Left-wing anti-Semitism has come to national attention since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party in September 2015. Since then up to 20 Labour members, including an MP and a former mayor of London, have been suspended by Labour for anti-Semitism. There have also been three separate inquiries into anti-Semitism within the party. A senior activist in the Corbyn-supporting campaign group Momentum has claimed that Jews were the “chief financiers of the slave trade”. Meanwhile Beinazir Lasharie, a Labour Party councillor who was suspended from the party in 2015, posted links on her Facebook page to videos claiming to show that Israel was behind Islamic State.

Left-wing anti-Semitism is typically blamed on the hard Left, and with some justification. The decision by the Soviet Union to label Zionism a form of racism in the 1960s and 1970s has found its echo in the racist no-platforming of Jewish societies imposed by self-proclaimed anti-racists on university campuses across Britain. However, left-wing anti-Semitism is as much a product of soggy liberalism — with its hand-wringing about “the other” — as it is derived from Stalinism. As Rich puts it, “The spread of anti-Zionism on the Left . . . was kick-started by Young Liberal and Arab nationalist activists . . . [who] used the language of anti-colonialism and human rights.”

This anti-Semitism is, then, not an invention of the Corbynistas, but rather something which has been bubbling away under the surface on the Left for decades. It is the result of the coming together of old Soviet notions of the Jews not being an authentic people and the New Left belief that, as Rich puts it, “Israel is a Western colonial implant in the Middle East.”

But anti-Semites have evidently imbibed a feeling of empowerment from the rise to prominence of Corbyn, a man whose political assumptions are largely taken from the anti-colonialist and anti-Zionist New Left. These assumptions, while not necessarily anti-Semitic in isolation, lend themselves rather easily to an anti-Semitic outlook. They typically run as follows: only dispossessed minorities can experience racism; the Holocaust was simply one genocide among many; and the world can be divided neatly into lightness and dark, with all that is good and virtuous on one side and the devil on the other.

Thus if racism is largely about power, the Jews are portrayed as uniquely powerful as a way of dodging charges of anti-Semitism when rallying against Israel. The scale and genocidal nature of the Holocaust is downplayed (or Zionists must be found to be at least partly responsible for it) because a full recognition of its horror might lead to an admission that Israeli society was forged in its shadow. The New Left shows little interest in the Western working class, and so humanity’s liberation must come from the “global south”, which encompasses anti-Semitic groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Inter alia, assumptions of this sort lead to the deliberate or accidental promotion of anti-Semitic tropes.

However, the root of a part of the left’s unwillingness to deal with its anti-Semitism problem — or to even acknowledge that such a problem exists — is found in its self-image as uncompromisingly anti-racist. As Corbyn’s office recently put it in response to reports that his supporters were engaged in the verbal abuse of political opponents, “No one responsible for abuse is a genuine supporter of Jeremy.” A similar line was taken by the Morning Star, for which Corbyn wrote a regular column until he became leader, when the former mayor of London Ken Livingstone erroneously claimed that Hitler supported Zionism. The newspaper responded by saying that Livingstone’s remarks could not possibly be anti-Semitic because the Left was, by definition, anti-fascist. It is the old No True Scotsman fallacy distilled in fresh bottles. The party is always right and therefore anyone who is wrong is outside the party.

There is probably a degree of prejudice in all of us, and the most dangerous thing a person can do is convince themselves that they have been completely inoculated against it. The age we live in — when a mob can descend like the tightening of a noose on any person who misspeaks — is itself hardly propitious for the sort of honesty and self-reflection required to root out bigotry from the politics of either Left or Right. As with other forms of irrational prejudice, anti-Semitism will almost certainly persist within the Labour Party for as long as it is viewed as a malady which afflicts a separate and alien category of human being.

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Any book about the unlikely Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will invariably speculate on whether behind the amiable demeanour lurks a ruthless political operator. Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup (Biteback, £20) by the journalist Rosa Prince tentatively answers in the affirmative. 

Jeremy Corbyn may be a naive idealist, but like most obsessives who lack what Denis Healey once called a “hinterland” away from politics he is an incredibly hard worker. Politics is his life, and for 40 years Corbyn has devoted nearly every waking hour to various forms of political activism.

Raised in a middle-class family, the son of a suburban solicitor, it was decided early on that young Jeremy was not to mix with the lower orders. Instead of being sent to the local primary school he was carted off to a posh convent school called St Margaret’s. Not that this brought out his studious side. Jeremy left education in 1967 with two E grades at A-Level, an insufficient result to get him into any form of higher education.

And so instead of further study he travelled to Jamaica with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), an initiative modelled on the Peace Corps. In return for two years’ labour Corbyn received a small stipend, basic accommodation and, importantly, something to take his mind away from academic failure. A friend of Corbyn tells the author that it was at this point, while still a teenager, that his political views were arrested. “I have personally always seen Jeremy as a Peter Pan figure, just not a grown-up,” the friend says.

In Corbyn’s favour, he does appear genuinely to care about the poor. The book is full of examples of him behaving with compassion towards those less fortunate than himself. The former Labour adviser John Mills tells Prince that Corbyn is the first dinner guest he has ever known to ask if he can take uneaten food away with him to give to the homeless.

But there is a dark side to the man. Corbyn may be caricatured as an amiable teetotaller who dislikes confrontation, yet he has a long record of flirting with thuggish groups. In the 1980s he invited convicted IRA terrorists to the Commons. He was branded a “disgrace to the Labour party” in 1999 by the International Development Secretary Clare Short after he opposed Nato efforts to prevent Serbian aggression in Kosovo. He called Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends”. He is an admirer of the late Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez, and was, until recently, a regular guest on Iran’s Press TV and Russia Today. He believes the roots of the Russian invasion of Crimea lie in Nato “belligerence”.

Corbyn is courteous to political opponents and will turn up to the opening of a fridge if he believes there is some benefit in it for the needy. The flip side of this idealism is a vicarious attraction to political violence that is strangely common to mild-mannered left-wing men.

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The film is about Saturday, February 15, 2003, which saw the largest anti-war protest in British history in opposition to the war on Iraq. “Not in My Name” was the popular anti-war slogan of the day and, with a few exceptions, everyone in the film wants you to know that George Bush and Tony Blair’s toppling of Saddam Hussein didn’t happen on their behalf.

The film propagates a number of myths about the Iraq war and opposition to it. For one thing, the war was never as unpopular as the film makes out. In Britain at least a slim majority were initially in favour of it. I remember this well because I was as scathing as the protesters about Tony Blair’s apparent hoodwinking of the British people with talk of weapons of mass destruction reaching the UK within 45 minutes. (I still am, if it matters.)

Also disingenuous is the film’s portrayal of the Stop the War Coalition, whose spokespeople appear regularly in the film, as a genuine anti-war outfit — when its demagogic leaders have consistently acted as apologists for some of the most reactionary forces in the world. Once the Iraq war started, the Stoppers pledged their support “by any means necessary” to the jihadist “resistance” in Iraq, whose pacifism consisted of butchering Iraqi trade unionists and the “wrong” sorts of Muslims.

But We Are Many does get to the crux of what a great deal of anti-war activism is now about: protesters wrestling assurances from government that no killing will be carried out on their behalf. Killing per se is a different matter — the 2013 House of Commons vote against bombing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces is portrayed in the film as a spectacular victory for peace, despite Assad’s bombs continuing to rain down on children ever since — what’s important is maintaining the illusion that activists’ own hands are clean.

In reality, if one has the ability to affect the outcome of a war then one’s hands are bloodied whether one likes it or not. The filmmakers undoubtedly believe that stopping war in Iraq was a realistic possibility, but leaving Saddam in power would surely have prolonged another war — the war his regime was waging against the Iraqi and Kurdish people, where on average between 70 and 125 civilian were killed by the regime every day for Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power.

One is struck by a notable absence of Iraqis in the film. This seems odd until one grasps that much of the activism on display doesn’t actually appear to be about Iraqis, Syrians or the oppressed at all. Instead, it is about blameless protesters feeling warm and fuzzy as the crowds filled London’s streets on a gloomy February afternoon. Not In My Name, the placards said. Better in somebody else’s, they might have added.

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This isn’t new of course; identity politics has been around for years. The real question is why race and gender have so thoroughly usurped social class in the supposed hierarchy of oppression.

Today’s activists are far more concerned with the colour of a person’s skin and their gender than they are with their social class. Projects such as the Media Diversified Directory seek (admirably in my view) to increase the presence of BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) voices in the media, while campaign groups such as the Labour Women’s Network and Panel Watch fight to ensure that public policy is not a testosterone-fuelled echo chamber for boorish men.

There is something to be said for all of this; but there are no comparable organisations seeking to do the same for the working class. I edit Left Foot Forward, a left-wing website, and consider myself a socialist. However, unlike many on the Left, I think social class is a far more accurate indicator of how much “privilege” a person has than either gender or race. I take this position because the evidence overwhelmingly points in that direction.But I find myself increasingly out of step with mainstream left-wing opinion, as evidenced by the vitriol increasingly directed at Dwems (Dead White European Males) by left-wing activists and the ubiquitous talk of “equality” when yet another upper-middle-class woman is parachuted into politics. Socialism today appears to mean half of a boardroom stuffed with middle-class men and half with middle-class women — not forgetting a sprinkling of middle-class ethnic minorities.

Yet perhaps this ought not to come as a surprise when the Left itself is so overwhelmingly middle-class. Being left-wing today requires far fewer sacrifices than in the past. You can wear a keffiyeh and wax passionate about white privilege while drawing a large private income with little chance of being knocked off your perch by a usurper from the lower orders.

Put like that, it is no wonder class politics has gone out of fashion like a bad pair of chinos. In obsessing about the comparatively superficial privileges that white skin and maleness bestow (superficial when compared to the disadvantages that come with being poor), student activists and “diversity warriors” may simply want to shift our gaze away from the economic inequalities they do very well out of.

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