Owen Jones

"Yes. I think there was a lack of very basic emotional intelligence in some sections of the left in terms of engaging with the collective trauma of the Jewish people. And the same with Israel. There is an emotional connection that many Jewish people have with Israel and you just cannot ignore that."

"And Galloway – a toxic demagogue who campaigned alongside Nigel Farage and voted Tory earlier this year – succeeded both in eating into the party's Muslim vote, and driving other residents into Labour's camp in opposition."

"There is nothing to recommend [[Keir Starmer|[Keir] Starmer]]'s leadership. He is, as we have seen, unprincipled. He is not honest. Where Blair and Neil Kinnock were talented orators, Starmer lacks any charisma or warmth."

"That more Labour voters than not desire his resignation, that more than six in 10 people do not see him as a prime minister in waiting, and that he lost the Hartlepool byelection – a seat Labour retained even in the landslide defeat of 2019 – shows he is unelectable. Starmer is Labour's version of Theresa May – who was originally lauded as a serious, public-spirited politician before being undone by her own cynicism and woodenness."

"BDS is an entirely peaceful strategy and yet it is still dismissed as beyond the pale, raising the question: what exactly is a legitimate form of Palestinian resistance?"

"The past and the present offer an obvious truth: the fate of women – of all sexualities – and LGBTQ people are bound together. While women are the principal targets of patriarchy (that is, a society rigged in favour of men), this system also punishes those seen to deviate from rigid gender norms. Improving the position of women will probably be accompanied by progress for LGBTQ people; likewise, rolling back women's rights will also mean those of LGBTQ people deteriorate in tandem. This underlines why it is wrongheaded to claim that trans rights and women's rights are on a collision course."

"It remains the case that the most interesting ideas are bubbling away on the left: banishing them from Labour's future is an act of self-harm. If a meek Starmer administration disappoints, a now cowed left may find an audience willing to listen. Starmer's team is buoyant now, and understandably so: but history tell us where hubris leads."

"This week in Manchester, [Nigel] Farage strode around the conference like a hungry crocodile, sizing up his prey. The rock-star reception he attracted suggests the faithful would quite like to be eaten."

"A principled position Scottish Labour could long have adopted is to wholeheartedly back the right of Scotland to national self-determination, without requiring any embrace of independence. In the here and now, that means championing new devolved powers, but also handing Scotland the right to choose the timing of any potential independence referendum."

"Jones was its foremost advocate and proponent. He was thrilled by Corbyn’s against the odds victory. He predicted and then witnessed at first hand the cruel ferocity of the assault upon Corbyn from within and outside the Labour party and defended him to the hilt. Now he faces the political crisis of a lifetime. The leader whom he defends will lose the battle that matters. What if his staying silent about this means, if only by default, that Owen Jones helps the Tories turn the country into "a jingoistic, foreigner-hating free market colony"?"

"Progressive head scratching as to what word might project the same corrective menace as terf (originally a small group’s chosen acronym, now applied at random), seems to have ended officially with this offering from my Guardian colleague, Owen Jones. "If," he mused last week, "TERF" [Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist] is unacceptable, let’s just use 'transphobe' and 'transphobic', problem solved." Given that this guidance comes from the man who admirably closed down "chav" because it "demonised" the working classes, there seems every chance that "transphobe" will become the approved term for people who think, for instance, that there might be one or two arguments for preserving certain women-only spaces."

"Self-appointed "feminist allies" such as the Leftist poster boy, Owen Jones seem to get a thrill out of screaming "transphobe" at those of us who make it clear we do not believe men can be women simply because they say they are."

"Jones, Britain’s best-known left-wing commentator, was born in Sheffield in 1984. His parents, both members of the Militant Tendency, met while canvassing for Labour in the late sixties; his father was a trade-union shop steward, his mother a prominent computer-science academic. Other relatives were Labour councillors and radical preachers ... After reading history at Oxford and a stint as a trade-union lobbyist he worked for two British left grandees: archiving the papers of Eric Hobsbawm, and serving as a parliamentary researcher to John McDonnell."

"Owen Jones was passionately committed to the cause, living and breathing every moment of Corbyn’s leadership."

"When Jones was later asked why he is so sceptical about the multiple reports of Hamas terrorists raping Israeli women – indeed, reports that they were specifically instructed to rape Jewish girls and women - he replied with a quote from a Washington Post article: "It's unclear whether authorities have accounts directly from rape survivors." That quote does indeed exist in that article, but it also makes clear that this is because Hamas almost certainly killed all the women they raped yet accidentally left many witnesses, including one who said a Hamas terrorist killed a woman while still raping her and a morgue worker who described female bodies so brutally assaulted they had shattered pelvises. But I guess he missed those details."

"Even a screening of October 7 footage collated by the Israeli government, much of it filmed by Hamas, didn't convince the Guardian columnist Owen Jones. In his little YouTube video ... [h]e notes a charred female corpse "has no underwear on and this has been offered as evidence of rape. But that is not what you would consider conclusive evidence ... If there was rape and sexual violence committed we don't see this on the footage.""

"Some relatives chose not to share footage, as the screening was told. But if Jones had seen even one such withheld clip — of a girl being gang-raped and murdered, then Hamas pissing on her corpse — maybe he'd still dispute details that chip away at the whole, parse dead women’s ripped knickers to propagate doubt. Such a simpleton cheerleader cannot compute believing Jewish women since it would cast moral shadows on "his" side."