Enough is enough: Labour fury at Corbyn over anti-semitism
Backbenchers get standing ovation in Commons as they turn on their leader over ‘betrayal’ of Jews
LABOUR MPS last night turned on Jeremy Corbyn over his “betrayal” of Jews as they described rape and death threats they had received for speaking out against anti-semitism in their party.
Mr Corbyn sat in the Commons in silence as his MPS read out hate mail they had received from his supporters. Others received standing ovations for calling out the “bullying and intimidation” in the party as the Labour leader was told: “Enough is enough.”
One Labour MP was moved to tears as Luciana Berger, her colleague, detailed the “torrent” of abuse she had faced for being Jewish in a party in which Mr Corbyn has allowed anti-semitism to become “more commonplace, more conspicuous and more corrosive”.
John Mann, the Labour MP, said members of the Corbyn-supporting Momentum group had targeted him for showing solidarity with Jewish Labour members. He said his wife had been sent a dead bird in the post and received rape threats and his son and daughter had had contact with the bomb squad and “special branch” after death threats to his family.
Dame Margaret Hodge, who lost family members in the Holocaust, was applauded as she said: “I have never felt as nervous and frightened as I feel today at being a Jew. It feels that my party has given permission for anti-semitism to go unchallenged. Anti-semitism is making me an outsider in my Labour Party. To that, I simply say, ‘enough is enough’.”
The outpouring of despair at Mr Corbyn’s lack of “leadership” on anti-semitism came during a near three-hour debate on the issue called by the Government, during which Mr Corbyn was chided by his backbenchers for leaving the chamber for part of the session.
At one point Tom Watson, the deputy leader, left Mr Corbyn’s side to sit with Jewish MPS on the back benches.
Ms Berger fought back tears as she said: “I have no words for the people who purport to be both members and supporters of our party, who use that hashtag, JC4PM, who attacked me in recent weeks for speaking at the rally... who said I should be deselected.”
Detailing other examples of anti-semitic abuse she said, voice shaking: “They have called me Judas, a Zio-nazi, and told me to go back to Israel.”
She had also been called a “paid-up Israeli operative”, a traitor and an “absolute parasite”. She added: “We have a duty to the next generation. Denial is not an option. Prevarication is not an option. Being a bystander who turns the other way is not an option. The time for action is now.”
Ruth Smeeth, her colleague, reached out and squeezed Ms Berger’s hand during her emotional speech, for which she was given a standing ovation as MPS ignored Commons conventions banning applause in the chamber.
Ms Smeeth, who was moved to tears by Ms Berger’s words, received a similar ovation as she read abuse she had received, such as “hang yourself you vile treacherous Zionist Tory filth, you’re a cancer of humanity”.
Labour’s Ian Austin said the current crisis was prompted by the “shocking discovery” that Mr Corbyn had “defended a grotesque, racist” mural depicting anti-semitic caricatures.
Mr Austin said: “He spent decades defending these people. Hamas’s charter is anti-semitic, Hizbollah’s is too, yet your leader described them as friends and invited them to Parliament.
“The problem on the hard Left is some of them believe they are so virtuous... Why is it they get angry at people complaining about racism instead of the people responsible for it?”
He was cheered after calling on the party to “boot out” Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor under investigation for much of the last two years after claiming Hitler was a Zionist.
Mr Mann, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on anti-semitism, said: “I didn’t expect, when I took on this voluntary cross-party role, for my wife to be sent by a Labour Marxist antisemite a dead bird through the post. I didn’t expect my son, after an Islamist death threat, to open the door in the house on his own, as a schoolboy, to the bomb squad.
“I didn’t expect my wife, in the last few weeks, from a Leftist anti-semite, in response to the demonstration, to be threatened with rape. I didn’t expect my daughter, similarly.” He said he did not expect to be rung by special branch to check on his daughter’s movements.
Separately Mr Corbyn’s attempt to address anti-semitism among his supporters was undermined after two of the main Jewish bodies pulled out of a roundtable meeting next week.
The British Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council said they would not attend the meeting after it emerged that Mr Corbyn had also invited the anti-israeli Jewish Voice for Labour group, which is chaired by Jenny Manson, a longstanding member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians.
Jeremy Corbyn launched a failed intervention yesterday when he tried to persuade the Commons of the need for a War Powers Act. Two debates unfolded. The first was about procedure: should the support of the Commons be required to go to war? If Britain is about to embark on an Iraqstyle campaign, then parliamentary consultation might be appropriate. But it would be foolish, even dangerous, to bind the hands of a government in a military emergency. If, say, nuclear weapons were launched at London, would Mr Corbyn demand that Parliament discuss the response?
Instructing the Government precisely what to do in the event of war is also contrary to Britain’s constitutional tradition. As Jacob Rees-mogg argued, the British legislature holds the executive to account: it does not run the executive by remote control. The Government acts and the Commons then scrutinises. If MPS disagree strongly with military action in Syria or elsewhere, they are welcome to trigger a confidence vote and, in effect, sack the Prime Minister.
Given that the Commons therefore already enjoys the power to hold the Government to account – and exercised it yesterday – Mr Rees-mogg implied that the real debate before the House was over whether or not Britain should ever go to war at all. As he said, Labour is run by people with a “pacifist tone” whose true goal is to “upset” the constitution in order to make military intervention as difficult as possible. The same goes for Mr Corbyn’s insistence that action always be referred to the United Nations: the ability of Russia to veto everything it dislikes means that to send a motion to the UN about Syria is to kick it into the long grass. And that is what Mr Corbyn presumably wants to do. That is why, as an MP, he has opposed every single military action put to Parliament – including those endorsed by his precious UN.
Having triggered a debate on Syria and lost it, Mr Corbyn then had to face a devastating Commons debate on anti-semitism, which has become a serious problem in the Labour Party. In fact, anti-semitism and Labour’s isolationist foreign policy are not unrelated: they are commonplace among those on the far-left fringe who believe the world is run by an Israeliamerican conspiracy, and that Bashar al-assad is “innocent until proven guilty”. Beneath the inept yet apparently pacifist exterior of Corbynism is a bitter anti-west agenda that is morally bankrupt.