The issue of anti-semitism has returned to haunt the British Labour Party. The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s recent report on the party’s handling of the issue is damning in terms of its addressing complaints of anti-Semitism and of a wider culture that creates a hostile environment for Jewish members and supporters. The issue, very swiftly, swivelled towards former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Mr. Corbyn issued a statement on Facebook, in which he acknowledged the problem of anti-Semitism, but also suggested that instances had been exaggerated by his detractors. He was swiftly suspended from the Labour Party .
Once again, the Labour Party has been torn apart, as it has been a number of times on Brexit. This is bad news, as the party, under the leadership of Keir Starmer, has been very effective in putting the Boris Johnson government on the mat over its sheer ineptitude. TheGuardian’s parliamentary sketch writer, John Crace, almost incredulously noted, “Boris Johnson must be unable to believe his luck”.
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Accusations of Islamophobia over statements that Mr. Johnson himself made and Islamophobic attitudes within his Conservative Party have not been half as damaging as they have been for Labour over anti-Semitism.
Brexit has let loose the genie of racism from the multi-cultural bottle that had hitherto contained it. The bottle had a label affixed to it, ‘Cool Britannia’, put there by another Labour leader and long-serving Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in what can only be called another one of his deceptive branding exercises. The escape of the racism genie in all its forms, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and the deep-seated prejudice against Blacks in Britain, reveals how the multi-cultural bottling never countered, but merely contained racism.
Mr. Starmer’s response towards suspending Jeremy Corbyn is worrying and has been characterised as his decisive ‘clause four’ moment as he seeks to marginalise the Left-leaning group within his party. Already, there have been adverse reactions to this from trade unions such as Unite, that were firmly behind Mr. Corbyn’s leadership. Mr. Starmer has perhaps not learnt any lessons from his predecessor, Tony Blair, who deleted clause four of the Labour Party’s constitution to sever its organic link with trade unions.
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Hard lessons
A study by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden has found that right-wing parties across the world, such as the Republican Party in the U.S., the Conservative Party in the U.K., and the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, have become increasingly more authoritarian. Remarkably, as the Right behaves in the most unhinged fashion and can even then expect to win, the Left has to tread ever so nervously, never straying too far to the left. This explains Mr. Corbyn’s massive electoral defeat in parliamentary elections last year. Lessons were quickly learnt across ‘the pond’, as the Atlantic is so fondly referred to on both sides, when Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic party’s nomination and the left-wing consolidated itself behind Joe Biden.
Comparisons are often made between politics in the U.K. and the U.S. Boris Johnson is the Trump clone on the other side of the Atlantic, as Joe Biden and Keir Starmer play political roles that almost mirror each other in terms of the caution they exercise from the left-wing of their respective political parties. That leaves us with Bernie Sanders as the American equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn. Mr. Corbyn has been very critical of the Israeli state and his sympathisers tend to believe that he is being hauled over the coals on the issue owing to his consistently critical stand against Israel. Notably, Mr. Sanders did not attend the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference earlier this year, referring to it as a platform for ‘bigotry’. Accusations of anti-Semitism are just likely to make the road back to power for Labour that much longer.
Amir Ali teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU, New Delhi
