Anti-Semitism crisis will cost us votes, admits Mc Donnell

JOHN McDonnell yesterday admitted Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis could cost it votes in Thursday’s election as leaked documents revealed the party’s shocking record in dealing with racist members.

Secret files, leaked from the party’s disciplinary department, show Labour is still overwhelmed with complaints about anti-Jewish racism left unresolved for months or years.

Most have resulted in lenient punishments, despite party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s election campaign claims that he had ‘dealt with’ the issue and that anyone responsible for anti-Semitism had been suspended or expelled.

Yesterday the Shadow Chancellor apologised to the Jewish community for ‘the suffering we’ve inflicted on them’. Asked on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show whether antiSemitism will be part of the reason if Labour loses the election, Mr McDonnell replied: ‘I worry that this has had its effect. We’ve done everything I think we can possibly do. We’ve apologised to the Jewish community. We’ve always got to learn lessons, of course we have – all political parties. Because it isn’t just the Labour Party.’

He added: ‘I say to them – we’re doing everything possible and we are going to learn more lessons and we want to be the shining example of anti-racism that the Labour Party should be.’ The leaked documents, obtained by the Sunday

Times, provide the first comprehensive insight into how Labour has handled the anti- Semitism scandal over the past 18 months.

The secret files show half of 100 anti-Semitism cases between summer 2018 and May this year involved a warning or no action at all. In a leaked recording from the party’s disciplinary committee in late October, a Labour official reveals that more than 130 cases remain outstanding even though the ‘vast majority’ were reported to the party 18 months ago.

One unresolved case had been on Labour’s books for more than three years, according to the recording. The leaked files reveal Labour members likening Jewish people to killer viruses, labelling them ‘ bent- nose manipulative liars’ and calling for the ‘extermination of every Jew on the planet’.

One Labour member from Nottinghamshire wrote Jews represented a viral infection that needed to be ‘eliminated’ and said he wanted the ‘complete extinction of all Jews’. It took more than ten months for the party to expel him after his case was first reported in 2018. Lord Macdonald, a former director of public prosecutions, said the man had clearly committed a racial hate crime.

Another member was allowed to stay in the party after allegedly confronting a veteran councillor at a Labour meeting and shouting that he ‘licked the bum of Jews for money’. A Labour member from Birmingham was subject to a complaint after posting on Facebook that the Red Sea was the ‘ideal destination’ to get rid of the Jews ‘who are a cancer on us all’ before adding, ‘no need for gas chambers anyway – gas is so expensive and we need it in England’. It took eight months for him to be expelled.

Other Labour members’ posts included claims that Jews were behind the September 11 attacks and branding the family of Jewish Labour MP Margaret Hodge as ‘rancid’. Dame Margaret said: ‘I am beyond horrified and so angry that people whose views echo those of Hitler should ever think they had a home in the Labour Party.’

Labour said claims about large numbers of unresolved complaints were ‘categorically untrue’ and insisted people would now be expelled in weeks rather than months. Yesterday hundreds of people attended a Campaign Against Anti-Semitism rally in Parliament Square, including Judge Rinder star Robert Rinder.

‘Case unresolved for three years’

THIS is a tale of two Dominics. Take it from another. The two this one has in mind are Messrs Grieve and Cummings. Dominic Grieve is the former Conservative MP now standing against his old party in Beaconsfield. More significantly, this erstwhile attorney general masterminded, with the assistance of the then Commons Speaker John Bercow, the unprecedented parliamentary manoeuvres that continually blocked the Government from ‘getting Brexit done’.

Dominic Cummings is the creator of the Vote Leave campaign which won the 2016 referendum and whom Boris Johnson brought into the heart of Downing Street as soon as he took over from Mrs May.

Cummings is also the architect of the brutally direct approach that ensued: the prorogation of Parliament, the sacking of 21 Tory MPs who voted for the ‘surrender Bill’ which forced the PM to ask Brussels for a further Brexit delay — and, above all, the push for a General Election on the slogan he devised (‘Get Brexit Done’).

I wrote in the Mail at the outset of this campaign that this slogan would be immensely successful. And so it is proving. As numerous Tories on the electoral trail have told me, it is hitting the jackpot even with Remain voters, who are fed up with the uncertainty (and who also believe, as democrats, that the 2016 referendum result must be honoured).

Pledged

At the outset of the last election, in 2017, Grieve had pledged to his constituents ‘that the decision of the electorate in the referendum must be respected’. So no wonder his local party, after his subsequent actions, passed a vote of no confidence in him even before Johnson removed the whip.

Now he is one of a number of former Tory bigwigs — most notably John Major and Michael Heseltine — telling people to vote ‘tactically’ to stop Mr Johnson taking us out of the EU on January 31.

They are not actually saying ‘ vote Labour’. But if you go to the several websites set up by anti-Brexit campaign groups to guide their followers how to vote, their recommendations for each constituency add up to over 500 ‘Labour’ ticks, and not much more than 100 ticks for the Liberal Democrats or other parties. This is because Labour is in the vast majority of seats the closest challenger to the Conservatives.

So let’s be clear: the strategy advocated by the former Tory Prime Minister Major and his deputy, Heseltine, would — if everyone did as they urge us to do — lead to a Communist self-confessed ‘friend’ of Islamist anti-Semitic terror organisations becoming Prime Minister with the biggest parliamentary majority in history.

That won’t happen, of course: not least because men such as Major and Heseltine, while of great fascination to broadcasters who treat their every utterance with unusual deference, have almost zero influence on voters. There is nothing quite so ex as an ex-politician, or, indeed, an ex-prime minister.

Moreover, anyone who knows Major also knows he is driven by resentment at the way the Tory Eurosceptics — Boris Johnson among them — made his life miserable when he was in office. His attempt at retribution (even urging Parliament to revoke Brexit without another referendum) is pettiness posturing as principle.

Grieve is a brighter man than Major; I have respected his intelligence ever since we were contemporaries at the same public school. So when I saw his broadcast to voters yesterday, I was amazed by its confusedness. He began by saying that, if re-elected, and if there were a hung Parliament: ‘ I will not under any circumstances allow Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister … I am clearly absolutely satisfied he would be a disaster in Downing Street.’

As if, after the defeat he wills for Johnson, Grieve would be so important he could, on his own, block the triumphant Labour leader from entering No 10!

Grieve went on: ‘We could set up a government of national unity. It wouldn’t be able to agree on very much, so you may well have another election before long, but at least it could provide for another referendum to try to resolve Brexit in some way.’ Had my old schoolmate been scripted by Dominic Cummings, he could not have done a better job of persuading voters to vote Conservative.

Strategy

If you admit that you are advocating an impotent government, to be followed by yet another election or a referendum without the faintest suggestion as to what would be on such a ballot paper, then you don’t need opponents to make you a laughing stock: you’ve done it for them.

This could not be in starker contrast to the clarity of the Cummings approach. In fact, I know this other Dominic quite well: we are both chess obsessives and have played a few games together. Like all chess players, Cummings understands that a clear strategy is essential: clever tactics are all well and good, but if they are not part of a logical plan, then they will rarely achieve the desired result (victory).

‘Take Back Control’ was the strategic slogan Cummings devised for the 2016 referendum. ‘Get Brexit Done’ is the equally down-to- earth 2019 version. I should add that Cummings, the Durhamborn son of an oil-rig manager, has none of Grieve’s grand manner.

So when Grieve, of all people, described him as ‘ arrogant’, Cummings told journalists: ‘I don’t think I am arrogant. I don’t know very much about very much. Mr Grieve … we’ll see what he’s right about.’

We soon will. And I know which Dominic I’m putting my money on.