Starmer’s anti-Semitism dilemma
In this guest post, James Heartfield explains why the Labour Party can’t seem to shake off its problems with Jew hatred.
Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the Labour Party, the party’s candidate for Rochdale jumps up to say that Israel deliberately let Hamas murder 1,200 Jews on 7 October, just so they could invade Gaza.
Azhar Ali should have been a shoo-in to win the by-election as Labour’s candidate for the Lancashire seat. Under Keir Starmer, the Labour Party has seen a spectacular comeback from the disastrous defeat of 2019, overtaking the Tories in the wake of the lockdown party scandal, rising to rack up a 20+ point lead for months now. Yet, despite the by-election victories in Wellingborough and Kingswood last week, Starmer could still face problems on the road to No.10.
Making Labour electable again
Starmer’s reform of Labour has been brutal for the outgoing Corbynite left – and deservedly so. Their programme was roundly rejected in two general elections. Starmer used his authority as outright winner in the leadership contest to rout the left, removing the whip from left-wingers Diane Abbott and Kate Osamor, and even suspending the leader he replaced, Jeremy Corbyn, from the party altogether in 2020. (He was readmitted within three weeks, but is banned from standing as a candidate.)
The issues around which Starmer repaired Labour’s standing were two-fold. The first, not often remarked on, is Brexit. Though he was the shadow minister who was responsible for Labour’s policy of re-running the Referendum, Starmer has quietly shelved it, with key figures, like arch Remainer David Lammy, saying, ‘not in my lifetime’. That was important to draw the sting from the Conservatives’ winning ‘Get Brexit Done’ slogan, but it had few ramifications for Labour’s internal life.
Much more important for his fight with the Corbynites hanging on in the Party has been the issue of anti-Semitism. In the election, anti-Semitism was not the decisive issue, but in the eyes of many voters, it seemed to show that Labour was not, after all, a nice party, but a pretty sordid and unpleasant one.
Starmer did a great deal to rid the Labour Party of the perception that it was an anti-Semitic party. He fully embraced the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) investigation and report into anti-Semitism in the party, promising to enact its decisions. Corbyn was thrown out for insisting that the issue had been exaggerated, thereby undermining Starmer’s strategy of demonstrative compliance.
After 7 October
Facing down anti-Semitism became the emblematic issue upon which Starmer was going to prove that Labour could be trusted again. Until 7 October 2023, Starmer was victorious over his left-wing critics in Labour as he was trouncing the Conservatives in the polls.
But now, with the Rochdale by-election in the spotlight - and Labour’s candidate exposed as a conspiracy theorist and 7 October ‘truther’ - Starmer’s success is faltering. First, he sent his shadow cabinet out to all the TV studios to explain that Ali was a good guy, ‘not a Corbynite’, who had just misspoken. Then it turned out that the ‘7 October was a pre-planned excuse for genocide’ line was just one of many harshly critical things that Ali had said about Israel. Starmer withdrew Labour’s support.
The problem is that the nominations had already closed in Rochdale, meaning that Ali, who Labour was not now supporting, was the only viable candidate. He is under some pressure from the maverick George Galloway, who set out to make the by-election a referendum on Britain – and Starmer’s – pro-Israel policy - a policy which the new Foreign Secretary David Cameron was already qualifying. Then, another prospective Labour candidate, Graham Jones, had comments he had made at the same meeting, where he said ‘fucking Israel’, publicised, and Starmer suspended him, too.
The context for all of this, of course, is the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, Israel’s retaliatory war and reoccupation of Gaza, and the hundreds of thousands of people in Britain protesting against the war. There is much to say about the problems of a movement that turns a blind eye to Hamas’s massacre of 1,200 Jews in southern Israel and treats Israeli retaliation as unjust. But here, let’s stick to what this meant for Labour.
Reviving the Corbynites
First, the Corbynite left leaped onto the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is important to understand that a large cohort of activists had been galvanised by Corbyn’s leadership, and bitterly disappointed by the electoral defeat of 2019. Labour’s improved position in 2017 meant that they could still think in terms of ‘one more push’. But losing to Boris in 2019 was both demoralising and disorienting for people who were already prone to wishful thinking.
Having enjoyed control over the party up until then, and having built up a network of activists, with their own media and organisation, they suddenly found themselves out in the cold, and unloved. A strong sense of ‘we were robbed’ pervaded the always-Corbyn left. In particular, they believed that the anti-Semitism issue had been conjured up out of nowhere – hence the hashtag #ItWasaScam – to sabotage Corbyn. They touted conspiracy theories that the right-wing press, or Israeli intelligence, or just ‘the Jews’ had invented the issue, and that there never was any problem of anti-Semitism.
Those were already heady emotions, but with the conflict in Gaza, all the depressed Corbynite activists were re-galvanised into action, throwing themselves into Palestine Solidarity. In their activist circles, the judgments of the post-election era were overturned. They were not unpopular. but took part in big protests. They were not anti-Semites. but anti-Zionists. Jeremy was back in pride of place on the podium, speaking to tens of thousands. The once-triumphant Starmer team were being barracked in their constituencies and in the street.
Starmer’s reaction
Surely, though, the problems that the Gaza marches caused for Starmer could be contained? After all, he is still high in the polls and there is no organised Corbynite breakaway party to challenge him. In the first two months of the conflict, Starmer pushed harder, adopting an impressively intransigent pro-Israeli policy. He took advantage of the left’s activism to isolate and remove the parliamentary whip from MPs like Osamor.
Later, it seemed that Starmer was more worried about polling that suggested he was losing some support among Muslim voters, and some of the more strident statements were modified. Suddenly, the shadow front bench were calling for a ceasefire, though still opposing the protests.
Starmer had hoped that his stance on anti-Semitism, and defending Israel after Hamas’s attack, would have been enough to stop the issue from blowing up in his face. But instead, it has erupted again in the most dramatic way. To Starmer’s shame, it seems likely that the next MP for Rochdale will be a former Labour politician, elected on a protest vote against Starmer’s own policy of ridding his party of anti-Semitism. Most likely, that politician will be Azhar Ali, who, having lost Labour’s support is coming out fighting as ‘sacked for protesting over Palestine’.
Worse, Starmer supporters, like the Guardian’s Michael White, were heard to complain about the Tory Press’s ‘weaponisation of anti-Semitism’. The Labour Left, of course, seized a hold of this unwitting concession, that there was indeed a ‘weaponisation of anti-Semitism’ not an actual problem of anti-Semitism. The Corbynite left’s adamantine belief that it was unfairly cheated became even more entrenched.
Why does the question of Labour’s anti-Semitism keep coming back?
The answer is two-fold. First Labour’s anti-capitalist message of old has been greatly moderated. No longer willing to make a case for a socialist society to replace the free market, Labour’s thinkers are looking around for an anti-elitist message that does not frighten the establishment too much. They have talked about bankers, landlords or greedy boardroom fat cats in the past, without really taking any action that would jeopardise their standing in the City of London. Labour’s dumbed-down socialism too readily shades into conspiratorial stories about Jewish bankers and media moguls in the minds of its stupider activists.
The second driver of Labour’s anti-Semitism is its failure to do anything materially positive for its Muslim supporters. Muslims in Britain are, on average, significantly worse off than other parts of the community in terms of income and household wealth. Explanations for Muslim disadvantage range from discrimination to cultural differences (like fewer married Muslim women working). The important point is that Muslims have been voting overwhelmingly for the Labour Party for as long as there has been a Muslim minority in Britain.
But Labour has not been a vehicle for Muslim improvement. For decades, Labour’s fixers mulishly stood in the way of talented Muslim candidates, leading to breakaway protest votes, like George Galloway’s successful challenge to Labour in the Gulf War, winning the Bethnal Green and Bow seat in London in 2005, and Lutfur Rahman’s successive challenges to Labour at the local level in the same London borough, Tower Hamlets. (Rahman himself spent many years building up the Labour vote before leaving.)
It is because they have failed to advance Muslim voters that local Labour campaigns have adopted Palestine Solidarity, putting a Palestinian flag into the local election leaflets, and maybe flying one from the town hall. Ken Livingstone adopted the cause in London, as a young George Galloway had done earlier in Dundee. No doubt both men were and are sincere, but the local Labour left’s support for the Palestinian cause gave them a short cut to Muslim voters who, in other ways, had reason to complain they were being taken advantage of.
In 2015, with the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party, the tie between the Muslim voters and Labour was complete. Labour was not a vehicle of Muslim advancement, but it was at least one of Muslim grievance – as symbolised by the victimisation of the Palestinians.
The queasy mixture of Muslim grievance over Palestine and Labour’s dumbed down socialist message came to a head in the Corbyn Labour Party, leading to outright anti-Semitic messaging, like the mural of Jews manipulating the world in London’s East End, or the coded messaging of ‘anti-Zionism’, which seems to find fault only with repression in Israel, overlooking the same in Syria, Iran and Sudan.
As we have seen with Starmer’s woes, though, it is not a problem that ended with Corbyn’s leadership. To turn things around, Labour needs to reform. Starmer’s reforms, though, are all disciplinary, and, as it turns out, fragile, anyway (once electoral damage threatens). As much as Starmer made a virtue out of complying with the EHRC investigation of Labour, that itself was a weakness. Labour is a political party. It cannot be changed by external agencies, but must be reformed from within, by political debate, not disciplinary action.
What Starmer ought to be doing is organising a programme of internal debate throughout the party around anti-Semitism – and the Middle East – to win his members over to the idea that Jews are not ‘white settlers’ robbing the Palestinians, but scapegoats for the failures of the political system to achieve good ends. Rather than seeking to silence his critics, he ought to be engaging with them and challenging them, openly to make their case. Criticism of Israel, as of any other state, ought not to be banned, but those who elevate Israel above all other nations as preternaturally bad ought to be challenged to explain why.
The alternative is that Labour’s leadership imposes an insincere conformity in public while the party’s activists continue to nurse their peculiar prejudices against Jews in Britain and Israel.
James Heartfield writes and lectures on British history and politics. He is author of Against Reparations, Britain’s Empires 1600-2020 and other books including Let’s Build!: why we need five million new homes in the next 10 years.
Follow James on Twitter: @JamesHeartfield
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