Chris Williamson is gone but the Labour Party remains a frightening place for Britain’s Jews

By no plausible standards could Chris Williamson, who was yesterday blocked by Labour’s national executive from standing as a candidate, be judged a left-winger. He has become a totem for the radical left for the sole reason that he has fairly remorselessly insulted or baited Britain’s Jewish community. His resignation letter from the party was entirely in accord with this record: a bizarre, ranting screed in which he contemptibly insinuated that he was a victim of nefarious Israeli interference in British politics.

Relief that the party has finally barred this demagogue as a candidate can’t but be tempered by the knowledge that he represents an ideological strain that has grown within Labour since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, and that there are others like him. To those who hold centre-left views and have usually (in my case, almost always) voted Labour, the state of the party is astonishing and appalling. This is not some fringe revolutionary sect but a historic party of the reformist left, with deep roots in Anglo-Jewry and long connections with the Labour cause in Israel and the search for a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

Williamson is a historically trivial figure in himself, and this is indeed my point. He entered parliament in 2010 as MP for Derby North having served in municipal government, where he was instrumental in a housing scheme based on a private finance initiative and led Derby Council in coalition with the Tories. He backed Ed Miliband for leader rather than Diane Abbott, supported military intervention in Libya and air strikes on Islamic State in Iraq, and abstained on the immigration bill proposed by Theresa May that envisaged the infamous “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants. After losing his seat in 2015, he won it back two years later and became a single-minded campaigner to undermine moderate colleagues and (there’s no better way of putting it) troll Jews, all the while denying that he was anti-semitic and insisting he was merely an opponent of Zionism.

To comprehensively list his inflammatory behaviour by word and deed would take more space than I have available but none was so noisome as to post on social media an attack by a far-left website on the Board of Deputies of British Jews a few hours after 11 Jews had been shot dead at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. What sort of person would do that? What twisted fanaticism would shut out human sympathy amid communal grief? Some of Williamson’s defenders claimed he’d been unaware of the massacre when posting his remarks but, as Jonathan Freedland observed in the Guardian, “that defies credulity: surely if he was on Twitter, which he was, he would have seen news of the killings.”

Williamson has also backed Jackie Walker, an activist expelled by the party for anti-semitism after she claimed that Jews were “chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade” and asserted that “the Jewish Holocaust does not allow Zionists to do what they want.”

These are not merely the occasional bad apples that are found in any institution in civil society. There is a perverse ideological current on the left that incorporates anti-semitism into its world view. It’s long been there. It's exemplified historically by such figures as Henry Hyndman, who launched the Social Democratic Federation, and the economist JA Hobson, who argued that the Boer War was being fought to advance the interests of foreign financiers among whom “the foreign Jew must be taken as the leading type.”

As my Times colleague Daniel Finkelstein noted a few months ago, Corbyn himself wrote a foreword to a new edition of Hobson’s book Imperialism, in which he made no mention of these anti-semitic tropes. To Corbyn, the notion of some kind of Jewish conspiracy to undermine the workers’ cause was a commonplace observation that required no comment.

Labour has traditionally inoculated itself against this sort of thinking. Leaders such as Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were staunch friends of Anglo-Jewry and of Israel. All of this changed in 2015 when Corbyn became leader. The signal was given that ideas that had lived in a twilight of conspiratorial fantasy were now part of the discourse of Labour activism. While couched in the language of anti-Zionism, these notions actually have very little to do with Israel. The tragic essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it encompasses two competing and legitimate nationalisms, which need to be accommodated in an eventual settlement balancing sovereignty and safety. To the ideological currents that have burgeoned in the Labour Party under Corbyn, Israel is a colonial state founded on apartheid. It’s a fantastical misconception about a state that has many sins of omission and commission to its name, but is a pluralist society and an essential guarantor of refuge for the Jews.

I’m not close to Israel: I’ve visited it (and the West Bank, though I’ve never been to Gaza) just half a dozen times in my life. Though I regard “Zionist” as an honourable label, I don’t use it of myself. I write on the subject extremely rarely, and then generally on how it’s perceived outside the Middle East. And I’m incredulous that the demonising of this flawed and highly imperfect democracy should have attained such prominence—such virulence—in left-wing discussion. It is in effect a cipher for an ancient and lethal prejudice.

Williamson is out of the Labour Party but far from exceptional within it. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has put the party under formal investigation, believing that “Labour may have unlawfully discriminated against people because of their ethnicity and religious beliefs.” It is no fault of the EHRC but dismaying even so that Corbyn may have entered Downing Street before it has reported. The prima facie case is strong that their suspicions are justified. In the last few days, Zarah Sultana, Labour candidate for Coventry South, has been exposed for making inflammatory statements that she would welcome the deaths of Tony Blair, Benjamin Netanyahu and George W Bush, and in support of “violent resistance” by the Palestinians. These comments were made not in a distant past or as a juvenile, but just four years ago. Sultana hurriedly issued a feeble apology for “articulat[ing] my anger in the manner I did,” as if her fault lay in the passion of her idealism. It should be obvious that she is hardly fit to stand as a candidate for a constitutional party, or even be a member of it, yet she appears to have the backing of the leadership.

Many who share my dismay at the state of Labour have directed their ire at the party’s moderate and decent MPs who are, at least formally, now campaigning for a Corbyn government. I don’t share that criticism. I know and respect many of these people (one is my own MP, Meg Hillier, who has written to me at length in response to my concerns about anti-semitism), and they have an acutely difficult decision to make. If they don’t fight from within Labour’s ranks, their place is likely to be taken by people who subscribe to the dismal catechism of the extremists. There is also the pressing issue of the government’s disastrous policies on Europe, which will damage the economy and living standards, along with Britain’s diplomatic influence and civic tolerance.

I don’t know what to do, as a voter, and especially as a longstanding Labour voter. I’m shaken by the knowledge that Tom Watson will not be present in Labour’s leadership after the election. We are seeing the normalising of anti-semitic discourse by the failure of one of Britain’s great political parties to take these issues seriously. This is hardly surprising when Labour is led by a man who shows no sign of self-awareness, let alone contrition, regarding his own provocations and slurs. It is a crisis not only for Jews but for the character of British society.