Confronting the poison within the party means repudiating Corbyn’s leadership

The Labour Party has long been an uneasy coalition between socialists and social democrats. But, under the Corbyn leadership, this has taken on new and menacing forms. The Labour Left which, under Nye Bevan and Michael Foot, was strongly parliamentary in character, has come, under Corbyn, to be buttressed by extra-parliamentary activists whose commitment to parliamentary methods is by no means wholehearted. By contrast with the SDP in the early Eighties, the new breakaway of seven former Labour MPS disagree with Corbyn not only on issues such as Brexit but also on the methods used by the extra-parliamentary Left that sustain the Corbyn leadership and which that leadership has legitimised.

These methods include bullying and intimidation, much of which has an anti-semitic element.

Luciana Berger, the only Jewish MP of the seven who have left the party, has suffered so badly that she required police protection at the last Labour Party conference. A number of her former colleagues who have, for now, remained on the Labour benches have received similar abuse. Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, has received, in her own words, “hundreds of pages of abuse” with anti-semitic undercurrents. She has, she says, been accused of being a Zionist traitor: “They say I’m taking shekels, I’m Mossad – and I’m not even Jewish”. She has had to put nine locks on her door out of fear for her safety.

Margaret Hodge, who fought off the BNP in her Barking constituency, says she finds more anti-semitism in the Labour Party than she ever encountered from the far-right. Ruth Smeeth, the Jewish Labour MP for Stoke on Trent North, has received more than 25,000 incidents of racial abuse. She has never spoken on Middle Eastern matters, so nobody can claim that she is being targeted over “Zionism”. Her crime is being Jewish.

She has “on numerous occasions” raised the issue of racism “privately” with Corbyn, with no result. “My biggest issue,” she says, “is that he knows it’s happening and that it’s still happening.” Labour, she concludes, “is no longer a safe space for British Jews”.

This seems to be a problem at all levels of the party, not solely for those who are in Parliament. Clare Kober, former Labour leader of Haringey council, declared that: “The levels of anti-semitism I’ve seen in the Labour Party are just astonishing.” And it seems to have spread to students on the Left, too. In 2016, Alex Chalmers, the non-jewish head of Oxford University’s Labour Club, resigned because “a large proportion of both OULC and the student Left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews.” Note he said “Jews” and not “Zionists”.

Britain has always been the least anti-semitic of countries. The vast majority of voters neither knew nor cared that Michael Howard, the Conservative leader from 2003 to 2005, or Ed Miliband, the Labour leader from 2010 to 2015, were Jewish.

I doubt their ethnic origin swung a single vote one way or another. In the past, politicians who have espoused anti-semitism, such as Oswald Mosley in his British Union of Fascists in the Thirties, became political pariahs.

Corbyn, however, is not a pariah but Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.

The seven MPS are right to highlight the overriding importance of antisemitism, which is by no means an issue solely for Jews. The prevalence of anti-semitism undermines the wider values for which not only the Labour Party but Britain as a whole have always stood. The former Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, captured it perfectly when he declared that anti-semites are never just antisemites. Hitler and Stalin did not confine their hatred to Jews. Antisemitism, he went on, “is the world’s most reliable early warning sign of a major threat to freedom, humanity and the dignity of difference”.

In the early 20th century, August Bebel, the German social democrat, called anti-semitism “the socialism of fools”. But progressive intelligentsia who continue to support Labour – the Keir Starmers and the Shami Chakrabartis – are far from being fools.

Loud in their protests against racism elsewhere, they are afflicted with laryngitis when it comes to combating anti-semitism in their own party. Indeed, the eerie silence of so many Labour MPS, including members of the Shadow Cabinet, is almost as sinister as the more outright tolerance of anti-semitism by the Corbynites.

Confronting the poison of antisemitism almost certainly involves a repudiation of the Corbyn leadership. Until the Labour Party takes that step no anti-racist, indeed no one who holds fast to liberal principles, can, with good conscience, support it. Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at King’s College, London.