Anti-semitism

When Labour last came to Brighton for its annual conference, I sat in a studio listening to people who had faced abuse because they were Jewish. I heard statements recorded at a fringe event suggesting it was fine to question whether the Holocaust had ever happened. As leader of the city’s council, I had to act. I wrote a letter saying Labour would not be welcome back in Brighton if it failed to sort out its issues with anti-Semitism. Two years on, I have been forced out of the party I loved. But Labour’s dark problem remains. The backlash against my message was swift and took me by surprise. I

Labour has yet again shown it doesn’t care about its Jewish members. Jeremy Corbyn said earlier this year that “there is no place for anti-Semitism or any form of racism in the Labour party”. But not for the first time – and not for the last – Jews who still belong to the party have been sidelined.  The latest cause for disquiet is the decision yesterday by the party’s National Executive Committee. Not content with scrapping the party’s student wing ahead of next week’s gathering in Brighton, the NEC has now agreed new rules concerning the handling of allegations of anti-Semitism and disciplinary procedures for expelling members. Yet it has done so

‘The Labour Party welcomes everyone* irrespective of race, creed, age, gender identity, or sexual orientation. (except, it seems, Jews)’. So says an unprecedented advert in the Guardian today, which is signed by more than 60 Labour peers. It could hardly be more damning. Yet while the advert is shocking, it stops short of pointing out the only way that Labour can solve its anti-Semitism crisis for good: by getting rid of Jeremy Corbyn. Labour peers who backed the statement aren’t the only ones to fail to state the obvious. Deputy leader Tom Watson, who says he favours the introduction of an independent complaints procedure, has also fallen short. So, too, has

The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s announcement last week that it is to formally investigate Labour over anti-Jewish racism is an hour of great shame for the party. It is also, finally, a moment of hope for British Jews. The public body set up, with chilling irony by the party it is now to probe, has seen evidence of the institutional anti-Semitism that Jews have been making complaints about for four long years and decided that it is credible enough to investigate. Its decision makes Labour only the second political party in British history to face a formal racism inquiry. The first? The British National Party.  Finally Britain’s Jews are feeling as though

A Labour activist – since elected a councillor – sharing neo-Nazi material declaring that ‘the Jews declared war on Germany in 1933’. A video of a Labour MP rousing a rabble with the incendiary suggestion that ‘Zionism is the enemy of peace’. An activist for the self-proclaimed anti-racist party suggesting a march on their local synagogue. The secretary of Jewish Voice for Labour telling a crowd of pro-Palestinian marchers that Jews are ‘in the gutter’. In isolation, all of these are jaw-dropping and deeply alarming. That they all happened – or emerged – in a short period of time following years of similarly scandalous behaviour means that a certain ennui

In Salvador Dalí’s Persistence of Memory, several clocks are melting away in a surreal desert scene where a distorted horse-like creature fades into the sand, below a ledge where a pocket watch crawls with ants. The bizarre painting is rather reminds one of the surrealism of the Brexit process, especially after this week. The government has gone into full meltdown mode – it lost yet again on May’s Brexit deal (though this time by a smaller margin, only by 149 MPs); ended up whipping against itself on a motion rejecting no deal, where 13 government ministers defied the whip; and just about wrested control of Brexit from the Commons on a

Is there a name for the moment something objectionable becomes so mainstream that those responsible can solemnly lament it as a fact of life? I propose that we call it the Formby Point. This week, Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby reportedly told a parliamentary party meeting that it was ‘impossible to eradicate anti-Semitism and it would be dishonest to claim to be able to do so’. Note the sly wording, the subtle distancing; you can almost hear the affected sigh of resignation. The woman who runs an institutionally racist party that refuses to challenge its institutional racism can, with a straight face, regret the inevitability of racism.  As a matter

Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has been roughed up enough lately and I am loath to add to the calumnies but something he keeps saying bothers me. ‘The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.’ Sacks has dropped this aphorism into speeches and articles for the past few years and no wonder: it’s a pithier version of the Niemöller verse, a shorthand for the metastatic nature of prejudice. First of all, I’m not convinced it’s true. They always come for the Jews but they don’t always come for the Communists or the Catholics or the trade unionists, not least because the Communists and the Catholics and the trade

It is quite clear what today’s NEC results mean for the Corbynites in the Labour Party: they’ve consolidated their control over the party structures. All the candidates who won were backed by Momentum, apart from Peter Willsman, who had seen the Corbynite grassroots organisation drop its support after a recording emerged of him making anti-Semitic comments. Willsman pushed moderate candidate Eddie Izzard out and will remain on the party’s ruling body. Izzard and ‘independent left-winger Ann Black’ came 10th and 13th respectively. Less clear is the implication for that rather nebulous group of anti-Corbynites generally known as ‘the moderates’. One of the reasons that the implications are less clear is

Why does Jeremy Corbyn show such disdain for the mainstream Jewish community? Why does he prefer to associate with terrorist “friends” in Hamas and Hezbollah? And why does the Corbyn clique now in charge of Labour insist on diluting the internationally accepted definition of anti-Semitism? The fact is that – despite its own boasts about “anti-racism” – the far-left has had a longstanding problem with Jews, and not just with “Zionists.” This problem pre-dates 1844, when Karl Marx published On The Jewish Question; but Marx’s essay is a good place to start. In On the Jewish Question, Marx tied up Jews with capitalism: “What is the worldly religion of the

Imagine if there existed a photograph of Boris Johnson next to a man whose associates subsequently axed to death four imams in a mosque. Just imagine it. Imagine how much discussion there would be about the mainstreaming of Islamophobic fascism. About how Boris was enabling murderous racial hatred. About how the Tory party was falling to an extremist loathing of Muslims. Corbynistas in particular would never stop talking about it. Everything they wrote about Boris, forever, would mention his rubbing of shoulders with a man who was cool with the slaughter of imams. Of course, no such photograph of Boris exists. But a photograph of Jeremy Corbyn in a similar