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coming into existence, I think it throws into question the right of Israel to exist.”
She added: “My own view is nobody should be questioning the right of Israel to exist so I’ve never been in favour of it [BDS] and I have consistently spoken out on it.”
But Ms Nandy hit out at those who criticised her and other Labour campaigners for taking part in debates with those who do support BDS.
“There is a live debate going on in the Middle East around BDS and it’s right that people who support it should get a hearing along with people like me who don’t,” she said.
“I think there is a worrying trend in Labour towards no platforming and I don’t think that is the answer to any of the main challenges we face.”
Ms Nandy said she was not in the main hall during the infamous Labour conference in Liverpool in 2018, on the day delegates waved Palestinian flags en masse.
“I saw it on TV later as I had committed to speaking at too many fringe events,” she said. She insists she has been “proud” to hold the Palestinian flag herself — but she would not refuse to also hold an Israeli one.
Ms Nandy insisted that any work she has done with the more radical Palestine Solidarity Campaign has been “positive... particularly around the issue of child detention”.
But she added: “I do believe there are certainly elements within what I would call the ‘anti-Labour left’ that use the Palestinian cause for their own ends.”
The 40-year-old has had a hugely encouraging two weeks, having secured the backing of the GMB union and is starting to see herself spoken about as a genuine challenger to frontrunners Sir Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey.
With Mr Corbyn’s successor announced on April 4, Ms Nandy was unsurprised that Labour’s failure to tackle antisemitism has kept coming up throughout the leadership campaign.
“For Labour this was and is existential,” she said. “When we were on the doorsteps in December, it came up.
“I have a very small Jewish community in Wigan. This should not have been one of the key issues of the election — but it was.
“And it was because people are thoroughly decent in this country. They do not like nastiness, they do not like discrimination.
“I have a lot of elderly constituents who fought in the war to defeat Hitler.”
Ms Nandy stressed she “in no sense” believed the vast majority of Labour members were racist and said it broke her heart to see local activists who had chased the far right out of Wigan being insulted during the election campaign.
“They don’t like racism, don’t like discrimination — yet they’ve been called ‘racists’ for a month on the doorstep,” she said.
Ms Nandy acknowledged the criticism of Labour’s leadership candidates who are now speaking out about the party’s failure on antisemitism, having remained silent when Mr Corbyn was leader.
She said that, unlike her three rivals, she was not a part of Mr Corbyn’s shadow cabinet after 2016. She said she “hasn’t criticised anybody else because I genuinely don’t know what they did.”
She added she had been asked whether the party should dismiss every member of its ruling National Executive Committee.
“The truth is there were people speaking up, and there were people who were not,” she said.
“What I welcome is that every single leadership contender is now publicly saying this is a problem that needs to be dealt with.”
But then she pointedly added: “One of the things I would like to happen now, one of the things I found very hard to understand, is why the shadow cabinet did not demand the right to the see party’s submission to the EHRC (the equalities watchdog conducting the investigation into allegations of institutional antisemitism in the party).”
Ms Nandy confirmed that all four leadership candidates had been invited to a briefing next Wednesday with Mr Corbyn in which he will explain why he responded to the antisemitism issue in the way he did.
“One of the things I’m going to be asking is for the EHRC submission to be shown to us,” she said.
Ms Nandy was adamant that, when the EHRC reports back, the “minimum” the party would do under her leadership would be to implement all of the recommendations.
She revealed that the experience of her father Dipak Nandy, the Indian-born Marxist academic who was instrumental in writing the Race Relations Act and subsequently became the director of the Runnymede Trust, had influenced her own thinking.
“The reason I am a Manc by birth”, she said, “was that my father moved [to Manchester] so he could work for the Equal Opportunities Commission, trying to get it off the ground as one of the things that came out of the Act.
“The EHRC has obviously evolved from this, but one of the regrets of the people involved in drafting the legislation in the first place was the lack of teeth the organisation had.
“I say implementing the recommendations of the EHRC is a minimum requirement because I am not sure how strong they are going to be.
“I think it is important not to close the door to more robust action.”
Ms Nandy also recalled how Jewish
Labour MPs were treated for speaking out at weekly meetings of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
“I will never forget standing in [Westminster’s] Committee Room 14 with Jewish MPs begging the party to take seriously what was happened and to adopt the IHRA,” she said.
“The response coming from the top table — that we know better than you about what constitutes racism — I can’t imagine a scenario where the party would speak to any other minority community in such a fashion.”
So what else — other than adopting the recommendations of the EHRC and signing up to the ten Board of Deputies pledges on “healing” the rift with the Jewish community — can we expect from a Labour Party led by Ms Nandy?
“One of the first things I would like to do is open the door and listen to people who left the party on what we need to do to resolve this,” she said, before adding: “And then do it.”
Asked about the influence of the proCorbyn, fringe Jewish Voice For Labour group, she said she felt “uncomfortable telling Jewish people what groups they can and can’t belong to.”
But Ms Nandy added that her “starting point” as leader of the Labour Party would be with the Jewish Labour Movement.
“That seems clear — and doesn’t mean that I would not work with a whole range of other organisations, the Board, the Community Security Trust, the JLC.
“But there is one condition, that if you do not accept that the incidents of antisemitism that have happened over the past few years have actually happened, if you do not accept there is a problem, then no meaningful dialogue is possible. At times JVL has given the impression that they do not believe this is a real problem.”
Ms Nandy was less willing to criticise the powerful Unite union boss Len McCluskey’s grip on the party — although she accepted her complaints about his approach to antisemitism remained unresolved.
“In my personal dealings with Len on antisemitism he took what I was saying seriously,” she said.
“I went to see him after JLM had the contract to do their training sessions removed. He took what I said seriously — but it never got resolved and JLM never got the contract back.
“That actually has been the story of the last four years. Spending a lot of time behind closed doors doing the talking and nothing happening.”
Ms Nandy said there was “a big moment coming up in a few weeks time” over antisemitism.
She accepted there was “no use” trying to urge former Jewish colleagues such as ex-MPs Luciana Berger and Dame Louise Ellman to return to the party “at the moment”.
She concluded: “We have got to sort this out. I suppose my message would be as leader of the Labour Party, I will make sure we sort this out.”
When we were on the doorsteps, antisemitsm came up’