No sooner had Sabbath rest descended on eruv-zoned central London than word spread from Westminster of a proposed ghetto wall. It appears that a Jew called Shapps had written to the mayor of London on government notepaper demanding a partition between two Jewish areas of the city. This is a very bad thing, any which way you care to look at it.
Shapps, whose ancestor must have dropped a superfluous consonant from the name, was made transport secretary last year by our shamboris prime minister in the hope that making him a bus and train spotter would give him fewer opportunities for rubbing voters up the wrong way, as he had done so successfully in previous posts. But give Shappsy a sheet of crested paper and he’ll be off rubbing again.
He has told the mayor that, in order to pay for empty buses and trains during Covid, Sadiq Khan should extend a £15 congestion charge all the way round the North and South Circular roads, which I may remind you were once considered a possible eruv perimeter for the whole of London.
That was in the 1930s, around the time my Uncle Marc bought a house in Highfield Gardens which, he told me, was the very last in London. Beyond the North Circular was nothing, a brownfield site called Hendon, of no use to man nor beast. Golders Green, in those days, was the end of the known world. No more Jews to be seen until you reached Hull.
Well, we know what happened next. Migrants arrived from all parts of Europe and, finding no room in the GG Beth Hamedrash, crossed the roaring circular road at risk of their lives and built a new Jerusalem on the Hendon side. Neither green nor pleasant, Hendon was noted for the unsightliness of its built environment — not just the pebbledash residential semis but the synagogues and shtiebls, which look more like temperance halls in rust-belt Lancashire than houses of Hebrew prayer with a proper kiddush cabinet under lock and key.
Despite visual blight, Hendon soon defined itself demographically against Golders Green which, by the machinations of dodgy estate agents and property “fixers”, was occupied by ultra-Orthodox black hats from Tottenham and Stamford Hill (pay attention, please: you may be asked this question in geography mock A-levels at Hasmonean).
Hendon proclaimed itself “modern” Orthodox, which means people who prefer to live in the 19th century than the 18th, and held itself aloof from GG residents no matter how often the two shtetls met at simchas. Hendon visited Golders Green to have its sheitls combed out and buy a bun at the late Grodzinski’s. GG went to Hendon for property auctions. A kind of mental apartheid prevailed.
That arrangement has just been undermined. A congestion charge running down the fast lane of the A1 would amount to a ghetto wall that sunders Hendon shoppers from special offers at Kosher Kingdom and GG frummers from the glatt eateries of Bell Lane. If it’s going to cost £15, kids from NW4 will no longer be dropped off at NW11 schools. Oldies in the Sage care home will go unvisited by grandchildren. GG shiur attendances will drop to single figures.
A social and economic disaster, the Shapps charge makes the West Bank barrier look like a model of enlightened co-existence and the Trump wall a benevolent gift to the Mexicans. Every half-educated Hendon canine is calling it barking. And unworkable. Penalise Hendoners when they go to Golders Green and they will find some other way of getting there, be it by the Gaza tunnelling option or by a flotilla of rubber boats on the River Brent to which the French Navy will turn a Nelsonian blind eye. One way or other, Jews will sink this egregious measure.
Our premier ally in the coming skirmish is not bluff Matthew Offord, the Brexiteering Hendon MP, but the bus-driver’s son Sadiq Khan, who knows how to punch a ticket and has pledged to fight the charge. His office says: “there is simply no way any mayor could accept conditions of this nature, which would make it harder to tackle the virus and choke off London’s economic recovery”.
What on earth was Grant Shapps drinking? This would be the same Shapps who once told the JC: “I feel totally Jewish; I am totally Jewish. I don’t eat pork, we only buy kosher meat and we don’t mix meat and milk. I like being Jewish and I married a Jewish girl. It’s like a way of life and it’s good to be able to instil some of that sense of being in your kids.” And he wants to charge the Jews for crossing from Hendon to Golders Green? And hold the seat at the next election?
My next drink’s got an “n” in it.
