Margaret Hodge: Labour hasn't won back Jews' trust yet, but we're working on it

Dame Margaret Hodge MP has spoken about fighting antisemitism in the Labour party, describing it as "one of the proudest moments of my career."

In an interview with former Labour MP for Ashfield, Gloria De Piero, the veteran Jewish MP said: “I'm really proud of a really difficult period in my life, and that was fighting antisemitism in the Labour Party.

"I'm an immigrant, I came here at the age of 4, my children are the first generation in our family that havent had to flee the country they were born in because of persecution."

“So to find antisemitism brought to the mainstream of the party and to find my party that I've been a member of since I was 18 infected with anti-Jew hatred and racism was more than I could bear.”

?t=2762

When asked whether she considered quitting Labour over the scandal which saw Luciana Berger leave in 2019, Dame Hodge said it never crossed her mind.

She added: “I’ve always been a fighter and I chose to take on the battle and fight to get rid of it out of the party,”

“So, I'm really proud of - you know there were a lot of people, particularly women, they were the ones at the heart of all this, who joined with us to fight the antisemitism and I'm proud of that.

“And in a funny way, because I lived through Militant in the 80s, and then Corbynism in 2015, in the 80s it took us a long time to get rid of the Militant influence, the extreme left in the Labour Party.

“I think this time round, because it was just so pernicious, because this anti-Jew hatred was at the heart of how they had chosen to identify themselves, it was their choice, it's gone much more quickly."

“And the Labour Party is now, you know, it takes a long time to change a culture, takes a long time to rebuild the trust of the Jewish community, but we're much further along that road than I thought we might be so soon after 2019.”

Speaking about her long working relationship with Corbyn, Hodge said while she never agreed with his politics, she genuinely didn't believe he was antisemitic until he became leader.

She said: "Journalists in the early days would say to me ‘Jeremy Corbyn's antisemitic’ and I'd say, ‘no, no, I don't think he is’."

But, after Corbyn's handling of several now-infamous incidents including being pictured at a wreath-laying at the graves of Black September terrorists and supporting the artist behind an antisemitic mural, Hodge said she ended up having no choice but to condemn him.

When asked if it was fair that she called Corbyn an antisemite to his face, Hodge simply replied, "yes."

She added: "I think that the way he dealt with that sort of antisemitism was just awful. He refused to accept the definition that every other public institution accepted of what antisemitism was. He refused to take seriously the horrible, horrible, horrible abuse that I and others were receiving. I mean, if I just told you in a 2-month period from when the report of the Equal Human Rights Commission on Antisemitism in the Labour Party, when that was published, and Jeremy was going in and out of the Labour Party. In that 2-month period, I got 90,000 social media messages, most of which were abusive"

“So, it's horrible, and for him to say we were making it up or we were ‘weaponising antisemitism’.”

In recent weeks, Labour has faced questions over its vetting of candidates after a raft of councillors were suspended for alleged extremist remarks.

Labour’s ‘repeat offenders’: Three ‘rehabilitated’ councillors face fresh antisemitism claims