Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

How to save Labour

Jeremy Corbyn and company’s anti-Semitism crisis is a symptom of a much wider malaise

To say that the Labour party is in crisis because it is ‘too left-wing’ is to miss the point spectacularly. With eyes wide open, and all democratic procedures punctiliously observed, its members have chosen in their tens of thousands to endorse not ‘the left’, but an ugly simulacrum of left-wing politics.

They have gone along with the type of left-winger who flourished in the long boom between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the great recession. The hypocrite who damns oppression, but only if it is committed by western countries. The pseudo-egalitarian who will condemn sexism and homophobia, but not the prejudices of favoured regimes and minorities. The fake anti-racist who will attack the ‘far right’ while echoing the fascist conspiracy theory.

Let us see how their ‘new politics’ are progressing. At the time of going to press, and we accept that this is a provisional tally, Labour has had to suspend Ken Livingstone for invoking Adolf Hitler in the latest of his many attempts to bait and humiliate Jews. Also suspended is Naz Shah, one of its two Bradford MPs, for saying that Israelis should be transported to America. Hanging alongside them on Labour’s drooping dirty-laundry line are a good half-dozen Muslim Labour councillors, suspended for saying that Jews were really behind Islamic State, or for echoing Shah’s call for the ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews, or for telling Israeli footballers that their country was the new Third Reich.

Cynics dismiss the fuss. There are 2.7 million Muslims and only 260,000 Jews in Britain. If left-wingers alienate Jews, the profit-and-loss account is still in the black, particularly when a large segment of the white bourgeois left is as keen on laying into ‘the Zionists’, as they so daintily call them. It is not true to say all British Muslims want fevered rhetoric against Jews (any more than it is to say that all Jews oppose Corbyn).

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in