As I've alluded to above, its the quality of the candidates moving forward that will drive change inside the Houses. I fear that these days we (as in the voting public) often don't really vote on the issues anymore, but focus on party & personality. Which is why various idiots have risen to the top, they've been louder than everyone else even if their substance is questionable, if existent at all. We need to get our candidates / MPs working harder on the ground again, and vote for people who can actually do the work asked of them.
Which requires reform within the political parties themselves. They set their own rules around candidate selection after all and are able to prioritise what they want. The other issue is that I believe for both Labour and the Tories the final decision on candidates is made by the local associations of members which, considering the collapse in party membership, means a more and more extreme electorate will be making the final choice that then goes to the public in the General Election. The candidates that get put in front of the membership are, themselves, of course whittled down by the Party machinery.
This internal process is the main reason why we have the candidates we have, I think in particular because the candidates have to focus so much on appealing to the party base which is often considerably further to the right/left than the average voter is. I do wonder if open primaries is the way to go for the final candidates. It doesn't need to be a big event in the way that it is in the US.
I would suggest that the qualification would simply be that you're a registered voter in the constituency in question where the candidate is being selected and the party has to provide reasonable notice that a primary vote is taking place and if you wish to take part you must notify your intention to do so. The Tories have actually done this a few times in the 2010s. Can't help but feel having the final choice of candidate being via an open primary would help improve the quality of candidate overall.
But in any event whilst you can blame the wider electorate for the deterioration in the quality of MP I can't help but feel that that's akin to locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. We are getting what's given to us the by the party machinery, I would question the process that that machinery follows before I would question the electorate themselves.
I’ve never understood why criticism of Israel’s government is automatically Antisemitic; there are many Israelis who dislike their government, are they now antisemitic? Ali obviously had to be suspended, but McDonald? Did he say anything that bad?
It is, of course, complex.
The issue is that whilst there is no reason you cannot criticise the Government of Israel for their actions now and in the past, for many who are antisemitic they use criticism of Israel as a fig leaf (and often code) for criticism of Jews more generally. They may say "How awful Israel's behaviour is, they must be stopped" but what they're actually saying is "How awful the Jews are, they must be stopped". This is not all people who criticise Israel but it is some and it can be hard to work out who is who. But then equally you have the opposite as well. Those who will jump on any criticism of Israel as being antisemitic and use that as a fig leaf to distract from their Zionism and staunchly pro-Israel views.
This is, of course, quite a messy situation to end up in when you have attacks coming from both angles of any criticism, justified or unjustified, of Israeli policy which makes it extremely hard to actually make reasonable comments on the policies and actions of the Israeli state.
Meanwhile the Labour party is struggling with legitimate past criticism of antisemitism when it was under the control of the Corbynite faction and so now is almost swinging to far the other way in its response to that previous problem. The right wing press sense a weakness here (and they're not wrong) so will happily punch at that bruise, the Daily Mail for instance today is poking away at the antisemitism line and we've seen members on this Forum poking away at it which makes them even more sensitive to the issue whilst also facing an internal party discipline issue if they are seen to be too pro-Israel.
But we're probably in danger of wandering off-topic into the wider Israel/Palestine issue which is better suited to
this thread.