Labour’s anti-Semitism row

To The Guardian

I neither know nor care whether Jeremy Corbyn should be accorded the Labour whip, but I’m dismayed by the terms of the discussion. Apparently his offence was to say that the scale of the Labour Party’s anti-Semitism problem had been dramatically overstated by his political opponents. There are two obvious points about this remark. First: there’s a good deal of evidence that it is true – presented, for example, in the book Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and

Public Belief. And second: it does not imply that there is no problem, or that anti-Semitism doesn’t matter. There’s no contradiction in thinking both that Labour’s anti-Semitism must be decisively opposed and that it’s not as extensive as people have been led to believe.

In other words, the view he expressed, right or wrong, is a reasonable one: there are rational grounds for holding it, and it doesn’t necessarily entail any anti-Semitic assumptions or implications. Yet several participants in the continuing furore have spoken of “zero tolerance” – that is, they demand that the expression of this opinion should be prohibited. It seems to me that in this case they, not Corbyn, are the enemies of liberal principle.

Prof Peter Womack, University of East Anglia

To The Guardian

Why are Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters being so tribal about this? This isn’t an attack by Keir Starmer on “the Left”. It’s clear that anyone who did what Corbyn did would have been treated in the same way. He downplayed anti-Semitism, just when zero tolerance had rightly been announced; he thereby also undermined the Labour Party.

Too much self-regard is stopping him from admitting that he’s fallible and that he needs to give a full and clear-cut apology.

Tim Bailey, Oxford