Labour disservice
Melanie Phillips’s “Antisemitism engulfs the British Labour Party” (As I See It, September 29) is regrettable.
The Labour Party Conference is attended by, at most, 3,000 delegates from a membership of over 600,000, who therefore represent less than 0.5% of the party. The party’s activists mostly attend and are frequently the most extreme in their opinions, but are not necessarily representative.
Because of the antisemitism they express (which incidentally is quite common in other political parties), Ms. Phillips asserts that people like myself are doing the Jewish people and the State of Israel a disservice by continuing our Labour membership. Like many of my co-religionists, I remain inside the party as a proud Jew and Zionist because that is the best way to influence our opponents.
Your readers might be interested to learn that I seldom need to speak on behalf of Israel in the House of Lords because so many non-Jewish Labour members there are first on their feet to show support for Israel. ROBERT WINSTON
London The writer is a Labour politician and sits in the House of Lords.
Melanie Phillips’s column is an insult to the intelligence of a thinking reader.
Members of the Labour Party – many millions in number – have, according to Ms. Phillips, been “engulfed” in antisemitism. Perhaps she meant the just the few thousand delegates at the Labour Party Conference.
The three instances she cites as having caused the “engulfment” are the remarks by a Holocaust denier at a fringe meeting, an anti-Zionist calling for two groups to be expelled from the party, and a lady who opposes the policy of the present Israeli government. As a result of these three, the whole party has become antisemitic.
Ms. Phillips is also columnist for The Times. I wonder if her editor there accepts the kind of hysterical drivel.
Only an individual can be antisemite or anti-Zionist. It is a personal decision – in which case it is time to stop trying to hang these labels on the Labour Party or any other party. NICK REYNOLD
Hadera