Robert Henderson
This Spring Labour Party activists from senior party members down to local councillors have been outed as people who are either actively anti-Semitic or who associate themselves uncritically with those who are.
The examples of anti-Semitism range from crude abuse such as that from Vikki Kirby the vice-chairman of a local Labour branch “What do you know abt Jews? They’ve got big noses and support Spurs lol” to senior Labour figures such as the newly elected Mayor of London Sadiq Khan who has called moderate Muslims Uncle Toms and been very ready to share platforms with Muslims who are openly anti-Semitic . Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has been identified as attending dubious political meetings and praising Hamas , an organisation which has embraced terror. He has also been much criticised for acting very slowly and indecisively against Labour members who have been outed as anti-Semites or who have been keeping uncomfortable Muslim company. Moreover, despite Corbyn’s reluctance to accept there is a problem in his party, it is reported that fifty Labour members have been suspended for alleged anti-Semitism. Finally, The ex-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has caused a good deal of politically correct heat by linking Zionists with the Nazis in the 1930s. However, his example genuinely raises the question of what is anti-Semitism and what is honest criticism of Israel. More on that later.
The most significant event in all this is Sadiq Khan’s election as London Mayor. Both before his election and since there has been a huge attempt by those on the genuine Left, including those in the Labour Party, and Muslims with a public voice to explain away Sadiq Khan’s associations with Muslim extremists. Most incredible of these have been the strenuous attempts to portray media and political commentary on Labour Party members’ undeniable anti-Semitism as a plot to remove Corbyn from the Labour leadership .
But however much Khan and his allies attempt to call his association with Muslim extremists as simply the consequence of Khan attending meetings where there is a range of opinion within the speakers, he is damned utterly by his “Uncle Toms” comment. A Muslim cannot speak of moderate Muslims as “Uncle Toms” without at the very least being willing to use the language of Muslim extremists in the hope that this will give him “street cred” with Muslim electors . At worst Khan may have been expressing his true feelings and sympathies. Moreover, it is telling that the “Uncle Toms” comment was made on Press TV, an Iranian state English language broadcaster, where he probably thought his use of the phrase would not be picked up by any of the British mainstream media. (Press TV’s licence to broadcast to the UK was revoked by OfCon in 2014 because the licence holder could not provide assurances that he controlled the station’s output. )
This is all very worrying because Sadiq Khan now holds a genuinely powerful political role in a major Western capital which contains over a million Muslims. Indeed, he is the first Muslim in a Western country to hold such a position. Even more worrying is how he came to win such an election.
How has this happened?
To understand what is driving the open expressions of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party it is necessary to comprehend the changes which the Labour Party has gone over the past thirty years. Widespread antisemitism in the modern Labour Party is on the face of it astonishing, truly remarkable behaviour for a party which prides itself on being rigidly politically correct and which has many Jews amongst its supporters including some of its biggest donors. However, it is no great surprise to those who know something of the party’s history.
In the past the Labour Party has been extremely politically incorrect, being staunchly opposed to, amongst other things, mass immigration and the employment of women in male dominated jobs. Part of the political incorrectness within the party was a healthy strain of anti-Semitism. When Oswald Mosley – a man who had served as a minister in a Labour-led government – left the Labour Party in 1931 to form the New Party (the precursor of the British Union of Fascists) he drew much of his support from people who were natural Labour supporters, namely, the white workingclass, people who were trying to find some escape from the miseries of the Great Depression and joined Moseley after the Labour Party failed them. Most of these people were also comfortable with Mosley’s anti-Semitism . This is unsurprising because those who have historically objected most vociferously to Jews being in the UK have been the white working class. When Jews started to return in numbers to England in the 18th century they sporadically provoked violent riots, most notably, the violent reaction to an Act to allow the naturalisation of Jews passed in 1753 which was repealed a year later. As late as 1947 there were anti-Jewish riots in the UK in response to the violence perpetrated by Jews against British servicemen and administrators in Palestine. Of course, anti-Semitism was far from being restricted to the working-class as George Orwell recognised, but it was more openly expressed by the working-class who constituted the large majority of the population in the 1930s.
Labour substitutes minorities for the white working-class
In the 1980s Labour began to forsake its traditional client base, the white working class, and replaced it with a motley rainbow coalition based on race, ethnicity and gender. They did this for three reasons: the white working class were stubbornly refusing to go along with what became the politically correct agenda; Thatcher was enticing the part of the white working class which was aspirational to vote Tory and large scale Thatcherite privatisation was seriously undermining the unions which traditionally provided the foot soldiers of the Labour movement.
After four successive Labour general election losses between 1979 and 1992 the Labour Party found itself in the hands of Tony Blair following the untimely death of John Smith. Blair emasculated the party, ruthlessly removing all its traditional concerns and values and replacing those with a devotion to laissez faire economics and the ideology now called political correctness. Instead of addressing the wants and needs of the white working class, Blair produced a party which was devoted to amplifying and to a large extent creating the grievances of women, gays and ethnic/racial minorities whilst at the same time undermining of the economic position of the white working class through both the continuation of the Thatcherite privatisation agenda that destroyed what was left of trade union power, and the permitting of massive immigration, which reduced opportunity and wages for the poorer members of society. This was done on the cynical calculation that Labour could attract the votes of women, gays and ethnic/racial minorities while keeping the votes of the majority of the white working class because they had nowhere else to go as the only other party with any realistic hope of forming a government were the Conservatives, a political movement in the grip of Thatcherism which was deeply unsympathetic to the white working-class at worst and indifferent at best.
But not all groups are equal under the politically correct banner. Pandering to the claims of sexism and homophobia in order to win votes came a distant second to capturing the ethnic/racial minorities. This was not simply because of a hierarchy of importance within the politically correct doctrine, although that played its part. There was also hard headed political calculation. Women and gays do not offer the same sort of group identity that is found in ethnic minorities, who often live in areas where they are the dominant population group , a situation which allows them to live apart from British mainstream society. In such circumstances ethnic voting becomes not merely possible but probable. Such has been the scale of immigration over the past sixty years that in quite a few British constituencies capturing the ethnic minority vote more or less guarantees the election of a candidate. This tendency is especially strong in London. There is also growing evidence that postal voting is resulting in large scale fraud where there is a large population from the Indian subcontinent.
The largest of the minority ethnic groups is that of Muslims who now total three million plus in Britain and have a strong tendency to vote en bloc according to what their imams and political leaders tell them to vote. Consequently, it is no surprise that the Labour Party is becoming ever more anti-Semitic and tolerant of anti-Semitism because they want to attract Muslim voters.
Why did Zak Goldsmith lose?
There were serious weaknesses in the campaign run by Goldsmith. The Tory leadership barely campaigned for him and Goldsmith, a multimillionaire who inherited his wealth, was an unappetising candidate for London Mayor in a city which has been a Labour stronghold for much of the past century. The London demographics were also unpromising for there are over a million Muslims in London plus another million or more of ethnic minorities/immigrants entitled to vote.
But Goldsmith’s failure is not being attributed to any of those possible causes by many if any of those with a public voice. Instead, politicians (including Tory MPs) and much of the mainstream media attribute it to his tactic of pointing out Sadiq Khan’s propensity to associate with Muslims who might reasonably be called extremists and Khan’s description of moderate Muslims as Uncle Toms. This it is claimed energised Muslims and possibly white liberals and members of other ethnic minorities to get out and vote for Khan. The problem with that claim is that only 45% of voters bothered to vote . Nonetheless, if voters of all stripes were reluctant to vote it is possible that enough people were energised by the Goldsmith attacks to vote Khan to make the difference. In the end Khan took 56.8% of the first and second preference votes ( 1,310,143 votes) and Goldsmith 43.2% (994,614 votes).
It is also true the Goldsmith campaign made the crass mistake of trying to enlist the support of other non-Muslim minorities by playing on what his team fondly imagined were the fears of groups such as Indians and Tamils. Here are a couple of examples:
‘“The British Indian community makes an extraordinary contribution to London and to Britain. Closer ties between the UK and India have been a priority for me as prime minister. I was pleased to join Zac Goldsmith in welcoming Prime Minister Modi to the UK last year at Wembley Stadium.” Then, under the heading The Risk Of A Corbyn-Khan experiment, Cameron described the policies of “Jeremy Corbyn’s candidate Sadiq Khan” as “dangerous”. If Khan won, Cameron said, “Londoners will become lab rats in a giant political experiment”.’
And
“Under the heading The Tamil Community Has Contributed Massively To London, Goldsmith wrote: “I recognise that far too often Tamil households are targeted for burglary due to families owning gold and valuable family heirlooms.” Under the heading Sadiq Khan Will Put London’s Future And Your Community At Risk, he wrote: “As a government minister, Sadiq Khan did not use his position to speak about Sri Lanka or the concerns of the Tamil community in parliament. His party are beginning to adopt policies that will mean higher taxes on your family and your family’s heirlooms and belongings. We cannot let him experiment with these radical policies.”’
None of this helped Goldsmith but it is difficult to see them having a decisive effect simply because of the low turnout. The real answer is demographics combined with political correctness which prevented Goldsmith from becoming Mayor.
The demographics are the major problem. The proportion of the population of London which describes itself as white British is well below 50%. The 2011 census has the figure at 45% but it will be significantly lower now because of white flight from London, the continued influx of foreigners both black and white and the high birth-rate of the immigrants. It is quite possible that the white British population is now around 40%.
The 2011 census also had approximately 1.2 million who describe themselves as white but not British. Thus the total white population of London in 2011 was approximately 4.9 million and the non-white approximately 3.3 million. I doubt whether five years of immigration and higher non-white reproduction has resulted in whites being in the minority. However, if things continue as they are with white flight from London, ever growing immigration and high non-white birth rates, it will not take that long, perhaps ten years , to find whites a minority in London. As for Muslims, by 2011 they made up 12.4% of London’ population with an increase of 35% (405,000) between 2001 and 2011. As the Muslim proportion of the London population grows this will attract more and more Muslims to the city. It is unlikely that Muslims will be in the majority within the next twenty years but in 2036 they could well be the largest ethnic group in the city.
As for the whites who do not identify themselves as British, they are likely to either not vote or to vote for the Labour candidate because Labour are ostensibly more immigrant friendly than the Tories. As those over 18 who are qualified to vote for the Mayor include “An Irish citizen, or a Commonwealth citizen, who has leave to remain in the UK or who does not require leave to remain in the UK, or a citizen of another European Union country” this means that the majority of non-British whites will be qualified to vote and thus their potential to influence the election of the Mayor is substantial.
Last, there is the question of political correctness. At no point did Goldsmith or anyone else in his campaign team or the wider Tory Party wholeheartedly attack Khan by straightforwardly asking white voters do you want a Muslim who has by his own words and actions shown sympathy with Muslim extremists to be Mayor? Instead Goldsmith’s attacks on Khan Khan were merged into a general complaint about the Labour Party or the economic policies Khan was likely to pursue. Goldsmith was desperately trying to remain within a politically correct envelope. To appeal to the white British electorate or even the white electorate overall was out of the question for a mainstream politician in Britain’s presently politically correct circumstances. This failure to address what Khan represented both now and as a harbinger of the not too distant future was doubly important because whites in Britain have been bombarded with politically correct multicultural propaganda for several generations. This has produced a state of mind whereby the white population has tended to come to think that acting against the politically correct view is on race and immigration is not merely dangerous because the expressions of such opinions can lose the person their job or in some cases end up on a criminal charge , but in some ill-defined way is actually wrong. The white electorate needed Goldsmith to give them permission to go against the constraints of political correctness.
Conversely, Khan and the Labour Party side of the argument were not constrained. Instead they used political correctness to distract from Khan’s behaviour with regard to extremist and moderate Muslims. In the Alice in Wonderland world which is that of the politically correct it is Goldsmith who is being called everything up to and including a racist while Khan incredibly plays the injured party.
Ken Livingstone, the Nazis and the Zionists
Back to Ken Livingstone. His treatment after bringing the collaboration between the Nazis and Zionist Jews in the 1930s into the Labour anti-Semitism story emphasises the hysterical refusal of the politically correct and self-interested minorities to take on board facts which conflict with their interpretation of the world. They routinely do not offer argument or facts merely abuse, very often of the crudest type.
Those unthinkingly screaming anti-Semite, Nazi and racist at Livingstone on account of his labelling of the Nazis before WW2 as Zionists hand in glove with those Jews who wanted to establish a Jewish state in Israel, are on very treacherous factual ground. it would be stretching matters considerably to say the Nazis were Zionists. However, odd bedfellows as the Jewish Zionists (there have always been Jews who opposed Zionism) and the Nazis were, even the oddest of bedfellows may sometimes sleep comfortably together when they have a serious shared aim. Here that shared aim was simple: Hitler wanted the Jews out of Germany and the Zionists wanted Jews rushed into what was then the British Protectorate of Palestine. To this end a company (HAAVARA) was set up in 1933 with the agreement of the Nazis to enable the transfer of Jewish property from Nazi Germany to Palestine and hence expedite the immigration of German Jews to Palestine. Although controversial amongst Jews the Zionist Congress in Lucerne (1935) supported the plan. Some 60,000 German Jews migrated to Palestine between 1933–1939 as a result of this Nazi/Jewish collaboration .
This was not the only other Nazi plan to remove Jews from Europe. In 1938 a scheme to establish a Jewish settlement on Madagascar (then under French rule) was mooted. The Madagascar Plan was never implemented but survived until February 1942 as a project. By 1942 the Final Solution had moved from the mass migration of Jews, forced or voluntary, who were to be settled outside of Europe, to the extermination of the Jews.
The problem with the response to Livingstone is that although he over-egged the extent of the engagement between Nazis and Zionists, he was clearly working from a firm historical basis when he claimed the Nazis and Zionists had cooperated in the 1930s. Had Livingstone been attacked on the grounds that he misinterpreted or misrepresented the motivation for the strange alliance, which he did, that would have been reasonable. The problem is that those who attacked Livingstone have simply denied, directly or by their refusal to address the historical evidence, that there had been any collaboration between Nazis and Zionists. Moreover, the denials of what Livingstone has claimed have been hysterical in tone more often than not. As the evidence of Nazi/Zionist cooperation in the 1930s is clear, this makes the attacks on Livingstone seem absurd to anyone who bothers to look at the bare facts. The refusal to engage with Livingstone on the facts also distracts from the larger questions of the undoubted and often surprisingly crude examples of antisemitism within the Labour Party and the question of what criticism of Israel is reasonable and what is disguised anti-Semitism.
Where does this leave Britain?
We have reached the stage whereby our political elite is so cowardly or so detached from reality by political correctness that a Muslim politician ensconced within a major British political party cannot be criticised by a non-Muslim for posing a potential danger , no matter that the politician calls moderate Muslims Uncle Toms and provides evidence that he is content to associate with Muslims who make no bones about hating Britain and the West in general.
This election also showed that a white British mainstream candidate will not make a full-hearted appeal to the white British population for fear of being called a racist. Instead such a candidate is likely to make clumsy appeals to various minorities.
The people being left out of this debate are the native British. London is the shape of demographic things to come not only for itself but other areas of Britain with large immigrant populations. Already those describing themselves as white British are a minority in the city. Within twenty years they may not even be the largest minority. This is likely to happen because the political elite in Britain have actively connived at mass immigration on and off since the late 1940s and are unlikely to change their habits.
Andrew Neather a Blair speechwriter, wrote in an Evening Standard article in 2009 that the great increase of immigrants under Blair seemed to be a deliberate policy to make Britain more diverse. He wrote of a Downing Street paper published finalised in 2001:
“…earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.”
“I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.”
Sadly, there is no one in Britain with a public voice to call what is happening by its true name, treason. Until there is the situation will get steadily worse with the major British parties becoming more and more ready to compromise with the demands of larger and larger ethnic minorities.
