Labour’s anti-semitism crisis – what caused it and how well was it handled?
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
Jamie-Stern Weiner is editor of the free e-book Antisemitism and the Labour Party, published last November.
Here, in an interview published in the Morning Star, he gives his views on how the “antisemitism crisis” arose, how it has been exploited, the role of the media in amplifying the accusations – and what Labour should have done about it.
This article was originally published by the Morning Star on Sun 9 Feb 2020. Read the original here.
Labour’s anti-semitism crisis – what caused it and how well was it handled?
With anti-semitism cited by many as a factor in Labour’s defeat in the general election and left figures such as Michael Rosen and Ken Loach still being attacked over it, Ian Sinclair talks to academic and author JAMIE STERN-WEINER about the controversy.
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I notice this in the Grauniad’s report on the Newsnight leadership debate :
” … the candidates discussed the party’s record on antisemitism – which all four said they would apologise for.”
Is this dishonesty what we’re voting for??? – with no alternative?
The only apology that should be made is to the Party for the endorsement of the BoD/JLM fictions.
Otherwise – apologise by all means if you actually are or have been guilty of antisemitism.
But : “Not in my name”.
Excellent article. Appeasement was, and is, a failed strategy.
With the “new new antisemitism” we really have come full circle, as is clear from the extraordinarily high percentage of Jewish members of the Labour Party who have been targeted. Call it for what it is: bigoted demonisation (by Jews) of the wrong type of Jews.
RH makes a good point: all four leadership candidates are basically endorsing the BoD and chief rabbi’s view that labour is “institutionally antisemitic”. This amounts to a gross insult to the membership of the party, as they are implying that we are willing to remain members of an antisemitic party.
An honest straightforward summary of what happened plus exactly what the Labour response should have been. This was stymied – mostly by the divisions within the party about how to respond, as well as by the seemingly myriad false accusations from some Labour members.
Re the BOD, and other lists of pledges in the leadership campaign, with hindsight the candidates should have not signed up to anything but should have referred back to existing Labour policies on equality and inclusion.
Now, I fear, we are going to be even more divided by the trans issue. This is worse as a large percentage of women members are being alienated from even voting in the leadership campaign. It is about conflicting rights – of trans people to self identify and of women to safe spaces. Some analysis of this would be helpful.
This analysis is spot on and exactly what I’ve been saying since this whole sorry story began. The leadership should have challenged those making accusations to produce their evidence instead of automatically assuming they were true.
As for the current crop, they’re just as terrified of being accused of antisemitism as Corbyn has been and will roll over on request and probably expel the lot of us! I had a big argument with Lisa Nandy after our local hustings: she basically told me she knew more about antisemitism than I did and that I was completely wrong about the level of prejudice within the Labour Party. Not only is she not Jewish, she wasn’t even born when I first joined the party, yet she apparently knows more than me.
It would be easy to despair, but we need to fight back. If we give in and back down, they’ve won.
This interview is very helpful in setting out the basic issues surrounding allegations of Labour antisemitism.
It is clear that Labour could have and should responded robustly to false and evidence-free accusations. This was obvious from the outset so the real problem is to know why it didn’t do so.
There are no doubt many factors to consider in answering this problem but I think two which should be considered are the following.
(1) Labour’s general approach to anti-racism, and therefore to antisemitism is too simplistic to deal with complex issues. Responding to the issues involved in the accusations of antisemitism against Labour required required rather more than Labour’s simple moralism about clearcut racism. It required a confident undertanding of the nature of antisemitism that Labour did not and does not have – as it demobstrated by its adoption of the IHRA document with its clearly spurious definition and its tendentious examples. Labour was just not equipped to deal with the onslaught that hit it.
(2) Despite having promised to put the party members in charge of party policy when he was elected leader in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn never came near to doing so. The left leadership carried on with the same backroom stitchups and opaque policy making which has always been such a strong feature of Labour politics. Even on specific issues on which the leadership could have called on the expertise of members who would willingly have given it the reaction was instead to rely in an inner circle which clearly gave very bad advice. This was nowhere clearer than in the case of responding to the accusations of antisemitism. To anyone who suggests that this would have been difficult because of the affilaiate status of the JLM I would say (a) that does preclude informal contacts and it didn’t prevent them from reading the excellent material in the LRB and Open Democracy and (b) it could have been pointed out that not only does the JLM not represent all Jews in the LP but it is not even open to all Jews to join because of its required acceptance of Zionism.
So my view is that the affair revealed fundamental political weaknesses of policy and organisation of the Labour Party. And now all the leadership contenders have committed themselves to ensuring that it stays that way.