Of all the deformities afflicting Western politics right now, none is quite so grotesque as Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party. Yet the world is presently so deranged that Corbyn could well become prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
The world is transfixed by Brexit, and rightly so, but these past few months Corbyn has been engulfed by a deepening controversy about anti-Semitism in his party, and especially anti-Semitic elements in his own politics.
In our own parliament this week we saw foolish, inaccurate, prejudiced and unacceptable comments by senator Fraser Anning, a marginal figure elected in a series of flukes by an electoral system that produces on its margins some truly weird results. Our mainstream political parties reacted well to Anning. They condemned his remarks but did not overreact by censuring him in the Senate or spending energy on him in the House of Representatives question time. And many people rightly observed that we need to have an immigration debate, but not in the prejudiced and fact-free terms that Anning uses.