On the question of Labour and
antisemitism, my Jewish friends are divided. My Jewish family, on the
other hand, are all voting Labour, either in Canterbury, where Rosie Duffield
won a historic but fragile victory over the sitting Conservative just two years
ago, or here in our south London constituency of Tooting, where the admirable
Rosena Allin-Khan has a relatively safe seat.
I suppose I am as personally
invested in the fate of British Jews as a non-Jew can be. And I don’t dismiss
the accusations of antisemitism within the Labour ranks as simply a right-wing
smear campaign, though the tabloids have certainly played a role in distorting
the facts and exaggerating the problem. But I’ll be voting Labour anyway.
This will be, at least in
part, a tactical vote to defeat the Conservative Party and its vision for our
country as an off-shore tax-haven subject to the ravages of global corporate
asset-stripping (if I lived in Brighton, I’d vote Green; in Dominic Raab's
nearby constituency I've been stuffing envelopes for the Liberal Democrats). It
will certainly not be a vote of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn.
As a member of the Labour Party, I voted against Corbyn three years ago when his leadership was challenged. My objection to him was not that he came from a left wing faction of the party, whose priorities I mainly agree with, but that he was allowing the party to be divided by factionalism. There's a desire among his more enthusiastic supporters to purify the Party and remake it in Corbyn's image. I marched against the Iraq war and thought Blair too timid in his support for the public sector, but I don't see the point, 12 years after his departure, of labelling Labour moderates as Blairites and working to have them deselected. The bullying of MPs who waver from left-wing orthodoxy on the Palestinian question rises from the same well of self-righteous intolerance.
It’s clear that among some
Labour activists the line between criticising Israel and blaming Jews has been
hopelessly blurred. Whatever his private convictions, Corbyn has been sloppy
about this himself and has failed to take a firm stand against it as leader.
So how can I justify voting
for his party? First, because the Corbyn faction doesn’t yet represent the
party as a whole. The Conservatives, in contrast, have been thoroughly taken
over by Brexit-mongers. And second, because Boris Johnson’s prejudices are
not even in question and have been on display for years. Though he uses his
bumbling comic style to deflect criticism, in a bigotry competition with
Corbyn, Johnson would be the clear winner.
As the husband and stepfather
of Jews, should I take comfort in the fact that Johnson’s sneers have been
directed at Muslims and people of colour, rather than at our lot? Well, no,
because I refuse to be pushed into making a choice between antisemitism and
Islamophobia. Those in positions of power have always found it useful to turn
the poor, the powerless and the culturally marginalised against each
other. It’s not a game I’m willing to play.
And in any case, the racist
impulse tends to be indivisible. People who express hatred of one group of
foreigners are not reliable friends to any other group. An ultra-conservative
Britain that isolates itself from Europe because it dislikes Poles, threatens
to deport elderly British West Indians on a historical technicality,
deliberately creates a “hostile environment” for refugees and other
undocumented migrants, and gambles with the future of its own Irish citizens is
not a trustworthy friend to Jews.
I think about those White
Supremacists marching in Charlottesville. How easily their chant slipped from
"You [brown people] will not replace us" to "Jews will not
replace us". I wouldn’t trust Little Englanders not to engage in the
same kind of slippage if it suited them, or if it suited their leaders to
encourage it. Expressions of support for Israel from members of the extreme
Right are not reliable indicators of an absence of antisemitic feeling any more
than concern for the Palestinians necessarily means indifference to the fate of
the Jewish population of Israel or of Jews around the world.
Last week a group of British
writers published a letter explaining why they could not, in good conscience,
vote Labour in this Election. Perplexingly, some of them have never been Labour
supporters, so the suggestion that Corbyn’s views were causing them moral
anguish was disingenuous. But for the progressive voters among them the dilemma
is clearly genuine. “Antisemitism,” they wrote, “is central to a wider debate about
the kind of country we want to be. To ignore it because Brexit looms larger is
to declare that anti-Jewish prejudice is a price worth paying for a Labour
government. Which other community’s concerns are disposable in this way? Who
would be next?"
That question, with its
distant echo of Niemöller's confession, correctly identifies the
sliding nature of prejudice. But it is misleading in implying that, in
contemporary Britain, the Jewish community is at particular risk. We don’t need
to ask who would be next because the victims of prejudice are all around us.
One way of compiling a list would be to start with a compendium of Boris
Johnson’s jokey ethnic slurs.
My late and much lamented
mother-in-law would occasionally, in response to some turn in American or
global events, drily observe that “this is not good for the Jews”. The Brexit
project, if and when it is completed, will be no better for British Jews than
for the British people in general.
