In the House of the Hangman One should not Mention the Noose: Jewish Voice for Labour’s Attack on the Equality and Human Rights Commission

In May 2021 Jewish Voice for Labour (“JVL”) published a combative document entitled How the EHRC Got It So Wrong-Antisemitism and the Labour Party. The document criti­cises the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s October 2020 Report of its investiga­tion into antisemitism in the Labour Party. The Commission found the Labour Party responsible for antisemitic conduct giving rise to several unlawful acts in breach of the Equality Act 2010. In addition to its legal findings, it also made critical factual findings, identifying a culture of acceptance of antisemitism in the Labour Party, which suffered from serious failings in leadership, where the failure to tackle antisemitism more effectively was probably a matter of choice. The essence of JVL’s attack on the Commission’s Report is as follows. First, it is said that the Commission did not and could not lawfully investigate antisemitism as such; to the extent that it purported to do so, its findings of unlawfulness are purportedly meaningless. Secondly, JVL claims that the Commission made no finding of institutional antisemitism. Thirdly, by failing to require production of evidence referred to in a certain leaked report, probably prepared by Labour Party officials loyal to Jeremy Corbyn, the Commission is accused of nullifying at a stroke the value of its own Report as a factual account. Fourthly, JVL claims the Commission’s Report is not just legally unten­able, but purportedly a threat to democracy. Finally, JVL claims the Commission’s analysis was not just wrong, but that it exercised its statutory powers in bad faith. This article offers a response to each of the five pillars of JVL’s attack, all of which collapse under scrutiny. As to the first pillar, the article identifies the disappearing of antisemitism as the linchpin of JVL’s argument and shows how JVL’s criticism is underpinned by a political epistemology of antisemitism denialism. As to the second pillar, it shows that the absence of the term “institutional antisemitism” in the Commission’s Report is a semantic quibble. In sub­stance, the Commission found that the conduct under investigation amounted to institu­tional antisemitism. As to the third, the article demonstrates that JVL’s complaint about the Commission’s failure to call for production of the leaked report is perverse because that report constitutes an admission of the correctness of the complaints put before it. More­over, the Corbyn-led Labour Party itself decided that it did not want the Commission to consider that material. As to the fourth pillar, the article shows that far from being a threat to democracy, the Commission’s Report grasps the nettle of antisemitism denial. It con­cludes that continuing to assume and assert that Jews raising concerns about antisemitism are lying for nefarious ends may itself be, and in at least two cases was, a form of unlawful anti-Jewish harassment. As to the fifth, the article rebuts the extraordinary charge that the Commission exercised its powers in bad faith. Rather strikingly, neither JVL nor Jeremy Corbyn was willing to take the Commission on judicial review. The article concludes by considering how the poverty of JVL’s reasoning, coupled with the extravagance of its accu­sations, invites a symptomatic reading of Antisemitism and the Labour Party as a disap­pointing illustration of left-wing melancholia.

Modelling through Modality: (Re)shaping Brexit

Due to Brexit, the UK has been involved in a continuous political debate between Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition. This paper compares and analyses the modality used in a corpus consisting of their political speeches until Brexit day. Modal verbs are used to express ability, possibility, willingness, certainty, obligation and necessity. Politicians’ choice of certain words can be a useful tool to affect voters’ decisions and modality is a resource which reinforces that influence. The findings show remarkable similarities between both politicians and reveal that possibility is the most frequent meaning of the modal verbs used in the corpus.

Brexit and Political Personality: The Psychological Profiles of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn

This article focuses on the role of personality in the case of Brexit, the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union on January 31, 2020. A decisive step in Brexit were the general elections on December 12, 2019, in which Boris Johnson, Conservative Prime Minister of the UK and advocate of Brexit, defeated Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party and ‘neutral’ about Brexit. Political psychology considers personality as a major factor in political developments. This article presents the results of an assessment of the personalities of Johnson and Corbyn, and it argues that the personality of these key players influenced the Brexit process. The analysis is based on the theory and methods of Immelman, Immelman & Steinberg, and Mastenbroek. Our findings suggest that Johnson’s charismatic personality, his dominant leadership style, and his negotiating skills contributed to his electoral victory and to the realization of Brexit. Johnson profited from Corbyn’s lack of personal charisma and from his undecisive and divisive leadership regarding Brexit.

The Working Class and the Poverty of Electoral Strategy

The defeat of the Labour Party in the 2019 general election was widely seen as a rebuttal of the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn but it has also raised the question of the nature and direction of the party and whether fundamental social changes have undermined its long-term electability. A concentration on the changing structure and orientation of the working class of Britain, and the implications for political parties, is the focus of a book by former executive director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), Claire Ainsley, appointed in 2020 as the chief policy adviser to the new leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer. The book’s rationale is that a new working class, lacking political and workplace representation, is being forged, distinct from the working class that preceded it. However, Ainsley’s empiricist approach hinders a coherent analysis of class, which as a result is confused and confusing. Moreover, her analysis lacks any appreciation of the structure of power within which values and opinions are created. Her analysis clearly underpins the shift in policies espoused by Starmer - a move to the ‘centre’ of politics, decency, fairness, family, and patriotism - but gives no indication that it can address the anger and alienation of the working class and its disenchantment with its treatment by Labour.

The British Example

In order to place the empirical findings of this study into a more concrete context, in this chapter the authors examine the United Kingdom as a case study, using traditional comparative politics qualitative methodology. They examine the history of anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews in the United Kingdom, focusing on the religious, anti-Zionist, and conspiracy-based explanations in this context. They demonstrate that it is plausible to argue that all three of these motives have caused discrimination against Jews in the United Kingdom. The chapter also discusses briefly the allegations of anti-Semitism by the Labour Party in recent years, specifically under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

The Brexit Elections, 2017–19

The years immediately after the 2015 general election were dominated by another vote, held in 2016. In 2013, the electoral challenge from UKIP had forced David Cameron to promise an in–out referendum on the EU should his party win the next general election. Cameron fulfilled his promise, after negotiations with the EU which only partially addressed the grievances of Eurosceptics in UKIP and within his own party. The chapter discusses the narrow victory for ‘Leave’ in the 2016 referendum, arising from divisions within the UK which cut across previous party allegiances and introduced a new element of volatility in an electorate which was already barely recognizable from that of 1964. The situation was complicated further by the election of the radical left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader after his party’s 2015 defeat. By contrast, when David Cameron resigned as Conservative leader and Prime Minister after the referendum he was succeeded by Theresa May, who was regarded as a pragmatic centre-right politician who could negotiate a compromise ‘Brexit’ deal with the EU. The chapter examines May’s failure to carry out this promise, marked in particular by her inept attempt to secure a convincing parliamentary majority in the 2017 general election. When May was forced from office in 2019 she was succeeded by Boris Johnson, a far more controversial and divisive character who nevertheless was able to lead the Conservatives to a comfortable electoral victory, not least because their pro-European opponents were hopelessly divided. However, the victorious Conservatives had no reason to feel complacent; even if Johnson’s government could deliver the favourable Brexit deal which it had promised, over the years since 1964 the British electorate had become far more fickle and parties were increasingly vulnerable to events outside their control. Within a few months of the 2019 election, party competition in Britain, which had seemed so stable back in 1964, was exposed to a new and deadly source of disturbance—the outbreak in China of the Covid-19 virus—which presented the most serious challenge faced by any UK government since 1945.

A mural that helped to bring down Jeremy Corbyn

In the 2017 elections, the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn did much better than expected, in spite of being denounced by the established British media for its radical anti-capitalist agenda. To turn the tables, the media then shifted their attack from this political programme to Corbyn’s alleged blindness towards antisemitic manifestations. The resulting loss of sympathy with voters cost Labour dearly in the 2019 elections and brought his leadership to an end. As key evidence for his moral failure to tackle the antisemitism issue, the media cited, in a barrage of pieces, his 2012 comments on a short lived London mural. Was it anti-capitalist or antisemitic? In the absence of any serious dialogue between contrary views, the judgment passed reasserted the underlying media agenda.