I'm standing as a Labour candidate because I know they've changed on antisemitism - The Jewish Chronicle

It was the telephone calls that were the most invasive. Usually, there would be three of us, all women, looking at who would be brave enough to answer the phone, but sometimes just two of us and on occasion we worked alone. On those days the phone was left to a machine to respond to callers and our triple levels of security was never left unlocked.

Naturally, we reported issues, sent them to the police when particularly bad, “double-hashed” individuals to flag them to others should they pick up the phone on a future occasion, sent some to the Labour Party for action. Sent many names actually.

Whilst we waited and waited for a breathing space, we had new antisemites to deal with every day. From all over the country. Emails were easy to deal with - press the delete button. Letters were binned and the answerphone abuse was deleted.

But not all could be ignored. The far-right targeted us, and it was the same group who later tried to murder an MP. Labour Party members abused us, from the South-West, from Merseyside, from the North-East, in fact from all over. Usually men. Sometimes violent men.

We wrote police statements, got interviewed, and years later saw criminal convictions. There should have been more.

I could say my husband was to blame. John Mann was the local MP and has been my husband for 36 years. It was immediately after one of his Question Time appearances that someone from the Glasgow area chose to threaten me and my daughters with rape. The police couldn’t be certain which individual in a household used a computer that night to intimidate and threaten us, so there was no prosecution.

But it was me who was targeted by local Labour member Roger Dyas Elliot several years earlier. He had been banned from attending our events after antisemitic letters to local papers, about how the Rothschilds and others were controlling the world. As Campaign Coordinator, he blamed me for not being accepted as a council candidate so he sent me dead blackbird through the post. My call to the police led to them calling the bomb squad, because they had to presume the worst.

Dyas-Elliot was convicted and quickly expelled.

Now I am standing for Parliament.

I think it's fair to say that I know what I am going into, indeed the keyboard warriors have lept into action. I spent ten years on what has become the Unite national executive opposing the extremists, so I am battle-hardened.

But I am also committed to fighting antisemitism and indeed all hatreds. There is no hierarchy of racism.

Why now, why me? Well, why not me? And now is a crucial time for us to fight back.

If I thought and I saw and I experienced from the coalface of Labours antisemitism that my party had not cut out its cancer, then I could not look myself in the mirror and put myself forward as a Labour candidate.

Of course, it has needed leadership from Sir Keir Starmer and it's me and others like me who are the ones who are winning this battle. And by win, I don’t mean that everything is perfect, but as Bury and Pendle and Peterborough have all shown, there is antisemitism in the Tory party and in all our political parties. I bear witness to how bad things became in the Labour party and now I bear witness to fact that the Jewish community can again choose to vote on the economy, the NHS and the energy crisis.

When I proposed that my council adopted IHRA, we did so with a tiny almost invisible Jewish population in Bassetlaw, a dozen or so at most, but we did so because it is essential that we play our part. The decent people of my area Bassetlaw have little knowledge of the Jewish community in Britain and minimal contact. All the more important that we set a threshold of zero tolerance of any antisemitism. We have acted and we have seen results from that action.

I share that responsibility with others, a bigger percentage of Labour councils have adopted IHRA than Tory or Liberal Democrat or SNP councils. But after what I have been through, I will not be standing back and let others take a lead. I bear the scars of what today’s antisemitism leads to and I have a responsibility to speak out.

The idea that I should run away from the fight, that I should hand over my party to extremists was always anathema to me. I stand proud to be a Labour candidate in a changed Labour Party. We stood, we fought and we have won to turn the Labour Party back to being a party of decency again. I will strike out whenever and wherever antisemitism rears its ugly head in Labour. In beating antisemitism we must all clean our own backyard first and of course there is work still to be done. There always will be in all political parties.

When my first daughter was born, an elderly great aunt delighted in our choice of Rachel as her name. I had unknowingly named my Rachel after her mother, my great-grandmother. It was the first time that I discovered that I might have Jewish ancestry. Rachel Rhoda Smith died years before I was born and I have come to realise that she faced antisemitism from within her own family.

During those difficult Corbyn years, I took some solace in online family research and I learned more about my roots. Rachel Rhoda Smith was the daughter of Aleza Raphael of Whitechapel. Understanding why emergency supplies of chicken soup was lovingly prepared and carried across town when we were sick children fell into place as the family secret revealed itself. It is only one grandmother, but as we know from history, for some that was sufficient.

There is no way that I could put myself forward as a Labour candidate if I did not see and feel that the Labour Party had cleansed itself of antisemitism. At the next election, at least on this issue of antisemitism, it is politics as usual and I pay a particular tribute to the women inside and outside the Labour Party whose courage and inspiration has made this possible. As a country, we owe them a debt of gratitude and the Labour Party will always be grateful.

Topics:

Antisemitism