Anti-Semitism - Starmer’s Next Step

After Labour leader Keir Starmer sacked Rebecca Long Bailey from the shadow education brief yesterday for the not especially heinous crime of endorsing one of the party’s more outspoken supporters, there was predictable irritation on the left. This, though, misses the great opportunity for Starmer to turn an issue - allegations of ant-Semitism - that had dogged his own party, into an effective weapon against the Tories.

For starters, while alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, influenced by chief Downing Street polecat Dominic Cummings, has effectively told the world that his Government doesn’t do resignations - hence Cummings remaining in post, and Robert Jenrick likewise - Starmer has, by taking the action of sacking one of his front bench team, showed that same world that he now occupies the moral high ground.

Then we come to racism, and especially anti-Semitism. Starmer will act on the faintest whiff of the latter, but will Bozo? And we all know the answer to that: no he won’t. Hence the promotion of Suella Braverman, who used the Nazi-era anti-Semitic trope of “Cultural Marxism”, and of Priti Patel, who caused disquiet with her pointed attack on the “North. London. Metropolitan. Elite”. Because it’s code for “Rich Jews”.

Bozo has also taken no action against Michael “Oiky” Gove for conflating “Jews” and “Israel”, which the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism calls anti-Semitic. And he has not even said boo to Jacob Rees Mogg for claiming that George Soros was behind the Remain campaign, or for attacking John Bercow and Oliver Letwin as “Illuminati”, another hoary old anti-Semitic trope. Nor has he apologised for his own anti-Semitism.

Munira Mirza - back catalogue under scrutiny

As a group of Jewish academics and campaigners put it in a recent letter to the Guardian, Bozo wrote a book while in opposition which “describes ‘Jewish oligarchs’ who run the media, and fiddle the figures to fix elections in their favour. He portrays a Jewish character, Sammy Katz, with a ‘proud nose and curly hair’, and paints him as a malevolent, stingy, snake-like Jewish businessman who exploits immigrant workers for profit”.

And then we have Munira Mirza. While Bozo’s choice for head of the 10 Downing Street policy unit has previously told the world “The press should be free to ridicule Islam" (it already is, thanks), "Diversity is divisive", "Stop pandering to Muslims" (stop something that never started - good move, eh?) and "Lammy review: the myth of institutional racism", there was also her time at Spiked predecessor Living Marxism.

As Iggy Ostanin has noted, in an LM article published back in 2000, she told “[the N Word] ’is described as “arguably the single most offensive slur in the English language”. But depending on who is on the receiving end of an insult, I can think of worse’”. And in that same LM issue, its editor Mick Hume made another interesting claim.

Ostanin summarises thus: “the editorial was titled ‘Exploiting the Holocaust’. It ridiculed the idea of putting elderly Nazi War criminals on trial and argued ‘The Holocaust has become perhaps the ultimate symbol of our victim culture’”. Munira Mirza may not have written those words. But she does not appear unhappy to have featured alongside them.

The stench of anti-Semitism hanging over the Tories is overpowering. So let’s say so.

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