Mick Hartley

Philip Rosenberg, a Labour councillor in West Hampstead, on The institutional racism in my local Labour party:

[T]he toxicity of the Hampstead and Kilburn Labour Party has meant that I have had no choice but to speak out on racism, time and time again. At seven of the last nine meetings, the Kilburn Brent Branch of the party has tabled toe-curling motions singling-out Jews and Israel. Seven out of nine. If that is not institutional racism, I don’t know what is.

This obsessive behaviour and focus comes despite the myriad of other things going on in the world, and despite the immense damage done to Labour by the disastrous handling of its antisemitism problems. It all culminated on Wednesday night in a shameful vote to strip the Jewish Labour Movement of an award it received – from Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, no less – for its work in campaigning for the Labour Party.

The vote was a symbolic gesture and will have no impact on the award given. The political poseurs who proposed it know this. But as I warned on Wednesday, amid the nauseating cacophony of jeers and heckling against anyone who dares question the ‘permitted groupthink’, the effect on most Jews will be a clear sign that this is no safe space for us….

The frenzied desire to ‘give the Jews a good kicking’ led the room to reject local MP Tulip Siddiq’s alternative offer of a report on her parliamentary activities instead. Apparently, as we seek a full-on return to the Dark Ages, the ritual ‘humiliation of the Jews’ must come before any competing business. Especially that of our MP daring to try to involve us in the work of making our area better.

What more can one expect? A past Kilburn Brent motion was to censure Tulip for speaking out against antisemitism.

As one Jewish comrade put it to me afterwards, ‘Why beat around the bush? We should just wear ‘yellow stars’ next time’.