Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Labour’s anti-Semitism shame must never be forgiven

Sometime around the start of this decade, before anti-Semitism was as cool as it has become, I was standing on a stage in London with a couple of rabbis and a Muslim. And if that sounds like the start of a joke then what followed wasn’t. We were there at the request of a new Jewish group to speak out against the anti-Semitism that we already saw on the rise in the UK.

I’m not much given to protests myself as long-time readers will know. But the day showed some solidarity with British Jews and we all went home at least partly feeling like some good had been done.

But one thing about the day stayed in my mind. During her remarks, one of the rabbis summoned up the famous phrase of anti-fascists in the 1930s. ‘They shall not pass’. Or ‘No Pasaran!’ as the Spanish communists had it.

I’m not wild about the Spanish connotations of that phrase. But in English it still had some utility. Not least because it was famously used by the Jewish community and their friends in 1936 when Oswald Mosley sought to march his fascists through the East End of London. When Blackshirts tried to intimidate British Jews eighty years ago, ‘They shall not pass’ meant something and was a slogan worth rallying around.

In the early 2010s, I wasn’t so sure. After most of us had drifted home from our protest I said to a friend that there was something troubling about the rabbi’s use of Cable Street and her summoning up of the spirit of 1930s anti-fascism. The question that begged to be answered in my mind was ‘Who? Who shall not pass?’

It was easy enough in 1936. The former Labour MP Oswald Mosley had by then named his movement the ‘British Union of Fascists’.

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