Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis can never be solved under Corbyn

If racism is to succeed in corrupting institutions and countries it needs authorisation from the elite. The popular caricature of the racist as a white working-class man, or superstitious east european peasant, or shabby paranoid academic, shows not only class bias, but a lack of understanding that what transforms extremism from poisonous men muttering in corners to political movements with the power to ruin lives, is the authorisation given by leaders and intellectuals.

A party can have racist members – as the Conservative party undoubtedly does. But because its leadership is not anti-Muslim their effect is constrained to personal abuse. I don’t mean to diminish it. If my experience is typical, race-based insults are something you never forget. But by their nature they remain a part of the everyday ugliness of life. Corbyn’s Labour, like Trump’s Republicans, has an institutionally racist leadership working with the worst of the party’s membership. Anti-Semites everywhere were empowered by Corbyn’s victory. The failure of the Labour membership to reject him not once, but twice, not only licensed existing racists to let rip but encouraged others to release hatreds they barely knew they had.

Listen to the giggling reaction from a Labour audience to anti-Jewish jokes whose crassness would have embarrassed Bernard Manning and learn how the far left has completed the project of Oswald Mosley and the National Front and made anti-Semitism mainstream:

As the authentically left wing Alliance for Workers’ Liberty said in a paragraph I wish I’d written:

Milk gone sour then “thickens” and changes its consistency. The long-existing absolute anti-Zionist antisemitism dominant on the pseudo-revolutionary left has, on entry to the new, new Labour Party, thickened into something more virulent and poisonous. There is joy and satisfaction in self-righteous hatred, a nasty mix of aggression and self-love.