Throughout the chapters of our lives, British Jews have learnt that Nazism culminated in the gas chambers but did not begin there. It did not begin with the cartoons, or the ghettos or the destruction of Jewish businesses. It began with the bystanders: when ordinary, unpolitical people turned a blind eye. My grandmother, an escapee from Berlin, had no memories of the smashed windows. But she never forgot her friend from primary school who told her one morning that she could no longer talk to her because she was a Jew.
And yet there is another lesson I have learnt in my life as a debater, barrister and writer. Never invoke comparisons with the Nazis. Don’t mention Hitler. One doesn’t do one’s argument any service at all when one reaches to the extremes of history to make one’s point. But what about when it is strictly accurate? What about when one can see history repeating itself in one’s own continent? What then?
The story of the British Labour Party over the last year or two is a well-documented descent into the ugliness of antisemitism. Many members have said openly grotesque things about Jews. Some have been disciplined, some have not. But what is most dangerous in the Labour Party is what is denied as antisemitic, what doesn’t yield an outcry anymore. In Labour, it is barely commented upon that outside its national Conference leaflets are handed out explaining why the Jewish Movement in the Labour Party should be removed. Or why so many have come to the view that, unique among the nations, (only) Israel should not exist and (only) Israel’s products and people be boycotted.
It was the shabby strategy of Jeremy Corbyn, the Leader, to commission an “inquiry into antisemitism” by a Party loyalist, Shami Chakrabati, to whitewash the party of the charge in exchange for her being awarded a life peerage. And so together they crafted the ultimate and archetypal blackmail of Jews: you only raise antisemitism to damage the Party, thus proving the disloyalty of which we accuse you.
As ever with the Hard Left, it is not just antisemitism alone which is of concern, although it is the fulcrum. Its leaders flirt with misogyny and violence. Just recently the Shadow Chancellor calling for a female MP to be “lynched”. They are in thrall to Russia and Islamist strongmen, in the pay of Iranian state TV, curiously silent when Aleppo is bombed but happy to share platforms with homophobic hate preachers and holocaust deniers.
None of the above is news in and of itself, but Labour has now reached an emphatic conclusion on the matter: it will not change course. This weekend, the Labour Party membership (with the aid of thousands of Marxist and Trotskyist entryists) overwhelmingly endorsed its leader after his mandate was challenged. There is now little doubt that Corbyn will lead Her Majesty’s Opposition into the next General Election, seeking to become the British Prime Minister.
The opinion polls suggest that Corbyn is unelectable. Thankfully, he is serially incompetent and a truly terrible orator. But politics can be radically affected by events and surprises and Prime Minister Corbyn cannot be written off as impossible, however unlikely.
Were this to happen, the Jewish community would face its gravest crisis in post-war British history. For in their conspiracy-fuelled minds, Corbyn’s base consider that it is the Jews who are responsible for the ills of capitalism and imperialism. How long before British trade is banned with Israel? How long before blind eyes are turned to anti-Jewish hate crimes in the name of “protest against the occupation”? Senior Conservative MPs already warn of resurgent dinner party antisemitism and we were told this week that “the Labour Party is no longer a safe space for British Jews” by a Labour MP. So how safe would Jews be if Labour ran the country?
That is why it is the moderate, decent Labour MPs, of whom there are many, hold the key to Labour’s future; or rather, whether this Labour Party has a future. Many of them, like Wes Streeting, John Mann, Jess Phillips and Yvette Cooper, have stood up and told their Party that antisemitism has no place, is a scourge. They may be in the Blair tradition or the Brown tradition or the Kinnock tradition. It does not matter: they are right and they are brave. But they have also lost their Party. The effect of their remaining in Labour is to bolster a campaign for a Labour Government under whose leadership antisemitism has flourished and under whom their values are unrepresented. This would not just be a political failing on their part, but a moral one.
The only course for those principled Labour MPs to take is to split from Corbyn and his cronies and to launch a new, progressive, centrist coalition which abhors the bigotry of the Hard Left.
It would of course be a wrench from them to leave a Party whose traditions they have embraced for their whole life. But a dignified exit would create both electability and decency in one simple manoeuvre.
“What’s in a name?” asks Shakespeare’s Juliet of a rose, Labour’s traditional symbol. It is the values of one’s party that matters, not its nomeclature. Should the Labour moderates chose to remain in Corbyn’s Labour, they will be irrelevant bystanders in their Party – and worse, they will be actively facilitating the ugliest political leadership in British political history. For the sake of the Jews whom they support, but also for their own sake, they have to get out.