country had put Labour in chiefly to get the Tories out – but that he hoped that he might, through a spell of solid governance, secure the public's trust.
It is an unusual kind of political logic – having won an election, he now hopes to win over the people – but it fits the times.
Britons are exhausted, wary and sceptical. They have seen the big promises, charismatic performers and grand schemes – Brexit, levelling up – all come to nothing.