2 min read
ByRobert Philpot, Robert Philpot
For the third consecutive year, the Liberal Democrat annual conference will clash with Yom Kippur. As journalist and party member Charlotte Henry noted in a piece for the Spectator's blog in July, this repeated unhappy coincidence suggests not simply "a cultural blindspot over the Jewish community", but a party that is "telling a community that you don't really pay them much attention".
Polling suggests the feeling is mutual: on the eve of the last general election, research by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research indicated only 11 per cent of Jews intended to vote Liberal Democrat, this at time when the party was scoring nearly double that in the polls.
That Nick Clegg led the domestic criticism of Israel this summer over Operation Protective Edge - pushing for a ban on arms exports - will have done little to mend fences. The deputy prime minister's defenders argue that both Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath adopted a similar stance during other conflicts involving the Jewish state and note that, although Clegg was also at the forefront of the attacks on Israel during the 2008-9 war between it and Hamas, he was also the first senior politician to call for a boycott of Durban II over its anti-Semitic discourse.
But, as the party gathers in Glasgow this weekend, it is some of the discourse rather closer to home which troubles many in the community.
A slew of crass and offensive comments about Israel, "the Jews" and the Holocaust by some of the party's parliamentarians have led to the impression that the Liberal Democrats have a Jewish problem. A charitable interpretation is that it is the party's bureaucratic structures which have led many of these to go unpunished.
For a party whose support has collapsed since 2010, there is some raw politics at play. As John Kelly, vice-chair of Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine, suggested in April, the party managed to chisel away at previously rock-solid Labour support among the Muslim community before the last general election, not only because to its stance on the Iraq war, but also because Mr Clegg had been "the only party leader to consistently criticise Israel for its policies towards the Palestinians".
In the post-Iraq 2005 general election, the Liberal Democrat vote rose most sharply in seats with the heaviest concentration of Muslim and student voters. The result - the highest representation in Parliament for the third party since 1923.
Clegg's U-turn over tuition fees has splintered one part of his coalition: attacks on Israel offer a rare opportunity for him to shore up support among Muslims and reach out to those left-leaning voters who the Liberal Democrats wooed in 2010 but lost with the formation of the coalition.
Electorally, it is a relatively cost-free strategy - the three-way marginal seat of Hampstead and Kilburn, Sarah Teather's Brent Central and Lynne Featherstone's Hornsey and Wood Green are the only constuencies with a strong Jewish presence where Clegg's party is seriously in contention next May.
For the deputy prime minister, international politics is truly local.