There’s an old joke in South African circles that it’s impossible these days to find anyone who was on the wrong side of the fight against apartheid. As so often with campaigns against evil in which good eventually triumphs, everybody who was there at the time later insists they were always on the right side. So it is with the Labour Party.
Yet, unlike the principled few who resigned from the party in disgust, or the Jewish MPs who were hounded out, those who remained have questions to answer.
Steve Reed is one of them. Last week he told the JC the antisemitism problem laid bare by the EHRC’s report was “nothing short of horrific and contemptible”. But last year he insisted the problem was confined to a “tiny minority”.
Similarly, he now says that “I was an ally 100 per cent”. But when Luciana Berger saw no choice but to flee from Labour and hoped others might join her in solidarity, he resolutely tweeted: “I’ve been a member of the Labour Party for 40 years this year, and I’m looking forward to being a member for the next 40 years.” That’s a strange way to show you’re an ally.
He says he can understand why his victimised colleagues and their actual allies left the party, but maintains that “if all of us had walked out, then the Labour Party would be in the hands of the antisemites now.” But if it weren’t for the Jewish community and the decent British public, the government would be in the hands of an antisemite now – precisely because Mr Reed and his colleagues loyally campaigned to make Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister.
In fact, not only did Mr Reed not challenge his institutionally racist party, but he even served on the front bench during Mr Corbyn’s tenure as leader. “I wasn’t just sitting there on the front bench hiding,” he insists. Well, he certainly did a good impression of doing just that.
Mr Reed is far from the worst culprit. As our research into the records of each of the members of Sir Keir Starmer’s new Shadow Cabinet showed, the reaction of most Labour MPs to antisemitism over the past five years has been deafening silence. For what was once an avowedly anti-racist party, it’s astonishing how tolerant of racism almost all its MPs were.
Then, of course, there are those MPs who have actually indulged in antisemitism themselves. On the day the EHRC published its report, we submitted a complaint to Labour against 15 sitting MPs (including Mr Corbyn), to be investigated only once Labour has introduced the independent disciplinary process the EHRC has demanded.
Mr Reed is among them, not because of a longstanding animosity towards Jews, but because, earlier this year, he tweeted an antisemitic trope about Jewish billionaire puppet masters. He immediately apologised and deleted the tweet. It showed that even those who weren’t central to Labour’s antisemitism scandal have imbibed casual anti-Jewish racism.
Mr Reed’s record shows just how much Labour still has to do to restore its anti-racist tradition.
Gideon Falter is Chief Executive of Campaign Against Antisemitism
