Other people’s work is sold for hard cash but Palestine flags come free
At a drinks reception for Labour Friends of Israel on the fringe of the party’s conference, there was a besieged feeling of camaraderie. The room was so packed that an elderly attendee fainted at one point from the heat. The chair of LFI, Joan Ryan MP, hosted the meeting. As a result of her vocal criticism of anti-semitism, a mob of hard-left, anti-zionist local party members recently began deselecting her. At the LFI reception, each time the assembled guests cheered her, she came close to tears. “I wish you were all in my local party,” she said.
Among the guests was shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, who, to her credit, popped in to show support, having earlier denounced activists who use Palestine as a cover for anti-semitism. At this point, though, it will take more than words to reassure Jewish voters.
A visiting Israeli Labor Party MP, Ayelet Nahmiasverbin, did not mince her words: “What leadership have you shown, Mr Corbyn, to root this out? Stop acting like the victim of this. You have met with more terrorists who have killed Israelis than Israelis.”
There was little explicit anti-jewish feeling at the conference. At no point did it feel unsafe. But there was an undertone. An otherwise respectable-sounding delegate droning on about the EU on the train took time to denounce talk of antisemitism as “a conspiracy”. An article in Red Pages,a pamphlet produced by a group called Labour Party Marxists, boasted that the Jewish Labour Movement had “kept their heads down”.
Meanwhile, the so-called Jewish Voice for Labour, the hard-left, pro-corbyn front group, took surreptitious pictures of kippah-wearing, Jewish delegates and posted them online to show that Jews were “not at all” afraid. One of the men featured soon responded, horrified: “Deliberately taking pictures of Jews on conference floor to make a political point? Disgusting. How on earth do you know what I’m feeling right now?” Soon afterwards, the post was erased.
Signed copies of Angela Rayner’s speech, three pounds!” After each event, Labour activists appeared at the doorways of the conference’s main hall. They were there to flog hard copies of the speeches for hard cash. This crass act of Mammon brought to mind my student days of reading Marx. I watched with horror the commodification of Ms Rayner’s thoughts, words and pen strokes, listened, appalled, to the transformation of her brain labour into commercial exchange value and was disgusted by the wanton exploitation of the shadow education secretary’s unique and precious species being.
Outside the main hall, I was able to enjoy the fruits of cheap factory labour as honest socialists thrust plastic-wrapped packages at me with the offer: “Free Palestinian flag!” Ah, I thought, there’s another meaning to the phrase “free Palestine”.