Bowl, (I’d) Rather
Bowl
by
Bachchoo
Shami Chakrabarti headed Liberty, a UK human rights outfit that sided with the meek and oppressed, against the powers of evil and capitalism, promoting their inheritance of the earth. When a row broke out this year on anti-semitism in the Labour Party, Shami was appointed to a commission to enquire and produce a report. Several Jewish and non-Jewish MPs alleged supporters of now twice-elected leader Jeremy Corbyn made anti-semitic and inflammatory statements on social media. Bradford West MP Naz Shah sent publicly accessible messages saying “remember everything Hitler did in Germany was legal”, and wrote some nonsense on her Facebook page proposing that Israel be evacuated to the United States to rid the Middle East of Jews. Earlier, a former Bradford Lord Mayor Khadim Hussain was suspended from Labour for anti-semitic posts and rants.
Corbyn, suspending Naz Shah and three other councillors pending an inquiry, insisted he was anti-racist and this included being against anti-semitism. It reminded me of the opposite blanket quip of American genius William Faulkner, who said: “I hate Jews, but before you judge me for that remark, keep in mind that I hate everyone else too!” The classic Labour response to accusations of anti-semitism is to make a distinction between that and anti-Zionism, which they would admit.
The argument may be sound, but lapses into disingenuousness when MPs get vile threats and abuse in their mail from those purporting to be Corbyn supporters.
Shami Chakrabarti produced a report which many Jewish MPs labelled a whitewash and an evasive, mealy-mouthed report. I read bits of it, and it seemed hard-hitting and not equivocal at all, but then prejudice is, even legally in the UK, judged through the eye of the victim. Ruth Smeeth, a North England Labour MP, Jewish herself and married to a Roman Catholic, felt the report didn’t go far enough, excused a great deal of anti-semitic verbiage and activity and neglected the central dynamics of anti-semitism in the party. She walked out of the meeting where Shami unveiled her report.
Smeeth was thus labelled “the Jewish MP” and received a letter from a member of Momentum threatening to kill her and over a hundred messages calling her everything from a “dyke” to several combinations of the “f” and “c” words — and of course labelling her a traitor. Several other MPs told the newspapers they got similar threats and anti-semitic abuse. The earlier Labour leader, Ed Milliband, was of Jewish origin and, Jewish MPs say, the anti-Jewish incidents and sentiments remained suppressed. The central dynamic and dilemma of this anti-semitism in Labour arises from a significant demographic. It’s no surprise that Naz Shah, Khadim Hussain and the suspended councillors are from Bradford and northern areas that have turned from mill-towns to mosque-towns.
These have a large Muslim population, the descendants largely of immigrants from Pakistan’s Mirpuri district and from Bangladesh. The paradox of these communities is that they always voted Labour, being shift workers in the textile mills of the Midlands and north, and consequently the poorest section of the population. They were naturally concerned with food, clothes, shelter, employment and the National Health Service.
Tony Blair’s decision to join America in its Iraq and Afghan wars changed all that. For the Muslim populations of Britain this foreign policy decision and the war against Muslim countries meant in large measure a withdrawal of allegiance from Blairite Labour. The Labour left, which included Jeremy Corbyn at the time, dissented from the decision to wage war in Iraq and consequently claimed the loyalty of this electorate and these communities.
A very clever adventurer, George Galloway, a Scottish Labour MP at the time fell out with the party leadership over the war and was expelled from Labour. He exploited the origin of his rift by becoming a spokesman for anti-US and anti-Blairite policies and on the platform of being on the “Muslim” side of the war stood as an Independent against a Labour candidate in largely Bangladeshi Tower Hamlets and won.
When he lost that seat he spent time on the fringes and then stood again in Bradford and, again as an advocate of a foreign policy that purportedly supported Afghanistan, Pakistan and even with the pretence of having become a Muslim convert and never having touched alcohol, won it. He was subsequently displaced in 2015, but the pattern of his success demonstrated that these and other Muslim communities were more concerned with backing Islamic regimes against US and British “imperialism” than with food, clothes, shelter, employment and the National Health Service.
Corbyn’s Labour support consists, to a significant extent, on the vote of these communities. Within them preachers and a considerable element don’t make the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Jewishness. Hence the cavalier way in which Naz Shah conducted herself. Alienating this section of the electorate in the industrial heartlands of the north and Midlands is not what Jeremy Corbyn’s section of the party will attempt. Hence the complaints of MPs such as Ruth Smeeth against Shami Chakrabarti’s report, which to her seemed like soft-pedalling.
Shami, of course, has been rewarded by Corbyn by being promoted to the House of Lords as Baroness Chakrabarti and being appointed shadow attorney-general. She is an interesting figure and, after being a dedicated and vociferous opponent of private schooling, has just sent her son to an £18,000-a-year private school.
