{"id":4126,"date":"2021-09-16T12:41:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-16T16:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=4126"},"modified":"2021-09-21T11:58:32","modified_gmt":"2021-09-21T15:58:32","slug":"antisemitism-crisis-in-labour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2021\/09\/antisemitism-crisis-in-labour\/","title":{"rendered":"Antisemitism crisis in Labour"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel Randall:<\/span> Your book is a dissection of the major events of “Labour’s antisemitism crisis” under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, from 2015-2019\/20. Can you give a chronology of those events for readers who may be unfamiliar with them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Renton:<\/span>Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, our main opposition party, in September 2015. Right from the start, he faced accusations<\/a> of anti-Jewish racism. But he was popular, he had just won the leadership contest with a healthy 60 percent of the vote. Also, it felt as if these were criticisms of him for campaigning for Palestinian rights. Therefore, he and the Labour left were able to ignore them. Labour lost the 2017 election, but narrowly and with Labour increasing its vote faster than at any time since 1945<\/a>. At this point, it felt as if Corbyn was the next Prime Minister and the Left close to power.<\/p>\n

In March 2018, a Jewish Labour MP Lucianna Berger asked Corbyn<\/a> about his support for an American artist Mear One who had painted a street mural in east London, \u2018Freedom for Humanity<\/a>\u2019. If you look at the mural for any length of time, it clearly embodies any number of antisemitic visual messages: an idea of Jews as the financial masters of the world<\/a>. Corbyn had seen the photograph and posted a quick, mis-spelled message of support for the artist. Between spring 2018 and the end of 2019, the press ran constant stories about the Labour Party, accusing it or its members of antisemitism.<\/p>\n

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“LUCIANA BERGER on anti-semitism and leaving Labour party”; Art<\/a> by dou_ble _you<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In my book I go through the scandals. There are places where I say they weren\u2019t true – for example, the press confected a story about Corbyn laying a wreath to the terrorists who attacked the 1972 Olympics<\/a>. But there are also places where I say ordinary Labour members were worse than the press conveyed, including in the treatment of Lucianna Berger. She had long been the victim of abuse from the far right, but by the end of 2018, there was a similar level of vitriol against her from the Left, with numbers of Corbyn supporters calling her a traitor or worse. Two left-wingers received criminal sentences<\/a> for harassing her. By the time of the 2019 general election the Corbyn movement was in retreat, over Brexit, and other issues. He lost the 2019 election and his replacement as Labour leader Keir Starmer, has since taken the party to the right.<\/p>\n

Renton: <\/span>Now a question for you, Daniel. There have been other movements on the left accused of antisemitism (like Bernie Sanders in 2019<\/a>) where the allegation has fallen flat. But with Labour, from the point of view of millions of voters, this story felt believable. What was it about the British Left that made us vulnerable to criticism?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Randall: <\/span>The British Left and labour movements have our own particular history with antisemitism, going back to trade union agitation to restrict Jewish immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries<\/a>. But there were two specific, more recent, factors that made it likely there would be an \u201cantisemitism crisis\u201d around \u201cCorbynism\u201d in particular. Firstly, the pulling into, or back into, the Labour Party of older leftists formed in a 1970s and 80s Left dominated by a campist anti-imperialism with a particular attitude to Israel and Zionism. In the case of the Workers\u2019 Revolutionary Party (WRP), an influential current throughout the 70s and 80s, that campism had an explicitly antisemitic form. You go into some detail in your book about comments by the former London mayor Ken Livingstone; the formative collaboration of Livingstone\u2019s early political career was with the WRP.<\/p>\n

The second source of vulnerability was a failure to move beyond shallow, populist responses to the 2008 crash. Populist misunderstandings of what capitalism is and how it functions are given an ideological frame by antisemitism, and with the way the Internet transformed the transmission of ideas it was easier for conspiracy-theorist and antisemitic ideas to circulate.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite, but he was part of the problem, simply because of who he was politically. His socialism is moralistic, thinking in terms of good (downtrodden and disadvantaged) and bad (powerful and oppressive) people. That lends itself both to shallow populism, and to campism, which replicates the \u201cgood and bad people\u201d framework on the terrain of international politics. In addition, he chose to put into key positions in his office people like Andrew Murray and Seumas Milne who were dyed-in-the-wool campists and Stalinists.<\/p>\n

Randall: <\/span>Broadening the focus slightly, I want to ask a question about what you write about the relationship between antisemitism and racism more generally, both in terms of their shared features and the distinctions between them. Could you say something on this issue?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Renton: <\/span>People often make the mistake of talking about antisemitism as if it\u2019s something that\u2019s so large it\u2019s almost mysterious: that it\u2019s been around forever and yet it\u2019s always at the same level of intensity, so that the world is never more than one small incident away from the start of a second Holocaust. The way we talk about it can hide the reality that, at its simplest, antisemitism is a word for racism directed at Jews.<\/p>\n

This is only the first step towards understanding it. Because of the history of the ways racism has been used against Jewish people it is also, of course, unlike colour-based racism, Islamophobia, etc. But once you grasp the commonality of racism and antisemitism, other things follow – that anti-racists have a stake in fighting antisemitism, just as we do in fighting anti-black and other racism; and that people who want to fight antisemitism have an interest in resisting other forms of prejudice as well. That doesn\u2019t mean we are guaranteed to live up to our politics, but that we should strive to.<\/p>\n