Is Labour really anti-Semitic?

There was a time when to be a British Jew was virtually tantamount to being a Labour Party supporter.

That was the case of the Jewish side of my family. My mother was an active Labourite, working as a secretary to a Labour MP during the Second World War, and true to that loyalty right up to her death at 94 two weeks ago.

Like her, I’ve never voted for any other party, and remain a member to this day.

That makes it sad to see that a breach has opened up between Jews and the Labour Party today. A personal sadness for myself. But also ultimately for the Labour Party itself.

The current conflict focuses on Labour’s refusal to adopt in its entirety the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA). Or rather, not to accept all the accompanying examples.

Three Jewish papers express their anger at Labour's stance

As it happens, the IHRA’s text is weakly drafted and open to multiple interpretations. Take this suggested example of anti-Semitism:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.

The Labour leadership objects to it because they see it as limiting the freedom to criticise the state of Israel. However, I see no basis for saying it prevents anyone saying that when the Israeli government reduces the rights of its Arab citizens. Nor does it prevent anyone arguing that by doing so, the Israeli government and many citizens are displaying racist attitudes. As they are.

Indeed, it does not even prevent anyone arguing, as I do, that setting up the state of Israel was an error. It has always struck me as way for Americans and Europeans to salve their consciences over Europe’s failure to learn to iive with its Jews. In effect, we said ‘we can’t learn to live with you, so go away and set up your own country, even at the cost of the people living there today.’

Today, though, it’s far too late. The state of Israel exists and is home to about 6.5m Jews. That’s a reality with which anyone trying to argue about Middle East politics simply has to come to terms.

What is it about that example that annoys the Labour leadership? What argument do they feel it limits their right to express? Do they want to protect the freedom to argue that the Jewish population of Israel has no right to self-determination?

Let’s see where that argument would lead in practice. If that population has no right to self-determination, Israel has no right to exist. If it has no right to exist, then it’s legitimate to use force to bring it to an end. And what would happen to the Jews in the region? We would be backing a policy of ethnic cleansing of Jews.

Is that a position anyone in Labour really wants to take? I can’t imagine a more clearly anti-Semitic stance.

It makes no difference that Israel, while asserting the Jewish right to self-determination denies it to the Palestinians. The bad behaviour of the Israeli government does not justify Labour backing the use of violence against Israel’s citizens.

Another IHRA example of anti-Semitism to which Labour leaders object reads:

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Again, what right are they trying to uphold? Comparisons with the Nazis are the most facile and futile of arguments. Unless a government has deliberately set out to exterminate an entire race, the comparison is false. Injustice, collective punishments or excessive force against civilians are shameful crimes that Israel has committed, but so have the US and Britain. Perhaps a parallel with them would make more sense than a comparison with the Nazis.

In any case, why would Labour pay a high political price just to allow some of its members to make so lazy and intellectually weak a case?

Because the price is high. Had Labour simply adopted the full IHRA definition and examples, it would have won itself some credit with the Jewish community. It would have undermined the opponents who are now making mileage from the accusations of anti-Semitism. Instead, they have handed their enemies a weapon they could hardly have hoped for in their wildest dreams.

There is, however, another explanation. I’m afraid things turn a bit ugly at this point.

It could be argued that this is all about too little. There are only around a quarter of a million Jews in Britain. Labour could win every single Jewish vote and fail to win an election, or it could lose every single one and still get in.

Besides, though I don’t have statistical evidence for it, my persona experience suggests that British Jews have moved to the right since my mother was young. Like many immigrant communities, they started out on the left while they were poor and oppressed. But as they became prosperous and assimilated, many drifted rightwards.

So maybe there aren’t many votes for Labour to win among the Jewish. How much do they matter to figures in the leadership who suspect them anyway, because of their sympathy for Israel?

The people who matter much more are those traditional Labour voters who, out of xenophobia and delusion that Brexit would benefit them, went over to the far right. That’s why we have the paradox of figures on the left sharing a platform with the hardest nationalists, notably veteran left winger Kate Hoey posing for photo opportunities with Nigel Farage, then leader of the crypto-fascist United Kingdom Independence Party.

After all, there are several million of those voters.

The calculus is easy to follow. On the other hand, many of us in Labour would like to see it being a little more principled than that.

A party that cosies up to the hard right but can’t will make no concessions to show some respect for Jews? That’s not the party my mother and her friends backed in the forties.

How I wish we could get that party back.

Poor old Jezza - he just doesn't get it

Poor Jeremy Corbyn. He really is completely out of his depth, a man promoted far beyond his level of competence. He flounders and flails and sadly sinks.

Greeted like a pop star at the Glastonbury Festival, he went with his advisers’ instincts and organised his own festival in London, Labour Live. In the end, by dint of slashing ticket prices, they were able to attract a turnout of 13,000, way below expectations.

At ‘Labour Live’: a voice Corbyn should be listening to

Why was the turnout so poor? For the same reasons as he is still trailing the Tories in the opinion polls, even though Theresa May’s government is divided, unpopular and distrusted. He simply doesn’t know how to build a majority.

What threw many of his critics, including myself, at the general election of 2017 is that he won a huge surge of support from young voters. That fooled opinion pollsters who expected that the 18-24 age group would be the one with the lowest turnout, as in most previous elections. But, inspired and mobilised by Corbyn, they confounded that expectation and gave him a far more healthy score than we’d predicted for him.

His supporters presented this as some kind of victory, even though he did in fact all the same come second, and there are still no silver medals in elections. Fail to come top and you’ve lost. What he achieved was a more honourable defeat than had been forecast, but it was still a defeat.

However, there’s something else about that 18-24 age group. It is massively pro-European: 71% voted to stay in the EU. Indeed, even the next age group up, 24-49, voted 54%-46% to remain.

In other words, to hold on to the youth vote, Corbyn needed to adopt a Remain stance. That shouldn’t have been hard since it is, after all, the official policy of the Labour Party he leads. But he has two problems that have led him to make no unequivocal statement on the issue: the first, is that a large proportion of Labour MPs represent constituencies with a Brexit majority and they’re frightened of alienating them; the second, that he has traditionally belonged to the anti-EU group on the left of the Labour Party.

All I can say about the fear of Brexit supporters is that leadership does sometimes involve challenging the views of voters. The greatest fear of working class Brexiters is immigration. Labour will truly sell its soul if it tries to accommodate that kind of xenophobia for electoral considerations.

But when it comes to the Brexit left, I have to say that I’m bemused. The central tenet espoused by these people is that the EU is a neo-liberal institution forcing casualisation of the labour market and poor wages on the working class. This vision seems to suggest that Britain is a nation thirsting for radical change, held back only by the vicious free-market ideology of the EU. The reality is that Britain usually leads the charge towards deregulation. You have only to compare worker rights and labour regulation in France or Germany with Britain to see how much further Britain goes in this direction.

Indeed, many of the rights enjoyed by British workers are protected by the EU against serious objections from entrenched interests in the UK. Unsurprisingly, it is the very people who want to tear up regulation and rights that most strongly back Brexit. The Brexiter left has therefore found itself in bed with some strange people, perhaps most strongly symbolised by veteran left-winger Kate Hoey campaigning in a boat on the Thames alongside the hard-right Nigel Farage.

A shameful moment: left-winger Kate Hoey (right)
with ultra-right winger Nigel Farage (left) campaigning for Brexit

In this context, it’s interesting to see that some of the small band of young people who attended Labour Live hoisted a banner calling on Corbyn to ‘stop backing Brexit’. The truth is that he dodges and evades rather than openly backing Brexit, but I share the suspicion of the banner-holders that he does, indeed, secretly back leaving the EU, lacking only the courage and honesty to say so.

It was interesting to discover from the Guardian’s Tim Adams, that a group who wanted to raise a pro-Remain banner during Corby’s speech were bundled away and prevented from protesting. So it seems that the Corbyn regime is not only as ready as Blair’s to evade and fudge, it’s also happy to block the freedom to oppose its views. I know I’m in a minority in this view, but it has often struck me how much more Blair and Corbyn have in common than is generally admitted, at least in the way they operate.

Meanwhile, the anti-Brexit voice was gagged at Labour Live (suggesting that ‘Live’ is a bit of a misnomer). But even more striking than the young people who were silenced is the number of young people who stayed away. It seems to me that they too suspect Corbyn of favouring Brexit, and therefore diametrically opposing them on the biggest question of the day.

He doesn’t get it yet, but maybe it’s time Corbyn worked out this was why he couldn’t get young people to a festival, or to back him again in the polls.

Left and right: opposite wings or the meeting point of a circle?

“Any delay in the ranks of the left exposes us, at the very least, to a further advance by the far right, which will further reduce the social and political strength of the left in the parliamentary elections.”

That was French Socialist Party politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2002, the first time the far right National Front saw its candidate, Jean-Marie le Pen, win a place in a run-off election for President.

In 2017, no longer in the Socialist Party, Mélechon took a stance on the far left of French politics and came fourth in the first round of the Presidential election, with a respectable but insufficient 19.5% of the votes cast. Once again, the far right is through to the runoff – in this case represented by le Pen’s daughter, Marine. But, amazing to relate, Mr Mélenchon seems to have forgotten his wise words of 2002 about the damage of delay, preferring indeed to delay day after day instead of coming out in favour of the centrist candidate, Emmanuel Macron, front-runner in the first round and now the only candidate able to block “a further advance by the far right”.

Now, why might that be? Could it perhaps have something to do with the sense that rather a lot of Mélenchon’s voters might prefer to go with the hard right in the second round, than with the soft left? And that Mélenchon would rather go along with that than lose contact with a voter base he rather values?

Call me cynical if you like, but that’s what I think is going on. There is in the hard left a holier-than-thou attitude which claims that it’s more principled and honest than the rest of us, but it’s capable of being just as opportunistic and evasive as, say, a Blair or a Putin.

At a deeper level, there is also a deeper link between far left and far right. Both are far out. They like to reason in terms of simple, pure solutions to complex problems, which avoid any of the complexities and messiness of reality. Compromise? That only dilutes the purity of our principles. Instead you end up defending a maximalist policy which, on the left, can lead you to defend the rights of the poor so hard in Venezuela that you bankrupt the country and starve your people. On the right, it leads to taking Britain out of the EU to escape from international control, only to leave it entirely dependent on the whims of the United States (or, worse still, the Trumpiverse).

There is today a taste for the simple and uncompromising. And it leads to the far right and far left both exerting greater appeal than they usually do – and almost interchangeably. Which is why voters can switch from Mélenchon to the National Front without apparent inconsistency.

Nor is this an exclusively French phenomenon. Kate Hoey, left-wing Labour MP for Vauxhall, has an enviable reputation for standing up for the rights of her hard-pressed, poor constituents. And yet, seduced by her enthusiastic dislike of the European Union, she found herself working shoulder to shoulder with Nigel Farage, then leader of UKIP, the British equivalent of the French National Front. They may have come to their common position from opposite directions but ended up, like two halves of a circle, meeting at a single point.

Hoey with her buddy, and supposed inveterate opponent, Farage

In the pursuit of fantasist, simple solutions, people can find themselves with strange bedfellows, though they approach them from different directions. Britain, sadly, is going to be living with the consequences of those fantasies for decades to come, struggling to find a role outside the EU. In France, on the other hand, if the defeat of Mélenchon is followed and confirmed by the defeat of the National Front, that fate may well be dodged.

At least for now.