Gisela Stuart:
Extremism and intolerance creep up like a tide – why is Labour’s leadership not addressing this?
Ifirst arrived in the UK from Germany on a cold and rainy Thursday afternoon in January 1974. A man called Ernest Hochland had offered me work in his university bookshop on Oxford Road in Manchester. I didn’t know then but found out later that Ernest’s parents had been in the camp in Theresienstadt. Ernest himself was born in Koenigsberg, today’s Kaliningrad. When Nazi storm troopers sacked a Jewish school on Kristallnacht in 1938, he escaped by jumping from an upper storey window.
On Valentine’s day a year after my arrival, a local psychiatrist whom I had seen in the bookshop but had never spoken to, gave me flowers and chocolates. He had come to apologise. “All my family died in a concentration camp,” he said, “and I had promised myself that for the rest of my life I would never knowingly speak to a German. I now think that this was wrong. The world has moved on, and you are of a different generation. Please forgive me”. He shook my hand, gave a curt bow and left me standing speechless and humbled.
Manchester had then and still has a large Jewish community, and I was to discover that many had made similar journeys of reconciliation; forgiving the next generation, but never forgetting the past.
A few months ago I was asked to take part in a broadcast discussion that would cover the issues of the day, including anti-semitism in the Labour Party. I made my views very clear. As I was leaving, a former Labour Party colleague was in discussion with a producer. “Why do you think Gisela made such a big issue of antisemitism?” I heard him ask. “I think it may be something to do with her being German,” came the reply.
In truth it was because I, too, have not forgotten the past. As a young German national moving to work in a foreign country, I have been keenly sensitive to the unequalled magnitude of the evil committed as a direct consequence of Europe’s indulgence of anti-semitism. But I think most of my generation, regardless of their country of birth, would share my view that anti-semitism poses a unique threat quite unlike any other and must never ever be allowed to gain a foothold of respectability in Europe again.
Anti-semitism has been at the fringe of politics in Britain for as long as I can remember; in Germany too, where last month saluting neo-nazis tried to take over a public protest in the town of Chemnitz. At the margins and in the open we know how to identify this kind of extremism and how to deal with it. In the UK, our two-party system has historically absorbed the extremes of the Right and the Left and managed them within two broad party coalitions.
Today that system is under strain. In part that is because the Labour Party has changed. Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader has put Labour under the control of the far Left and put the idea of the party as a broad-based and moderate coalition at risk. Antisemitic views among supporters are surfacing and the lack of swift action has signalled a level of acceptability. Further cues are there in what the Labour leadership says and does not say; in the company they keep and the platforms they share. Their resistance to the adoption of the international definition of anti-semitism; the failure to condemn the suggestion that concerns expressed by the Jewish community are attempts to smear the party. The list goes on and each sends a dangerous signal of approval.
All this matters because extremism and intolerance creep up like the incoming tide. And yet Mr Corbyn and his team don’t appear to understand why someone like me might be making “such an issue” of antisemitism.
This is the danger for Labour. The party’s traditional voters have a strong commitment to fairness and value common sense over ideology. The Jewish community is not some alien other – they are our neighbours, friends and family – our community. This is an argument that should never have needed to be made. If we are still having to make it in the months ahead, the Labour leadership will have shown it is unfit for high office and Labour’s traditional supporters across the country will not forget.
Gisela Stuart is a former Labour MP