I’ve been waiting a long time for this story to drop — as in more than a year — so naturally it drops just days before the US election.
Short Version
In the December 2019 general election in the UK, Labour got its worst result, in terms of Parliamentary seats, since 1935. How come? Their catastrophically awful hard-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who went into the election with a Trumpish net approval of –27%.
Corbyn Labour was electoral poison. It was also moral poison, because the Corbynista cranks were too often more than a little iffy when it came to antisemitism, yet were absolutely sure they were saints. Jewish members who objected to Corbynista antisemitism were harassed out. Some really wacky high-profile Jew-haters in Labour somehow kept failing to be expelled from the party, all of them (coincidence, surely!) Corbynistas. Jews in Labour protested this, but Corbyn saw no problem, and nothing improved. Last year Jews in Labour, ignored by Labour leadership, made an appeal to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, roughly analogous to our Equal Employment Opportunities Commission.
The EHRC ruling has just come through: the Jewish community was right, the Corbyn cranks did turn the party apparatus illegally antisemitic, and there is hell to pay. Hell to pay, and fines to pay, and lawyers to pay, and civil damages to pay.
Edit: Jeremy Corbyn has now been suspended from the Labour Party and the whip removed. This is, not to get too gushy, SPECTACULARLY good news.
Corbyn: Very Much Not the UK Bernie
One of the chains shackling Corbyn’s Labour to inevitable defeat was a long-bubbling and ugly problem with antisemitism within the cadre supporting him. It was a kind of mirror-image Tea Party takeover, all “better burn it all down than compromise one inch.” Corbyn had attracted to the party ranks a swarm of people from the insular, Marxier-than-thou, shouty-shout-shout Manichean hard left. Labour Party decisions were being taken by people with no Labour Party history.
Corbyn is sort of a Trump of the left. Getting Corbyn to denounce antisemitism in the hard left is like getting Trump to condemn white supremacy. Just can’t do it, can’t bring himself do it, not unless he’s completely cornered and has no alternatives left, and then — like Trump — any minimal condemnation is emitted in the most perfunctory teen-peevish way possible, with the agonized facial expression of a man at gunpoint trying to shit out an eight ball.
And, like the GOP under Trump, Corbyn’s personal moral weaknesses became Labour’s organizational moral weaknesses. And it showed. In the summer of 2018, trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) to get their point through to Corbyn, the Jewish community staged literally its largest street demonstration since the 1940s. By summer 2019, there was enough evidence on both the local and national level of organizational Labour mistreatment of Jews because they were Jews to persuade the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission, roughly a counterpart to our Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, to perform a statutory investigation of the party organization — including the ability to compel testimony, invalidate NDAs, and subpoena documents.
The final report landed today. And it is unambiguous: the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn was institutionally so hostile to Jews that it broke the Equalities Act.
The self-declared party of anti-racism was legally found to be racist against Jews. The proud Labour record of anti-racism is now permanently stained by an ugly Corbyn-shaped patch of institutionalized antisemitism.
This is a moment of great vindication to the Jewish community of the UK, which had a half-decade of ugly shit dumped on its head by hard-left Corbynistas eager to shout them down, and a party comms megaphone eager to help them do it.
How Did Labour Lose its Anti-Racist Compass?
A catastrophe of this scale doesn’t suddenly occur in isolation. It has to be built from a combination of smaller semi-catastrophes, themselves perhaps built from a layer of quarter-catastrophes.
So what were the sources of Labour’s antisemitism catastrophe? Much of it, but not all of it, is down to the figure of Corbyn himself.
1: A failure of empathy
Corbyn, in his three decades on the back bench in the House of Commons, failed to build any kind of visceral, sympathetic relationship with the Jewish mainstream. He thought he had one, because he had Jewish friends of long standing. But he never understood that they weren't a representative sample -- in fact, that they tended to loudly declare themselves not merely outside the Jewish mainstream but gleefully, vocally opposed to the Jewish mainstream. When the crisis came, Corbyn couldn’t draw on any built-up reservoir of goodwill with the mainstream Jewish community, because he had failed to build one.
He hadn’t bothered to get to know the Jewish community; he simply presumed he did. He didn’t. And it showed.
2: The blind spot
Corbyn was vocally opposed to antisemitism... but only sometimes. Like much of the hard left that lionizes him, he has a wide and noticeable blind spot: take any standard antisemitic meme -- even the ugliest of the old ones -- and dress it in the language of the hard left, and ping! its antisemitism becomes invisible to him. Antisemitism on the right the Corbyn crew will happily condemn, but antisemitism on the left doesn’t express itself in the same way, and the hard left has generally disabled the radar that would otherwise detect it were it not cloaked in the hard left’s own language.
Show him a mural that's anti-capitalist and antisemitic, and Jeremy Corbyn sees a mural that's anti-capitalist (and condemns the mural’s having been painted over after the community complained about its antisemitism). Show him a group that's anti-Zionist and promotes Holocaust denial, and Corbyn sees a group that's anti-Zionist (and chucks change into their passed hat). Show him a cleric who's anti-Israel and says that medieval Jews baked the blood of murdered Christian children into their matzoh, and Corbyn sees a cleric who's anti-Israel (and then invites him to tea at Parliament). True stories, and part of a larger pattern.
That pattern convinced most Jews in the UK that they could not depend on Corbyn to defend them against antisemitism, only at best certain kinds of antisemitism, others of which he gives a free pass, because you can’t object to what you can’t detect.
BTW, what do you call a racial double-standard that cuts exclusively against Jews? There’s a word for it, I seem to recall.
Corbyn’s antisemitism is of the passive-aggressive sort, a string of obvious things left obviously undone and obvious alarms obviously failing to go off. Passive-aggressive antisemitism is still antisemitism.
3: METASTASIS
This antisemitism problem didn't matter much when he was winding through three decades in back-bench obscurity. But when he became party leader in 2015, the party apparatus had a choice: do they say "Jeremy, you're a big boy in charge of a big party, you can't afford that sort of blind spot anymore," or do they indulge it, do they go the Nixon/Trump route — denying, stonewalling, obfuscating, and counter-attacking?
To the party's moral shame, it chose the latter. And what they “counter-attacked” was … the Jewish mainstream.
Well, when you're planning on pointing the full force of a major party's comms apparatus (including its press and Twitter surrogates) at the mainstream of an ethnic minority, using it as a heat ray specifically focused to attack that ethnic minority's mainstream, you'd better make sure your hands are NASA-lab clean. And neither Corbyn nor his chief advisor Seumas Milne had clean hands.
The result was four flavors of apocalyptic crap-splatting catastrophe.
- Optical catastrophe: a self-declared anti-racist party going into a high-visibility war against the mainstream of an ethnic group, only to have a constant stream of their members exposed — oooopsie! — as antisemites.
- Managerial catastrophe: vast Labour resources poured into an unnecessary and unwinnable battle, including eventually uncountable legal hours.
- Moral catastrophe 1: Corbyn's passive-aggressive antisemitism became the unstated Labour policy, with the result that left-wing antisemitism was not officially discouraged with any force. And racism is like a weed: it doesn’t need encouragement, just a lack of discouragement. It was Corbyn’s version of Trump’s “good people on both sides” moment, greenlighting racism within the party.
- Moral catastrophe 2: Labour actively encouraged loyal Corbynista rank-and-filers to deride and dismiss even the possibility that Labour had a significant antisemitism problem. The way they encouraged you telegraph your loyalty to the Corbyn Project was to be as brutally dismissive as possible to even the merest chance that Jews were being sincere in their alarm. And if that involves hounding Jewish MPs out of the party for the crime of disliking antisemitism, well, what’s so very wrong with that?
4: The problem of not solving the problem
By the time you get to 2018, this turmoil had been stewing for years, and the Jews of the UK were declaring seven to one that Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic. Well, if seven of eight people tell you you've grown donkey ears, have a look in the mirror, y’know?
Several accounts (including the one I’m about to mention) said that Corbyn at this point, unable to handle the controversy, simply froze up, got stuck between floors — unable to address the accusations but unable to ignore them. So he just sorta sulked about it, and about how oppressed he was, and how unfair the world is. And that was his way of dealing with it.
Here’s how Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn — a really good Bob-Woodwardy inside-story retelling of the last two years of Corbyn’s leadership — puts it.
Corbyn has often been cast as a prisoner of his advisors. “The good king and the bad viziers,” is how one close aide puts it. When it came to Labour’s relationship with the Jewish community, the failure was his. The empathy that defined him as a man and politician escaped him. In the face of accusations of racism, he too often empathised with himself. It might reasonably be argued that here was a leader whose preference was to split his own party, rather than apologise [to the Jewish community].
Corbyn’s lack of self-analysis meant that the crisis went on for years, because Corbyn let it go on for years. His adoring acolytes told him he was morally unimpeachable; why disbelieve them?
What, Me Worry?
In the same way it will take years to detoxify everything Trump touched, it will take years to detoxify Labour from the antisemitism Corbyn let spread unhindered and even encouraged through the abuse of the party comms apparatus. Corbyn, and Labour’s comms under Corbyn, trained up loyal comrades to reflexively dismiss any charges of antisemitism on the left, to reflexively accuse anyone complaining of left antisemitism of acting in bad faith with ulterior motives, to reflexively presume that any Jew who is bothered by left antisemitism is merely faking it and is best answered with a roll of the eyes, if not an anatomically profane outburst. And that is a legacy that, unfortunately, will outlast the bum who normalized it.
So let’s bring this home. Is the Democratic Party in any danger of falling disastrously into Corbyn-like antisemitism? Is this a harbinger of our future?
I’m not too worried.
First off, because such a thing takes a Corbyn — someone just barely adept enough to find himself in control of a big national party, while being inept enough not to see his blind spot on antisemitism, and stupid enough to ignore everyone who tries to tune him in to it. The Democratic primary process would quickly weed out someone with Corbyn’s weaknesses.
I’m also not too worried, as long as the left in the US understands, as I think it generally does:
- Antisemitism manifests in a different way on the left than on the right. If you only judge antisemitism by looking for the markers of right-wing antisemitism, you give left-wing antisemitism the Jeremy Corbyn pass. Hint: that’s bad.
- Perfuming the classic imagery and ideology of antisemitism in the language of the left disguises but does not remove its antisemitism. An argument, meme, or whatever that is based on antisemitic rhetoric is an antisemitic argument, an antisemitic meme, an antisemitic whatever, no matter where on the political spectrum it comes from, and no matter what the topic.
- And yes, that includes the topic of Israel.
- Jews don’t yell “antisemitism” for giggles, just as Blacks don’t yell “racism” for giggles, and if you automatically and reflexively dismiss the possibility that Jews are being sincere when they raise the issue, then you have bitten a Jeremy-Corbyn-sized chunk out of your own stature as an anti-racist.
- Fighting antisemitism matters. If you have a construction of antisemitism that says antisemitism is not really racism, I mean not really really racism, I mean not really an issue anymore, or somehow a yawner of lesser moral importance than other forms of racism, then your construction is, to that degree, immoral. Fighting racism is not a zero-sum game. You don’t say “I can’t fight racism B because I ran out my battery fighting racism A, so all I can say to victims of racism B is tough shit, get in line earlier next time.
Exhale, already
I’ve watched the Corbyn/Labour antisemitism scandal from its opening days, five years of waiting for good people in the party to finally give their head the proverbial shake, see the blindingly obvious, and stop excusing it away in the name of Jeremy Jeremy Jeremy.
The EHRC ruling is that proverbial shake.
Jeremy Corbyn now goes down in the history books as not merely a catastrophic political failure but as the man who mainstreamed antisemitism in what claims to be an anti-racist party.
Labour has, under its new leader, Sir Keir Starmer, rededicated itself to it antiracist principles. In fact, Starmer issued an apology to the Jewish community within his first fifteen minutes as leader.
But the Jewish community of the UK isn’t going to settle for words anymore. They’ve had too much shit poured over them to go quietly acquiescent.
[Updated]: Corbyn immediately issued a statement dismissing the results as partisan hogwash. Starmer asked him to withdraw the statement. Corbyn refused. Starmer suspended Corbyn from the party and “removed the whip”, i.e. removed Corbyn from the Labour contingent in the House of Commons. THIS IS A SPECTACULARLY GOOD RESULT.
If Starmer fails to punish Corbyn, it would be like Trump being re-elected: a complete absence of consequences for tragic, racist ineptitude.
But we’ll see what happens as it happens. In the meantime, though, the legal finding is unambiguous: Labour under Corbyn was racist against Jews, and it was the party leadership that made it so. There is always something a little bit here-comes-the-sun, joyous if exhausting and frustrating and painful, when after half a decade of inexplicable eclipse the obvious becomes obvious again.