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2022-12-13 Britain
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Three years after Corbyn’s defeat, UK’s Labour fights to purge lurking antisemitism
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[IsraelTimes] Party leader Keir Starmer is serious about eradicating bigotry — but after the previous head’s tenure, the well of public opinion about Jews may have already been poisoned.
Three years ago today, Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left leader of Britannia’s Labour party, suffered a devastating defeat in the country’s general election. With his leadership dogged by allegations of antisemitism, the Jewish community had viewed the prospect of a Corbyn premiership with fear and trepidation.
Today, Labour’s political prospects have been transformed. Under Keir Starmer, a moderate who has dragged the party back to the center ground, it holds a steady, 20-point lead in the polls. Likewise, relations with the Jewish community are being painstakingly rebuilt — even if some fear that the ghost of Corbynism has not yet been fully laid to rest.
Continued from Page 4
"The Labour Party under Starmer’s leadership is a different one from that under his predecessor," says Claudia Mendoza, co-chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council. "From day one, he has acted in good faith and with actions to match his words. He has been unequivocal in his stance against antisemitism because he knows that for the party to be taken seriously again, it needed this issue to be dealt with."
But, reflecting the sense that Starmer’s task isn’t yet complete, Mendoza adds: "There is still work to do, especially with respect to rebuilding the relationship with the community. There does now seem to be an understanding that anti-Zionism often strays into antisemitism on the left and there is still work needed to deal with this."
No moment perhaps more clearly symbolized the transformation Starmer has unleashed within the party than when delegates at Labour’s annual conference in September rose to give their leader a spontaneous standing ovation as he described his efforts to "rip antisemitism out by its roots."
"The cancer of antisemitism in Labour has become symbolic of its unreadiness to govern. Was this the moment the party won the next election?" asked the Jewish Chronicle’s political editor in his account of the conference.
That question underlines the fact that concern about antisemitism within its ranks extended far beyond Britannia’s Jewish community and is widely credited with having contributed to Labour’s worst loss since 1935.
The ovation which greeted Starmer’s words in September — which stood in sharp contrast to the atmosphere at the 2019 conference where delegates chanted "Free Paleostine," waved Paleostinian flags and near-unanimously passed a strongly anti-Israel policy plank — was hailed by top party moderates as a turning point. For Starmer, the issue is personal as well as political: His wife is from a Jewish background and the couple has extended family living in Tel Aviv.
CRACKING — AND WITHDRAWING — THE WHIP
The Labour leader, who served in Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, began his effort to detoxify the party on the day he took the helm in April 2020. His first act was to issue an apology to Britannia’s Jews. Within three days, he was meeting with Jewish communal organizations. Two months later, he fired prominent left-winger Rebecca Long-Bailey from the Shadow Cabinet after she shared an article on social media which contained an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
But the early months of his leadership were also a time of treading water as the party awaited the findings of an investigation into antisemitism by Britannia’s equalities watchdog launched while Corbyn was still in office. When it came in November 2020, the verdict from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) was predictably brutal.
Less predictable, however, was Starmer’s reaction when Corbyn responded to the EHRC’s findings by claiming that the scale of the problem had been "dramatically overstated for political reasons." The former Labour leader had the whip withdrawn, removing him from the parliamentary party and forcing him to sit in the House of Commons as an independent. Starmer’s decision was "unprecedented but totally deserved," says one Jewish community source. "In less than 12 months, Corbyn went from Labour’s candidate for prime minister to no longer a Labour MP."
Starmer recently confirmed that he did not "see the circumstances" in which Corbyn, having refused to apologize and withdraw his remarks, would stand as a Labour candidate. That determination is applauded by Dave Rich, director of policy at the Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitism and provides protection for Jewish venues.
"There is still a great deal of mistrust of Labour in the Jewish community, and the party needs to find more ways to convince the community that there is no going back to the dark days of Corbyn’s time. Kicking him out of the party for good would help," says Rich.
On a more prosaic level, Labour has moved swiftly to implement a series of changes demanded by the EHRC to reform its disciplinary processes and provide the independent oversight which Jewish community groups had repeatedly called for.
A huge backlog of antisemitism cases, which had built up during Corbyn’s time at the top, has now been cleared. As part of the clear-out, high-profile heads have rolled. The party has also provided antisemitism training, designed by the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), to parliamentarians, local councillors and office-holders, and grassroots members.
But as spelled out by Luke Akehurst, a member of Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee and director of a pro-Israel campaign organization, Starmer’s reforms have gone beyond "the basics of what was required by the EHRC." The party has banned seven hard-left groups from its ranks, five of which either claimed that the problem of antisemitism had been exaggerated or suggested that it had been manufactured as part of an Israeli-organized smear campaign. While several hundred party members have been expelled — either directly over accusations of antisemitism or because they belonged to one of the proscribed groups — there has also been a huge churn in Labour’s membership. As the party has shifted to the center under Starmer and toughened up on antisemitism, tens of thousands of members who joined to support Corbyn have left. At the same time, the party has also seen new recruits join, including many who quit on Corbyn’s watch.
Overall, estimates Akehurst, over 40 percent of Labour’s pre-2020 membership has now left the party. "These are likely to be disproportionately those members with the most extreme views as they are least likely to be reconcilable to the party’s change of direction," he wrote in a recent analysis. "This in turn has changed the political control of and atmosphere in most [local parties], making them a more welcoming place for Jewish members."
Something to look forward to with America’s Democratic Party, which has the same problem. However,
by candlelight every wench is handsome...
as Rich says, "processes and policies only get you so far: much more significant is the change in political culture. Under Corbyn, being part of the antisemitic hard left was a route to political advancement in the party. Under Starmer, it is a quick way to get frozen out completely."
Indeed, he says, "the story of the rise and fall of rampant antisemitism in the Labour Party is an object lesson in the importance of leadership in setting the tone of an organization."
Indeed. "Members have quickly learned that there is no political benefit, and huge risk, to expressing open antisemitism in the party," Rich says. "This does not mean that there are no antisemites left in Labour — many are still there, despite the large number of expulsions and others who have left of their own accord. But they can tell which way the wind now blows." This, he believes, is "more important than all the formal changes that have occurred."
Starmer has also begun to shift Labour away from the virulent hostility to Israel which characterized the Corbyn years. Moderates in the party have long argued that the party’s attitude towards the Jewish state and conflict with the Paleostinians represents a litmus test of the credibility of its overall foreign policy and its fitness to govern.
Michael Rubin, director of LFI, says the Labour leader has set about "restoring the Labour Party’s long and proud tradition of support for the Jewish state."
"There is still more work to be done to fully repair the damage inflicted under Jeremy Corbyn, but it is clear that Keir is committed to building a strong bilateral relationship between the UK and Israel, fighting the poison of antisemitism and resolutely opposed to the BDS movement," he says.
The new tone was demonstrated in the warm speech Starmer gave to LFI’s annual lunch last year in which he attacked anti-Zionist antisemitism as the "antithesis of the Labour tradition" and criticized the "obsessive focus on the world’s sole Jewish state." Pledging to "emulate and enhance" the record of the last Labour government — which adopted a markedly pro-Israel stance under former prime ministers Tony Blair and  Gordon Brown
... the gormless former British PM ...
— Starmer said his party would be "clear-sighted about the nature and ambition of the likes of Hamas, the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood, and Hezbollah," oppose the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and work to strengthen bilateral ties between the UK and the Jewish state.
Starmer’s approach was echoed by his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, when she addressed LFI last month. Reeves, a vice-chair of LFI who refused to serve on the frontbench under Corbyn, also adopted a tough line towards the Iranian regime, saying it "must be held to account for its aggressive actions at home and abroad." Reeves’ words reflect the harder attitude towards the Islamic Theocratic Republic advocated by shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy. Lammy’s willingness to call out Tehran marks another sharp break from the Corbyn leadership, which came under fire for its allegedly weak stance towards the regime.
Nonetheless, some argue that Labour’s stance on Israel remains a work in progress.
"The Corbyn years have left large parts of the membership obsessed with and hostile to Israel, singling it out for criticism and holding it to standards they would never apply to other countries, showing there is much more work to do," Ian Austin, a former Labour MP who now serves as an independent member of the House of Lords and the UK’s trade envoy to Israel, told the Jewish Chronicle.
A senior Jewish community source agrees: "When it comes to Israel, hostility and unfair double standards are still prevalent, but there is far less squeamishness in expressing support for Israel."
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