The virus that shines a light on inequalities as it kills

April 29, 2020April 29, 2020 / davesrebellion / 1 Comment

My speech from last night’s live-streamed meeting on “COVID-19 and Disproportionate BAME Deaths” organised by Stand up to Racism. The meeting, watched by 1,700 people, heard also from health workers, FBU, CWU, RMT and NEU representatives, speakers from BAME campaigns and Muslim organisations, three Black Labour MPs, and Jeremy Corbyn. The organisers were keeping speakers rightly to time so I had to lose the final paragraph in my actual speech, but I’ve published the whole text here.

Greetings. As well as the Jewish Socialists’ Group, I’m active in the Labour Party in Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency, where I helped set up a discussion page on our branch website that focuses on political side effects of the virus that the media downplays, and develops ideas about the political changes we need. I set the ball rolling with a piece about Coronavirus and racism. Some of my messages tonight are based on that.

The first 10 doctors to die in Britain form coronavirus

Coronavirus attacks black and white, gay and straight, old and young, prime ministers and homeless people. But it impacts on different communities in different ways. The virus shines a powerful light on existing inequalities and vulnerabilities under a government inspired by eugenics, that regards the elderly and disabled as collateral damage, and shows little concern for minority communities who are among the very hardest hit.

Migrants and members of BAME communities are more concentrated in low paid, unsafe work, including frontline provision of health and social care and live in more crowded, shared accommodation, where its hard to self-isolate.

The ultra-orthodox, Jewish communities in Hackney, also live in more crowded, shared accommodation with high infection rates. One significant community leader there, a longstanding friend of both Dianne Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, who I knew personally, was Rabbi Pinter, for many years a Labour councillor, He died from the virus aged 70,

In the Jewish community I grew up in, relatives of people I knew have died in their 50s and 60s. My aunt is very ill in hospital with coronavirus right now. [very sadly, she died this morning]

More recent migrant communities, though, are directly affected by the Hostile nurses_3p37auA.max-760x504 Environment. Undocumented workers are scared to approach health services, not only because of charges they think they may incur, but because the Home Office pressures the NHS to share immigration data. Campaigning groups among NHS workers, like Patients not Passports and Docs not Cops, who are resisting the Hostile Environment in their workplaces must be supported.

Migrants who are are deterred from seeking medical help through racist policies, are a risk both to themselves, and to others, if they contract the virus.

The really tragic thing is that among asylum seekers and undocumented workers, there are qualified and skilled health workers prevented from using their skills.

When the crisis eventually subsides we will face an economic recession. Racists will try to exploit these circumstances to shift the blame towards minority communities. They are already rehearsing. Near where I live, there are stickers on lamp-posts attacking asylum seekers and promoting “Race and Nation”.

Far right conspiracy theorists spread hate on the internet. Former UKIP leader, Gerard Batten, has targeted the Hungarian Jew, George Soros in tweets about Coronavirus. He asks: “How much money will George Soros make out of it?”

Screen Shot 2020-04-29 at 11.42.07 Fascists in America attack the lockdown as a plot against the people. They have been driving around parading antisemitic placards depicting Jews as rats with the words – “The real plague”.

But conspiracy theories are also spreading within some Black African communities here, who have many reasons not to trust the government, and to believe that capitalism will further exploit peoples of Africa. These conspiracy theories attack the vaccine industry and Bill Gates alleged involvement in it.

We need to challenge all the conspiracy theories about coronavirus, from all quarters.

We should honour the memory of the high proportion of NHS staff fatalities from BAME communities by simultaneously campaigning for the NHS, combating the Hostile Environment, and combating conspiracy theories which weaken, divide and disarm us.

Ultimately, coronavirus attacks one race – the human race. That is how we must fight it and support people facing hardship from it. That is already happening in many places through multicultural, multi-generational, mutual aid groups that have sprung up. They have given us a glimpse of how our world could work if its was based on meeting human need rather than private profit. Let’s build that world!

He kept the memory alive!

April 19, 2020April 20, 2020 / davesrebellion / 2 Comments

IMG_2266 (1)

“Those who were killed in action had done their duty to the end, to the last drop of blood that soaked into the pavements of the Warsaw Ghetto. We, who did not perish, leave it up to you to keep the memory of them alive – forever”

(Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights)

Today on the 77th anniversary of the beginning of the three-week long resistance known as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, I want to pay tribute to a Polish-Jewish, working class activist, who was in the same organisation as Edelman – the Jewish Workers’ Bund. This activist came to Britain as a refugee after the war, and did more than most to keep the memory of the ghetto uprising and the spirit of resistance that existed among Polish Jews alive.

His name was Majer Bogdanski, a tailor, born in Piotrkow in 1912, where he became active as a trade unionist and a Bundist by his late teens. He moved to Lodz in 1935. After the war he continued to work in London as a tailor. He lived in the East End, at first, just off Brick lane and later behind Cable Street. He was active in the Labour Party and, from the mid-1980s, also in the Jewish Socialists’ Group, where he was a living link with the political tradition we were closest to.

I first encountered Majer in the early 1980s at an incredibly moving Warsaw Ghetto commemoration in the East End, which he was chairing, conducted entirely in Yiddish. Yiddish was the mother-tongue of most of those incarcerated into the ghetto, the first language of most of those deported from there to the death camp at Treblinka, and the language of most of the resistance fighters. This annual commemoration, organised by the Friends of Yiddish – a group he chaired for around 20 years – was the only regular Ghetto commemoration in Britain conducted in Yiddish.

At the time, I was one of a small number of young people there in our 20s. My Yiddish was fairly rudimentary then, but developing. There were some people in their 40s and 50s and several who were Majer’s age (he was 70 at the time), or older. Like Majer, they were post war refugees who had grown up in Poland and were in their 20s or 30s when the Nazis invaded.

Some were Holocaust survivors, others had a different trajectory like Majer himself, who had been conscripted to the Polish army when he was 21, in the early 1930s, and called up again as war broke out in 1939. Stationed in the part of Poland that was taken over by the Soviet Union, he spent a year and a half in a labour camp in Siberia, the fate of many Poles both Jewish and non-Jewish, before an agreement was eventually signed that freed the Poles and enabled them to form army units that subsequently took part in many battles against the Nazis during the rest of the war. Majer arrived here with other Polish soldiers in 1946.

In the photos above, you can see Majer with handwritten notes. Each year, he would write something new for the Friends of Yiddish ghetto commemoration, and later also for annual ghetto commemorations organised by the Jewish Socialists’ Group (JSG), as well as giving talks to other groups about anti-Nazi resistance in the ghetto. He joined the JSG in the mid-1980s and remained a member until he died in 2005.

Although he always added new insights and reflections to his talks each year, certain strong themes and formulations always returned. I remembered from that first event I attended onwards, he would close his talk with a series of individuals and groups he especially wanted to mention, beginning each sentence “Mir gibn op koved…” (We honour..), and unlike some of the bigger more establishment-oriented commemorations in the Jewish community, he would always include koved for Gypsies whom, he said, “were murdered in the same way and for the same reason as the Jews”. He would always include the fighters themselves, all who engaged in cultural resistance, and he would give a special mention to a courageous individual Bundist, with whom he used to have daily contact in late 1930s Lodz – Szmul ‘Artur’ Zygielbojm – who committed suicide in London as a protest when he knew that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had been finally crushed.

Majer would also talk with rage at those such as the “historian” David Irving who sought to minimise or even deny the Holocaust. To Majer, who had lost his wife, Esther Wolstan, almost his entire large extended family, so many close friends and comrades, and neighbours, it was unbearable. In 1935 he had married Esther Wolstan, also a Bundist, and from a family of prominent Bundist activists. They upset many of their more religious relatives by getting married in a secular civil ceremony. They were committed atheists and didn’t want either rabbis or God to be present at such an occasion. Under family pressure, they eventually had a second ceremony in a synagogue.

While Majer was incarcerated in Siberia, Esther was part of the underground resistance in Lodz. Majer later found out after the war that she had been murdered at Auschwitz. Prior to that she had been arrested and tortured but had not betrayed her fellow Bundist resisters.

Another devastating theme that recurred in Majer’s Ghetto commemoration talks was about children. He emphasised that among the 6 million Jews who were exterminated there were more than a million children. The Bund had a youth movement in Poland – Tsukunft (Future), and a children’s movement, Sotsialistisher Kinder Farband (Socialist Children’s Union/Association), known as SKIF. Majer had been a group leader at SKIF camps, known as Socialist Children’s Republics, and once wrote a beautiful piece in Jewish Socialist magazine, about being part of this evolving project of helping to nurture young people with secular, socialist, internationalist and humanitarian values. When he was active in the Labour Party here, he became a school governor and visited schools frequently.

His own childhood had been a terrible struggle against poverty. He told me once that he attributed his survival in the Siberian labour camp to the fact that in his younger life he endured weeks where his family had gone without food sometimes two or three times a week. He was used to great hardship so he developed exceptional resilience.

He had been apprenticed as a tailor when he was 13 years old, and had some income, but it was meagre. His family were worried that he might pick up the habits of other young people facing great hardship and get into pickpocketing or other petty crime, to enhance his income. As a moral counter to this, they insisted he went to evening classes at a Yeshiva (Jewish religious seminary). He went for a year. He told me that, of a class of 30 children, by the end of the year, almost none of them believed in God, quite a few became communists, some became Zionists and he gravitated towards the Bund!

His exposure to very religious Judaism, though, had an unexpected product. He was always interested in singing and music. Post-war he undertook adult education classes in music theory and learned to play the violin. He also had a magnificent singing voice which he illustrated in songs he sang at ghetto commemorations, usually songs written by Yiddish-speaking Jews under Nazi occupation He remembered many cantorial tunes from his time at the Yeshiva. After the Holocaust many of those melodies were simply lost. A culture was destroyed as well as people. But he transcribed more than 50 of the tunes he remembered and deposited them with YIVO, the Yiddish Institute in America; deeply religious tunes salvaged by the most secular of Jews. He also self-published via the radical/anarchist Freedom Press in Aldgate East, four volumes of melodies he had put to Yiddish poems.

His telling of the events of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was also enriched by his personal experience in Poland of the fight against antisemitism especially in the decade before the Nazi invasion. He was very proud that the Bund had led this fight, and also deeply appreciative of the cooperation they were able to develop in this struggle with the mainly non-Jewish socialists of the left-wing of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). He also retained a strong anger and disappointment at those who didn’t take part in this struggle, including both the ultra-orthodox, who believed God would intervene, and the Zionists, who, apart from a small very left faction, “Left Poale Zion”, did not believe that antisemitism could be combated and were concentrating more on training young people to emigrate to Palestine.

Majer’s fundamental opposition to nationalism, including Zionism, stayed with him throughout his life. And while he recognised that in the ghetto itself, Zionists, Communists and Bundists cooperated in a united fighting organisation, he was very keen to emphasise the consistent role of the Bund of militantly combating antisemitism throughout its history, from its self-defence squads against pogromists in the early 1900s, through to the efforts of its militia in the maelstrom of 1930s Poland, and then its later physical resistance in the ghettoes and in partisan units. He praised the Bund also for its work to promote secular Yiddish culture and for its continued determination to build a world free of nationalism and oppression.

And so today, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, we should remember those who resisted in so many different ways in the ghettoes, physically, culturally, spiritually, and we should be remembering those like Majer who gave so much to the task of keeping their memory alive.

What does Labour’s leaked report tell us?

April 16, 2020April 16, 2020 / davesrebellion / 3 Comments

Screen Shot 2020-04-15 at 21.23.54 “They are cheering and we are silent and grey faced”, lamented a WhatsApp message sent from the headquarters of a certain political party on the night of 8/9^th June 2017. Despite a very poor and wooden campaign by Theresa May, a stark contrast with Jeremy Corbyn’s energetic one, based on Labour’s exciting and radical manifesto, major newspapers and pundits were still predicting a Tory landslide just days before the election. So you could completely understand the shock and misery that must have descended on the faithful at Tory HQ.

Only this wasn’t Tory HQ. It was Labour’s. In Corbyn’s office, staff joyously celebrated thumping majorities in their safer seats and whooped with delight at every gain, including some very unlikely seats turning Labour for the first time in decades or ever. They allowed themselves to start to imagine what seemed unbelievable. Labour ended the night within a whisker of pulling off a shock result. Less than 2,500 votes spread over just seven marginal seats, would have not only deprived Theresa May of her majority – which they did achieve – but Labour could have feasibly formed a minority government. A government putting people before profit that could have started to turn the tide of years of austerity. In today’s Coronavirus crisis and the utter failure of the Johnson government to protect the most impoverished, marginalised and vulnerable members of society, or indeed frontline healthworkers, we can see the true cost of Labour failing to pull off that victory which was almost within its grasp.

But our grey-faced messenger was in a different room in Labour HQ with her close work colleagues. She messaged her wider circle on this WhatsApp thread, reacting to Corbyn’s strong performance: “Opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years!!” (my emphasis.)

The hard-earned money of ordinary Labour members – a very different socio-economic profile to the average Tory member – was funding the salaries of Labour staff who had been actively working for a Labour defeat from the day that Corbyn became Labour leader. Our messenger was part of a tight-knit, self-perpetuating senior management team at Labour HQ, embedded in the Blair years. When vacancies occurred they were filled by carefully selected interview candidates some of whom were forearmed with the likely interview questions.

Corbyn may have been in office when he won the leadership in 2015 but he

Emma Dent Coad won Kensington for Labour for the first time in 2017

and his team were not in power. They struggled for resources to fund their campaign in key 2017 marginals, because, under their noses, in the same HQ, a powerful set of salaried staff, were running a an alternative election campaign, that funneled resources instead to key seats, mainly safe ones, to make doubly sure that their close right wing allies in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), retained them, and would be well-placed to run a leadership challenge to depose Corbyn after they assumed would be an inevitable, crushing election defeat.

I’m a seasoned political activist. I’ve witnessed political betrayals at close quarters. I’ve seen turncoats do their worst, and heard their cynical justifications as they attacked former comrades. But as I read through the details in the 851-page leaked Labour report that emerged last weekend (the leak was effective BTW – I was offered it by six different sources), I didn’t just feel anger, I felt physically sick.

The disgusting language and repugnant values captured in a mass of WhatsApp messages and emails between key people who were at the heart of that staff team under the leadership of the former party General Secretary Iain McNicol, have been exposed in several commentary pieces penned in the last few days since the leak. I won’t repeat them all here but leave a few examples, such as the racist/sexist descriptions of the highest placed MP of Caribbean heritage Diane Abbott: “angry woman”, “truly repulsive”, “literally makes me sick”, said in the same breath as negative comments about Dawn Butler, another leading female Black MP.

Clive Lewis meanwhile, born to a white English mother but brought up by his Grenadian father on a council estate in Northampton, is described by a regional organiser as “the biggest cunt of the lot”. A very senior staff member, who later appeared as a “whistleblower” telling tales of woe on the infamous July 2019 Panorama hatchet–job on Corbyn in July 2019, wholeheartedly agreed with this description of Lewis.

Unflattering physical descriptions of leading staff members of Corbyn’s LOTO team litter these WhatsApp exchanges among Labour HQ’s senior management. One is described as “actually fat”, a “bitch face cow” and “medusa monster” whose face “would make a good dartboard”. Another highly-placed LOTO officer was referred to as “pube head” and a “smelly cow”. There are demeaning references to the mental health of perceived political opponents, often dismissed as “crazy”, “nutters” and “mentalists”. One senior staff member expressed a wish that a young Labour member, struggling with mental health problems, should “die in a fire”. And if that member was on fire, a member of Labour’s Governance and Law Unit (GLU) added that he “wouldn’t piss on him to put him out”. A key liaison person between the party bureaucracy and the PLP commented: “Wish there was a petrol can emoji”.

Screen Shot 2020-04-15 at 21.33.00 Insulting and physically threatening language was not reserved just for young activists but directed at Corbyn himself. Just after Corbyn was voted leader, one senior staff member at Labour HQ boasted that they had used the word “cunt more in the last 48hrs” than in their whole life.

They vented anger especially at Labour MPs who proposed to nominate Corbyn for the 2015 leadership ballot to “widen the field”. Any MP doing so “deserves to be taken out and shot”, said one staffer. Another thread discussed “hanging and burning” Corbyn. A policy head joked that staff should tattoo their foreheads “FUJC” – “Fuck You Jeremy Corbyn”.

In early 2018 after the Labour Party Left eventually won a narrow majority on Labour’s NEC, its ruling body, Iain McNicol resigned and now sits as a Labour peer. Many of his key staff followed, having negotiated fine redundancy packages for themselves even though they had been deliberately obstructive and uncooperative. On their own admission they spent their years after Corbyn became leader on a go-slow, while developing WhatsApp chat groups on which they would be “tap tap tapping away” to “make us look v busy”. Discussing likely redundancy packages if they completed enough years of service, one key GLU Director advised a staff member that she would be “entitled to a decent chunk. Worth staying for it even if it means coming into the office & doing nothing for a few months”.

There was, however, one piece of work that key members of staff engaged in very energetically and enthusiastically, devoting shedloads of time that could have been spent on other priorities, such as dealing with members’ complaints of racism including antisemitism. This was “validation” of members and supporters eligible to vote in the leadership contests of 2015 and 2016. During both those contests, thousands of voters had their eligibility to vote removed at a stroke. Some were given explanations based on incredibly flimsy pretexts. Most got no explanation at all. This fell almost exclusively on voters planning to vote for Corbyn.

Back in Labour HQ, the perpetrators shared messages with each other about their

Even Sadiq Khan was labelled a “Trot”

“trot hunt”. Anyone remotely left of centre could be accused of being a “Trot”. Some HQ staff applied this, bizarrely, to Ed Miliband and Sadiq Khan.

The summary exclusions from the leadership electoral roll caused immense pain to many longstanding socialist activists who at last had a candidate with a radical programme they fully endorsed. One such person was a very close friend of mine, a Jewish man in his early 70s, who had been active in socialist and labour movement causes from his teenage years. Despite some health problems that limited his mobility, he always made strenuous efforts to get to meetings and support campaigns, locally and globally (in better health during the Yugoslav wars he had helped to deliver “Workers Aid” by lorry to Tuzla in Bosnia).

Late one Saturday night, in early September, 2015, he rang us in a very agitated state having been informed earlier that evening by Labour HQ that his vote had been nullified. We tried hard to calm him down and give him some practical advice about who he might contact to try to get it resolved. At the end of the conversation, though, he was still very wrought up. We didn’t hear from him the next day. The following morning he was found dead at home, having apparently died in his sleep.

The narrative that has dominated the commentary since last weekend has described the consistent attempts to directly sabotage Corbyn-led Labour’s progress by right wingers ensconced in the party’s inner bureaucracy. The saboteurs looked forward to their efforts being rewarded through a large Tory victory in 2017 after which Corbyn would be forced to resign. Some of them founded a plot they called Operation Cupcake and met with Tom Watson, Labour’s Deputy leader, grooming him to become interim leader if Corbyn resigned.

raynerkeir_errk2h It is inconceivable that wider elements of the PLP, especially among the 178 who attempted a coup in summer 2016, did not know about this. Did Keir Starmer know? He was one of the Shadow Cabinet members who staged an immaculately choreographed, phased resignation from their posts to build the coup. Perhaps Angela Rayner, at that time very loyal to Jeremy Corbyn, and someone who still claims that legacy (though not always convincingly) might be pressurised to ask him.

The fall out from these revelations has had two contradictory effects. For some members, especially younger activists, enthused and energised by Corbyn’s ascent to leadership, who gave their all for him over the last five years, the emerging details of this betrayal on the back of the failure by the candidate closest to Corbyn’s views to win the 2020 leadership election, is the last straw. They are leaving the party. I wish I could persuade them to stay, because the other reaction, now that the scheming, plotting and sabotage is in the public domain, is shared anger across the Left of the party and across some of the arcane divisions that often needlessly separate us from one another on secondary issues. There is now the prospect of a more united fighting Left emerging within Labour.

But we must also not lose sight of the reason this report was written in the first place. It Dltb4itXgAIosLu was prepared as a submission to the EHRC, a body initially set up by the Labour Party to advance equalities in Britain and ensure that institutions were maintaining good practice in doing this. The Tory Party with a long history of racism going back to the Aliens Act of 1905 that sought to reduce Jewish immigration to Britain, through its harsh refugee policies in the 1930s, its fondness for Empire, its advancement of racist policing policies, its opposition to sanctions against Apartheid South Africa, while its student body in the 1980s sold “Hang Nelson Mandela” merchandise, and its record of deflecting repeated accusations of Islamophobia, were hardly likely to be creators of equality institutions.

Bizarrely, at the behest of a very right-wing Zionist Jewish group, Campaign Against Antisemitism a body whose own attitudes to racism have been rightly questioned, and the rabidly anti-Corbyn Labour group, the Jewish Labour Movement, the EHRC were asked to investigate whether antisemitism has been present within Labour’s processes. At the moment Labour’s lawyers won’t let this document be submitted as an official Labour report. Perhaps it was through frustration at this situation that the report was leaked. Individuals are at liberty to submit it to the EHRC, though clearly it would be stronger coming from the party itself. Their cut-off date for submissions has passed, but their terms of reference state they would continue to consider pertinent submissions.

The keenness of EHRC to investigate was also media-driven. A popular mainstream media narrative, mirrored by the the dominant press in the Jewish community, says that Labour was a proud anti-racist party but since Corbyn became leader there have been increasing numbers of cases of antisemitism in the party that the party has failed to deal with. In that five-year period the media have increasingly fingered Corbyn and people close to him, as the source of the problem. This attack on Corbyn-led Labour became increasingly virulent after Labour’s strong showing in the 2017 General Election. Organisations and individuals who self-define as Jewish community leaders have led the charge too.

Jennie Formby

In response, the Labour leadership has always stressed its absolute opposition to all forms of racism including antisemitism. It has made some errors of judgement and not always appreciated more subtle forms that antisemitism can take, but it can point to its record of dealing with such problems as there are, especially since a new General Secretary, Jennie Formby, came into post, in early 2018. She constructed a new team and initiated several reforms of the way the party has handled complaints.

At the same time many activists on the left, both Jewish and non-Jewish have argued that the dominant narratives around Labour and antisemitism were false, that claims of antisemitism within Labour were wildly exaggerated, and many allegations did not stand up to scrutiny. And they were especially concerned that among those targeted and punished for challenging these narratives were a disproportionate number of pro-Palestinian activists including Jewish left wingers. They argued with justification that the hullabaloo around questions of antisemitism has had a chilling effect on members wishing to promote the cause of Palestinian human rights and criticise Zionism for its racist practices in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

There are many shocking aspects pertinent to this debate that are revealed within this report. It certainly blows apart the dominant media narrative by showing that between 2015 and 2018 the party’s Governance and Legal Unit, which engaged in constant factional plotting against Corbyn’s leadership, failed dismally to act on the majority of complaints of antisemitism that it received, forwarding complaints from one inbox to another with very few cases being resolved, and the ones that were apparently settled often reached questionable conclusions. That period saw more than 300 complaints submitted. Only 34 were investigated.

Just as seriously, when the Labour leadership team inquired about progress on cases they were: given inaccurate information and statistics; told that complaints had been processed when they hadn’t; assured that many perpetrators were not Labour members (which was untrue); and given timetables for ongoing complaints to be resolved that were not met. Perhaps the leadership should have pressed further and deeper, and risked being told it was unnecessarily “interfering” and didn’t trust the staff to do their jobs. Ironically in the period since Formby’s substantial reforms there have been large numbers of allegations of antisemitism, especially through the MP for Barking, Margaret Hodge, that have turned out to be mainly complaints against individuals unconnected in any way with the Labour Party.

Outside the Party, though, during Corbyn’s leadership, the narrative gained traction that antisemitism was being allowed to fester in the party, and that this was the fault of the leadership. Corbyn commissioned a report by Shami Chakrabarti, but struggled to get its many excellent recommendations put into practice. The GLU simply didn’t play ball. She had provided guidance on a wide range of conduct that was antisemitic, and made a series of recommendations. The report was placed on the party website but GLU largely failed to use this guidance. When staff within HQ were asked to update and revamp the party website they did so, but in its new iteration the Chakrabarti Report had mysteriously disappeared. LOTO’s Stakeholder Manager pointed out this discrepancy, and also asked that agreed codes of conduct were placed there, accessible to members. The leaked report reveals a disagreement within senior GLU staff with one insisting: “My strong view is that (it) should not be on the website.” It was eventually reinstated but barely acted upon.

The question remains of why there was such a poor record of dealing with the cases? The leaked report portrays a dysfunctional system, where little attention had been given to training and development on issues of antisemitism or other racist bigotries. This was compounded by the inordinate attention key officers gave to their factional political work against Corbyn’s leadership. The fight against antisemitism and other forms of racism within the party was hampered and constantly deprioritised by this obsession.

Since some change of staffing initially in 2018, and a new and bigger team effectively in place since 2019, Labour can justifiably claim that on the whole it has addressed the complaints much more efficiently and with more professional systems for logging, recording and acting on cases. It acknowledges that some errors continued to be made, where complaints against certain members resulted in light sanctions, because patterns of behaviour failed to be discovered at first. These have been addressed since. Formby’s new team has also carried out a historical audit to trace cases going back several years, that were never properly resolved. Of those original 300 cases, the party believes there was a case for serious action on around 150 of them, far more than the 34 where some progress on earlier cases had been made by the staff previously in place.

But when you examine the detail of these cases it also presents a significant challenge to

A labour member shared Holocaust -denier David Irving’s material

those who stubbornly deny there is any problem of antisemitism in the Labour party. Although the numbers of such cases are very small in a party of half a million members, these include some cases of very extreme antisemitism. A few examples: Holocaust denial; conspiracy theories about Jews/Rothschild bankers running the world; accusations of “zioscum masters” with an “ultimate agenda of wiping out the goyim”; members sharing David Irving’s material and claims of a “phony 6 million”; an image shared of a Jewish man rubbing his hands together, as the world burns, captioned “Zionism cancer of the Earth”; an image of numerous Jews with the caption “know your enemy these men rule the world”; a social media post claiming “Sadly all we have today is a bunch of worthless politicians controlled like puppets by Jewish lobbyists and Rothschilds working for their personal benefits $$$$”; an article claiming “Jews are leading the legal fight against brexit” and a video claiming “Gentiles will be the slaves of Jews”; a post saying the Jews were behind 9/11, Rothschilds were behind World War 2, and Israel controls America.

How could people holding these views have got anywhere near the Labour Party? Did they publicly express general views about a fairer society but somehow hide these repulsive but strongly felt ideas? Did they not give any hint to fellow Labour members of their views before they were eventually brought to the attention of the Labour Party centrally? There is also some evidence within the report of complaints of anti-black racism and Islamophobia also failing to make progress through the clunky (lack of) system formerly in place. But that is not so surprising when you read the everyday racism expressed in the WhatsApp chats .

Since Jennie Formby’s reforms, Labour has addressed the historical cases and sought to bring them to a conclusion. In many cases expulsions have occurred. In others, members who have expressed Hitlerite-style antisemitism, who have received notice of a case against them which may result in expulsion, have resigned.

Without doubt there must be a fight to unite the party as a whole, its members and its staff, around its core socialist values again, which must have equality and respect at its heart, but there is still an ongoing fight to educate our members and supporters against all forms of antisemitism and other bigotries.

Lessons from a forgotten murder

April 6, 2020April 22, 2020 / davesrebellion / 1 Comment

Fifty years ago, in early April 1970, there was a horrific racist murder in the East End, but the memory of this tragic case has been obscured by later similar events in that locality. In the aftermath of that murder, the advice given to anti-racists by a veteran Jewish communist remains as valid as ever

The racist murder of an Asian immigrant in the 1970s East End of London, and the outpouring of grief and anger by the local community that followed it, immediately brings to mind Altab Ali, the 24-year-old Bengali clothing worker attacked and stabbed to death on his way home from work in 1978. his murder was indeed met by a wave of protests led by militant young Bengalis who had formed themselves into militant youth campaigns to confront the fascists terrorising their community. Their fight was centred on the East End though they took their protests to the West End too

But Altab Ali was not the first Asian immigrant in east London to be murdered by young people whose minds had been poisoned by racism. That first victim bore the same, common surname and came from the same part of the world in search of better economic opportunities, but he was twice Altab Ali’s age. His name was Tochir/Tosir Ali. He, too, was murdered on his way home from work, but in April 1970, only a few months after Altab Ali came to live in London.

Altab Ali himself rarely travelled beyond the East End where he settled with his uncle and found employment within the busy clothing trade in and around Brick Lane and Hanbury Street. Tosir Ali, by contrast, worked as a kitchen porter at a Wimpy Bar amid the bright lights of the West End, but usually returned late at night, to the dark, forbidding streets between Bromley-by-Bow station and the gloomy housing estates in St Leonard’s Street, Bow. Tosir Ali lived in a 3rd floor flat in

Tosir Ali

Phillips House. It was a few minutes after midnight when he was attacked by two 18-year-olds, one a labourer, the other unemployed. After they slashed him with a knife they ran off. Ali dragged himself up six flights of stairs leaving a trail of blood behind him. The motive was not robbery. His wallet containing £10 was found with his body.

The alarm was raised by Helen Houlihan who lived in the estate opposite. She heard a horrific, piercing scream which she described to a journalist on the local paper as akin to the sound of a “wild animal… a mixture of pain and fear”. When she ventured outside she saw Ali staggering along the landing opposite before falling against his front door. He was rushed to nearby St Andrew’s Hospital but died soon afterwards from stab wounds to his throat.

This was not an isolated incident. Two days earlier, the Observer newspaper drew attention to the serious growth in the number of assaults on the East End’s small but growing Pakistani community, many of them Bengalis from Sylhet in what was then East Pakistan, later a region in independent Bangladesh. Around 90% of the Sylheti-born immigrants there were men who had recently settled in east London. From his lofty privileged position, a writer in the Observer pompously commented: “Any Asian careless enough to be walking the streets alone at night is a fool.” Tosir Ali was neither careless nor a fool; he was simply a victim of the precarious labour market in which immigrant workers from former colonies were forced to settle for low-paid jobs or take jobs with the least sociable hours.

Dave R tosir skinheads Who carried out all these assaults? The attackers were largely young men, dressed in a distinctive style: closely cropped hair, checked shirts, braces, or sleeveless tank-top jumpers, dark jeans and steel-capped “bovver” boots. The angry, aggressive, “skinhead” subculture had emerged among alienated youth in impoverished working class areas at the end of what was called “the swinging 60s”, but in Bethnal Green where skinheads were particularly numerous, it was anything but swinging.

Bethnal Green had a long and inglorious history of certain layers of the working class attaching themselves to racist movements. This stretched from the British Brothers’ League of the early 1900s which railed against East European Jewish immigration (or “pauperised aliens” as they put it more politely in public posters and adverts), to the mobs who rioted locally in 1917 when they believed Jews were evading army service, to Mosley’s fascist movement in the 1930s, whose Bethnal Green branch held a weekly march to its headquarters in the part of Roman Road known then as Green Street. Post-war the tradition was revived by market traders there, warming to Enoch Powell’s targeting of non-white immigrants in 1968.

Local skinheads fell into this tradition more naturally after 1976, when many of them supported violent political groups such as the National Front and British Movement who made a determined effort to organise in the area. But in the late 1960s the East End’s skinheads were not yet politically aligned, and their cultural influences, especially in music, overlapped significantly with Jamaican ska/reggae/Rude Boy influences.

Monty Neysmith was a Jamaican-born member of the skinhead band Symarip, dave R tosir ali moonstomp formed in 1969, that released the Moonstomp classic in 1970. He remembers spending time with many other black skinheads in that period. The emerging skinhead culture was, he recalls, split between those who essentially identified with the fashion and style, and those “causing racial problems”. The latter, he said “would go after the Pakistanis, because they considered them weak, because they would not fight back.” Recently arrived Pakistani immigrants, nervously finding their way with limited English language skills in an insular, unfriendly country, became a target. Other young whites, who were not macho, and who skinheads also perceived as vulnerable, weak and afraid, were targeted too.

A pattern of attacks on East End Pakistanis could be identified from the summer of 1969. Many assaults happened in broad daylight, with passers-by too scared to intervene. Four local social workers collectively published a report in April 1970 based on a survey especially of the first two months of that year when the attacks peaked. Their report described Pakistani immigrants as being “too insular and withdrawn”. Their jobs and accommodation were “arranged by fellow countrymen”. They were “unlikely to make any initial contact with English people”, and had “little opportunity to be integrated.” The authors acknowledged that many of the attacks on Pakistanis were carried out by skinheads but observed: “Not all skinheads indulged in ‘Paki-bashing’ … although the average young person might be prejudiced against the Pakistanis, he is unlikely to attack them.” But, they added: “He might lose this restraint if he joins a gang.” And there was another factor. This was learned behaviour: “…some parents do not disguise their prejudice and are encouraging their children to show contempt towards Pakistanis.”

The report added that “tensions were reflected in the local secondary school … some Pakistani children are afraid to go to school.” But having identified the influential role that their parents’ racism played, it nevertheless concluded that the main reasons for the attacks were opportunist – “to steal money or just crude beatings up.”

The geographical areas in which the East End skinheads operated reached across to Whitechapel and Aldgate, and further east through Bow to Stratford and Plaistow. More young people attending West Ham football ground adopted the skinhead style. Racist attacks reported by the local newspaper, the East London Advertiser, through the first six months of 1970, occurred in several East End districts.

In Hanbury Street off Brick Lane a skinhead gang set fire to a car, scratched others, damaged shop fronts and broke into flats to open up gas and electric meters. In Alie Street near Aldgate there was an arson attack late at night on a condemned building. Around 20 Asians – men, women and children – fled from there. There were repeated attacks on local Muslims outside their main place of worship, a mosque on Commercial Road. Bottles and stones were thrown at mourners during a funeral procession.

On another occasion six youths assaulted the imam and two other worshippers, one of whom, Mr Hakim, had initially been approached for a light. When he put his hands into his pocket the youth knocked him over and kicked him in the face. But there was also a spark of resistance. The imam’s wife warned, “It will be a sore thing for the louts if they come back because I and some other woman judoists will be armed with crowbars.”

Two weeks before the deadly assault on Tosir Ali, three skinheads approached an Indian immigrant, Naranaya Vasupillai, on the street near his Newham home. As they threatened him three more skinheads came up from behind. They knocked him down, smashed his glasses, kicked and punched him leaving him on the pavement with blood pouring from a gash inside his mouth. Pasdman Kesavin, who lived at the same address as Vasupillai, said the victim was his fourth friend to be beaten up by skinheads in two weeks.

In late April there was a series of skirmishes between skinheads and young Pakistanis in Brick Lane. In one incident around 50 white youths rampaged down Brick Lane smashing shop windows and attacking people on the street. Two Pakistani youths needed hospital treatment that day. Police arrived on the scene and arrested two white youths and two Bengali Pakistanis – an 18-year-old and a 32-year-old shopkeeper). The two white youths were released later while the two Pakistanis were charged.

Several community meetings were called in response to this escalating crisis. Some were led by more establishment bodies: the local Community Relations Council, police, MPs, citizens and church groups. They listened to people’s experiences and sought to dampen down conflicts and identify positive steps to improve the situation. Others were organised by militant political groups such as the Pakistani Progressive Party, the Pakistani Workers’ Union, Black Panthers, the the Black People’s Alliance and the Third World Party led by a charismatic activist calling himself Brother Louis. More than 200 young Pakistanis were recruited into vigilante patrols. In a demonstration that followed one meeting, dozens of activists marched on Arbour Street Police Station off Commercial Road. They had placards that read: “Down with Paki Bashing” and “End police brutality”, and chanted: “Stop police harassment of Asian people,” promising: “We will hit back now!”.

Solly Kaye in his youth

At one of several community meetings, mainly attended by local Pakistanis, a familiar, veteran political figure spoke up. Solly Kaye was a Communist Party councillor in Stepney. He had already experienced this situation as a young communist activist in the 1930s East End where the East European Jewish immigrant community he was born into faced ideological and violent physical attacks from fascists and other antisemites. He joined the Communist Party in 1934, took part in the Battle of Cable Street, and spoke on many indoor and outdoor platforms against fascists.

In a powerful intervention he argued that “the purveyors of racialism can be defeated by united action… it would be the greatest error and worse, if the struggle were left to the immigrant organisations to bear the brunt of the fight… the fight against racial discrimination and violence is part of the fight for a new and better society.”

It had an immediate positive effect. It also contains important principles that we need to restate when communities are under attack now. The responses to today’s outbursts of hate must always be wider than the community directly attacked. There is often a stress on the community under attack leading the fightback, but we need to hardwire a reaction to expressions of hate in which wider groups instantly demonstrate an attitude that “their fight is our fight”. We must support each other unconditionally against racist attacks.

Minorities who have suffered similarly are generally good at supporting each other, but Solly Kaye recognised that the onus was also on majority communities. For him, solidarity was the responsibility of all who want a better society. And the fight against racism could not be delayed for other fights to be settled first. Racist attacks on communities always present themselves urgently.

Kaye’s intervention implored people to be not bystanders but upstanders when others were attacked. But his statement also coupled the violence the Pakistani community endured with the everyday discrimination they suffered. He recognised that they were intimately linked. He understood that the responses from a wider community to the assaults the Pakistani community were suffering had to provide real, tangible support for them, and ensure the victims felt empowered.

Today, 50 years on from Tosir Ali’s horrific murder by young racists, and nearly 42 years on from Altab Ali’s murder, we have become used to using the language of “hate crime” to describe the negative treatment of minorities. But what gets categorised under “hate” is actually more than that. Very often it is a defence of the real or assumed privilege that maintains everyday hierarchies, everyday discrimination, everyday oppression. Hate crimes take place within a framework of privilege and power.

The term “hate crime” is too much of a catch-all. We need a more sophisticated language to counter different kinds of negative actions in different ways. We need to develop appropriate and distinct responses to negative social media comment, specific threats to individuals, general threats to communities, and physical attacks.

It is also crucial to recognise that discrimination, whether on the basis of skin colour, faith, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or based on negative stereotypes, can be enacted quite coldly and routinely, without the outburst of emotions implied by “hate”.

If we are to follow the meaning of Solly Kaye’s wise intervention, we must recognise that the continuing impact of routine discrimination in limiting people’s lives, diminishing their aspirations and opportunities, and depressing their potential, should command our attention just as much as dramatic outbursts of hate that end with blood on the streets.

* This article was written for the Spring 2020 issue of Jewish Socialist magazine which will be out later this week. Subscribe to Jewish Socialist (£10 for 4 issues) at:
https://www.jewishsocialist.org.uk/resources/subscribe
It has also been published today, on the 50th anniversary of Tosir Ali’s murder, in the Morning Star, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/remembering-tosir-ali-murdered-skinhead-racists-1970

Questions for Keir – Jewish Labour members need answers

April 5, 2020April 6, 2020 / davesrebellion / 8 Comments

Dear Keir,

Congratulations on winning the Labour leadership contest. I will confess that I did not vote for you, and also that, because the campaigning period for the contest had been significantly truncated by the Coronavirus emergency in which lives were and are being lost at the most alarming rate because of Government failures, I also proposed through social media that the contest should have been suspended, to be resumed later in the year.

Given that Jeremy Corbyn, as Labour Leader, was playing the central role in holding the government to account on these failures and putting forward alternative proposals for action, I suggested that Labour should have established an interim Emergency Shadow Cabinet Leadership consisting of Jeremy Corbyn and the three leadership candidates, which would last until the pandemic was receding and life was returning to normal, before formally resuming the campaigning period for the Leadership.

That didn’t happen, and we are where we are. You are now in that central position. But as an active, ordinary, Jewish Labour Party member, an elected officer in my CLP, and a trade union branch officer in the NEU, I wanted to address you directly, Keir, in relation to a concrete initiative that you took yesterday – your letter to Marie Van der Zyl, President of the Board of Deputies. I want to ask you several questions.

My status as “an active, ordinary, Jewish Labour Party member” ought to be a sufficient reason for me to wish to communicate with you on this, but perhaps I need to say a bit more.

Singing a Yiddish song of resistance at a memorial in Auschwitz/Birkenau, 2019

I have been involved in anti-racism, as well as education and campaigning about antisemitism both professionally and at a more grassroots level for several decades. In the 1980s I worked for the GLC-funded Jewish Cultural and Anti-Racist Project. After Margaret Thatcher closed down the GLC, I worked for several years at the Runnymede Trust. During each of the last four years I have helped lead an educational initiative that takes multicultural, cross-generational groups of trade unionists and anti-racist activists to Krakow and Auschwitz where we learn about antisemitism, past and present, and make links with other bigotries that are reemerging so menacingly especially in Europe and America today.

In 2011, I published a book about the Jewish confrontation with fascism and antisemitism in 1930s Britain (Battle for the East End). I teach adult education courses that include aspects of London’s Jewish history and another focusing on Jewish life and death in Warsaw with a central focus on the Warsaw Ghetto and the Uprising of 1943. In 2016 I was the overall convenor of Cable Street 80 – the celebration of an immensely proud moment in the history of London, the Jewish community and the labour movement, when people united across communities in huge numbers to prevent thousands of Mosley’s uniformed and jackbooted fascists from terrorising people in predominantly Jewish streets in the East End.

At the two rallies – before and following a commemorative march – Labour was

Marching along Cable Street 2016

represented by three MPs: Rushanara Ali, Dawn Butler, and Jeremy Corbyn who made a very moving concluding speech. The other (now retired) Tower Hamlets MP, Jim Fitzpatrick, was out of London that weekend but was very helpful and supportive of the event. Other speakers included the Labour Mayor of Tower Hamlets, John Biggs, several trade union speakers, including TUC General Secretary, Frances O’Grady, and representatives of Bangladeshi, Irish and Jewish bodies (including the Jewish Labour Movement and the Jewish Socialists’ Group, and Cable Street veteran Max Levitas). You may have been there too among the 3,000-strong crowd. Our only regret was that London’s Labour Mayor, Sadiq Khan, was the sole politician not to reply to several invitations to speak.

So, to my questions. You say in your letter that you “will be speaking with the Jewish community” but could I ask you to clarify who you mean by the Jewish community? In addition to Marie Van der Zyl’s organisation (the Board of Deputies), you have listed three organisations, the Jewish leadership Council (JLC), the Community Security Trust, and the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). The first two of these are entirely unelected, while the Board of Deputies has a severe democratic deficit. The Board has a monthly “parliament” meeting of representatives, mostly elected through synagogues in uncontested elections. At least until recently, some of these synagogues were denying women members a vote for their representatives.

This “parliament” debates issues, but the key decisions of the Board are made by paid officers. The significant and growing Haredi (ultra-orthodox) communities don’t recognise the authority of the Board of Deputies (BoD). How are the estimated 50% of secular Jews represented by the Board? The majority of Jewish Labour Party members are secular Jews.

The BoD record in opposing antisemitism is a very chequered one, to put it charitably. They told Jews to stay indoors on the day of the Battle of Cable Street; they denounced the courageous 43 Group who took on fascists immediately after World War 2; they discouraged Jews from joining the Anti-Nazi League, the largest mass anti-fascist and anti-racist movement in the 1970s, at a time when the National Front was menacing communities. All this was because of sectarian political differences. Thankfully at all these junctures, many ordinary Jewish people ignored the BoD’s injunctions. You probably know that Marie Van der Zyl’s Tory predecessor as President of the BoD, Jonathan Arkush, was one of the first to heap lavish praise “on behalf of Britain’s Jews”, on Donald Trump, when he was elected US President, despite the fact that 70% of American Jews voted against Trump and an extreme scarcity of British Jews who support him!

In recent years I have visited Poland several times (Warsaw and Krakow). I am all too aware of the unsavoury regimes in central and Eastern Europe, where antisemitism rides in tandem with Islamophobia and anti-Roma prejudice, and also aware of the

Best mates: Johnson and Orban

Conservative Party’s close alliance with their leaders through the Conservatives and Reformists Group in the European Parliament before Brexit. Outside of that group too, Tory leaders have been full of praise and support for Hungary ‘s Premier, Victor Orban. Does it not worry you, Keir, that in the last 10 years, the BoD, JLC, and CST, who claim to challenge antisemitism in a non-party political manner, have been so muted in expressing any criticism of these regimes and of the Tory’s close associations with them?

I also wonder this, Keir: where in your letter can I find an indication that you intend to engage with grassroots Jewish Labour Party members? I suspect you will answer by pointing to your plan to meet with JLM, and certainly they represent a section of the Party’s Jewish members. Long ago, in their previous incarnation as Poale Zion, they had a history of Labour Party activism, trade union work and anti-fascist engagement, but I am sure you are aware that they are far from representative of all Jewish Labour Party members. You do not have to be Jewish or a Labour Party member to be a member of JLM but you do have to sign up to an explicitly Zionist constitution.

This immediately excludes a large proportion of Jewish Labour Party members who, if asked to define themselves in relation to Zionism, would reply that they are non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. And they would do so either on the grounds that their most relevant terrain of political engagement is here, in Britain, not in Israel. They happily consider themselves Diasporic Jews. Or they might express varying degrees of disapproval or outrage about the injustices and human rights abuses committed by the Israeli government, military, and settlers against Palestinians, which has been exacerbated by Israel’s Nation-State Law of 2018, a law condemned by many Israeli commentators as an “apartheid law”. I know many Jewish people, young and old, who have joined the Labour Party since 2015, enthused by it becoming a more radical party fighting for social justice and with an explicitly ethical approach to international issues, including Israel/Palestine. What plans do you have to engage with these members, Keir?

I am a grassroots member of a Jewish Labour organisation called Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) which was launched at a meeting attended by 300 people at the Labour Party’s Conference Fringe in 2017. JVL does not stipulate taking a particular position on Zionism as a condition of membership. Its Statement of Principles says: “We aim to strengthen the party in its opposition to all forms of racism including antisemitism, broadening the party’s appeal to all sections of British society”, and “We stand for rights and justice for Jewish people everywhere, and against wrongs and injustice to Palestinians and other oppressed people anywhere.” On many anti-racist and anti-fascist protests I have marched and participated alongside JVL members but seen no presence at all from the Jewish bodies you have declared you wish to meet with.

JVL go canvassing in Westminster for the left wing Jewish Labour candidate, Gordon Nardell

During the General Election in 2019, I was active campaigning in several marginal constituencies, often in the company of other Jewish Labour Party members. I was quite shocked to find that JLM had declared that they were boycotting the General Election and would only be working for a Labour victory in a handful of constituencies. The contrast with JVL, which encouraged its members to canvass wherever they were, for every Labour candidate, whether supporters of the leadership or not, as well as doing specific work in certain marginals, was very stark. JVL now has over 1,000 members in constituencies across the country. Unlike JLM, full voting members have to be Labour Party members and define themselves as Jewish. So, Keir, can you confirm that you intend to meet with JVL too, and that you would also like to meet with non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews who are Labour Party members?

Some final questions. I was a member of the Labour Party for a few years in the 1980s (in Newham, then in Camden) but was disillusioned by the party’s rightward drift and dropped out, though I remained personally close to many Labour activists and worked with them in a range of progressive campaigns. I rejoined (in Islington) in 2015, as Labour shifted towards becoming more explicitly a member-led party. It grew enormously in size and potential. It is a party where, unlike the Tories, democracy counts. Our members make policy. But that is why I found it disturbing that all the leadership candidates and a majority, though not all, of the deputy leadership candidates, were so quick to sign up to a series of pledges from an external third party that many considered anti-Labour. What if these pledges conflict with member-led policy decided at Conference? And what about the excellent proposals that many members were involved in developing that were presented at the Race and Faith Manifesto launch in November 2019. Will you seek to honour that manifesto? And how would you justify handing over party disciplinary matters to a body unrelated, unaccountable and often hostile to the Labour Party?

In your letter to the Board of Deputies you said you wished to reiterate your “commitment to stamping out antisemitism within the party”: a commitment I am entirely at one with, along with stamping out other bigotries and forms of discrimination. How that is done has proven to be complex and problematic. While I have certainly encountered antisemitism in wider society, for example on public transport, at football grounds, in online commentary, I have not encountered it in the Labour Party, but I know members who have.

There are of course real incidents that must be dealt with, though we know from Jennie Formby’s statistical analysis that it is a very small number, and people don’t generally join Labour to indulge in bigotry (the Tories maybe!) We also know that many allegations of antisemitism relate to commentary on the Israel/Palestine question, where those accused may not have realised they have crossed a line from strong but fair comment to bigotry. Shami Chakrabarti did some excellent work on this, proposing that education should be the first resort and heavy-handed discipline the last resort. Do you agree with her about this, Keir?

I hope you will address these questions, because these are of considerable importance to many Jewish members who feel that the Labour Party speaks to their concerns to a much greater extent than the Board of Deputies ever will.

Sincerely

David Rosenberg

Inner strength, integrity and principle – thanks Jeremy!

April 3, 2020April 4, 2020 / davesrebellion / 1 Comment

Summer 2015. The Labour leadership election had begun. I bumped into one of the candidates at a small demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Clue: it wasn’t Liz Kendall. It was actually the most reluctant of the four candidates, who had been told it was his turn to hold the torch of the Socialist Campaign Group, and that he couldn’t say “No”. Jeremy Corbyn was suddenly airlifted out of his comfort zone. From backbench rebel, street activist and campaigner on local and global issues, and dedicated local MP supporting local projects and initiatives within his constituency, he was now a leadership candidate.

The bookmakers, usually far wiser than journalists or politicians at predicting the course of events, placed him on 200/1 odds. I looked at him and said jokingly “But what are you going to do if you win?” He laughed, but in his reaction I saw a glimmer of hope that he might come third instead of fourth. And I sensed from him that this would be a small step in the right direction for the beleaguered Left in the party where the hopes, dreams, and votes of ordinary people in the terrible Blair years had been squandered. But the brief Ed Miliband interregnum had marked a small shift to the Left. Then something remarkable happened.

Jeremy’s campaign took off. Outdoor rallies, indoor rallies, a new generation of young activists full of energy and zeal, endorsements from trade unions, and an incredible buzz of excitement. The bookies odds began to tumble, though I know at least one person who took a smart gamble when Jeremy was 100/1.

Jeremy’s advantage was his complete lack of egotism. He was completely at ease talking and listening to people of all backgrounds and generations, genuinely interested in people, and was used to addressing and enthusing large crowds. He was up against three candidates whose interactions with ordinary people rarely got beyond a carefully selected focus-group, and who looked and sounded wooden and insincere when they moved beyond their own small echo chambers.

I was not a labour member at that time but joined as a £3 supporter which meant I had a vote. I had been in Labour for around five years in the early/mid-1980s Harsh times under Thatcher’s class war but also exciting times of municipal socialist resistance from the left wing GLC under Livingstone’s (then) inspired leadership. Though, in four years in my local ward meetings – first in Newham, east London, then in Camden I never heard the word “socialism” mentioned. I heard the term “jumble sale” very often. When Thatcher closed the GLC down and Kinnock, elected on a fairly left wing ticket, was driving the party rightwards, I couldn’t see the reason to remain a member. I was active in many different grassroots campaigns for real social change and my membership of Labour seemed then to add nothing to this.

It was at that time that time I first encountered Jeremy personally. We were both platform speakers at a small anti-racist and anti-fascist rally in central London. The principles he holds to with such depth and humanity are as obvious now as they were right then.

We moved house in 1996, as a result of which Jeremy was our MP, and the following year I joined a political party, but it was not Labour. Blair had won a landslide, but with such a majority he had no reason to listen to the left at all. He treated them as simply an irritant. The day after Blair became leader I joined the Green Party, which seemed to be on a left trajectory. I was convinced that in this period any progressive pressure on a Blair-led Labour Party would come from outside of Labour. I stayed a member of the Greens for a few years but eventually lapsed feeling a mismatch between their progressive ideas and the lack of dynamism in my local branch.

Fast forward back to 2015 – but this time to 12 September – a huge march in support of refugees. As we gathered near Marble Arch putting up our banners, we were glued to our phones. And then a roar swept through the crowds as the results of the Labour leadership contest were declared: a decisive victory for Jeremy Corbyn, one which would have been even greater, but for the old guard whose chosen personnel still staffed the party’s inner bodies and managed to exclude around 4,000 potential voters – overwhelmingly supporters of Jeremy – from participating on the flimsiest of pretexts if any at all.

As soon as he had made his acceptance speech, and said his thank yous, he hurried off to join that rally for refugee rights, because the issue he cared about always came first before personal honours. His presence at that demonstration instantly wiped from our minds the obscenity that at the previous General Election the Labour Party was marketing coffee mugs with the slogan: “Controls on Immigration”.

So much has been written about the last five years, that you don’t need to hear yet one more analysis of that. We all know that in 2017, with a visionary and radical manifesto, he overcame the most vicious and cynical war by the establishment and their servile media to recruit huge numbers of new members and retrieve millions of Labour votes lost by Blair, as he deprived the Tories of their majority.

But the long wasted months of 2016 in which he was forced by the right wing opposition from the majority of Labour PLP to engage in another internal leadership contest, meant Labour was not as strong or united as it could have been when they entered that election.

The gains Labour made in 2017 gave his opponents both outside and within the party such a scare that they moved up a gear in their vicious psychological war of character assassination, and used every filthy means to further undermine him afterwards.

Jeremy was constantly portrayed by their media as weak, inept and hopeless. In the face of ugly personal abuse, including death threats, he and his family actually showed the most enormous reserves of inner strength and integrity. But he was bolstered and reinforced in his key principles whenever he was among grassroots Labour members, and ordinary people campaigning for their real needs and for social justice.

Ultimately the total propaganda war by the establishment, and the daily demonisation, proved too much to overcome in 2019. The compromises enforced on him over Brexit by some of those close to him pushing for a second referendum when the first hadn’t been implemented reduced his options for how he could campaign with integrity on that issue. He hoped the fair and practical solution he adopted, married to an even more radical manifesto would have a chance of squaring the circle on election day. It couldn’t. And however impressive and empowering the manifesto promises were, Labour’s internal machine failed in its messaging to communicate those in simple, clear, repeated slogans to match the crude simplicity of “Get Brexit Done”.

But Jeremy’s legacy as leader is so significant. The party is now firmly an anti-austerity party; it has recruited huge numbers of members – and is the largest left/social democratic party in Europe; its Shadow Cabinet had a majority of women for the first time in its history and now has its highest proportion of BAME MPs; it is leading the argument among mainstream parties on Climate Justice; it has shifted towards a foreign policy based on human rights; it stands unashamedly again on the side of trade unions… and much more.

Whatever the outcome of the leadership contest that will be announced tomorrow, any new leader will struggle to win the membership behind any quick reversal of those crucial gains.

I want to finish with a personal memory of collaboration with Jeremy on the issue in which we first encountered each other back in the 1980s: anti-fascism. In 2016 I was the overall convenor of Cable Street 80 – a march and two rallies to commemorate the anniversary of 4 October 1936 when London’s working class Jewish community, concentrated in the East End, allied with significant sections of the Irish community, with trade unionists and other communists, socialists and anti-fascists to repel an attempted invasion by thousands of uniformed Blackshirts of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

We offered speaking slots to 30 people across both rallies. Half of them spoke at Altab Ali Park – a green space named after the young Bengali victim of a racist murder in 1978. The other half spoke in St Georges Gardens,where we ended our march, just behind the building whose side wall hosts the magnificent Cable Street mural. The basement of that building houses the local Unite Community branch. We held many of our Cable Street 80 organising meetings there.

We had no doubt at all on the organising committee who we wanted as our closing speaker: Jeremy Corbyn. But at the time he was under the most ferocious and savage attack by those who defined themselves as leaders of the Jewish community, and guardians of its past, present and future. The Board of Deputies, who back in the 1930s had told Jews to stay indoors and not involve themselves with demonstrations on 4 October 1936, and had advised Jews in the 1970s to steer clear of the largest post war anti-fascist movement, the Anti-Nazi League on the basis that they might mix with pro-Palestinians, were joining with other right wingers to dishonestly and cynically try to cast Jeremy as a friend of antisemites.

The media loved this contrived war and we knew we had to ensure that Jeremy was able to reach the platform and give his speech unhindered by the media or anyone seeking to undermine the event. This was his first outdoor appearance after the second leadership contest. We made elaborate plans to whisk Jeremy from a cab into that basement as soon as he arrived, keep the media hounds at bay, and shepherd him to the platform from there. We did that. But he didn’t go straight to the platform, typically he spent time in the basement with the mainly young people who we had recruited as volunteer stewards, and he shared a cake with them that he had brought along. He knows that big political events depend on a team of ordinary people doing ordinary tasks and he always takes time to thank them.

Once on the platform he listened intently and patiently to the speeches, paying particular attention to that of Max Levitas, 101 years old then, who had been at the Battle of Cable Street. And when it came to his moment to speak and close the rally Jeremy gave the most powerful and moving speech, relating how he had heard about Cable Street first through his mother, who was present there in 1936. And in that speech, he not only gave the strongest condemnation of all types of racism, but held out the vision of the multicultural and equal society we must constantly seek to build and strengthen.

Though he is no longer the Labour leader, I know that in the years to come he will continue to be such an important part of that fight, while many of his detractors will have been forgotten. Salud! And thanks.

David Rosenberg re-joined the Labour Party in September 2015

rebel notes

david rosenberg

Month: April 2020