Is it safe for Jews to vote Labour?

The membership of my local party changed dramatically after Corbyn was elected leader. My CLP went from 500 to 2,700 members. Suddenly meetings were besieged by a mob.

I did lots of things as an MP, but all my local party were interested in was Israel. I was surrounded by people who thought Israel shouldn’t be there and they hounded me.

One member said I had dual loyalties and represented a “foreign fascist government”. I said, “that is basic antisemitism”, but they carried on.

Then there was a Momentum plot to deselect me.

While Corbyn was still leader, the Labour Party conducted an internal report into my experience and concluded that I had suffered antisemitism. The local party wasn’t allowed to meet for some time, but no disciplinary action was taken against individuals and the report was never published.

Once the sanctions were lifted, the CLP couldn’t openly harass me, but the strength of the Momentum faction had grown, and they started a campaign of “dehumanisation”.

CLP members would avert their eyes from me, slam doors in my face and refuse to use my name, referring to me only as “the MP”.

My CLP thought that socialism could exist alongside antisemitism. Labour was my home and I wanted to stay and fight, but in the end I couldn’t.

It pains me to say it now, but I realised that unless Labour lost the general election in a big way, then the hard left would never be dealt with and Labour’s antisemitism would not go away. I resigned after a vote of no confidence in me, to be debated on Yom Kippur, was submitted.

On the day he was elected, Starmer told me he would make it his mission to rid Labour of antisemitism. He rang me up and said he had one goal: to make the Labour Party electable and deal with antisemitism.

I knew it would take time for the Liverpool CLP to be rid of Jew-hate, but I watched Keir Starmer address Labour’s antisemitism and I rejoined.

Starmer has been put to the test on Gaza, but he has held the line. He’s been attacked and Labour even lost some local elections because of its stance on Gaza, but Starmer was firm.

Now I am relieved to say there is no barrier for a Jewish person to vote Labour.

Melanie Phillips, columnist

A social commentator for the Times, panelist on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze, author and columnist for the JC, Melanie now lives in Jerusalem

I’m not convinced that it is safe to go back in the water, as the scene in Jaws would have us believe.

I would like to say that Labour was safe for Jews again because it would make all of our lives so much easier.

Starmer made changes that have improved the party. All credit to him for being ruthless and changing the rules.

He understands that unless the Labour Party is a moral project it is nothing, and so if it has the stain of antisemitism, it is nothing. He will do everything he can to remove that stain. But a stain is something you can see. He has removed what we can see, which is the worst of it, but a number of problematic individuals are still there.

Kate Osamor has been readmitted to the Labour Party after she used Holocaust Memorial Day to compare the Holocaust with Palestinian deaths in Gaza. She was rightly sanctioned but is unrightly back again after a quick apology. Richard Burgon said his local hate march in Leeds was on “the right side of history”. In Rochdale, the “reformed” Labour Party produced a disastrous candidate.

But if we put those individuals to one side, a structural issue in progressive politics that goes well beyond the Labour Party reveals itself.

The progressive world supports the Palestinian cause, but this cause is constructed entirely on the desire to annihilate Israel and appropriate Jewish history.

The Metropolitan Police are allowing people to scream “jihad” and “globalise the intifada” on the streets of London, but I am most concerned by the Palestinian flags. The flags say to me: “We want the Jewish people out of our lives in the UK and in Israel.”

This has infected the Tories too. A decent opposition would oppose the government. If Starmer really had the interests of the Jewish people at heart, he would oppose the disgusting lies about Israel being told by David Cameron. But instead, Labour has doubled down on those lies. If the majority of Labour members support the Palestinian cause, then the party still has a fundamental problem.

Josh Simons, director of Labour Together

Josh first worked for Labour as a party staffer under Jeremy Corbyn, before resigning over antisemitism. In between, he was a Fellow at Harvard University, a Research Scientist in AI at Facebook, and wrote a book about data and democracy

I didn’t grow up in a Labour family, but when Corbyn offered me a job in 2015, I joined the party and moved to London.

My dad was concerned about antisemitism in the Labour Party and offered me a firm warning, but it didn’t dawn on me that the party had a serious problem until Seumas Milne realised I was Jewish.

I was put in charge of Corbyn’s relationship with the community. As the only Jew in the office, I had to prepare Corbyn for meetings with community leaders. I asked him why he had shared platforms with various antisemites; he didn’t have any answers.

The Labour leader would usually make tea and bring in homemade jam for meetings, but when the Board of Deputies met our team for crisis talks, Corbyn treated them with disdain and a stoney face. Here were Jews looking for reassurance, and Jeremy Corbyn could not give it to them. My dad had been right.

I worked with Keir Starmer when he sat in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and understood his strategy. Starmer knew that Corbyn would lose because he knew that the British public was too sensible to elect him.

Starmer also knew that if he won Labour leadership, he could quickly take control of the institution. Unlike the Tory Party, it is the membership of Labour who hold the power, not the MPs. Starmer needed members to elect him and, once he did that, he could change the party.

He might have served in Corbyn’s cabinet, but he was playing the long game. Now he has rid the party of antisemitism and is ready to take centre-left politics to Number 10.

Politics is about power: Starmer had to win and he had to be smart and strategic about it.

I care about centre-left values, democracy and freedom. The Labour Party is the best vehicle to advance those values, so while it will always be hard for a Jewish person like me to trust Labour, I trust Starmer, and I trust Labour to deliver centre-left change.

Starmer’s capacity to lead a shadow cabinet into a position that is ahead of even the US on Israel and Gaza takes great courage and skill. Members of his shadow cabinet share a diverse range of views on the war – some of which I disagree with – but Starmer’s ability to navigate these views and bring them together is the mark of a skilled politician.

Ian Austin, life peer in the Lords

Formerly a Labour Party MP, he resigned in 2019 to sit as an independent and was subsequently ennobled 

Rishi Sunak has fired the starting gun and Britain faces six weeks of campaigning.
And what a welcome difference it is to the last election.

When Britain last went to the polls in 2019, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn who had described Hamas and Hezbollah as friends, praised an antisemitic mural and spent his entire time in politics campaigning against Israel.

Under Corbyn, Labour had been poisoned by anti-Jewish racism. Eight out of ten of Britain’s Jews thought the party was antisemitic and 90 per cent said they would not vote Labour as a consequence.

Today, happily, Britain’s Jewish communities can decide who to vote for on everyday issues like everyone else. Which party has the best plans to manage the economy, improve schools and hospitals, make our streets safer or get immigration under control? That is a huge change from the existential worries facing Jewish people in 2019.

But there are concerns too. Let’s hope both parties can stand up to the anti-Israel obsessives whose campaigning can – all too often – cross the line into antisemitism. The Rochdale by-election and last month’s local elections show how events overseas can poison politics and damage community relations here in the UK.

All candidates and the rest of us have a responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen in the next six weeks.

Mike Katz, national chair of the Jewish Labour Movement

In addition to his role at the JLM, Mike is on the executive committee of London Labour, sits on the Daily Mirror editorial advisory panel, and is on the board of Yachad UK. He is also the chair of Camden Labour

This is an extremely worrying time to be a Jewish person.

October 7 showed us that the fight against antisemitism is never over. We always need to be vigilant in the battle against hatred.

JLM was at the forefront of this fight under Jeremy Corbyn. We repeatedly told the Labour leadership that they needed to address antisemitism, but we were rebuffed time and time again. Corbyn’s team was not interested in taking any action against antisemitism. They just wanted to keep their political show on the road.

We discussed disaffiliating with the party that we had been attached to for over one hundred years, but decided instead to go for a campaign strike in 2019 and only canvassed for a few very select candidates.

JLM members today tell me that their CLPs have completely changed. The Jewish experience of being in the party has fundamentally transformed from where it was under Corbyn.

The first thing Sir Keir Starmer did when he was elected leader was to apologise to the Jewish community for antisemitism.

Since Starmer’s first speech as leader, the number of members who have been expelled and the organisations who have been removed is staggering. The depth, breadth and speed of the change gives me lasting confidence that the Labour Party is different under Starmer.

Although I will always find it hard to trust an institution that was used and abused in the way Labour was under Corbyn, this change is solid. The EHCR has taken the Labour Party out of special measures, and JLM helped shift the dial.

Soon after the deadly Hamas massacre in Israel, I went to the Labour Party’s annual conference. A moment of silence was held in the main hall for the Israeli victims of the attack. I was on tenterhooks, but you could have heard a pin drop.

These were mainstream Labour members with empathy, warmth and humanity for Jews. A few years ago, Labour conference looked like a Palestinian flag shop, so this marked a changed Labour Party. The entire shadow cabinet attended a Labour Friends of Israel vigil a few days later.

On Gaza, Starmer has proven that he is serious about achieving change. The position of the Labour front bench is the same as the government and the White House and that’s exactly where it should be.

But antisemitism is just one element of Jewish life. What excites me is what a Labour government will look like for Jews and non-Jews alike.

There will be more investment in fighting crime, so we might see community policing on our streets. There will be better quality public services and a renewed focus on economic growth.

The UK under Labour will be better for us all.