Suffering a stunning electoral defeat last December, Britain’s left-wing Labour Party is in the process of electing a new leader. This individual, party members hope, will be able to defeat Boris Johnson’s Conservative government come the next election in five years’ time.
One first order of business? Ensuring that Labour can move on from the stain of recent anti-Semitism scandals — a stain etched into the party’s fabric by its outgoing anti-Semitic leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Except maybe it’s not a first order of business.
At a Sky News debate on Thursday, two of the three remaining leadership candidates didn’t exactly distinguish themselves as the individual to win back voter trust on this critical issue.
Lisa Nandy was the exception. Asked how she would deal with anti-Semitism and what the questioner called the “misconception” that Labour is anti-Semitic, Lisa Nandy responded without flinching. She accepted that the problem came down to a “collective failure of leadership at the top of the party for years, where we’d allowed high profile cases of anti-Semitism to go undealt with and unaddressed. And by doing so, we’d given a green light to anti-Semites everywhere that they had a home in Labour.”
Nandy, who trails in the leadership polls, said this is why she had quit the Labour Party’s front bench, also known as the “shadow Cabinet,” and taken up a seat on the back benches of Parliament.
The next candidate to speak — Keir Starmer, probably the favorite — offered only platitudes. Starmer insisted that he didn’t want to cast blame on Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet for its utter failure to address anti-Semitism. When pushed by Sky News’s moderator about whether he was evading the issue, Starmer refused to budge. The Labour front-runner thus showed himself to regard the issue as one of only passing importance.
It got worse when Rebecca Long-Bailey, speaking up for the Corbyn far-left wing of the party, joined with Starmer in a call to stop blaming Labour leaders for this failing.
The telling moment came when the moderator asked the audience members to raise their hands if they believed that Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet had done enough to deal with the crisis. Only one man out of dozens raised his hand, and he launched into a screed about how the charge was entirely Conservative Party propaganda, and the prominent Jews complaining about it were just Tory partisans.
Is that true? The moderator asked Nandy, and she flatly rejected the idea that the charge was just propaganda, at which point the same man launched into yet another tirade.
This was perhaps unhelpful for Labour, in that it reinforced the suppurating anti-Semitism that lurks beneath the surface.
