Joy at Corbyn’s defeat, but anti-Semitism still thrives

Jewish Britons are over the moon at Labour’s thrashing but changing leader doesn’t fix an institutional problem

Ever since Labour’s strong showing in the 2017 election, the Jewish community has lived in fear of a Labour government. We have been so anxious about the prospect that 47 per cent of us have seriously considered emigrating.

At 10pm on Thursday, that fear vanished. Then something hit me that had never occurred to me before. Labour hadn’t just caused anxiety across the Jewish community: it had done something even more appallingly profound. It had made my family and my community doubt the decency and sense of our fellow Brits.

With hindsight, of course, the British people were obviously going to tell the extremists where to go. That is what we have always done and will always do. But such was the onslaught from the Corbynites that most Jews feared otherwise.

The past two days have been a blur of conversations, texts and emails from friends and relatives, ecstatic that the threat has gone. I share their joy.

But I also advise caution. Because while the current Labour leadership has been humiliated, the poison they released has not gone away. Far from it. Jeremy Corbyn and his allies turned Labour into a party so foul that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission decided it had to investigate its institutional racism. But the Corbynites could only behave as they did because so many Labour members are either anti-Semitic or don’t give a damn about it. Those members remain – and will choose the next Labour leader.

It’s true that it was Mr Corbyn’s boneheaded determination not to take serious action against Labour anti-Semites that turbocharged the problem. Had a more politically astute figure such as John McDonnell been leader, he would have been far more subtle about attempting to neuter the issue.

That is precisely why the departure of Mr Corbyn does not mean the end of Labour anti-Semitism. Had it been Mr McDonnell in charge, the Jew hate would not have disappeared: there would simply have been a more sophisticated effort to persuade people that it had.

We can expect that whoever succeeds Mr Corbyn will understand the political imperative of being seen to do something. The forthcoming leadership contest will, I am certain, see every candidate stress the vital importance of tackling anti-Semitism. And when there is a new leader, he or she will surely make an early speech full of apologies to the Jewish community, stressing the need to change the party’s culture and promising, for example, to meet with genuine Jewish groups – rather than the fake organisations set up by the Corbynites solely to deny the party had a problem.

It will all sound good. It will be hailed as a transformation. And it may even be sincere. Any new leader would have to be the most gormless, ideologically constrained fool – to be Jeremy Corbyn, in fact – not to do this. No new leader will want to be saddled with the same label of institutional racism as Mr Corbyn.

But speeches, fine as the words may be, mean nothing. Mr Corbyn wrote a series of articles and made a series of comments committing himself to the fight against anti-Semitism. But his Labour Party sat on over a thousand cases and his office repeatedly intervened to stop action being taken.

The real issue is not about disciplinary processes and speeding up action against anti-Semites. It is about the culture of the party, of the members. Tackling that and returning Labour to being a party that decent people can support requires a leader to effect a fundamental transformation of the party’s culture. That means a moment even more dramatic than Neil Kinnock’s confrontation of Militant at the 1985 Bournemouth party conference, or Tony Blair’s abolition in 1994 of Labour’s Clause IV commitment to nationalisation.

I have a suggestion. The new leader should announce an investigation into how and why Labour has become riddled with anti-Semites. It should be led by a genuinely independent expert on anti-Semitism, such as Anthony Julius, and include serious figures from the Jewish community as well as key allies of the new leader.

That would be a good and necessary start. But the new leader will have just been elected by the same membership that he or she will be investigating – and will have to confront the party members as their first act. If any of the potential leaders really are willing to do that, they may actually mean business.