Right so Labour and antisemitism, it’s become Rishi Sunak’s go to attack line against Keir Starmer every week it seems, that Keith tried to put Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10, usually when Starmer has had him on the ropes, the sheer amount of sleaze coming from Sunak’s government right now making every week an open goal even Starmer can’t fail to score in. It’s all Sunak can weakly come back with, it’s happened so many times Corbyn has asked if he’d mind giving him advanced warning as is convention when Sunak plans to raise him in debate. But this attack line is one of the Labour right’s own making of course, the scam that it is, the attack line that after numerous attempts finally stuck and became the stick the entire establishment took turns with to beat Jeremy Corbyn and his transformative agenda for this country down with. When you see what has happened to the country since, the loss of what could have been has been has been felt all the more, but if Sunak was half as clever as he thinks he is, he wouldn’t need to bring Corbyn into the equation at all because as much as antisemitism is an issue in the Labour Party – as it is in all main bodies and political parties, the societal ill that it is – if anything, evidence points to Starmer’s administration, not only of being guilty of weaponising the issue to help bring Corbyn down themselves, red Tories that they are, but as being even guiltier of it and there’s a massive example of that that’s just come to light, probably the worst story of factional racism from Starmer’s Labour I’ve yet heard, which I’ll come to in a moment.
Sunak’s regular PMQ’s attack on Starmer for enabling Jerermy Corbyn isn’t for the most part true. For those of us familiar with Keir Starmer’s brand of politics, ie dishonest as sin, we know that he pretended to be a socialist to get elected leader before tearing up everything he stood for and embracing full on Blairism, complete with Peter Mandelson by his side. When the Labour right tried to bring Corbyn down via mass resignations triggered throughout the day to keep the story rolling, Starmer joined in, though being the sheep he is, was one of the last to do so, resigning so late in the day he missed being part of the story by and large. He basically quit because everybody else did.
When he became Labour leader he praised his predecessor, called him his friend, but has since used him as a political football. When Boris Johnson had a letter circulated about him by his backbenches referring to him as the Conservative Corbyn, Starmer couldn’t help but jeer that he didn’t think it was meant as a compliment, eliciting outrage on social media and amongst still socialist Labour members.
Starmer of course had Corbyn suspended from the party even after he was cleared of any antisemitic allegations by the party’s own National Executive to pretend that he was dealing with the scourge of antisemitism. He paid off antisemitism whistleblowers the party had been taking to court despite advice that the party would win the cases against them, some of whom have since risen in the ranks of the party too.
The purge of members of the left of the Labour Party has been an ongoing, vastly underreported scandal. Aside from overseeing the largest purge of Jewish members from the Labour Party ever, Starmer even had the only Jewish member of the elected senior body of the Labour Party, that National Executive Committee expelled for speaking to a group at a time it was fine for Labour members to speak to, but which Starmer later had proscribed, had banned and the Governance and Legal Unit of the Labour Party under him and his General Secretary David Evans have used that to retrospectively ban members of the party they functionally do not want, to entrench the right of the party in a way it never has been before.
The Labour right used antisemitism for it’s own ends, has tried to bury the issue with Corbyn, despite the man being a lifelong anti-racist, this issue having offended so many, but actually the worst offenders of legitimate racism in that party are the ones in charge now and my God did they reach a whole new level of sleaze and depravity this last week.
Last Friday, the 27th of January was Holocaust Memorial Day. It encourages the remembrance of some six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, along with other groups targeted by the Nazis, such as the Roma and also commemorates more recent genocides, such as those seen in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia. The reason the 27th of January has special significance is because it was the day the people kept at the largest Nazi death camp at Auschwitz were liberated in 1945, but not before some estimated 1.1 million people had been executed there.
It is a day of particular significance, not just to Jewish people, but anyone who has been touched by genocide, anyone who fears the return of such atrocity, lest it ever be forgotten.
In keeping with that belief that the lessons of the past still need to be taught, the stories and the horrors still need to be told and remembered, actual living survivors of the Holocaust are few and far between now, some 78 years on as we are since the end of WWII. Those surviving now, were children then and one such person is a man called Stephen Kapos, who was a guest on Crispin Flintoff’s Not the Andrew Marr Show. If you’ve never seen his show, it’s on every Wednesday and Sunday over Zoom, and the recordings get put on YouTube so you can find past shows and past guests and interviews there.
Now Stephen has been a member of the Labour Party for some 35 years and as a Holocaust Survivor, he is one of a precious few that not only remembers those events because he lived through them, but is also prepared to stand up and speak about his experiences and as such, you can imagine anyone inviting him to speak at an event, he wouldn’t be the sort of person to say no to that. Stephen’s story told of how he was taken from his parents in Hungary, was in hiding from Hungarian fascists, was made to sit and eat with nazis who, if they became aware he was Jewish, would surely have killed him. As you can imagine such experiences shaped Stephen’s life and shaped his thinking. He became a lifelong human rights activist, is part of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, he himself drawing the parallels between what he went through and the apartheid being felt there today, the Zionist movement of Hungary betraying so many Jews from that part of Europe as it did.
Stephen was invited to speak at a Socialist Labour Network event, which is an amalgamation of two of the groups Keir Starmer’s Labour had proscribed. Stephen’s opinion was that since the Holocaust was the biggest example of genocide that has ever happened, as a human rights activist, as a child survivor of those events, he feels it is a ‘compelling duty’, to bear witness to that time, to what happened, what was done to people like him and so he accepted the invitation.
The Labour Party then emailed him, warning if he attended, he would likely face expulsion. A Holocaust survivor facing expulsion from Starmer’s Labour if he dared speak about the events of the Holocaust he was witness to. Labour, the supposed Party of having cleaned up antisemitism. Labour the supposed Party on the side of Jewish people. I’m struggling frankly to imagine anything more grossly antisemitic they could have done. Surely the very groups Labour expelled would be the very ones they would feel would benefit the most from political education, surely? Especially on the issue of anti Jewishness and who would be better than someone who survived the Holocaust to do that? Is it really about fighting antisemitism, or simply promoting a Starmer led Labour vision of how they interpret it, because the two don’t seem to match. I felt sick when I heard this, plenty of us on the left are disgusted at what Labour has become, but this was depraved and inherently racist. Stephen Kapos resigned from the Labour Party with immediate effect, accusing the Labour Party of reviving McCarthyism, a comparison many have already made, but coming from a Holocaust survivor, a Hungarian Jew who bore witness to the evils he lived through as a child, the most antisemitic events in history I would say, on what planet can you believe Starmer’s Labour aren’t very much part of the problem?