3 min read
ByDavid Aaronovitch, David Aaronovitch
David Aaronovitch says Labour's general secretary has done none of things that would show she genuinely wants to defeat its Jew-hate
February 11, 2019 10:29Imagine for a moment that the organisation you worked for had a serious problem and that it was your job to put it right. Not only that, but the problem was one you yourself thought was intolerable and consequently you were utterly determined to sort out. Not rhetorically, but in reality. In taking it on you were determined to be the prime mover.
And now ask yourself — soberly and without prejudice — whether the Labour Party general secretary Jennie Formby, in the matter of antisemitism in the Party, resembles such a person. Rhetorically, of course, she sometimes does. Her most recent statement, sent as a message to the Parliamentary Labour Party promises to “eliminate the evil of antisemitism from our movement once and for all”, and adds a “personal” commitment “to reassuring the Jewish community that we stand with them against oppression and prejudice.”
Well, yes, but anyone can say the abstract words. This week, in his State of the Union address, Donald Trump extolled the virtues of bipartisanship and the need to rise above division. Even those applauding him cannot have believed any of it. So, returning to my original question, what would a person who was so committed to getting rid of any taint of antisemitism in her party actually do?
The first thing she’d do is to be up front about what the problem was that she was dealing with and how it came to exist. She’d level with the world about the mechanisms whereby critiques of Zionism had metamorphosed into the acceptance and repetition of antisemitic tropes. She would be open in her analysis that a specifically left-wing form of anti-Jewish prejudice had long existed and indeed predated the foundation of the state of Israel. She’d say that in order to tackle the problem you had to understand it.
Next she’d recognise that in recent times these problems have become worse. And that far from them being tackled, many in the Party including those close to the leader, had reacted to people making complaints as though they were enemies.
Indeed she would want to observe that over the last three years many of her comrades had been forced to move like a tantruming child sent to its bedroom, edged bit by bit across the living room and up the stairs, screaming and holding on to every piece of furniture and every bannister. And only finally stopping when the cause looked hopeless. Walker. Livingstone. Shawcroft. Willsman. The mural. The wreath. The English irony. The obsession with the issue of Palestine beyond all other international issues. The evident penetration of anti-Jewish ideas into the Labour Party via social media. She would be frank about all of it.
Then she would present as detailed and transparent an account as the law allowed of what was being done concretely to fight against such ideas ideologically and by disciplinary measures. She would give numbers for those expelled or suspended, explain in as explicit terms as natural justice allowed, what they had been disciplined for, and, if there was some delay, she would account for it.
Ms Formby has done none of those things.
Her message to the Parliamentary Labour Party consisted of a number of pieties, a few shallow claims and bureaucratic obfuscations. How, for example, are we to understand the boast that, “we have nearly completed the process of recruitment to more than double the size of the staff team that handle investigations and disputes processes, and they have been working incredibly hard”?
Or “these reforms have enabled us to clear all of the previously outstanding antisemitism cases from the investigation and disputes panel stages of the process. Only complaints which have been recently received are still under investigation”?
But Jennie, how many staff? How many cases? How recent is “recently”? What kind of cases are they? Is the volume of complaints increasing or decreasing? And why does your claimed but completely unquantified success in tackling this problem not reflect itself in how Labour members are behaving and writing on social media?
And here, of course, we get to the nub of it. Jennie, no one really believes you.
The sensible observer will conclude that, at best, this is a damage limitation exercise designed to contain the reputational harm being done to the Corbynite Labour Party. It isn’t being done out of conviction or outrage.
How could it be?
The simple and obvious truth is that the leader himself and his closest political allies would not recognise an antisemitic trope if it bashed them on the back of the head with a caricature of a Jewish banker.
Nothing you are doing is designed to change their minds.
David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Times
