It’s been a while

So I haven’t updated my blog in over two years. Last time I posted, I was packing up my library. I unpacked it shortly afterwards in a lovely office overlooking the Strand. A few months later, I packed it up again and moved it to a different office – less lovely in a conventional sense, but much more to my taste – on a side street off the Strand. Then, just over six months ago, I had to start working from home thanks to Covid-19.

What a strange few months they have been! I’ve published quite a bit, and won a grant – more on which later, once I have time to start updating this blog regularly again. But in some ways – ways of the sort that I don’t discuss in public – the last year and a half have been such an extraordinary upheaval that – at least from my point of view – the last six months have seemed almost a continuation of the same run of extraordinariness and upheaval. Almost.

A new academic year is about to start. I’ve been recording video lectures, and I hope that my students have been watching them. And next week, it’s back to campus for the first time in an age, to teach my first face-to-face seminar since the lockdown: just one per week, masked and socially distanced, and with all the other seminars online.

So I’ll see my library again. But it’s people that I’ve missed.

Packing up my library

Packing up my library

Somewhere in these boxes is a copy of Illuminations, the collection through which Walter Benjamin’s writings are known to English-speaking undergraduates everywhere. And somewhere within that is Benjamin’s 1931 essay, ‘Unpacking my library’. Benjamin was moving his books after a divorce, but I’m moving mine because I have a new job with a contract that comes into effect today. I’m sad to move on from the University of Leicester, which has been one of my happier academic homes. But as of now, I am Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence at King’s College London, and on Monday I will begin to unpack.

‘ “Hitler had a valid argument against some Jews”: Repertoires for the denial of antisemitism in Facebook discussion of a survey of attitudes to Jews and Israel’ (now in print)

My article ‘ “Hitler had a valid argument against some Jews”: repertoires for the denial of antisemitism in Facebook discussion of a survey of attitudes to Jews and Israel’, which was published online in April this year, has now appeared in the August issue of Discourse, Context & Media. It explains the background to the antisemitism crisis that has now engulfed the Labour Party leadership, then analyses some of the ways in which Labour supporters deny the existence of antisemitism before looking at how the largest unofficial Labour Party Facebook group makes the problem worse by readily expelling those who challenge antisemitism but only expelling antisemites for extreme transgressions.

Allington-2018-first-page

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How many ‘centrists’ are there? (On Twitter and off it)

‘Centrists,’ Jeremy Corbyn’s former official spokesman tells us, ‘love being talked down to by people in power as it provides false reassurance that they must be better than them.’ The centrist, another Corbynite B-lister explains, ‘has the weary, lecturing tone of a frustrated parent absolutely nailed on.’ But why be so mealy mouthed? As the man who came closer than anyone to embodying the spirit of the ongoing neo-Tankie renaissance memorably put it, ‘better a thousand honest fascists than some glistening sleaze who’s “neither left nor right.”‘

Is it wise to alienate voters who don’t identify with the left or the right? Some have taken last year’s general election result to demonstrate that it is. The Hammer of the Moderates himself, Owen Jones, has argued that an appeal to moderation can make no electoral sense ‘at a time when more than 80% of the electorate voted for a left-led Labour party or the Brexiteer Tories.’ But given that Labour lost that election by a wider margin of seats than it did under Gordon Brown, that argument seems a little odd. Surely losing an election to the Conservatives after publicly abandoning the centre doesn’t indicate that publicly abandoning the centre was the right thing for Labour to do?

But I think I’ve got it figured out now. These people live their lives on Twitter, where the best way of getting your voice heard is to start a fight that others will want to join in. Moderation never gets much traction there. It’s not like in the outside world:

left-right-self-identification-twitter-users-and-non-twitter-users

Data courtesy of the British Election Study.

Voters in the 2017 general election – and how they voted previously

This is the third and final part of my preliminary analysis of groups of voters defined by the choices they made in the 2015 general election, the 2016 European Union membership referendum, and the 2017 general election (c.f. Stephen Bush’s nine voter groups), using an English subset of responses to the British Election Study’s post-election face-to-face survey. In the first part, I looked at the ten largest groups, from Conservative-Leave-Conservative to Conservative-Remain-Labour, both in terms of their size and in terms of their self-declared likelihood to vote for various parties in future, and found that Labour Remainers were not only more numerous but (on their own assessment) more likely to be poached than Labour Leavers, while the smaller group of Conservative Remainers who had switched to voting Labour were quite likely to switch again. In the second part, I looked at six groups of voters who had in common that they could have voted but did not in the 2015 general election, finding that most of them did not vote either in the 2016 referendum or the 2017 general election, and that only the minority who voted Remain in the 2016 referendum were more likely than not to have voted in the 2017 general election.

To finish up for now, here’s a single chart showing all voter groups which participated in the 2017 general election (weighted by demographic group and by 2017 vote). Each quarter of the chart below shows the members of the sample who voted for one of the four main parties. These voters are further subdivided into columns to show how they voted in the referendum and into coloured blocks to show who they voted for in 2015 (note that black covers both non-voting and voting outside the four main parties, which most often meant voting Green as the data are from England only):

Voters in the 2017 general election - and how they voted previously

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Non-voters from the 2015 general election and what they did next

On Friday, I posted some analysis of groups of English voters defined by the combinations of choices they made in a succession of votes. That was the first installment of a multi-part response to Stephen Bush’s recent article on why we should stop focusing so obsessively on people who voted Labour in 2015 and then voted to leave the European Union in 2016. I’d now like to take a look at those who didn’t vote at all in the 2015 general election.

Excluding those who did not vote because they were ineligible, there were 290 GE2015 non-voters in the dataset that I’m using: an English subset of the post-election 2017 face-to-face survey carried out as part of the long-running and hugely respected British Election Study. The 290 become 311 or more if we weight for demographic group, as I did for Friday’s analysis – which indicates that the non-voters were from demographic groups that were under-represented in the sample as a whole. (It’s only slightly less difficult to get non-voters to answer a survey than it is to get them into a polling booth, as we see from the fact that just 15% of the sample did not vote in an election with 66% turnout.) But because 290 is a small sample and weighting tends to magnify the effect of sampling error, I’ve used unweighted counts throughout this post (not that weighting made an appreciable difference to any of the patterns I will talk about below). The following alluvial diagram (created using the R package, ggalluvial) tracks the voting behaviour of sampled 2015 non-voters post-2015:

The subsequent voting behaviour of 2015 General Election non-voters

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Ten voter groups: combinations of EU referendum and general election votes in the BES 2017 face-to-face survey

Like many, I read with interest Stephen Bush’s recent article on ‘The nine voter groups who are more important than Labour Leavers’. If Bush were a grant awarding institution, there would be money available for researching those groups. Well, he isn’t, so there isn’t, but I like a challenge so I’m going to make a start anyway – using open data from the British Election Study (henceforth, BES). To be more specific, I’ll be using the BES 2017 face-to-face survey, which was conducted after the election and uses what should probably be considered a more genuinely random sample than the online waves.

Continue reading “Ten voter groups: combinations of EU referendum and general election votes in the BES 2017 face-to-face survey”

The Labour-Conservative swing in Barnet, 2014-2018

My analysis of the local election vote in Barnet has now been quite widely discussed, including on pages one and six of last week’s Jewish Chronicle. But while the chart I created does tell the story of the election, it’s a little difficult to read because it tries to show the whole story, with rises and falls in vote share for all four main parties. This leaves the reader to work out that there’s really just one central narrative of shifts between the two largest of those four parties, while nothing really happens with the remainder.

For that reason, I’ve now produced a simpler chart which shows only the Labour to Tory swing:

Swing from Labour to Conservatives by population, Barnet local elections (2014-2018)

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The Jewish vote in Barnet

Theresa May argues that her party’s success in re-taking control of Barnet Council was a result of Jewish voters ‘reject[ing] the vile antisemitism’ within the Labour Party. Do the numbers back her up? Yes. Just look at the chart above, which is based on ward-by-ward voting figures and the 2011 census. Labour picked up votes only in those parts of Barnet where the Jewish population was low; the more Jews there were within a ward, the more likely it was to lose them instead.

The red trend line falls more steeply than the blue trend line climbs, suggesting that not all Labour’s lost Jewish votes will have gone to the Tories. And in the wards with few Jewish voters, Labour tended to gain about as many votes as the Green Party lost, giving us a clue as to where the votes it picked up came from, and why. But the message here is clear, and much starker than in June, when the ex-Labour vote in Jewish areas seems to have gone to the Liberal Democrats rather than the Tories.

That message is that many left-leaning Jews now see Labour as an institutionally antisemitic organisation that must be kept from power even at the cost of voting for a party on the opposite side of the political spectrum.

‘Hitler had a valid argument against some Jews’: repertoires for the denial of antisemitism in Facebook discussion of a survey of attitudes to Jews and Israel (manuscript draft)

This manuscript has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Discourse, Context & Media. By agreement with the publisher, it can be distributed on this website. For offline reading, a PDF copy is available for download (although if you wish to share it with others, please direct them to this page rather than sending the file directly). EDIT (13 April 2018): The version of record is now available online via ScienceDirect at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2018.03.004 ahead of print publication. EDIT (4 August 2018): The article has appeared in the August issue of Discourse, Context & Media (vol. 24), and is available online at the same address (although now with correct pagination).

Author: Daniel Allington, University of Leicester
Journal: Discourse, Context & Media
Received at editorial office: 11 Dec 2017
Article revised: 16 Mar 2018
Article accepted for publication: 21 Mar 2018
Article available online via ScienceDirect: 12 April 2018
Article available in print: 21 July 2018

Bibliographic reference: Allington, D. (2018) ‘ “Hitler had a valid argument against some Jews”: Repertoires for the denial of antisemitism in Facebook discussion of a survey of attitudes to Jews and Israel’. Discourse, Context, and Media 24: 129-136.

Abstract

Discourse analytic research suggests that, in contemporary liberal democracies, complaints of racism are routinely rejected and prejudice may be both expressed and disavowed in the same breath. Historical and quantitative research has established that – both in democratic states and in those of the Soviet Bloc (while it existed) – antisemitism has long been related to or expressed in the form of statements about Israel or Zionism, permitting anti-Jewish attitudes to circulate under cover of political critique. This article looks at how the findings of a survey of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli attitudes were rejected by users of three Facebook pages associated with the British Left. Through thematic discourse analysis, three recurrent repertoires are identified: firstly, what David Hirsh calls the ‘Livingstone Formulation’ (i.e. the argument that complaints of antisemitism are made in bad faith to protect Israel and/or attack the Left), secondly, accusations of flawed methodology similar to those with which UK Labour Party supporters routinely dismiss the findings of unfavourable opinion polls, and thirdly, the argument that, because certain classically antisemitic beliefs pertain to a supposed Jewish or ‘Zionist’ elite and not to Jews in general, they are not antisemitic. In one case, the latter repertoire facilitates virtually unopposed apologism for Adolf Hitler. Contextual evidence suggests that the dominance of such repertoires within one very large UK Labour Party-aligned group may be the result of action on the part of certain ‘admins’ or moderators. It is argued that awareness of the repertoires used to express and defend antisemitic attitudes should inform the design of quantitative research into the latter, and be taken account of in the formulation of policy measures aiming to restrict or counter hate speech (in social media and elsewhere).

Keywords: anti-Semitism; anti-Zionism; denial of racism; attitudes; Zionism; Israel; Jews; Labour Party; Facebook; social media

Continue reading “‘Hitler had a valid argument against some Jews’: repertoires for the denial of antisemitism in Facebook discussion of a survey of attitudes to Jews and Israel (manuscript draft)”