‘The Greens risk repeating Labour’s antisemitism crisis’

It’s a familiar story. A populist left winger becomes the leader of a political party, largely having spent the campaign recruiting legions of new members who previously had little or tangential connection to its political tradition to form the bulk of their support.

New members, able to join online within minutes of trying, face little to no serious scrutiny or due diligence as Party staff and structures are overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all. 

Whether encouraged to join organically by popular social media personalities or partisan new media channels, or by hard-left political movements and parties that adopt deliberate entryism tactics, new members now either outnumber existing members, or certainly have more energy and desire to control the future direction and agenda of their Party.

READ MORE: Passionate disagreement is part of Labour’s DNA, but abuse should never be

Overly focussed in bathing in the warm waters of an early media honeymoon, addicted to the adrenaline of addressing large crowds turning up at rallies and events to cheer them along, the leadership either indulge or ignore the early warning signs.

But soon enough longstanding members start raising the alarm. It comes to light that amongst the new crowd are far too many people with extreme views. Social media accounts are littered with anti-Jewish racism. Tensions escalate as the very same people begin acting on those views inside the party, and begin to be selected to run for public office. The party machinery either can’t or won’t act quickly enough to stem the problem. An election takes place, and with media scrutiny, the party’s dirty little secret becomes a big and open problem.

What followed from this point in the story within the Labour Party were years of anguish and struggle for Jewish party members and activists. Only an intervention from the UK’s equality watchdog on the eve of a general election sponsored any meaningful willpower or action by the party to address its own issues.

Labour overcame. But only after unrelenting actions from a new leadership that restored faith and confidence that zero tolerance really meant zero tolerance, even when it earned them scorn from those who found themselves on the wrong side of what was the right thing to do.

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For the Greens, who now harbour so many of the very same people who were either expelled or left the Labour Party because of these very same issues, they face the gargantuan challenge of shutting the stable after the horse has bolted. Worse, from the words and deeds of their Leadership, they seem to want to double down, rather than learning any of the lessons that the Labour Party learnt at great moral and yes, electoral cost.

At the height of Labour’s antisemitism crisis, the central distress of the Jewish community, and the Party’s Jewish members was the alarming concern that at best, tolerating hateful speech, or at worst, amplifying it, would have real world consequences for Jewish people and Jewish communities in Britain.

The latest wave of attacks on the UK’s Jewish community are real. They have exponentially increased and escalated into acts of arson, assault and murder. This is a wholly different and more dangerous time than has been experienced in recent living memory.

Terrorism is perpetrated by terrorists. 

But we would be fools if we were to ignore the very real consequences of politicians pouring fuel onto the fire in allowing hate speech to be normalised in everyday political discourse. 

The Greens will one day, even if not today, rue the day they allowed the old party of progressive environmentalism to be overrun by the same tendency that took the Labour Party to the precipice of oblivion.

For the sake of the UK’s Jewish community, and for the health of our democracy, even said as a political adversary who has bought and worn this particular t-shirt before, I hope they find their way out of this. But they can only do that if they truly want to.

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