Please stop applauding Labour for the bare minimum - The Jewish Chronicle

I really don’t want to be a party pooper. I too would love to be tearfully joyous, wondrously ecstatic that Labour – the organisation that styles itself as the anti-racist party - is no longer run by antisemites and that Dame Louise Ellman has re-joined. But I feel like the person standing in the corner wondering what magic drink people have imbibed and why they didn’t offer me any.

Yes, of course I am happy that Corbyn and the worst of the antisemitic cranks have been relegated to the fringes and are slowly – so slowly – being ejected. But how did we ever get to the point where we are pathetically grateful that they are doing the thing they are meant to do? And they aren’t even doing it that well.

The return of Ellman, heralded during Starmer’s conference speech, which some of my friends got all gooey and emotional about, left me rather nauseous, I am sorry to say.

I’m pleased she feels things have changed enough for her to go back. But that all those MPs who had not only ignored antisemitism in their party but, in some cases, actively perpetuated the ‘smear’ line, were suddenly giving her a standing ovation genuinely turned my stomach. It was gaslighting – they were pretending that they weren’t guilty.

Not just papering over the cracks, Ellman’s return symbolised the message that Starmer had put out earlier in the week that the party had “closed the door on antisemitism”. He made this grandiose sweeping statement when the party agreed to rule changes for an independent complaints department – a change demanded by the EHRC which had found Labour guilty of appalling antisemitism. A third of the delegates there didn’t even want to pass that.

Blowing a raspberry in his face, a day after Starmer prematurely said the antisemitism issue was now all over, the party conference passed a motion calling for sanctions on Israel and backing a Palestinian ‘right of return’ which would – could only – end the Jewish state.

The fact is, despite the valiant work of the Jewish people who stayed in Labour and their allies, there were still many antisemites (and, yes, I know that anti-Zionism doesn’t always equal antisemitism - but it too often does) at the conference. The only consolation is they are no longer the ones in control of the party.

There are two things at issue here.

One is the obsession with Israel, which is demonised by so many in the Labour party as the worst nation in the world. It was the seventh most popular topic to debate by Labour CLPs – more than violence against women, Coronavirus and protecting workers rights.

Education on the issue, so that it is seen not merely as a binary scenario of ‘Israel bad, everyone else good’, but rather as the complicated and difficult situation that it actually is, is desperately lacking not only among the rank and file but among many MPs, too. Over the summer, far too many of them were leading anti-Israel marches which were characterised by antisemitic chants and placards.

Labour’s response on this should have been led by Starmer and his shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy when the summer skirmishes started. Instead, they appeared hamstrung and for several days both only attacked Israel. Hamas weren’t mentioned.

This obsession impacted on many of us during those dark days of the conflict. Our children were bullied in schools and universities, work was made uncomfortable for many of us if our colleagues were left-wingers, and there were physical attacks in the street. This demonisation of Jews because of their connection with Israel is the next obvious step; words lead to action.

The second is the uncomfortable truth that Starmer was next to Corbyn when he caused all that pain to our community. While he can insist that they rowed about it furiously in shadow cabinet meetings, we can only take his word for it; what we do know is that he barely criticised it in public, preferring to parrot the line that all this stuff about Corbyn was down to those awful creatures in the media.

When Ellman quit the party in October 2019 saying, “the Labour Party is no longer a safe place for Jews and Jeremy Corbyn must bear the responsibility for this,” Starmer was asked about what she had said by Andrew Marr. He replied: “I don’t accept that. I don’t accept that. I am 100 per cent behind Jeremy Corbyn.”

On winning the leadership, he called Corbyn his “friend” and even now he said that to win the whip back all the former leader has to do is apologise for saying the antisemitism crisis in Labour had been “dramatically overstated”.

Why has no one guilty of the antisemitism crisis – which hurt so many of us, made us feel like strangers in our home, led to many of us contemplating leaving the country – properly apologised and acknowledged what they did? Why hasn’t Corbyn, in particular, been thrust completely out of the party instead of headlining fringe events where they are still wailing ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ like cultists? Why are Labour MPs, including deputy leader Angela Rayner, still attending events with Corbyn and people thrown out of the party for antisemitism? Why hasn’t Starmer acknowledged and apologised for his own part in it?

This week I’ve been interviewing some of the brave men of the 62 Group who fought anti-fascists in the 1960s, and whose story will be told in new BBC series Ridley Road, which starts on Sunday night. They knew how you dealt with antisemites. While I’m not advocating starting fights at Labour meetings, I do think we need to put our heads up a bit higher, find a bit of Jewish pride, and only forgive the Labour party when they actually and completely solve their problem with antisemitism.