Luciana Berger’s return to the Labour party is not only a restoration but a supreme act of forgiveness. The former MP was hounded out of the party in 2019 because she was Jewish at a point where the whole rotten institution had become infested with antisemites. Berger fought to hold on to her party, not wishing to hand a victory to Jew-haters. This steeliness was not surprising, given her pedigree.
Berger’s great-uncle was Manny Shinwell, Labour MP for Seaham and a straight-talking left-wing Jew. During a 1938 Commons debate, Shinwell was on his feet when the Conservative MP Robert Bower shouted: ‘Go back to Poland’. Shinwell paused his speech, walked across the gangway, socked Bower right in the jaw, then turn to the Speaker and said: ‘May I make a personal explanation?’
Labour could apologise every day from now until the end of time and it still wouldn’t be enough
Berger is more forgiving. Following an invitation from Sir Keir Starmer, and in light of the Equality and Human Rights Commission taking Labour out of the special measures it was placed in to tackle its anti-Jewish racism, Berger is rejoining the party. It can’t have been an easy decision for her. As Sir Keir writes in an open letter to his former colleague, she was ‘forced out by intimidation, thuggery and racism’ and ‘shamefully, those who should have defended you stood by’. In his letter, he apologises on behalf of the party for something that will ‘forever be a stain on Labour’s history’.
His apology on behalf of the party should be accompanied by one on his own behalf. Because Sir Keir was one of those people who shamefully stood by. Oh, he may have uttered warm words and found the whole episode distasteful but he noticeably didn’t follow her out the door. One of his Jewish colleagues was, as he puts it, forced out of the party by racism and Sir Keir responded by campaigning to make that party the government. By campaigning to make that party’s leader prime minister.
This underscores a point I made during the Labour antisemitism scandal. The moral bankruptcy shown up by that affair was not merely of the hard-left but of the soft-left. The soft-left of the Labour party seldom hesitates to speak out against racism. It was not slow to embrace Black Lives Matter and to take the knee. It drew attention to anti-Muslim racism within the Tory party. Labour MPs are among the first to speak on allegations of institutional racism elsewhere in society. Yet when their party was swamped with antisemites, many of them went silent or, worse, tried to deny it.
The oft-heard cry of the soft-left in those days was that they were ‘staying to fight’, an admission that they believed there was something worth fighting for. My question was at the time and still is now: would they have done the same had the racism been directed at any other racial or ethnic group? I submit that many wouldn’t, that they would consider racism simply beyond the pale and the Labour party beyond recovery. The only difference was that, however progressive their outward politics, these people simply did not consider antisemitism to be ‘real’ racism, or as bad as other forms of racism.
So the Labour party does owe Luciana Berger an apology. It could apologise every day from now until the end of time and it still wouldn’t be enough. That makes her decision to forgive all the more powerful. She knows the party’s mistreatment of her was not only personally distressing but deeply upsetting to many British Jews. She knows the antisemites who still riddle Labour’s ranks, albeit in smaller numbers, will never accept her. She probably knows the soft-left excuse-makers would behave exactly the same way if it all happened again. She knows this and yet she forgives.
Luciana Berger is coming home. Some progress has been made in ridding the party of the culture that drove her out, but Labour still does not deserve her return or her forgiveness. It should strive each day to earn them.
Comments