Antisemitism, Labour’s broad church fallacy, and a letter box in East Finchley
On a quiet November afternoon, nearly a year ago, in a quiet side-street in East Finchley, I made myself ineligible for membership of the Labour Party.
I had of course already left. But the very moment I put that first leaflet for Luciana Berger — a Jewish woman who had been driven out of the Labour Party, while pregnant, by racists, and standing in Finchley for the Liberal Democrats in the General Election — through that first letter-box in East Finchley, just down the road from where my grandmother had lived and a couple of miles away from where I grew up, I was no longer eligible, for a minimum of two years, to be a member of the Labour Party that I had been a member of, campaigned for, been a local government candidate for, and in which I had met my beloved and then recently-deceased wife: because I had campaigned for a candidate from another party.
Not that I am complaining. I knew the rules, I had already left, and — as someone who has found a new political home in the Welsh Liberal Democrats — I have no wish to return, and cannot imagine any circumstances in which I would wish to do so. Leaving the sewer that the Labour Party had become by the time I could face it no more in early 2019 was, above all else, a relief. A relief that I no longer had to make excuses. A relief that I would never have to sit in a ward meeting with — and make hollow gestures of solidarity with — someone who had tweeted in support of Holocaust denial. A relief that I could return home to my North London roots and look the community in which I had grown up in the face again.
I have watched with horror the way in which the process of dealing with Labour’s racists has unfolded — that Panorama programme and its aftermath, the extraordinary testimonies in Forced Out, the constant excuse-making by those both who backed Corbyn but most of all by those who didn’t want to see what was happening in front of them; in Brighton, the town that had been my home for 27 years, the Labour Councillor who demanded a march on the local synagogue, the local twice-suspended Labour activist who organised a rally in solidarity with the former MP Chris Williamson and asked Jews to identify themselves and come to the front of the meeting; the hounding of Warren Morgan, former Labour council leader, for the offence of saying that antisemitic events on Council premises were not acceptable.
But most of all there was the tolerance. People who burbled on about “a broad church”, a piece of code for the tolerance of Jew-hate. People who didn’t want to face what their party had become, who talked of never having seen antisemitism in the Labour Party (it’s amazing what you don’t see when you don’t want to), of how Jeremy Corbyn — a leader who had shared platforms with individuals who had literally advocated anti-Jewish genocide, who endorsed organisations like Hezbollah for whom antisemitism was a core belief, and who accused British Jews of not having been part of Britain long enough to understand English irony — apparently did not have “a racist bone in his body”.
One of the most chilling conversations I have ever had in politics was with a Momentum activist who was on a street stall in central Cardiff — who claimed that, in his view, the Holocaust probably happened. He said he was a teacher.
The publication of the EHRC report — at last — appears to have done little to change the environment of denial within the Labour Party. Keir Starmer has rightly emphasised that this is the beginning not the end: that the job will only be done when people who left Labour because of antisemitism will be safe to return.
But will take no more than a cursory glance at Twitter today to see that the racists are still there. Their leader may be gone, but they are still part of the Labour Party: making excuses, undermining the ECHR, attacking Starmer, muttering about Zionists. They’re still occupying their accustomed pews in the broad church. Unlike me, made ineligible for campaigning for a victim of racism, they are still eligible for Labour Party membership.
It will not do. As one of Labour’s socialist heroes, R H Tawney, wrote in the 1930s: to kick over an idol you must first get up off your knees. Labour has always excused far too much by its claim to be a “broad church”. Those who stayed in the Labour Party — despite their knowledge of what was going on around them — have to examine their consciences, and ask themselves what they did to offset the comfort and solidarity they gave to the racists by staying in “their” party. You need to ask yourselves, did I stand up or did I look away? And you need, not just to apologise to the Jewish community but to own the hurt that has been done to that community, and ask what you must now do to atone it.
And frankly, being a broad church doesn’t cut it any more. Your party will only have regained any kind of moral legitimacy when every single antisemite and every single one of their fellow travellers has themselves been forced out. Your party will only be able to aspire to the decency of being authentically-non racist when you have got rid of every single Corbyn fellow-traveller, every single person who used the broad church excuse to turn the other way, every single person who allowed the broad church to be used as an excuse for tolerating a narrow racist sect. What sort of party is it that tolerates those who, as the EHRC report demonstrates, were acting illegally and tolerating illegality, while ostracising and harrassing those who couldn’t stomach the racism? Any response that falls short of mass expulsions, for life, is an evasion, not a solution.
Because moral respectability has to be earned. And Labour, a party that fostered and tolerated a culture of unlawful racism, has a very long path to tread before it has any right to claim it.
