Labour’s mistake is to believe there are no enemies to the left

A young Labour party member recently asked me “How bad was the anti-Semitism in your day?” I had to reply that the current problems were new to the party.

Of course, there had been racism — the labour movement has always had a strand of nativism that could rapidly edge over into xenophobia. From the dockers marching to support Enoch Powell in 1968, to Gordon Brown’s infamous promise of “British jobs for British workers”, racism was always a clear and present danger. But anti-Semitism? This is a recent phenomenon, and it coincides with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader.

That conversation echoed in my mind as I watched one MP, Luciana Berger, who is Jewish, resign from the party and denounce it as institutionally anti-Semitic; another, Chris Williamson, was suspended for claiming that Labour was being “too apologetic” about anti-Jewish hatred. How has it come to this?

Of course, no party can be free from members with prejudiced views — Labour has its share. But, given the role of Jewish radicals and intellectuals in the British labour movement, why has the party fallen prone to the oldest of prejudices?

The fault lies in the fallacy of the “popular front” and, more precisely, the myopia that leads some in Labour to believe that there are no enemies to the left. Tony Benn made this mistake when he opposed the expulsion of the Militant Tendency in the 1980s. Good fences make good neighbours and strong boundaries make strong political parties. The tide of enthusiasm that swept Mr Corbyn to the party leadership brought with it people and beliefs that had been carefully excluded from the party by its former leader Neil Kinnock. (Any remaining after his era quit in disgust and disillusionment at New Labour prime minister Tony Blair.)

Now these individuals are back, along with a binary world view formed during the cold war — if global politics is a struggle against capitalism, then the US is the enemy and my enemy’s enemy is my friend. From this flowed pro-Soviet feeling in the 1970s and 80s and the pro-Russian sympathies found in the writings of Mr Corbyn’s most talented staffer — strategy chief Seumas Milne. These views are held by his senior staff because they are held by Mr Corbyn.

It’s a Manichean philosophy: the Labour leader’s difficulty in criticising Hamas and Hizbollah or supporting actions against the Syrian regime is because they oppose US-backed Israel. Once understood, this outlook explains nearly everything about Mr Corbyn. And his own unwavering commitment to this way of organising the world leads him to a serious miscalculation. Just as there are no enemies to the left, there can be no enemies on “the right side of history” — any unfortunate views that surface, particularly on the subject of Israel, must be misunderstandings. So, being pro-Palestinian bleeds into anti-Zionism. Opposition to a, or indeed any, state of Israel can be separated from anti-Semitism.

Others might be more careful. But for Mr Corbyn and his friends on the left, the cause is righteous and, therefore, they are always right. This leads to absurdities. Take the Labour leader telling two Zionist critics that they “don’t understand English irony”.

Not all the resurgent left are at fault here. Jon Lansman, leader of Momentum, the Corbynite faction, has a long record of opposing anti-Semitism. His organisation produced a video message for supporters deconstructing the Rothschild conspiracy theories popular on both far-left and far-right.

But the understanding of anti-Semitism within the Labour left remains one-dimensional. It is not sufficient to say that since one opposes racism in all its forms that — of course — one opposes anti-Semitism. These prejudices manifest in very different ways. As the historian Deborah Lipstadt points out, anti-Semitic tropes share three elements: money or finance is always in the mix; an acknowledged cleverness that is also seen as conniving; and, power — particularly a power to manipulate more powerful entities.

All of these feature in the criticism of Israel and the so-called Israel lobby. They can be easily moulded into a critique of capitalism, too. Rhetoric about the 1 per cent and economic inequality has the same underlying theme — a small group of very rich people who cleverly manipulate others to defend their interests. So anti-capitalism masks and normalises anti-Semitism — condemned as the “socialism of fools” by German political writer August Bebel.

Another young Labour member recently asked me: “What would you think if 40 per cent of Britain’s Asian community said they would consider emigrating if a Labour government were elected?” This is what Britain’s Jews said in one poll: it’s a serious situation. Diagnosing how Labour got here is one thing, changing it is another. But change must come — and from the top.

The writer is a political strategist

Letter in response to this article:

Labour must continue to apply complaints system / From Arthur Goodman, London, UK