DOMINIC LAWSON

SOME images from the Black Lives Matter demonstration in London on Saturday will linger long in the memory. The sheer scale and physical density of the march, as viewed from above, is one, simultaneously impressive in its display of solidarity and terrifying for NHS medics anxious to avert a ‘second wave’ of Covid-19 infection.

Then there was the film of a small group of violent demonstrators hurling objects (including a bike) at the horses carrying mounted police officers — leading one to bolt, with the policewoman concerned crashing into a lamppost and thence rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung and smashed ribs.

But the most perplexing image for many of us will have been the sight of the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square sprayed with graffiti (as was the nearby statue of Abraham Lincoln). For this was the exact anniversary, June 6, of the 1944 Normandy landings: the single day which perhaps best exemplifies the British people’s struggle against genocidal fascism — a six- year- long fight inspired and led by Churchill.

Given the demonstrators are campaigners against racially-based oppression, this is, to put it politely, perverse.

Ignorance

The same applies to the demonstrators’ defacing of the Lincoln statue. Their anger with the current President of the United States is understandable — Donald Trump’s first foray into politics was as a fomenter of the racist ‘birther’ movement, which claimed that Barack Obama was not truly American.

But Lincoln was the president who emancipated the slaves of the Confederacy, achieved through the huge sacrifice of a civil war. Lincoln declared: ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.’

He definitely believed that ‘Black lives matter’. Lincoln paid for this with his life: he was assassinated by a supporter of the defeated Confederacy. Yet this is the man whose London statue was daubed last weekend. I suppose we can put it down to ignorance rather than malevolence; but those who seek to ‘make history’ through their actions should also learn it.

Churchill himself was driven by a sense of his own place in history. One of the remarks most often attributed to him is: ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.’ Which, as an author, he did.

But the hard-Left in this country has long taken delight in trashing Churchill’s memory for their own purposes. They intensely dislike the fact that such a defender of the British Empire is still so much admired by so many. Even now, opinion polls suggest that he is the best regarded of British prime ministers.

So I was not surprised that Jeremy Corbyn, in his first big interview since his comprehensive defeat in December’s general election, should have chosen to defend himself by traducing Churchill. The context is relevant to the weekend’s marches, even though the interview, in a magazine called Middle East Eye, appeared three days beforehand, on June 3.

Because, while hundreds of thousands have been marching against anti-black racism there is only one party currently being investigated by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission for racism. That is the Labour Party, following numerous complaints about anti- Semitism among the hard-Left membership most adulatory of Corbyn (involving such a degree of abuse as to cause a number of Jewish Labour MPs to quit in disgust).

The Commission said its formal investigation would attempt to establish whether elements in the party had indeed harassed or victimised individuals on the grounds that they were Jewish.

In his interview last week, Corbyn — whose uncritical admiration for such openly anti- Semitic organisations as Hamas and Hezbollah is legion — gave us a glimpse of what he will say if the enquiry does decide that the case has been proved. Disgracefully, he claimed that the EHRC is ‘part of the government machine’.

In other words, he insinuates that it was doing the Conservative Government’s bidding in its investigations, and that this would be the real reason if it were to decide widespread anti-Semitic harassment had taken place within the Labour Party. Corbyn’s remarks follow on a letter from 40 British imams, questioning the role of the EHRC’s chairman, David Isaac, who had held a position at a law firm which advised the Government.

Harassment

Rebutting this insinuation, the EHRC last week declared: ‘We are an independent regulator and take our impartiality very seriously. Since taking up his role as chair, David Isaac has not been involved in or profited from any work for government.’

Still, we can see where this is going: if the EHRC finds that anti-Semitic harassment had indeed been a feature of Labour in-fighting during Corbyn’s leadership, the usual characters will be busy on Facebook and Twitter saying: ‘What do you expect? Its chairman is a Jew.’

And where does Churchill come into this? Through Corbyn himself: in this same (strangely unnoticed) interview, he counter- attacked, declaring that, in contrast to his own impeccable anti-racist record, we should pay close regard to ‘Churchill’s anti- Semitic remarks all through his life’. That is a calumny, apparently based (according to Middle East Eye) on a 2007 book by the historian Richard Toye which sensationally purported to have unearthed a 1937 article by Churchill filled with clearly antiSemitic sentiments. In fact, as Toye was seemingly unaware, the article, How The Jews Can Combat Persecution, was not written by Churchill, but drafted by a journalist who occasionally ghost-wrote pieces for him. More pertinently, the article was never published: not under Churchill’s name, or anyone else’s. It is not even clear that Churchill ever read it.

In fact, Churchill was much friendlier to Jews, both individually and collectively, than was customary among the British upper class at the time. He was a longstanding and early supporter of Zionism (the Jewish national movement which Corbyn and his acolytes regard with undisguised repulsion). In 1904, his main criticism of the Conservative government’s Aliens Bill was that it could be abused by ‘an anti-Semitic Home Secretary’.

Prejudice

During World War II, he suggested the removal of those he termed ‘anti-Semitic officers’ from high positions in the Middle East. This was the sort of action which led one of his friends, Sir Edward Spears, to tell Churchill’s official biographer, Martin Gilbert: ‘Even Winston had a fault. He was too fond of the Jews.’

By contrast, as recently as 2011, Corbyn wrote an adulatory preface to a reprint of the 1902 tome, Imperialism: A Study, by John Hobson, a writer admired by Lenin.

This book declared that ‘the central ganglions of capitalism’ and of imperialism were banks run by Jews: ‘United by the strongest bonds, always in closest and quickest touch with one as other, situated in the business capital of every state, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, by men of a singular and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience, they are in a unique position to control the policy of nations …there is not a war, a revolution … or any other public shock, which is not gainful to these men; they are harpies who suck their gains from every new forced expenditure.’

Hobson’s analysis, indistinguishable both in its language and its prejudice from that later expounded by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, was praised by Corbyn as ‘correct and prescient’ in his 2011 preface.

Fortunately, the new Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has declared his firm intention to ‘root out anti-Semitism’ within Labour. But it would be good if he could also bring himself to utter a word of criticism of those who defaced Churchill’s statue on the very anniversary of the day Britons, along with our U.S. allies, began the liberation of Europe from the most murderously racist regime in history.

It would also do his and his party’s own standing no harm. For the millions of citizens who acclaimed ‘Captain Tom’, it was in part the old soldier’s proud wearing of the medals for his service in that war which will have moved them. Those who dishonour that, dishonour the cause they purport to serve.