Red/brown unite shocker - over damn foreigners

Attitudes to Jewish immigration by political identifier.

The Canadian journalist Michael Colborne likes nothing better than to crunch some numbers. So there he was, as you do, rooting round the details of the of the European Social Survey (ESS) - an enormous project which you can see more about on its own Wikipedia page.

And lo, this is what he found:

The vast majority (94%) of respondents said that either many, some or a few Jews should be allowed to come live in Britain, with only 6% saying no Jews should be allowed at all.

But…regardless of how you slice up the left/right scale, British people who identify as furthest to the left or right seem a lot less keen on Jews than those in the relative middle on the spectrum.

Drilling down some more he found that fully a fifth of those who identified as furthest left would permit no Jewish immigration to the UK, just shy of the 22.5% of the furthest-right who wouldn't either (image at top of page). Colborne (who I follow on Twitter) confirmed to me that the samples are statistically significant.

It gets worse

Today Colborne did some more number crunching and found that far-left attitudes to Jews come in a context - hostility to immigration full-stop.

This is - in cold, hard numbers - a big minority of the Corbyn supporting, Momentum supporting far-left having the same views as a similar sized minority of the far-right.

Here some comparisons from the same source across Europe (Courtesy Colborne):

All great stuff for the proponents of horseshoe theory, as well as those also on the left who have been pointing out that the left has some fucking serious issues for years (thinking of you, Nick Cohen).

Oh and Michael has set off to plow through other surveys to find other samples demonstrating the same phenomenon ..