“Shit-stirring Zionist cum buckets, bought and paid for by Israel.” According to the Labour party governance unit, as recently as last year, this statement made about Margaret Hodge and I was neither racist nor misogynist and didn’t warrant any action against the Labour party member who had written it. That is, until it appeared on the front page of a national newspaper and even then, the member wasn’t suspended until Jeremy Corbyn had to face MPs in parliament.
This is just one example of literally hundreds detailing how Jews were treated by Corbyn’s Labour party. The last five years have been grim for too many Jewish Labour party members. We have been abused, threatened, belittled and then told we were making it all up or if it did exist we were weaponising racism for factional gain. It felt like a systematic campaign to break us and hound us out of the party. Every day there was a new antisemitism scandal and every day the leadership of the party tried to turn a blind eye.
The fact that I had to move home on the recommendation of the police due to the sheer scale of the threat and that Luciana Berger had to have police protection at the Labour party conference, in the city she represented, were merely inconvenient truths for people who wanted us out of the party, who wanted us silenced.
The Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), the Labour party’s oldest socialist affiliate, at first tried to find a way to work with Corbyn’s team but every effort was rebuffed – to the point that when an antisemitism subcommittee was convened by the Labour party, JLM was told to wait outside: we weren’t wanted at the meeting as they discussed us.
After three years of misery JLM decided that enough finally was enough and that we had no option but to appeal to a regulatory body, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), to intervene to determine whether the Labour party was systematically discriminating against us because of our heritage.
And finally, last Thursday the EHRC did the unprecedented – it found the Labour party responsible for three breaches of the Equality Act and stated that: “The equality body’s analysis points to a culture within the party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent antisemitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it.”
Those words made me cry. My party, my political home for 25 years, was found to have been illegally discriminating against its Jewish members. My tears were of horror, deep sadness but also relief. We had been vindicated, the world could no longer dismiss what we were saying as a smear. It would finally be possible to move on and fix the endemic racism that had taken a grip of the party I had dedicated my life to.
So, the only important question now is what should to happen next? The EHRC has outlined a series of steps that the party needs to take but the reality is that its remit is about policy and procedures not cultural change. Of course, the JLM wants to work with the new leadership of the Labour party to make sure that the new systems work and that we as targets of abuse have confidence in the new procedures, but we need more than that.
Jewish members need to be heard, our stories of harassment acknowledged and we need to see real cultural change in the party, not just to ensure that the Labour party is a safe space for Jews and non-Jews alike but also to make sure that this never, ever happens again, to Jews or to any other minority community.
Keir Starmer has a huge job of work to do to rebuild bridges with the Jewish community and to fix the Labour party. He didn’t create this mess but fixing it now lies with him. All I can ask of him is please don’t let us down.
Ruth Smeeth was Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, but left the Commons on 6 November 2019
