Luke Akehurst: Labour is in a mess – but you must vote for the party of Attlee, Wilson and Blair

The Socialist Workers Party used to call on its members to “Vote Labour – with no illusions”.

I never thought I would have to steal one of their slogans.

But the last week has awful.

It would have been bad enough if it had just stopped at Naz Shah MP being exposed for having shared Facebook posts calling for Israeli Jews to be “transported” to the US. Naz apologised and showed real contrition and demonstrated that since she became an MP she has embarked on a political journey away from the kind of kind of hatred that characterises some of the online debate about the Middle East.

But then NEC member Ken Livingstone decided to take to the airwaves and defend things Naz had already apologised for and accepted were antisemitic. He did so by both saying it was only antisemitic to hate Jews here in the UK (implying hatred of Israeli Jews is OK – since when was it acceptable for socialists to hate on the basis of nationality) and to rehearse a crank historical theory promoted by a fringe Trotskyist writer that Hitler had been sympathetic to Zionism (the movement to establish a Jewish State in Israel), because some desperate German Jews had signed an agreement with the Nazis to be allowed to flee to Palestine. There was no reason at all to bring Hitler into a debate about contemporary antisemitism unless to provoke and distress Jewish people. I can’t think of anything more calculated to distress Jews than to connect something the vast majority of them support – Zionism – to Hitler the man who perpetrated the Holocaust.

A grotesque antisemitic trope alleging the collusion of Jews in their own genocide has been moved by Ken from the fringes of ultra-left and far-right discourse to being widely debated and covered in the media.

Repeatedly Ken has toured the studios, not apologising for, but defending his views.

Whilst there have been honourable voices from the Labour left such as Owen Jones and Jon Lansman condemning him, others have attempted to defend the bizarre version of history he promoted, turned on John Mann MP (who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Antisemitism) for confronting him, as though Mann was the wrong-doer, others including Diane Abbott MP have tried to claim there is no problem with antisemitism in the Labour Party (the next day three more councillors had to be suspended for antisemitic Facebook posts), and senior figures like Unite’s Len McCluskey have blamed moderate Labour MPs for the furore as though it was them not Ken who kept the issue in the headlines for days. Much of the defence of Ken has itself read like an antisemitic conspiracy theory about Jewish control of the media and politics.

To be fair to Jeremy Corbyn, this problem has been bubbling under the surface for years. Ken himself has made a career of antagonising the Jewish Community (can one imagine a Labour politician “picking a fight” with another small ethnic or faith minority in this way?). In 2012 I wrote this after Ken lost to Boris:

“His antagonistic stance towards the Jewish community. This must rank as one of the most bizarre electoral tactics any candidate in the democratic world has ever employed – deliberately shunning a group of 120,000 voters with a high propensity to turnout and a known record as a swing vote. The clumsy and insulting language Ken used at his meeting with Jewish Labour activists (set up by them to try to help his campaign!) came on top of a history of offending the community with his jibes at Jewish journalist Oliver Finegold and his embrace of extreme Islamist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Ken appears obsessed by the Jewish community, and not in a positive way – entire sections of his autobiography are devoted to critiques of Zionism. For most voters this just made Ken look like a crank. For the Jewish community it caused real fear – I have had Jewish friends beg me not to vote for Ken because they fear his use of language that they perceive to include anti-semitic tropes will make their community more vulnerable to anti-semitic attacks. If you don’t believe this had an electoral impact look at Camden & Barnet, the GLA division where there is the largest Jewish electorate – Labour GLA candidate Andrew Dismore got about 20,000 more votes than Ken. This whole episode has caused permanent damage to Labour’s relationship with the Jewish community which could damage our chances of winning back a number of North London parliamentary marginals. They cannot believe we tolerated his behaviour. It left me, for the first time in my life, feeling morally compromised by my party’s choice of candidate.”

The difference made by Corbyn’s leadership is twofold:

1) He has brought people from the Trotskyist and Stalinist far left where this kind of discourse (which I explained a few weeks ago here) is commonplace, from the fringes to the heart of the party.

2) His leadership campaign got groups with an anti-Israel agenda – the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War Coalition – to encourage their supporters to join Labour and vote for him. This has increased massively the number of party members from a milieu where antisemitic anti-Zionist discourse is prevalent.

3) His own views on Israel are so extreme – for instance describing Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” and meeting with antisemitic cleric Raed Salah, that although not personally antisemitic he has trouble understanding when anti-Zionism becomes antisemitic.

4) The left’s aversion to suspensions and expulsions because they fear the party right using them to purge Trotskyists as happened with Militant, means they are hesitant about using them even to get rid of racists.

The net result has been foot-dragging over suspensions, repeated use of clumsy phrasing that seeks to elide antisemitism with “all other forms of racism” rather than tackle it head on, and the creation of a review process that looks like it may have been constructed to define antisemitism so tightly that much extreme anti-Zionist discourse that the Jewish Community find antisemitic will be whitewashed.

We couldn’t get to a much lower moral juncture as a party if we tried. We are in a disgraceful and tragic mess.

How then can I possibly advocate voting Labour on Thursday?

1) Our candidates do not deserve to be punished for the antics of Ken and the others who have been exposed. Sadiq Khan has run an exemplary campaign for Mayor of London, reaching out to all communities with a message of tolerance and solidarity, while his Tory opponent Zac Goldsmith has peddled dog-whistle attacks on Sadiq because of his Muslim faith. If Sadiq wins, a liberal Muslim mayor running Europe’s largest city, going out of his way to embrace and support London’s Jewish community and to combat extremism will send a powerful symbol to the world. Our London Assembly candidates are moderates who have condemned Ken. Our councils are run by moderates who do not come from the murky political swamp of the far left. Our Scottish and Welsh leaders have nothing to do with this kind of politics.

2) Labour remains the only force consistently offering progressive policies based on social justice for London, local councils, Scotland and Wales. You will get a better GLA, a better local council, a better Welsh Assembly Government, a better Scottish Government from Labour.

3) Labour is the party of John Mann, Wes Streeting, Ruth Smeeth, Ian Austin, Luciana Berger and other staunch fighters against antisemitism as much as it has ever been the party of the odious views of the likes of Ken Livingstone. If you care about this issue Labour is a battleground, not an enemy.

4) The Labour activists knocking on your door are unlikely to be among the people promoting this awful discourse on social media – the people that actually turn up to Labour meetings up and down the country are mainly electing moderate conference delegates and nominating moderate NEC candidates.

Go to the polling booth on Thursday and vote Labour, vote for the party of Tony Blair and Harold Wilson and Clem Attlee, vote for the party founded on the values of anti-racism and social justice and equality. But do so with no illusions about the mess the party is in, and the culpability of the current leadership and people around it for that mess.

Then after Thursday redouble our efforts to use every democratic mechanism available within the Labour Party to win it back for decency and real Labour values.

We will win eventually. It may take weeks, or months, or years, or decades. But Britain cannot forever be denied a viable centre-left party of government. Our values as Labour moderates are those of the decent majority of British people. We will take our party back. We cannot let the likes of Ken Livingstone destroy it.