My talk tonight at an online event organised by Durham North West CLP on Racism in today’s Britain: What it is and How to Fight it 

Thank you for inviting me. I want to begin with a quote:

“We are full of grief and outrage over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade and all black lives lost to police brutality and white supremacy. As a multiracial Jewish community committed to racial justice and a better world for all, we mourn together, we protest together, and we recommit ourselves to work together for racial justice within ourselves, our communities, and our country.”

This statement was published last month in Boston, Massachussets by one of seven remaining North American branches of the Workers Circle: a Jewish mutual aid society founded in New York, in 1900, by Yiddish-speaking immigrant sweatshop workers, that fought against “sickness, early death and capitalism”!

In Coronavirus times, we have rediscovered Mutual Aid, and its philosophy: “solidarity not charity”

The Circle* once had branches in 34 American states. It would have been 35, but Alabama’s laws required societies to register and confirm all members were white. The Circle would not legitimise racism, so It operated informally there.

The Workers Circle are very proud of two consecutive campaigns from the 1940s. They helped pressure a reluctant US government to admit Holocaust survivors from Displaced Persons camps in Europe. Then in 1947 they co-sponsored a tour through the American South to test a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on interstate buses. They joined anti-lynching protests in the 1950s and freedom marches in the 1960s.

They fought for the oppressed, exploited, and those suffering discrimination. Today, they identify completely with “Black Lives Matter!”

In my late teens I joined a Jewish group here with similar values: the Jewish Socialists’ Group (JSG). I’m still a member. The anti-fascist struggle of the late 1970s dominated my early Jewish Socialist years, as the National Front were terrorising and intimidating Caribbean and Asian communities.

We were energised by the slogans “Black and White Unite and Fight”, “Self-Defence is No Offence”, “Here to Stay, Here to Fight”. But one well-meaning slogan was problematic. It said. “Yesterday the Jews, Today the Blacks”. It highlighted vicious racism against Caribbean and Asian communities but relegated antisemitism to history. I knew then, as now, that antisemitism was still breathing. Fascists don’t replace targets – they accumulate them.

While fascist foot-soldiers physically attacked Black and Asian communities their internal propaganda was pushing wild antisemitic conspiracy theories to core members, accusing Jews of masterminding mass immigration to dilute the white race.

Those ideas have returned today as the “the great replacement theory” that accuses Jews of driving immigration by Muslims and refugees to the West to replace the white race.

As a young anti-fascist I heard about the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. Members of my family and community came together with non-Jewish Londoners to form mass blockades and build barricades to prevent 7,000 police from forcing a path through for Mosley’s fascists to invade London’s East End.

I learnt about the Jewish People’s Council against Antisemitism and Fascism who mobilised Jews, while building links with non-Jewish anti-fascists to cement a local anti-fascist majority.

But the Jewish People’s Council had one additional battle: against their so-called community “leaders”, the Board of Deputies, who told people: stay indoors; don’t join public demonstrations.

In the 1970s, the Board of Deputies told Jews: keep away from the Anti-Nazi League. Trust the state authorities. But these authorities included police using SUS laws against Black youth, and immigration officers targeting Asian communities. Left wing Jews ignored the Board and we threw ourselves into the struggle.

Today the Deputies claim the threat of antisemitism is not from the right, but from the left, from Islamic groups, from my MP Jeremy Corbyn, who I have known personally for decades. They accuse Corbyn of tolerating antisemitism as party leader and being antisemitic himself.

Jeremy is a rock-solid anti-racist and anti-fascist in both word and deed. Jewish members in our CLP work very closely with him and see him much more frequently than his detractors do. If he held antisemitic views would we not notice?

I want to be clear. I know that there is, and has been, some antisemitism among Labour members that must be dealt with appropriately. I’ve seen it immediately challenged by Labour members when it has very occasionally surfaced in our CLP.

Sometimes, though, comments on the separate matter of Israel/Palestine, borrow antisemitic stereotypes, consciously or unconsciously. That needs challenging. Some comments impugn all Israelis, when they mean the government, the military, or settlers, and talk as if there were no internal opposition, which there certainly is. More precise language and more vocal support for Israeli oppositionists would undercut false claims that attacks on Israel = attacks on Jews.

In most cases, though, when Labour members support Palestinian rights, condemn Israeli policies and military actions, and criticise Zionist ideology, they express perfectly legitimate views, shared by increasing numbers of Jews, including myself. It is bizarre that some 25 Jewish LP members, including longstanding anti-racist activists, have been suspended or investigated, accused of antisemitism.

So where does antisemitism really live in Britain? How is it manifested?  until WW2, At least, Jews in Britain suffered state racism and frequent discrimination, as well as attacks by antisemites. I was born in 1958 and I have heard more antisemitism spoken in the last five or six years than ever before, especially on buses, tubes and planes, in cafes and pubs, and at football grounds. There are around 1,500 reported antisemitic incidents a year in Britain, far fewer than Muslim communities endure, but growing. They are mainly carried out in London and Manchester.

These include verbal abuse and threats; physical attacks especially on ultra-orthodox Jews; desecrations of Jewish cemeteries and synagogue; social media comment ranging from negative stereotypes to outright hatred, frequently including Holocaust denial, and praise for Hitler.

Perpetrators, where identified, tend to be white and far right, but a significant minority of attacks are by individuals from groups that experience racism themselves. We need to combat that through education and learn more about each other’s oppressions.

Serious ideological antisemitism remains, as it has for more than 120 years, among upper-middle/upper classes on the right and far right of British politics, and among those segments of the working class and lower middle class they have won to fascism.

Far Right movements in Britain are fragmented, but through YouTube and other social media channels, they can mobilise large numbers for certain actions

We will eventually emerge from the COVID-crisis but straight into a huge economic recession. Racists and fascists are rehearsing arguments to blame immigrants, refugees, and groups they define as not fully English, for that crisis. But they can’t credibly blame other poor people for running the economic and political system, so they revive conspiracy theories against wealthy figures who happen to be Jewish, like Rothschilds, Goldman Sachs, and George Soros.

in Hungary and Poland where Islamophobia, homophobia, anti-feminism, anti-Roma prejudice and antisemitism ride together, conspiracy theories about Soros circulate freely. In Trump’s America too. Our local Soros-haters include Rees Mogg, Johnson, and Nick Timothy (Theresa May’s key advisor).

The Black Lives Matter! movement has started to rebalance and re-politicise discussion about racism in Britain where systemic state and institutional racism that Black and migrant communities suffer daily, had been relegated by the media below vicious but less frequent random hate crimes against Jews. We are now starting a long overdue conversation about decolonising our schools, our institutions, and our public spaces. We must all be engaged in the fight against systemic daily state racism and against fascist ideology and hate crimes. In America, Trump himself recognises the links, describing Black Lives Matter! protesters as “looters, thugs, Radical Left… Lowlife & Scum” and by targeting Antifa.

I want to end by returning to the Boston Workers Circle who described their community as a “multi-racial Jewish community”. That is true in Britain too, though not recognised enough. Since the early 1980s, we have had JSG members who are Jews of Colour. In uniting with Black, Asian and other migrant communities against the racism they suffer, the Jewish community must also tackle racism within. And the time to do that is now!

* It was originally called the Workingmen’s Circle, although two women workers were involved in the meeting that founded it.

My co-speakers were former international footballer Curtis Fleming, of Show Racism the Red Card, and Local Labour member and Romany Gypsy Jane Lee. The meeting was chaired by Laura Pidcock.