Nick Cohen

This  is the English version of a piece of mine that was first published in DIE WELT on 4 August 2018, in which I attempt to explain to German readers why anti-Semitism, of all things, is dominating politics in Britain, of all places. Germans visiting Britain before Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party in 2015 would have struggled to find anyone who believed anti-Semitism was worth discussing. I and a few others had warned that the collapse of socialism had allowed a strange post-Marxist left to emerge that endorsed ideas previous generations of socialists would have dismissed as fascistic. There appeared to be no reason for the rest of the country to listen to us. Surely, we were told, you are just talking about marginal extremists.

Being a Jew on the Corbyn left is soul- crushing. In the name of the cause, you must excuse racism in all but its extreme forms. The presence of a real Jew in its midst provides the left with cover. But stray from the party line, and you are not a comrade having a legitimate disagreement. You are a Jew and only a Jew, a corrupted and illegitimate voice that has no place in left-wing discussions. The compromises Jewish leftists must swallow can be seen in the faintly pathetic career of Jon Lansman. In theory, there is nothing pathetic about him. The founder of Momentum is the third most powerful man in the Labour movement, behind only John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn.

If Britain were not in the middle of a nervous breakdown, Shahmir Sanni would be a national hero. As it is, the British right has done its damnedest to wreck the life of the whistleblower who provided the evidence that pro-Brexit groups Vote Leave and BeLeave “worked to a common plan” to break “legal spending limits”. Sanni defended the rule of law and the integrity of the democratic process. His fate tells you much about modern Britain – none of it good. It illustrates the most striking feature of the extremes that dominate our country: their contempt for objective truth and for the elementary belief that democracy requires all sides to uphold minimum standards.

What’s one woman’s life worth as the great battles about Brexit rage? Nothing at all, apparently, as Boris Johnson’s indifference towards the fate of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe shows. The British mother is, you will recall, being held in an Iranian prison on trumped up spying charges. She says she was just visiting Iran, and there is no reason to disbelieve her. Johnson took it upon himself to risk provoking the country's religious dictatorship into extending her sentence when he told a parliamentary committee that she had been in Iran to train journalists. He later apologised in the Commons, retracting ‘any suggestion she was there in a professional capacity’.

In happier days when Britain was not on the brink of disintegration, David Davis told me a story about the 19th century French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Little did I suspect that soon he would be living it. The Francophiles among you will recall the apocryphal tale of Ledru-Rollin enjoying his lunch at a Parisian café when a revolutionary crowd stormed past. Ledru-Rollin leapt from his seat and cried “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader." Where were they going? He did not know. What was his plan? He did not have one. True believers in Brexit are revolting, and not without cause.

The far left’s argument in favour of Brexit is a mess of invented histories, smears, crocodile tears and paranoia. Worse, it’s a party line that is repeated by propagandists out of deference to the leadership. If the leadership should stand on its head and announce it supported Britain staying in the EU or remaining a member of the single market, Corbyn's supporters would stand on their heads too. The radicals who are now chanting “where’s Jeremy Corbyn?” may not study the intricacies of Labour Party politics – why should they waste their time when we are facing a national crisis? – but they cannot miss the overpowering odour of insincerity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUFvNJwiEA0 Labour’s bad faith is built on two dishonesties.

The left middle class is filled with anger as it sees the right, and, in its terms, the far right, triumph. Every time I write about Brexit I feel its fury pulsating around me. Brexit threatens the left’s core beliefs in international cooperation and anti-racism, while making its dream of ending austerity by reviving the economy unattainable. It must be resisted. Yet in a classic struggle against nationalist conservatism, Jeremy Corbyn, supposedly the most left-wing Labour leader ever, is at best an irrelevance and at worst an enemy when it comes to Brexit. His supporters sound like supporters of Tony Blair in the 1990s as they say Labour members must hold their noses and accept a policy they regard as immoral and economically disastrous out of electoral necessity.

The wags of the right have been chuckling since the Irish electorate voted to legalise abortion. Ha, ha, ha, they cry, look at all those liberals. They deplore the Brexit referendum result and seek to have it overturned but are whooping with delight at the – wait for it – referendum result in Ireland. Here is Mark Littlewood of an Institute of Economic Affairs that is blocking its ears to the economic consequences of Brexit. https://twitter.com/MarkJLittlewood/status/1000363740603273216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw And here is Matthew Goodwin, an academic whose attention seeking has become so desperate, I should call the Daily Mail comment desk and beg it to put the poor chap out of his misery by giving him a fill-in column. https://twitter.

If you want to get on in right-wing politics, it is essential you master the art of vice signalling. You must show you are tough, hard-headed, a dealer in uncomfortable truths, and, above all, that you live in ‘the real world’ – as if any of us had the option of living anywhere else. In a Spectator piece entitled ‘the awful rise of virtue signalling’, James Bartholomew staked a fair claim to have invented or at least fleshed out vice signalling’s antithesis in 2015. It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are.

The contrast between Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Jared Kushner and other great statesmen of our age under investigation swanking it up at the new US embassy in Jerusalem while Israeli troops shot down Hamas demonstrators, hid as much as it revealed. Not only Jews should notice how Israel has become a member of, and justification for, a Western authoritarian right that shows every sign of reviving the anti-Semitism of its predecessors. The EU might have put up a common front against Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December. A child could have told him it would lead to violence and lessen the pressure on Israel to cut a deal with the Palestinians. But Israel’s ally, Viktor Orbán, blocked the EU’s diplomats.

It ought to be a statement of the obvious that Labour is fighting a civil war between revolutionary socialists and social democrats, which goes back to the Russian revolution 100 years ago. The armies may have changed, but the battle line remains as static as ever. Instead of seeing what is in front of our noses, however, we lose ourselves in the familiar arguments of democratic politics. After last week’s local elections, Corbyn supporters claimed Labour had had its best performance since 1971 (which it had, but only if you exclude every part of Britain outside London). Their opponents said the results were a disaster, and “if we cannot beat this shambles of a Tory Party, we don’t deserve to be in the game”.

Conservatism would be an admirable idea if only its adherents followed it. Fear of change, or at least a wariness about its capacity to lead to unintended suffering, is by no means an irrational emotion. If your society is just about managing, to coin a phrase, it is not reactionary to worry that meddling could take it from bad to worse. Even those of us who have never voted Conservative can see the wisdom in the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s description of politics: ‘Men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel.

If you want a monument to the winner-takes-all conservatism developed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and reduced to absurdity by George Osborne and Donald Trump, look at the pulverised public realm and browbeaten citizenry around you. The project is a wreck. And I have seen few better examinations of its ruins than The New Serfdom, published tomorrow by the Labour MP Angela Eagle and Labour researcher Imran Ahmed. Arguments have their time. The self-confidence with which Eagle and Ahmed take apart the ruling ideology ought to be a sign that Britain is ready for a reforming government that can ease the pain and remedy the injustices the Conservatives have presided over.

The supporters of Jeremy Corbyn are meant to comprise the most cultish movement British politics has seen. Yet on the issue of left anti-Semitism they do not blindly follow their leader. For once in their lives, they give every impression of thinking for themselves. Corbyn has come as close as he can to admitting a mistake – which by most people’s standards is not close at all. Like Stalin airbrushing his own history, he has deleted his Facebook account. He did not explain how he found himself a member of Facebook groups that featured Holocaust denial, or defending  medieval fanatics who believe Jews drink the blood of Christian children, or endorsing Nazi-style propaganda.

Joseph Goebbels said fascists should not worry about their propaganda being too rough or too mean. 'It ought not be decent nor ought it be gentle or soft or humble; it ought to lead to success.' No one could accuse the anti-Semitic propaganda in London’s East End of being 'soft'. The Los Angeles graffiti artist Kalen Ockerman, who calls himself ‘Mear One’ to sound more street, painted a mural on the side of a house near Brick Lane showing bankers sitting round a monopoly board resting on the backs of suffering humanity. The bank that crashed the British economy almost a decade ago was the Royal Bank of Scotland. But history shows there’s more of a market for hating the Jews than hating the Scots.

Here is a message Russian propagandists are sending to Western commentators. It is from Yuliia Popova of REN-TV (which was once an independent Russian station but sold its soul long ago) to David Allen Green of the Financial Times. Hello David, My name is Juliia Popova. I represent Russian state TV channel. Would appreciate it if Matt Singh or any other political analist [sic] could give us a short comment on the matter of the following. We will be happy to know why the British government tries to blame Russian government for the attempted murder of ex-Russian spy, why is it happening right now when even USA on behalf of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says that so far there is no evidence to accuse Russia of that.

The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman is in Britain, and the argument over the next few days is as predictable as a wet bank holiday. The left will point to the immorality of Saudi Arabia oppressing its own population and killing Yemeni civilians with, on occasion, arms made in Britain. The right will say that is rich coming from a movement led by Jeremy Corbyn, the supposed supporter of women’s, gay and trade union rights, who has taken the money and appeared on the propaganda channels of Iran, a country that oppresses all three and much else besides. No one should yawn, however. Familiarity breeds ignorance as well as contempt. It blinds us to the reality that the old world where universal human rights were valued is no longer the world we inhabit.