Don't vote labour.

For past elections I've got to this point and posted a careful explanation - the case, as it were - for voting the way I planned to vote. I've been, over the last week or so, thinking through what I might say about the issues in this election.

And then I remembered that my wife's aunt, born in Manchester and living in Leeds, wanted a Magen David - she insisted it had to come from Israel. We have got her one. It came to me that there really is only one issue in the election and that, for the first time, I'll be asking you not to vote for a particular political party - asking you not to vote Labour.

At the weekend a few thousand Jews and supporters gathered in Parliament Square - to do one thing, to say no to antisemitism and to issue a plea for the rest of us non-Jews to listen to them when they talk about the threat to their community. A threat made worse by the fact that the Labour Party, at the highest level, is infected with that antisemitism.

The antisemitism at the heart of Labour means that otherwise good people, folk who see themselves as decent and caring, are considering voting to put a man described by most Jews as an antisemite into the highest political office in the land. Here's how Gideon Falter from the Campaign Against Antisemitism described Corbyn:

Referring to the days of Corbyn as a backbench MP, “when he could speak his mind without fear of scrutiny,” Falter described a man who committed countless blatantly antisemitic acts such as blaming “the hand of Israel” for Islamist terrorist attacks committed in Egypt, honoring a sheikh “banned from the UK for saying that Jews drink non-Jews’ blood,” calling a Hamas terrorist his brother, holding a “repulsive event on Holocaust Memorial Day in which Jews were accused of being the successors to the Nazis,” trying to have the word Holocaust removed from the title of Holocaust Memorial Day, laying a wreath at a memorial for the Black September terrorists responsible for the Munich Massacre, and much more.

Jewish organisations and individuals have gathered together the evidence - you can read many at the Labour Against Antisemitism website - from hundreds and hundreds of Labour activists. Not, as often claimed, people upset about Palestine but the full range of antisemitic nastiness - images of hook-nosed Jews straight out of Nazi propaganda, tropes about Jews controlling the media, the government and international finance, lies about the origins of Ashkenazi Jews, calls for the destruction of Israel - from the river to the sea - with the genocide that entails. And the Labour Party has failed to respond to this infection out of fear that, in doing so, it would get too close to its leader.

The response of many people has been either to deny the antisemitism - "you're confusing anti-Zionism with antisemitism" - or to say a bit of racism is acceptable to get a progressive government. The Guardian, in endorsing Labour summed up this position when it said:

"The pain and hurt within the Jewish community, and the damage to Labour, are undeniable and shaming. Yet Labour remains indispensable to progressive politics.”

A shocking attitude, essentially 'throw the Jews under the bus so you can get all that free stuff from a Labour government".

So I'm not asking you to vote for a particular Party just pleading with you to listen to those worried, frightened Jews. I don't care whether you vote Lib Dem, Conservative, Brexit Party or Monster Raving Looney. I don't care if you scrawl a rude picture on your spoiled ballot paper or stay indoors reading a book rather than voting. Just don't vote Labour. Please.

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Learning from Labour's mistake - thoughts on anti-Muslim sentiment and an enquiry for the Conservative Party

First, if you want to get an understanding of antisemitism in the Labour Party read this long piece from Sara Gibbs, a Jewish socialist:

One of the most devastating aspects of Labour’s antisemitism crisis has been seeing the sheer volume of people I like, respect, even consider friends, denying or minimising this issue which has caused me so much personal devastation. Tweet after tweet from moderates and pals, suggestions that people who don’t hold their nose and vote for Labour are “idiots” or “as bad as Tories” or “responsible for homelessness”. I will speak more about this at the end of the article, if you get that far. Knowing what I know about Labour and antisemitism and seeing it so callously disregarded by people I hugely respect has been one of the most tiring and demoralising things I’ve ever been through.

One caveat is that I don't recognise Sara's description of the Conservative Party (much of it is a crude caricature) however, when Sara talks about not wanting to throw her Muslim friends under the bus, us Conservatives should pay heed. Just because nine out of ten Muslims aren't going to vote Conservative doesn't mean we can indulge those too frequent tropes about Muslims all being terrorists or invaders and how they are going to breed white people into minority status if not actual extinction.

I do not consider that the Conservative Party is institutionally anti-Muslim but I can see how we could become so given the persistence of support for the lines peddled by people like Katie Hopkins and David Vance among a minority of our members. After all, Corbyn had been a backbench MP for 30 years before, in an act of derangement, the Labour Party elected him leader. It is entirely possible that a similar disaster could befall the Conservative Party if we don't maintain a robust attitude to racism (and especially anti-Muslim racism).

I live in a city with one of Britain's biggest Muslim communities - over 100,000 live in Bradford these days. And this community isn't even a community but rather a pot-pourri of different communities. We have Muslims who adhere to an austere version of Islam with strict dress codes and veiled women and Muslim women who wear western clothes and don't cover their hair. There are shia and ahmadi mixed in with the myriad versions of sunni Islam. If you take a brief peek into Muslim twitter or facebook you'll see robust arguments about attitudes to women, Saudi-promoted salafism and a host of other debates filled with words us non-Muslims can only guess at. Plus cricket, football and cars, of course.

I can tell you of my good (or maybe not so good) Muslim friend whose description of veiled women makes Boris Johnson's letterbox seem mild. And how I find myself gently and kindly pointing out casual antisemitism - from the political activist and armed forces veteran who told me the jews control the media to a businessman I know and love who described how the seller in a property deal "jewed" him.

Then there's the racism towards Muslims - "Asians". Always described as 'them' and where every bad thing in the city - the declining city centre, flat house prices, crime, bad driving, bins not being emptied, litter - is laid at the "Asians" doorstep. It's not that some within these communities aren't a problem but rather that, in the manner of all racism, the faults of a few are extended to the whole community. The hard-working young solicitor who has a nice BMW is seen as a problem because other young Asians (and non-Asians if we're honest) with similar cars drive like idiots round our streets. And the Asian businessman building a big new house in Heaton is, of course, a drug dealer rather than someone running a chain of takeaway pizza shops.

Then there's the terrorism thing. I remember holding a big rally with Keighley's Muslim community when I stood for Parliament in 2001. These rallies are quite difficult to control (especially when someone else is organising it for you and you don't speak Urdu let alone Mirpuri dialect Punjabi) and at mine a young man was called up by the master of ceremonies, only to be rapidly shut down and bundled away from the microphone as my host muttered about 'mujahadeen' and 'nutters'. I gathered later that he was launching into an impassioned speech backing a Kashmiri terrorist group banned in the UK. It's not that there's widespread support for terrorism within Muslim communities but rather that there's sympathy for the causes (Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan) that those terrorists exploit.

In addition many Muslims - with a modicum of justification - consider that their belief is unjustly singled out for criticism and this leads to a very defensive response to problems such as street grooming or a growing drugs culture. I'm pretty sure these things are haram but too often representatives of Muslim communities react prickily with comments such as "they're not all Muslims" or "most rapists (or drug dealers) are white, y'know". Very few Muslims are rapists, drug dealers or terrorists but, too often, concerns about county lines, street grooming of young girls or Islamist extremism get a response designed to deflect and an assumption that the concerns are directed at the whole community.

None of this, however, excuses the 'othering' of Muslims or the sort of "all Muslims are liars" or "London has fallen" tropes that are popular with racists like Tommy Robinson. Nor should we tolerate those who claim that street grooming, crime and terrorism are in some way required of believing Muslims. It is in this context that the Conservative Party needs to frame its promised enquiry into racism and prejudice - it's less that there's a need to seek out bad apples but rather that we need some clarity as to what will not be tolerated and how the Party will respond to breaches of this guidance. I hope this is what we will get and that it will strengthen our resolve to be a One Nation political party. I remember when John Taylor was selected as Conservative candidate in Cheltenham - he lost (to a decidedly racist Lib Dem campaign) but worse he faced horrendous racism from within the party. That we now have a front bench including people from Muslim, Hindu and African heritage shows how far the Conservative Party has come - we still have a long way to go and any enquiry must be honest enough to take us further on that journey.

More than anything, though, we should learn from what we've seen in the Labour Party and resolve not to try and obfuscate, deflect, ignore and cover up racism without our ranks. If we do it won't end well.


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Antisemitism. This is Britain we're supposed to be better than this.

When Margaret Hodge talked about her Dad saying "have a suitcase packed", she said something that near every Jew would relate to. I remember one Jewish acquaintance explaining why Jews favoured the professions, arts and businesses like diamond dealing - you could put your wealth in your pocket, pick up that suitcase and move.

This feeling of threat isn't new - my wife's family were given an ultimatum in 1492: leave, convert or die. They left Spain, taking with them what they could carry. And this pattern is repeated again and again as places decide Jews are a problem or Jews are to blame or Jews are too rich.

The Tweet at the top here is a stark example of what's happening now in Britain. Because people close to the leader of the Labour Party have got away with (so far) open antisemitism we see people now able to talk about "nasty Jewish people" and "final solutions". Is anyone surprised that, faced with the prospect of these sort of attitudes being close to power, some Jewish people are opting not to take the risk and packing that suitcase? 

This is Britain for heaven's sake, we're supposed to be better than this.

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The nice, pleasant, decent left is valorising violence with its silence and excuses

I know it's not all of you but "The Left" as it likes to call itself really does have something of a problem with being extremely unpleasant. And this problem is getting worse not better.

It may not be the biggest of big deals but this rather illustrates the problem:

"The government has blocked a giant statue of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament Square over fears it will be vandalised..."

 So it's just a statue of Britain's first woman prime minister - something definitely worth marking in Parliament Square (where, in case you haven't noticed, there aren't many statues of women). But because of that unpleasant faction on "The Left" it isn't going to happen.

The bigger problem with all this is that so many of those nice, pleasant, decent folk who hold left-wing opinions are prepared to make excuses for the sort of people who indulge in this sort of vandalism and worse. You only need to read the story of the attack on Sarah Wollaston's office, listen to Sheryll Murray describing the appalling vandalism and personal attacks in her election campaign, or to run down the Tweets of the Liberal Democrat campaigner in Manchester targeted at four in the morning for the heinous crime of putting up some posters.

Yet every time the response is to swat it away - "every party has these people" - to draw a false parallel between policy disagreements and vandalism or personal attacks ("look at these political campaign posters I don't like") or whataboutery - "here's something nasty that a Tory said fifteen years ago, what about that then". When the extreme left target a Liverpool MP for the terrible crime of being critical of Jeremy Corbyn, targeting that includes appalling anti-semitism and misogyny, those nice, pleasant, decent folk with left-wing views do nothing and say nothing. Every time.

It's true that every party has its share of unpleasant folk but it's also true that only "The Left" valorises vandalism, personal insults, threatening behaviour, intimidation and bullying as campaign methods. And because those nice, pleasant, decent folk with left-wing views don't deal with it - even having the almighty gall to talk about some sort of "kinder" politics - this sort of campaigning continues.

I've said for a long while that our political culture celebrates the bully - you only need watch "The Thick of It" to appreciate this - but we now are in the position where a faction on "The Left" has lifted this unpleasantness and transferred it to the political campaign itself. In forty years as an active political campaigner, I've never known a time when so much unpleasant, personal and downright nasty campaigning has been directed at the good people who hold different political opinions from "The Left".

I know you consider yourself different. You're not part of that left, oh no. But so long as you tolerate, excuse, deflect or explain away violent campaigning, you are little different from the left wing men who are doing the vandalising, performing the intimidation and ganging up on those most exposed and especially women and ethnic minorities.

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Antisemitism redux

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I think it's known as 'othering' - the process of making a group of people so different as to be unacceptable in society. It is, and always has been, something of a problem. Especially when that exclusion is on the basis of a characteristic a person can't do anything to change (ethnicity and gender are the two obvious examples here). In recent times, in part driven by events in Palestine, we have seen this 'othering' process applied to Jews. The return of anti-semitism.

For those who, like me, aren't Jewish, the problem seems small. The antics of a few idiots with unpleasant (often described as right wing views) wasn't the big deal since we could pretty much avoid these people. But then you find that it simply isn't like that. It's not a minority sport this anti-semitism, it is pretty much mainstream. Not among us right wing folk but in the polite conversation of the intelligent left.

And so my wife and I lose our moorings. We are of the Left, but are no longer welcome, unless we become “good Jews” who are not “bad, Zionist Jews”. We worry about our son. He will be confronted by Israeli Apartheid Week when he arrives on a University campus in a few years. If he is a Jew who believes that Israel has a right to be, he will be hated by many on the student Left. My son is an enthusiastic, articulate and kind boy. The realisation that he will be hated by those who will not see any of these attributes, but instead will see only one attribute – his Jewishness – chills me.

See that term 'good Jews' - those Jews who are 'anti-Israel' or 'anti-Zionist'. For a Jew to be acceptable in the salons of the left, he has to reject the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination, the right to a home. As the writer of that quotation observed, many of the promoters of anti-Jew violence are no longer sad worshippers of Adolf Hitler but radical and extremist Islamist organisations linked to the long conflict in Palestine. And the left wing folk who have long supported Palestinian rights now find themselves associating with people who are, without any question or doubt, anti-semitic.

'The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.'

How can an organisation committed to the extermination of Jews be called friends? Yet this - and much else besides (including reference to the anti-semitic libel 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion') is in the founding charter of Hamas. Somehow we are supposed to push aside this advocacy of genocide, this violent anti-semitism, in the cause of Palestinian nationhood. Indeed, so long as so many of the Palestine's leaders reject any solution other than a 'one nation' solution - from the river to the sea, as it's put by those Palestinian advocates - it's hard to see it as anything other than anti-semitism.

The left's problem isn't that there are no grounds for criticising Israel and Israel's government but that this criticism has blinded them to the anti-semitism of Hamas and other representatives of Palestinian nationhood. Above all those on the left feel able to condemn Israel but unable to see the dark side of Palestinian liberation:

If calls from those on the Left in the UK for the obliteration of Israel and its replacement by an Islamic Palestinian state and the sheer violence and blood lust in some comments were not surreal and disturbing enough, my wife and I have noticed something else. Silence. From friends on Facebook when my wife posts anything that acknowledges the very existence of Israel or the random horror that is being enacted on its streets.

In the last year, the number of anti-semitic incidents in the UK reached record levels - 1,168 incidents against Britain’s Jewish population in 2014, more than double that of the previous year and the rate hasn't slackened off. Yet beyond the ritual mouthing of concern, the left fails to realise that it's indulgence of anti-semitic organisations and the language of anti-zionism has played a part in this increase. It shouldn't be like this and doesn't have to be like this:

The Bradford Council for Mosques recently began working together with the local authority to raise funds for the Bradford Synagogue, to ensure the building remains a sacred space for future generations, the Telegraph reported on March 5.

“When the chair of the Bradford synagogue approached the Muslim community for help and assistance towards the maintenance of this building, it was a challenge which didn’t take us long to decide on,” Zulfi Karim, secretary of Bradford Council for Mosques, said.

So my friends, give some hope to Saul Freeman and his wife. Call out anti-semitism just as you would other forms of hatred. And say to your friends in the Palestinian movement that the first step they need to take is to accept Israel's right to be there and to take a lesson from fellow muslims in Bradford on how to respect Jewish people and the Jewish faith.

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In which David Ward MP does a little more digging in his antisemitic hole...

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Am I wrong or are am I right? At long last the #Zionists are losing the battle - how long can the #apartheid State of #Israel last?
— David Ward (@DavidWardMP) July 13, 2013

I know, we'll be told it's "anti-Israel" not anti-Jew. But wishing the end of Israel is an awful long way from disagreeing with the policies of its government.

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