Popularising an ugly game

If you think that football is the international game, think again. If you think it’s athletics, or chess, or tiddlywinks, well, you’re still on the wrong track. Today, the great game in country after country, is ‘get the immigrant’.

It’s the one thing that seems to unite large, and growing, numbers across nations and cultures. They all hate anyone from other nations or cultures. And they’re keen to keep them well away, especially if they’re being badly treated and escaping persecution or back-breaking poverty.

Here’s what a British Conservative MP, William Evans-Gordon, had to say on the subject, talking about the horror of finding aliens taking over areas of London: 

East of Aldgate, you walk into a foreign town

Even further to the right, Nigel Farage told a UKIP conference about how upset he was on a train in the outskirts of London:

It wasn’t until after we got past Grove Park that I could actually hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage. Does that make me feel slightly awkward? Yes.

Returning to Evans-Gordon, he also declared:

Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders 

And another Conservative MP from the far right of the party, at the time Home Secretary and responsible for action on immigration, Suella Braverman, used the same kind of language about invaders when she told the House of Commons:

The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast, and which party is not

Keeping that kind of invasion out requires a solid barrier, and the Dutch politician Geert Wilders claimed he knew what was needed:

We must have the courage to restrict legal immigration instead of expanding it, even if we sometimes have to build a wall

Naturally, his is not the only, or most famous, call for a wall against immigrants. Who could forget Donald Trump, with all his typical self-deprecating modesty:

I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.

Trump got four years as president to show what he could do and got a few miles of wall built, not an inch of it paid for by Mexico.

Before we go any further, I should admit that I’ve cheated a little. 

Farage, Braverman, Wilders and Trump are all contemporary politicians. Evans-Gordon isn’t. He was a Conservative MP from 1900 to 1907. I quoted him only to show how little the rhetoric of these characters has changed in over a century. The only shift has been in the targets of their attacks. In the early years of the twentieth century, the great concern, not just in Britain but across Europe and in the United States, was with Jewish immigration. Persecuted within the Russian empire – which back then extended right into most of Poland – Jews were fleeing westward, often destitute and in terrible health. Far from being greeted with open arms and assistance, most of the countries to which they turned tried to keep them out.

These days, anti-Semitism has faded somewhat, though it’s making a bit of a comeback thanks to the pursuit of violence by both Hamas and the Israeli state. What has grown into that same space is Islamophobia. As Geert Wilders assures us:

I am not ashamed to say that our culture is far better than the Islamic culture, which is a culture of barbarism.

What’s interesting about these views is the paradoxes they often contain. For instance, there were several hours of violent rioting in Dublin on 23 November, in protest against a knife attack which left three children and an adult injured, some hours earlier in the city. The rioters burned buses and cars, including police cars, and looted shops.

Police at the riots in Dublin

Rioters shouted anti-immigrant slogans.

Curiously, the Guardian tells me that the Irish have also raised nearly 350,000 euros for a young man who intervened against the knife-wielder, at considerable risk to himself. Clearly his action was appreciated by many in the country. And who was this heroic young fellow? Why, a delivery driver by the name of Caio Benicio. Where’s he from? Brazil.

He wasn’t alone in his intervention. A seventeen-year-old student joined him, taking minor injuries to his hands and face. He was from France.

In other words, the riots were triggered by the actions of a man who, it seems, was a naturalised Irishman and long-term resident of Ireland. He was overpowered by two foreigners. Both recent immigrants to the country.

A similar irony emerges from the recent history of Geert Wilders. He won the most seats in the recent Dutch general election but is having a bit of trouble trying to put together a government coalition he could lead. The man he appointed to conduct negotiations with other parties, Gom van Strien, had to stand down before he’d even started because of fraud allegations against him. That’s quite useful evidence about Wilders, showing that it isn’t only in his political stance that he resembles Donald Trump, but also in the company he keeps.

What’s more, despite his virulently anti-immigrant views, he strangely takes a populist or even left-wing stance on various social and economic matters, such as healthcare, pension entitlement, the minimum wage and public housing. According to two Dutch economists, Marcel Klok and Marieke Blom, if it pursued such policies, a coalition including Wilders might well have the effect of stimulating the economy. But Dutch unemployment is low. So the economists told the Guardian: 

Given the current strains in the labour market, we expect this to result in more demand for foreign workers.

Wilders espouses economic policies that may well lead to more immigration, while continuing to spout his bitter anti-immigrant rhetoric. But there’s nothing unusual about that, as the Irish have shown, or indeed experience in Britain. Anti-immigrant language is common across the British political spectrum, while huge areas of the economy, particularly agriculture, the catering sector and healthcare are in desperate circumstances for lack of foreign workers.

Ah, well. Anti-immigration remains the great international sport. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes any sense. 

Presumably that’s why it attracts spokesmen who talk nonsense, like Wilders, like Trump, like Braverman. Or William Evans-Gordon. Spouting the same bile for over a century, even if the ethnic group targeted has changed.

The Skwawkbox, or master class in writing fake news

“The TV News is lying to us. I get my information from Facebook, friends and social networks.”

An interesting comment. Many people in the England, the US or other nations might well share the sentiment. In this instance, it came from Spain.

It could also have come from the left as plausibly as the right. The BBC has been upset by the attacks on it from the left, just when its very existence is coming under threat from a right-wing government. We might soon see a great public broadcaster muzzled by the right while the left does nothing to defend it.

In this case, the speaker was from the right. He was a supporter of the far-right Spanish party, Vox. The left-leaning paper El País was interviewing him for a study of where Vox gets its support.

He prefers to get his news from Facebook, his friends and social networks. Which is another way of saying that what he wants isn’t information, it’s confirmation. He will find those groups and posts, or friends, who believe what he believes, and always strengthen rather than challenge his views.

That’s much more comfortable. It’s also how fake news spreads. That’s true whether the fake news is generated by a propaganda mouthpiece of the right, such as Guido Fawkes in the UK or the White House in the US, or the left, such as England’s Skwawkbox.

Purveyors of fake news
A rare photo of publicity-shy Skwawkbox founder Steve Walker (l)
Paul Staines of Guidow Fawkes (c) and the White House ranter

In answering a recent FaceBook comment of mine, a critic pointed me to a link to a Skwawkbox page which had the headline:

EXCL: NCC FORCED TO REJECT UP TO 90% OF ANTISEMITISM EVIDENCE AS UNFIT – MULTIPLE DEATHS FOLLOW EXPULSIONS

The claim, right at the start of the headline, to exclusivity is clearly a source of pride to the writer. To me, it just says, ‘no reputable journalist has picked up this story’. Clearly, the poster of the link was, however, entirely disinclined to wonder about the item’s reliability.

The story itself opens with:

A Manchester woman has died within days of her expulsion from the Labour Party under a new disciplinary system.

The woman, whose identity has been confirmed to the SKWAWKBOX, is understood to have died on Tuesday as a result of a brain haemorrhage that locals are linking to stress brought on by her summary expulsion under a new ‘fast track’ process in which the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) is expelling members against whom antisemitism complaints have been made.

It seems the person who pointed me to this piece had confidence in it. But all it’s saying is that someone, unnamed to us though the Skwawkbox claims to know who she is, is said by some anonymous source and their equally unnamed friends, to have died within days of being expelled from the Labour Party.

Given the headline with its reference of the lack of validity of ‘90% of Antisemitism evidence’, the implication is that the evidence against this woman was weak.

However, we can check none of this. We don’t know the name of the woman. We don’t know the names of the people living locally who commented on her death. We don’t know what evidence was brought against her, let alone whether any proportion of it, or none at all, was deemed invalid.

In fact, we don’t know whether the 90% figure is accurate. Any more than we know whether evidence rejected by the disciplinary bodies of the Labour Party ought in fact to have been admitted.

The piece is written in such a way that it’s impossible to verify any of its allegations. It may be that I’m too cynical, but I believe that anyone who makes claims that can’t be verified, is afraid of any kind of questioning. That’s likely to be because they’re afraid the case will fall apart if it’s examined too closely.

The naivety of certain commentators, such as my critic, lies in the refusal to see this obvious truth.

As a result, I thought the best response was to write a piece of my own, applying exactly the same journalistic standards as the Skwawkbox.

A reliable source leads me to understand that the woman who died in Manchester soon after being expelled from the Labour Party, had faced multiple charges of antisemitism backed by overwhelming evidence.

While a proportion of the evidence submitted was found to be too circumstantial or too weak, more than enough was both conclusive and believable, in many cases confirmed by multiple, independent sources.

Her death soon after the expulsion was a tragic coincidence. 

The same source confirms that the woman had a serious and long-term circulatory condition which was both inoperable and likely to lead to life-threatening trauma if triggered by, say, an external shock. My source confirms that she had such a shock, unrelated to the expulsion, before suffering a massive and tragically fatal aneurysm.

My heartfelt sympathy goes to the woman’s loved ones in this terrible moment for them. However, it has to be stressed that her death, while tragic, was not associated with the disciplinary action Labour had taken against her. Her expulsion was inevitable, given the incontrovertible evidence that she made antisemitic statements, repeatedly, over a long period.

There is no place for anti-Semites in the Labour Party.

Now here’s your challenge: prove that any of what I’ve said is untrue.

Jews: what goes around comes around.

Do you remember the jingle ‘In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue’?

I learned that at school. It was much later that I realised that 1492 was also the year in which King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain took other major steps, at least as significant as the decision to send an Italian sailor on his expedition westward – an expedition on which he left with no idea where he was going and came back with no idea of where he’d been.

It was in 1492 that Spain decided to rid itself of its Jews. 

Jews leaving Spain after August 1492

And 1492 saw Christians complete their reconquest of Spain from the Muslims.

My mother, who always enjoyed history, used to say that the decline of Spain as a great power dated from those times.

By moving against the Jews, Spain deprived itself of its most skilful financiers and traders. That’s no anti-Semitic slur: there is nothing inherent in Jews that makes them good with money, and few Jews were involved in high finance anyway. The law prohibited Jews owning land, forcing them into other professions such as finance, and some became very good at it.

Meanwhile, the most advanced and effective agriculture in Spain was carried out by the Muslim landowners of the south. Moving against them would carry a terrible price for the country. Like the financiers, they were outstanding wealth creators – literally feeding the nation – and it made no economic sense to drive them away.

Paradoxically, at the very moment that Spain was launching the exploration of the Americas which would turn it into a world power, it was ridding itself of the skills it needed to support itself in that position.

This kind of self-harm is what happens when nations deprive themselves of the skills that communities seen as ‘other’ bring with them. The converse is also true: when a nation drives those communities out, their neighbours benefit and move ahead of them. In 1685, France repealed the Edict of Nantes that tolerated Protestantism. Over the next thirty years, other countries such as Britain, Holland and Prussia took advantage of the flood of refugees, many of them skilled artisans – weavers, cabinet makers, clock makers – who fled with skills that enriched their hosts while their loss weakened France.

By 1720, some 11% of the population of Berlin was French-speaking. And the nation whose capital it was, Prussia, was on the way to becoming a European Great Power, one that would, indeed, overtake France in the next century.

Building bridges to take people in enriches a nation where expelling them, or building walls to keep them out, only impoverishes it. A lesson American fans of Trump need to learn. Or British fans of Brexit.

Curiously, over five centuries on Spain has made an effort to learn that lesson. A Spanish law of 2014 offered citizenship to anyone who could prove descent from the Sephardi Jews the nation threw out after 1492. They don’t have to give up their existing citizenship if they have one. They have to pass a language test and a test of culture, but they don’t even have to live in Spain.

Why, they don’t even have to be practising Jews.

The government that enacted this legislation presented it as an attempt to redress the error of 1492. I don’t know whether it does or not, but I feel it’s a remarkable aspiration. One to be admired.

Oddly, I only found out about it through the New York Times. That’s the paper that Donald Trump likes to refer to as ‘the failing New York Times’, though it seems to be flourishing. Perhaps it thrives on his criticisms.

The paper had picked up the story because a number of the Jews who had to get out of Spain decided to follow in the steps of Columbus, to the New World. That way, they remained in Spanish territory though they left Spain.

A number arrived in Mexico and some moved into the northernmost territory of that country, including New Mexico. Which was absorbed and made into a state by the US following its war on Mexico in the 1840s.

It seems that the Mexican authorities kept excellent records. So did the state of New Mexico. Consequently, a number of US citizens from that State are now well placed to prove that they are indeed descended from the persecuted Jews of Spain. With antisemitism on the rise in America, that curious Spanish law offers some Jews a potential bolthole – not one they intend to take, but one that it’s good to have available, just in case.

Through Columbus, 1492 opened up a new land of refuge. Through a law of the same year, made by the sponsors of his expedition, many Jews needed a land to which they could flee. And, in a beautifully cyclical movement – you know, what goes around, comes around – some of their descendants, now less safe in the land where their ancestors sought refugees can now claim citizenship of the land that that persecuted those same ancestors.

One thing hasn’t changed over the centuries. Nations still build walls and persecute minorities. Even it means shooting themselves in the foot.

And we don’t like learning lessons from history.

Corbynism acts against antisemitism. And trips over its own feet

Many Brexiters believe that the world is watching Britain, expecting it once more to roar so the whole world not only hears it, but heeds it.

My own view is that there may be people out there who don’t follow every detail of British political news. For their sake, here’s a little context.

The Conservative Party, which tends to be in power most of the time, is in power right now. Just. Clinging on by its fingernails as it tries to prepare for Brexit. Since there’s no formula for Brexit that finds favour even across the Conservative Party, let alone the nation, the government is one of the most unpopular for decades.

In Opposition is my own party, Labour. It ought to be 15 or 20 points ahead in the polls. Instead it languishes stubbornly two points behind. Why?

Two years ago Labour elected one Jeremy Corbyn to the office of leader. It was then flooded by new members principally committed to keeping him in that role. It’s all ‘Jeremy for Prime Minister’, ‘Jeremy, man of integrity’, ‘Jeremy: the second coming of JC’, and so on.

I may have made up that last one, but you get the drift.

These new members, or Corbynistas as they are technically known, are turning Labour from a party into a cult, in which they can follow not a leader but a guru, offering him not so much support as worship.

They may not have noticed how lamentable our position is in the polls. So they certainly aren’t asking the obvious question, ‘why?’

The answer is the same as the explanation for why the Conservatives tend to be in power most of the time. Conservatism is deeply anchored in Britain. It is strongly helped by a firmly right-wing press that looks for any stick with which to beat Labour. That means Labour leaders start off at a disadvantage, so where a Conservative merely needs to be competent, a Labourite has to be brilliant.

Sadly, only a worshipping Corbynista could be persuaded that the blessed Jeremy displays such brilliance.

Corbyn: out of his depth

The current stick with which the media are beating Labour is an accusation of antisemitism. The revered Jeremy promised to do something about it as soon as it was advanced. And then did practically nothing.

The leading instance of the party, the National Executive Committee or NEC, did adopt the definition antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). It wouldn’t, however, adopt all eleven the examples of antisemitism that accompany that definition. It balked at four, which it felt would stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.

This was a matter of principle. Corbynism could not tolerate this limitation on its freedom of speech. There was no way those four examples could be endorsed.

Suddenly the stick got far bigger and far more hands came forward to wield it. So Corbynism gave way. ‘Well, OK, we’ll accept three more of the examples. But not the fourth. Oh, no, that would be a step too far, a red line crossed, that we will die in the trenches to oppose.’

Then came 4 September 2018. On that date, the Corbynist NEC decided that, well, after all, on mature reflection, it could accept that final example too. Though it has come up with a little statement about how it still asserts its right to free speech about Israel, which, funnily enough, no one had challenged in any case.

Margaret Hodge, who is both a Labour MP and Jewish, summed up the problem just two days earlier. Had Labour adopted the entire IHRA definition with all the examples immediately, it would have defused the attack from the outset. Now it’s too late, and the dispute will fester on. In my view, an incompetent leadership has made it look as though Labour was unwilling to confront antisemitism seriously until forced to do so. By only caving in under pressure, it appears nasty, curmudgeonly and at the same time spineless – the worst of all possible worlds.

That’s not to say that early adoption of the full IHRA definition would have won the wholehearted support of the entire Jewish community. Many British Jews support the Conservatives. Many are more than happy to work with the right-wing press to hammer Labour. All we could have hoped for was to win the argument with the non-aligned and detoxify the accusation. But to do that would have required political professionalism, not at all the hallmark of the Corbynista.

Outside the NEC meeting where the IHRA definition was finally adopted in full but far too late, were protestors with placards proclaiming ‘for the many, not the Jew’. That’s a neat riff on the Corbynist slogan, ‘for the many, not the few’.

In reply to a recent tweet of mine, expressing my annoyance over some new Corbynist cockup or other, I was offered an even better riff: ‘for the many sheep, not the thoughtful ewe’. I liked the reference to thoughtfulness, because a failure to think things through is the central characteristic of Corbynism. As it wends its way from blunder to blunder, making our party look nasty and incompetent.

Leaving us adrift in the polls, behind a deeply unpopular government that should be trailing in our wake.

Leatrice: hankering for more

When I last wrote about my mother, Leatrice, I mentioned the strange circumstance that my parents’ wedding took place in Genoa.

Nothing strange about that for the Genoese, of course. Just unusual for a young English couple. Except that they’d met in Paris and were travelling to Rome, where Leonard, my father, was about to take up a new job with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. Genoa was on the way. So maybe getting married there wasn’t really that odd after all.

July 1951: my parents get married in Genoa

It was a moment of transition for Leatrice. Years later, she wrote several letters to contacts from the forties, asking for testimonials of the time when she’d worked for them. John Parker, Labour MP and leading member of the Fabian Society, one of the oldest progressive organisations in Britain, wrote one of them. He explained that she had worked for him from 1942 to 1945, when he had been General Secretary of the Fabian Society and MP for the seat of Romford in Essex:

… then the largest Parliamentary Constituency in Britain … which was divided into 4 Parliamentary seats at the time of the 1945 General Election… She also assisted me in the work of the Fabian Society… In particular she did a very useful job in our India Committee at a time when [India’s] future was very much in the melting pot… Much useful organizing work was also carried out for the Fabian Society particularly in connection with the running of the Summer Schools.

She already had a testimonial from August 1947 by Woodrow Wyatt, later an admirer of Margaret Thatcher’s but back then a Labour MP in his first term. He worked with the British Commission in India and in particular handled relations with the Muslims, who were preparing not only for independence from Britain but also independence from India, as Pakistan.

Wyatt had known Leatrice for two years and she had:

…acted as Minutes Secretary of the Indian Affairs Group of the Fabian Society when I was Secretary of the Group and during that time she was most energetic and capable, and showed a high sense of responsibility.

Another of the testimonials she collected in 1974 came from David C. Williams, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action. He’d been sent to London in July 1946 on behalf of the Union for Democratic Action, its predecessor organisation.

One of my first actions was to engage Miss Leatrice Bannister, now Mrs. Beeson, as my assistant. Her knowledge of the principles and programs of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and of many of their leading personalities proved invaluable to me… It enabled me to get into the swing of things much more promptly than I would otherwise have done.

She had worked with him until January 1948, when she left for Paris.

It must have been quite a heady atmosphere for a woman in her twenties. The India committee of the Fabian Society must have been particularly gratifying: Labour’s Clement Attlee was in office and, in foreign affairs, overseeing Indian independence remains his most significant achievement.

1951, the year of her wedding, definitively closed that period of Leatrice’s life. I was born in 1953, my brother in 1956. Leatrice, who’d worked for her own living since becoming an adult, became a wife and mother with no job of her own but dependent on her husband’s earnings.

Leatrice with my brother Nicky in 1956

One of my lasting memories of our time in Italy was the yearly summer holidays in Porto Ercole, in Tuscany. At the time, the place was a small fishing port, where my brother or I could wander off, and local people would be able to tell my parents where we were. Today, it’s a heaving mass of tourists. But what remains is Feniglia, outside the town, with its kilometres-long golden beach, where we’d spend hours in the warm water and then roll in the baking hot sand to get warm again, with barely another person in sight.

Nicky on the rocks (literally not metaphorically)
at one end of the Feniglia beach

Me on the edge of beach

My father would join us when he could

Leonard would come up and join us at weekends, and generally spent a week or two at some point. Eventually we’d head back to Rome, where we lived in a converted farm building on the edge of the city. It was part of a baronial estate which still had a large cement-walled pond where two local families would do their washing, the wives using bars of soap and cold water, wringing and beating the clothes in a sink fed from the pond.

Nicky on the edge of the pond at Via Casale San Pio V in Rome
Not the first place we lived in but the last
and where we stayed the longest

Leatrice in the garden
We lived on the top floor of the building beyond the gate

My father had work. My mother had us. Those long summers at Feniglia – did she enjoy them as much as we did? Or did she miss the intellectual stimulation of her English life? John Parker mentioned her role in organising the Fabian summer schools, at Dartington in Devon, where my parents eventually sent my brother and me to school. Another of the testimonials she solicited in 1974 came from a close friend from those times – I suspect they’d had at least a fling – and he wrote as a Professor from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver.

Did she ever wonder wistfully whether that was the world to which she should have belonged? That all the international travel had been exciting, but that she might have been more at home in academe or politics – or possibly both? Did she ever entirely recover from her pain at not getting the university education she had wanted in 1942 but passed up to go straight to work?

There’s a hint in the reason why she was asking for all those testimonials.

In 1974, Leonard was working at the headquarters of the United Nations Development Programme in New York. Leatrice decided that this was the opportunity to undertake the studies she’d missed before. She enrolled at Queens College of the City University of New York. The testimonials won her some credits for her course, but she hardly needed them: she took A grade after A grade, disappointed on the rare occasions when she fell as low as a B.

She was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and arguably the most prestigious of the American academic honour societies. That was something of which she was profoundly proud, and for many years she would wear the gold Phi Beta Kappa key around her neck.

Badge of pride: Leatrice's Phi Beta Kappa key

One of her papers was graded by a Professor Zvi Yavetz at Tel Aviv university. A Holocaust survivor, he was one of the founders of the university and a major figure in history studies in Israel for several decades. He wrote to her to say:

The following cable has been sent to the department of History, Queens College: ‘Grade Beeson Leatrice’s superb paper A+…

I would also like to tell you that only students like yourself can make a course interesting, because only they can stimulate a teacher to prepare his class.

It’s ironic today, with the Labour Party embroiled in a long drawn out dispute over antisemitism, to read this forty-year old praise from an Israeli academic for a lifelong, Jewish Labour supporter.

In June 1976, at the age of 52, she graduated in History with the top class of a US degree, Summa Cum Laude.

Leatrice's degree certificate
A proud achievement. But - three decades late?

It must have been a valediction for her. But perhaps also a source of regret. 

There’s no doubt that my mother took great satisfaction from most of her life and wouldn’t have wished to change much in it for anything else. On the other hand, her results in 1976 demonstrated just how much she could achieve. She must have wondered at times whether she’d missed the opportunity to fulfil her potential. Had she won such success three decades earlier, when she’d wanted to, how much more might she have accomplished?
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Do Jews matter? Or Muslims?

Martin Niemöller, imprisoned by the Nazis

Denmark, once a beacon of tolerance and inclusiveness, has banned the Muslim full-face veil. It also now operates a system of officially designated ghettos, mostly inhabited by immigrants.

The Danish example has animated the far right in Britain, with Boris Johnson, contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party, claiming that, while he doesn’t back a ban, he feels the niqab makes women look like letterboxes or even bank robbers.

Many, even Tories, have denounced the ‘morally empty’ Johnson for encouraging Islamophobia in this way. But he has received outspoken support from Jacob Rees-Mogg, from the hard-right, hard-Brexit wing of the Conservatives. That link between Brexit and Islamophobia is no accident: whatever people may say about ‘taking back control’ or Britain assuming its rightful place in the world, the main motive behind Brexit was xenophobia, and the first target of British xenophobia is Muslims.

The rise of xenophobia is creating a toxic atmosphere in which fundamental values of human rights are rapidly receding. We badly need a force capable of resisting that trend, which is why it’s a tragedy that the British Labour Party, far from fighting this crucial battle, has undermined its own position by failing to refute the charges of antisemitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

Now, I agree with his fans that the scandal is being sustained by right-wing propaganda against Corbyn and Labour. Where I disagree with them is in seeing this as in any way unprecedented or even unusual. Why, in 1924 the first ever Labour government faced a scurrilous campaign of vilification, including the publication (by the Daily Mail, a sewer then as it’s a sewer now) of a forgery, the ‘Zinoviev Letter’, which suggested that the Communist International was working for a Labour victory.

Attacks on Labour come with the leader’s territory. The hallmark of the leadership is its reaction to them. Sadly, the reaction of today’s leadership has been lamentable.

It could have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, with all its examples, immediately and in full. It didn’t. It decided that four of those examples would have limited its freedom to criticise the state of Israel. It’s hard to see how: nothing in those examples means that one can’t say, for instance, that the Israeli government’s attitude towards Palestinians is racist and abhorrent.

Corbynistas, however, objected to the four examples as a matter of principle. It had to be principle, since pragmatically it was a senseless decision. Ask most British voters about the Israel-Palestine conflict and it’s likely you’ll be met with ignorance. Those who do have an opinion are likely to come up with a ‘faults on both sides’ kind of argument. They might even say ‘well, Israel has to be able to defend itself against terrorists’. Persuading them that Israeli action goes way beyond legitimate action against terrorism would require a long process of education, and I’m not convinced many voters would be prepared to submit to it.

Oddly, though, the rejection of four examples was not, it turns out, a matter of principle after all. Corbyn has now decided that actually he can accept three of the four examples, so clearly they weren’t that problematic to start with. The suspicion has to be that in time he’ll accept the last one too.

Had he done that at the beginning, the attacks would not have stopped, but at least with swing voters he might have been given the benefit of the doubt. ‘Look, he’s accepted the international definition of antisemitism,’ they might have said, ‘and done it immediately. What more can you ask?’

By doing it late and reluctantly, he just looks truculent and unprincipled. He forfeits the credit he might have won otherwise.

Lousy politics.

The implications are more serious than that, however. After all, it isn’t antisemitism that is the most virulent form of racism in Britain today. It is far less widespread or intense than the Islamophobia which permeates society, as exemplified by Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. That’s what needs to be resisted before we follow Denmark down the ugly road it has taken.

But how does one resist racism by others when one’s own track record isn’t spotless? Until we’ve cleared ourselves of the charge of antisemitism, Labour can’t claim to lead the fight against racism. Boris may be morally empty, but a counter attack would be far more effective if we’d first secured the moral high ground ourselves.

The toxins run deep. A minority of Labour favours Brexit. Sadly, with his talk of the benefits of a ‘Labour Brexit’, the suspicion is that Corbyn is with that group. That gives it disproportionate power. So it’s unsurprising that the leadership is resisting, despite powerful pressure from the membership, attempts to have the forthcoming Labour Conference debate backing for a second referendum on the EU.

The French equivalent of the saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’ is ‘tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are’. Labour Brexiters are rubbing shoulders with the xenophobes they should be opposing. If they help reinforce racists’ views, they shouldn’t be surprised when they become tarred with that brush themselves. Backing Brexit lands them in the xenophobe camp.

Sadly, while it may only be Jews who are upset with Labour now, it’s Muslims who are facing general hostility. We should be strong in our defence of their rights. And not just for their sake: allow discrimination against the Jews or Muslims today and, who knows, in the long run you too could be the victim of your short-sightedness.

Niemöller adapted to our times

Corbyn's courage is not enough

Afiz Shah, who describes himself as British Asian, is a Labour Councillor in Bristol. He recently called in at a police station to report a serious crime, and was promptly arrested himself. He apparently ‘looked like’ a suspect the police were looking for.

Let’s be clear: ‘looked like’ means he had a similar skin colour.

This kind of ingrained racism is something from which many suffer for the colour of their skin or because they are Muslim. Suffer not once but repeatedly.

By contrast, though my mother’s family suffered from antisemitic persecution in the 1930s and 1940s – ninety relatives in Lithuania disappeared without a trace – I haven’t personally suffered any kind of threat or insult based on my Jewish roots. In particular, in my membership of the Labour Party, I’ve never seen any antisemitic behaviour directed against me or anybody else.

That’s not to say that I think antisemitism doesn’t matter. On the contrary, I think it matters deeply. It is a pernicious disease, just like any form of racism, such as the far more widespread Islamophobia in our society. It needs to be resisted, above all by the political left of centre, which ought to be the beating heart of anti-racism.

This means that any trace of antisemitism within the Labour Party itself has to be extirpated quickly and decisively. Not because antisemitism is in any sense the most important form racism, but because if we are tolerant of any form of racism, we weaken our position to combat all the others.

We owe it Afiz Shah and so many like him not to let that happen.

Many Jeremy Corbyn supporters claim that the accusation of Labour antisemitism within Labour is merely a stick used by his opponents to beat him. It certainly is such a stick, which is another reason that makes it urgent to deal with the problem. That it isn’t only such a stick is made clear, however, by Corbyn himself, in his statements of the seriousness of the problem.

‘We have not done enough to get to grips with the problem… my party and I are sorry for the hurt and distress caused’ he said before a meeting with Jewish leaders on 24 April.

Corbyn: not doing enough. Maybe not capable of doing enough?

It takes courage to admit that the party that made him his leader has not done enough to tackle a key failing.

On the other hand, who if not the leader is responsible for making sure that sufficient action is taken?

The Jewish leaders he met were deeply dissatisfied. They could not, for instance, persuade him to adopt the definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. For information, this is:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

This seems so uncontentious a definition it seems hard to understand why Corbyn could not accept it and pledge himself to campaign for the party to accept it. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

The most telling criticism came from Jonathan Goldsmith from the Jewish Leadership Council who said that Corbyn ‘engages in conversation until you ask him to do something.’ Or, as he told the BBC, ‘when you ask him to do something he has this habit of staring and just shrugging.’

Corbyn has been a backbench MP for 35 years. For 35 years he has been paid to talk and write about politics in the highest forum Britain offers for it, but he’s never been called on to take responsibility for putting anything into action. Indeed, his image of a kind of saintliness depends on it: he’s never sullied his hand by actually having to deliver anything in reality.

Thirty-five years is a long time that produces ingrained habits. Perhaps to stare and shrug when asked to do something. It is now nearly a month since Jews protested in Parliament Square against antisemitism in the Labour Party, and we are still in a position in which Corbyn has to admit that ‘we have not done enough’.

I said before that it took courage to make that admission. Unfortunately, while leadership certainly requires courage, it needs more than courage alone. Another essential quality is decisiveness.

Sometimes Corbyn can be decisive. He quickly fired Owen Smith from his team for publicly espousing a position on the EU with which two-thirds of the Labour Party agrees. Unfortunately, there’s a suspicion that some of the antisemites against whom he’s required to take action are supporters, possibly friends, of his. Is he less decisive with his friends than with an avowed opponent such as Smith?

Wobbly with his friends. Accustomed to speaking a lot but doing far less. Corbyn seems fated to disappoint on an issue needing to be addressed urgently – not for the sake of the Jews but for all those facing racial bigotry.

The question Corbyn really needs to answer is this one: is he up to the job? Now, making an admission in answer that one will need far more courage than just accepting that too little has been done. An admission, after all, would have grave implications for his own position – implications he may not be willing to face.

Any more than his supporters are.

A tribute and a denunciation

Bob Wilsker was perhaps the warmest-hearted individual I’ve met. I remember sitting in the back of his car and seeing his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Surrounded by laugh lines, they sparkled with the friendliness that marked him and which said that he saw no strangers, only people he wanted to get to know.

And yet that warmth was in horrifying contrast to the coldness he had experienced as a young adult. A Jew, he had lived in Vienna for over a year under Nazi rule, between Hitler’s occupation of Austria in 1938 and Bob’s escape to Britain in 1939. One sister escaped with him. His other siblings, his parents, his extended family all disappeared with the vast majority of his community into the slaughterhouse of the Holocaust.

A man almost incapable of bitterness, I heard him make only one truly harsh judgement: of the British officials who would walk down the queue of Jews outside the British consulate in Vienna, offering help for payment. Or, in other words, selling entry visas.

Jews waiting for visas in Vienna
A matter of genuine life and death

Those who never received such visas, like most of Bob’s family, were under sentence of death. And the sentence would be carried out within a couple of years. It has always struck me as one of the most shameful features of British history that our country took so few when so many were in such peril.

The car drive on which I was so struck by Bob’s eyes was to attend a session in a criminal court, where we tried, merely by our presence, to support a young man charged with public order offences for having demonstrated rather too vigorously against Britain’s nuclear weapon policies. Bob was very much a man of the centre-Left, opposed to all forms of racism, to militarisation, to political repression. He was, naturally, a Labour supporter.

Were he still alive today, I think he might have been a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. But he would equally have been demanding that Corbyn move in a great deal more decisive way, and far more rapidly, to extirpate, once and for all, any trace of antisemitism in the Labour Party.

But I think another issue would have shocked him still further. I think he would have found the behaviour of Israel increasingly unbearable. The use of live ammunition against civilian protestors, which led to the death of sixteen Palestinians and the wounding of dozens more would, I’m sure have sickened him.

As would have the sight of Israel preparing to deport political refugees. Many, above all from Eritrea and Sudan, have managed to make it to Israel. Large numbers have been sent to live in south Tel Aviv, much to the unhappiness of the local, Israeli population. Now it looks as though the government may start deporting these unwelcome migrants.

Warm-hearted Bob only showed resentment when he talked about the closed doors that Britain put up to people in peril for their lives. He hated it that some individuals took advantage of that state of affairs to enrich themselves. Above all, he could never accept that it was reasonable to let so many die because we were simply uncomfortable to take them in.

The discomfort was, of course, an expression of what we call xenophobia: dislike of the proximity of those are in some sense different from us.

Those people were Jews. And now the Jewish state is showing the same lack of compassion and fellow-feeling to those who find themselves, today, in the position of the Jews in the 30s. If Britain’s behaviour then was shameful, so is Israel’s today.

I’ll raise a glass to Bob tonight. A remarkable man, a precious friend it was a privilege to know, and a model of decency and openness to others. It makes me more determined than ever to deounce two great evils: antisemitism wherever it appears and its parent xenophobia, whoever is practising it – even if that is a state set up by the survivors of the most vicious and systematic antisemitism the world has seen.

One Jew's view of antisemitism in the Labour Party. And related matters

It takes only one parent, if it’s the mother – as in my case – to make you a Jew. The Nazis were even more indulgent: a single Jewish grandparent was enough to send you to the gas chambers. That means not only I but even my sons would be candidates for extermination if they made a comeback.

All this suggests that I’m far more likely to be a victim of antisemitism than a perpetrator of it.

But it doesn’t put me completely out of reach of antisemitic thoughts, even less of the accusation of harbouring them. Not that I can actually be antisemitic myself: the reproach reserved for Jews who express a view seen by other Jews as antisemitic is that they are ‘self-hating Jews’.

It’s an offensive suggestion and I resent it. But I have to admit, if I’m entirely honest, principally with myself, that the reproach wasn’t entirely misplaced.

Like many to the left of centre politically, I view all racism as abhorrent. That certainly includes antisemitism but it also includes discrimination against Blacks as it includes Islamophobia. There are aspects of the behaviour of the state of Israel towards Palestinians which, it seems to me, are expressive of deeply and violently Islamophobic attitudes and therefore deeply racist ones.

It’s when I make that kind of point that I’m most likely to find myself taxed with being a ‘self-hating Jew’.

Now, in one debate on the subject with a Zionist friend, I found myself suddenly interrupted by her.

‘You said “the Jews”,’ she told me, clearly pained.

I was about to defend myself saying that I meant ‘the Jews of Israel’. But of course I didn’t: there are many Israeli Jews, though not a majority, who deeply dislike the behaviour of their government. What I really meant to criticise was the Israeli state.

But that wasn’t what I said. When I said ‘the Jews’ I was labelling all Jews as somehow culpable for the behaviour of the Israeli state towards Palestinians. Which is ironic: Israel often inflicts collective punishment on innocent people, taking action against the family of a terrorist for the behaviour of that terrorist. Here was I using the same kind of perverse thinking, accusing all Jews of sharing in the guilt of the minority that forms the Israeli government.

It’s easy to see how this happens. Israel is the only Jewish state. It’s relatively easy to slip from referring to Israel into referring to Jews. That explains my error but it doesn’t excuse it. Loose words can lead to loose thoughts. I had to find a way to maintain my criticism of the behaviour of the Israeli government without letting it drift into a criticism of all Jews.

There is evidence that elements within my own party, Labour, have not been that circumspect. Some have let their anger over the excesses of Zionism spill over into something much more toxic. There may also be others who actually harbour anti-Jewish sentiments, but have been granted too much tolerance because they are sound in their opposition to Islamophobia and violent Zionism.

There have been honourable examples of reactions to antisemitism. The Labour MP Naz Shah, attacked over certain remarks, had the decency to admit that 'the language I used was anti-Semitic, it was offensive'. She accused herself of ignorance and described herself as being on a learning journey, and thanked the Jewish community for the ‘amazing compassion’ it had shown her.

It’s hard to demand more of anybody than that they sincerely recognise their errors and work to eliminate them.

Unfortunately, not everyone is prepared to go that far. Some may indeed be prepared to protect and cover up antisemitic elements. Far more widespread is a simple failure to do anything at all. The evil is left to fester in the hope that it goes away or, at least, won’t attract adverse publicity.

Festering sores turn septic, and adverse publicity has burst out anyway, drowning the party in a scandal that drags on from day to day.

Corbyn: not providing what Labour most needs - leadership

The failure to act has its source at the top of the Party, with the man who holds the leadership, Jeremy Corbyn. A report on antisemitism in the party was prepared in June 2016; nearly two years on, it hasn’t yet been implemented. The intention is to have an in-house lawyer working on the problem; it seems that the paperwork to appoint one is on Corbyn’s desk and hasn’t been signed.

This is Corbyn’s way. He’s marked by a terrible indolence, a dangerous inattention to detail. The most recent scandal broke out when it emerged that he had offered support on FaceBook for the artist of a mural that was to be overpainted. Corbyn spoke out in favour of free speech, apparently unaware that at the heart of the mural was a deeply antisemitic caricature of Jews gorging themselves while others suffered the terribly poverty to which they’d condemned them.

Corbyn has apologised, but he has had to admit that he wrote his post before he’d looked at the mural. See what I mean? Indolence. Inattention to detail.

In the latest scandal, he’s had to apologise several times because he couldn’t get an apology out that was adequate first time. Or second time. Again, a failure of political instinct, a failure of effort to get things right from the start.

His supporters claim that the scandal is just a weapon to use against Corbyn. I think the best response to that came from a Shadow Minister quoted in the Guardian: ‘… because it’s true it’s being used against Jeremy doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem.’

There is a serious problem of antisemitism in the Labour Party. It needs to be rooted out. And that needs to happen soon.

Making things happen. That sounds like an essential ingredient of leadership. And what’s needed right now in the Labour Party is leadership.

That’s something we ought to be able to count on from the Leader. Sadly, there’s precious little sign of that , as he flounders from apology to apology, taking too little action too late, and handing weapons – genuine, usable weapons – to his adversaries. To our adversaries.

Antisemitism is a morally crucial question. That makes it something vital for Labour to address. But in purely political terms, it’s not the biggest question facing Labour or Corbyn.

That’s the question of Brexit. And it’s another issue on which it’s proving impossible to pull a coherent stance out of him. Another issue on which the Leader’s showing himself incapable of leadership.

Reinforcing my sense that whatever the solution may be to the Labour Party’s present woes, it’s going to have to start with a change at the top.