Corbyn must deal with this Labour poison

Anti-semitism on the Left is being ignored by the party leader. This amounts to institutional racism

‘People call me a Zionist traitor, they say I’m taking shekels, that I’m Mossad…” “I’ve been called ‘a yid ----’.” There have been “over 25,000 incidents of racial abuse”. Are these headlines from a backward and faraway country where pogroms are still a reality?

No – reports from two Labour MPS. Jess Phillips, MP for Birmingham Yardley, is a non-jewish critic of Jeremy Corbyn. Ruth Smeeth, MP for Stoke on Trent North, is Jewish but has not spoken on Middle-eastern matters. So her “sin” is not Zionism – as if that excuses vile attacks – it is simply being Jewish.

Yesterday MPS on all sides debated the abuse many had faced while campaigning before the election. Although politicians have always needed a thick skin, much of what was raised was shocking. And it is impossible to overlook the fact that much of it was anti-semitic.

Britain has traditionally been the least anti-semitic of countries. Indeed, anti-semitism has not been seen in our politics since the days of Oswald Mosley in the Thirties, and it turned him into a political pariah. Mosley appealed primarily to the inadequate and ill-educated. Today that is changing, and it is changing on the Left.

Of course no one believes that Jeremy Corbyn or his close associates are anti-semitic. But that is beside the point. In the Stephen Lawrence inquiry in 1999, Sir William Macpherson defined institutional racism as “discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotypes which disadvantage minority ethnic people”. Racism, in essence, is a matter not of intention but of consequence. Sir William was suggesting that the police were institutionally racist. The police replied that they could not be since they were opposed to all sorts of racism and had an anti-racist policy. Jeremy Corbyn says the same.

Yet Jess Phillips says there is “definitely anti-semitism and [Corbyn] needs to clamp down on it”. Ruth Smeeth, meanwhile, has on “numerous occasions” raised the issue of racism “privately” with Corbyn. For her, the “biggest issue is that he knows it’s happening and that it’s still happening”. In consequence, she believes, Labour is no longer “a safe space for British Jews”.

Jeremy Corbyn could have confronted the problem of antisemitism among his Left-wing supporters, apologised for it and demanded criminal prosecution of the offenders under the race relations acts. He has done none of these things. Instead he commissioned a report by Shami Chakrabarti, widely condemned as a whitewash. It is difficult to acquit the Labour leadership from the charge of institutional racism.

This is what makes this antisemitism new to Britain and particularly pernicious. This is not Mosley-style thuggery. This is, is in some ways, more dangerous, because explicit racism is easier to identify and to confront, while institutional racism, precisely because it is unacknowledged, is more difficult to combat.

Anyone inclined to make excuses for Corbyn should ponder what their response would be if a female Conservative MP – Priti Patel perhaps – declared that she had suffered 25,000 instances of racial abuse, that she had complained to Theresa May about it, but that nothing had been done. The Left would be up in arms. But, of course, such a scenario would not occur. As Ruth Smeeth admits, the Conservatives “would squish it really quickly”.

Anti-semitism, the German socialist August Bebel declared at the beginning of the 20th century, was the socialism of fools. No longer. These days it is prevalent in our universities, including Oxford, my old university, where last year Alex Chalmers, the non-jewish chair of the OU Labour Club, resigned because “a large proportion of the student Left in Oxford have some kind of problem with Jews”.

It is high time the Left faced up to its responsibilities in combating this poison in Labour’s bloodstream. The great danger otherwise, following the entrenchment of the Corbyn leadership after the election, is that anti-semitism on the Left comes to be accepted as normal and is legitimised. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.