No apologies, but Labour drops disciplinary action against Hodge

How has a party with such a noble Jewish socialist history been torn apart over anti-semitism?

JEREMY CORBYN has dropped a disciplinary case against Dame Margaret Hodge, who confirmed last night she was no longer under investigation and revealed there had been “no apologies on either side”.

The MP had confronted Mr Corbyn in the House of Commons in a row over his decision not to adopt the international definition of anti-semitism in favour of a watered-down version. She said she was “pleased” that the party had dropped the action against her and she called on the leader to urgently sign up to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) version to “rebuild trust”.

Following the decision not to take action against her, she tweeted: “After 55 years of LP membership going after me instead of addressing the issue was wrong… Just to be clear: there have been no apologies – on either side.”

The party is still investigating Ian Austin MP over allegations of “abusive conduct” after he clashed with another senior party official over the same definition, and The Daily Telegraph can reveal that Labour MPS are demanding a vote in Parliament when it returns from recess to pressure Mr Corbyn into accepting the international wording.

They believe a non-binding vote would force him to back the definition in Parliament and later adopt it in full for the party.

Chris Leslie, a Labour MP who has the backing of the Board of Deputies, the parliamentary group against antisemitism, other political leaders and a group of prominent MPS, has asked the Leader of the Commons for time for a debate so politicians can show their support to the Jewish community.

In a letter to Andrea Leadsom, seen by The Telegraph, Mr Leslie called for Parliament to adopt the definition and “send the clearest of signals that antisemitism of any kind will not be tolerated”.

Yesterday George Mcmanus, a member of Labour’s ruling body, the National Executive Committee, was suspended for comparing Tom Watson to Judas after he demanded the party accept the IHRA definition.

Scores of Mr Corbyn’s supporters launched an online campaign to force Mr Watson out of office after he warned that Labour faces “eternal shame” over its failure to support the Jewish community.

The bid was said to have been bolstered by Russian-linked Twitter accounts.

Mr Mcmanus wrote on Facebook: “Watson received £50,000 from Jewish donors, at least Judas only got 30 pieces of silver.”

Labour MP Wes Streeting, who cochairs the all-party parliamentary group for British Jews, posted online: “This is 100 per cent a classic anti-semitic trope – and from a Momentum-backed member of Labour’s National Policy Forum. Will swift action be taken?”

Mr Mcmanus was suspended from the party, deleted the post and apologised.

If Labour is a church, Corbynism looks more and more like a cult. It’s on the hunt for heretics. Pro-brexit MPS are threatened with deselection. Tom Watson, the deputy leader, got it in the neck for calling for action against anti-semitism: Twitter lit up with nearly 50,000 demands for him to resign. They call this online movement #Wearecorbyn, and if Jeremy Corbyn was a Monty Python fan, he’d reply: “#I’mnot.”

How on earth has Labour, a party with an illustrious history of fighting racism, wound up in a civil war over anti-semitism? Seeing Corbynism as a cult is one way to look at it.

First, consider the believer’s point of view. Corbyn ran for leader in 2015 after two big election defeats: the party had tried Blairism and the soft-left mush of Ed Miliband and it had lost horribly. Corbyn won his job title with an agenda that was angry yet hopeful, refreshingly idealistic. Had he been wiped out in the 2017 election – as smart alecs like me predicted – he would have been discredited and forced out. Instead, Labour got its biggest percentage vote for 20 years. The hard-left strategy was vindicated.

And then, suddenly, came the anti-semitism row. “How convenient,” says #Wearecorbyn.

Corbynites might have taken it more seriously had the media, in their opinion, not poisoned the well. Remember that Ed Miliband had endured many personal attacks when he was leader, including the suggestion that his father – a Jewish immigrant – didn’t love Britain unconditionally. So, in the minds of many Labour activists, the media had overnight gone from being slyly anti-semitic to being cynically anti-anti-semitic, and they weren’t buying it. There’s a parallel with US Republicans who so resented the fake news reported about Mitt Romney in 2012 that when Donald Trump came along, they took his side against the mainstream media.

The thing is, Trump may well be innocent of one or two charges levelled against him, but he’s still guilty of 99 per cent of the rest – and it would also be a feat of fanatical lunacy to deny that Jeremy Corbyn has, among other sins, shared platforms with terrorists. I’m not exaggerating. Actual terrorists. He has, for instance, appeared on a platform with Leila Khaled, a Palestinian radical famous for hijacking planes – hijacking planes – who was so iconically nutty in her day that Doctor Who named a companion after her: Leela, the scantily clad savage.

Corbyn’s association with Ms Khaled points to the central problem with his politics: it’s weird. There’s always been weirdness in Labour – Militant, Ban the Bomb, the Alternative Economic Strategy, etc – and Corbyn has ridden the mad bus with most of it, but now the weirdness has captured the collective psyche of the party, almost beyond redemption. Moderate MPS won’t move against Corbyn because they tried that once and lost. The activists still seem to want him.

One psychological explanation lies in that wonderful book When Prophecy Fails, a study of an American UFO cult that predicted the world would end on December 21 1954. Spoiler alert: it didn’t, and yet the cult didn’t go away. You’d expect that those who had devoted so much time and energy to the coming deluge would have been bitterly disappointed that it never materialised, and felt conned. On the contrary, the more heavily invested a person was in the cult, the more they needed to believe its leader when she said there’d been a change to the schedule, and the more they were willing to stick with the group. Corbyn and Trump work on a similar level. When you’ve come this far with Corbyn – through the IRA stuff, the Venezuela nonsense, the shameless vegetarianism – the further you’re committed to go.

We now live in a hyper-partisan world that preaches high stakes: if my side loses, your side wins, and it’s curtains for me. Many Labour supporters cannot afford to believe Corbyn is guilty of anything because it means the other side might be right – and the other side might win. The tragedy is that this betrays some of the finer features of British socialism.

One is its libertarian tradition, its freedom to disagree. Having spent years dissenting from the backbenches – rightly so, and often right – the hard-left now wants to push out Labourites who dissent from them.

The second thing to go is the Labour tradition of common sense. As Aneurin Bevan said: “The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.” That includes the material needs of poorer voters. Corbyn is right to raise bus services at the despatch box, but the ambiguity over Europe is surreal, while the leadership’s enthusiasm for the Palestinians, whether you think it justified or not, has consigned Labour to talking about things that many constituents would judge irrelevant. Most Britons probably can’t point to Gaza on a map because, well, it’s got nothing to do with their lives.

The saddest thing imperilled by the cult is the Jewish socialist tradition, which was once the beating conscience of Labour. Its alienation is a crime. Some days I wish I was still a member of Labour just so I could resign from it again.