The Chakrabarti Inquiry was an inquiry into antisemitism and other forms of
racism in the British Labour Party in 2016, and the reason the inquiry was
held by the party was because there had been a whole series of Labour Party members
and activists, including quite senior people, who had allegedly made
antisemitic remarks, and some of them had been suspended from the party and
some had even been kicked out, and this reached a head in April 2016, when a
Labour Member of Parliament, Naz Shah, who is the MP for Bradford West, was
revealed to have put various statements on Facebook in 2014 at the time of
the conflict in Israel and Gaza which many people considered to be antisemitic.
One such statement was a map of Israel superimposed on to the United States of America,
with a title saying: "A proposed solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -
relocate Israel into the United States," and she had endorsed this
idea and made a joke about it on Facebook and other comments as well. These emerged in
2016 and after two days of prevarication, the party suspended her membership and
launched an investigation into her comments. Then the very next day,
Ken Livingstone, who is one of the best-known politicians in this country and a
very senior figure in Labour Party politics for 30 years, went on to the BBC
to defend Naz Shah, and in so doing made some really quite outrageous comments
about Hitler and about Zionism. He said that Hitler was supporting Zionism
in the 1930s and only after that, he, in Livingston's words "went mad" and ended up
murdering six million Jews, and he also claimed, as Ken Livingston often claims,
that there is some kind of conspiracy to use the smear of antisemitism, as
he sees it, to silence criticism of Israel. Ken Livingstone was then also suspended
from the party and in order to really put a stop to this snowballing even more,
the party announced an inquiry, and it was going to be headed by
Shami Chakrabarti who had just recently resigned as the head of one of Britain's
leading human rights organizations. So that was the immediate cause, but really
what had happened before then was that there had been a drip-drip effect
of lots and lots of Labour Party people allegedly making antisemitic comments,
and there was a whole question about antisemitism around the leadership
of Jeremy Corbyn himself. The Labour Party has a long tradition of support
from British Jews, and has long upheld a lot of things that British Jews really
care about, including support for Israel over many years. But in 2015
Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the party, and he comes from the hard left
of British politics, from an anti-Zionist left, from a left which is extremely
hostile to Israel and to Zionism, which really does not have much connections
to the Jewish community at all. And Jeremy Corbyn himself, at the time that he was
standing for the leader, was accused of endorsing or sharing platforms
with various unsavory people, some of whom were accused of Holocaust denial, others
of making various antisemitic comments. Corbyn himself was on video in 2010
making a speech in which he called Hamas and Hezbollah his friends,
and he described Hamas as a movement for social justice and political justice,
which coming from someone on the left is language that really means
an ideological connection, and Corbyn didn't answer these questions very well,
in fact he didn't really like being asked them, and so this whole question
of antisemitism hung around the Labour Party. It came to a head in April 2016
with the suspensions of Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone, it made antisemitism
a national political story in Britain, a headline story for the first time
in decades, and to try and get control of the story the party launched the inquiry.
Now sad to say it didn't work, partly because the content of the inquiry
report didn't really go deep enough into the problem. It addressed some of
the symptoms, it talked about some of the language the people shouldn't use.
For example it recommended that it was not a good thing for Labour Party
members to compare Israel to Nazi Germany or to use the word "Zio" as
an insult, which you think would be pretty obvious things for an anti-racist party,
but it didn't really go into the question of why these things have become
prevalent in parts of the left, and whether it's connected to
a really obsessive emotional hatred of Israel that exists in some parts of the left.
The issue of antisemitism never went away,
there was a kind of continuous bubbling up of stories emerging, some of them old,
some of them new, some of them about the structures of the Labour Party failing
to deal properly with with antisemitism, some of them about things that Corbyn had
said and done, and it bubbled up again and it kind of increased,
certainly the Jewish community became more worried because Corbyn became more
powerful. There was a video emerged from Jeremy Corbyn, when Corbyn had been
recorded really denouncing a couple of people who he called "Zionists", and he said
the Zionists don't understand the irony that the Palestinian ambassador
was employing, and he said they've lived in England all their life but they still
don't seem to understand English irony. And again it becomes then a matter of
interpretation, and Corbyn said this was just about language, but many many people
saw in that statement a kind of othering of British Jews, of saying that
British Jews live here but they're not really of us, and that was quite a big event.
The Jewish community, having had a kind of remarkable degree of
unity and consensus, began to say that it's important for them that
Labour adopts the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which is a framework, a set
of guidelines to help Labour decide, understand, what is antisemitic and what
isn't. And of course the anti-Zionist activists hate IHRA because IHRA is
explicit that certain kinds of hostility to Israel should be understood to be
possibly or potentially antisemitic. The formal adoption of IHRA, I think
calmed everything down again a little bit in the way of Chakrabarti, and in
the time after that in the autumn, the fall of 2018, the Brexit issue came to
the fore again and became a kind of really compelling discussion.
It's now the very beginning of January 2019,
and we have no idea what's going to happen.
What frightens me in terms of antisemitism is this - that the events in the Labour Party
have been creating, educating a cadre of activists to believe that
the Zionists are their key enemy, the Zionists or the Jewish community stand
between us and socialism, between us and our best chance in a generation to have
JC - Jeremy Corbyn - in power. And on the right the discourse also can be seen as
a kind of conspiracy theory - we're being run by Europe, by the EU, by the
foreigners, the elite, the cosmopolitan elite, the citizens of nowhere, are bringing in
immigrants to undercut labour, and this whole discourse about
cosmopolitans and citizens of nowhere, and the elite from the cities,
who are really in charge, is itself not antisemitic but it's very close to an
antisemitic narrative. So there's a cadre on the left
educating itself, its formative political experience is that the Jews stand between
us and socialism, and there's a cadre on the right
educating itself to believe that the will of the people is being betrayed by
a globalist, anti-democratic, cosmopolitan, citizen of nowhere elite.
And I think if there's a political and/or economic crisis then this pair of cadres
of political people, which have been created over the last few years, might grow
and get a hearing and become powerful and important, and I think either of them
could develop into much more explicitly antisemitic movements,
that's the danger I see.