Mick Hartley

James Kirchick interviews Ian Austin, the former Labour MP who resigned from the party over its antisemitism:

In their campaigns to succeed Corbyn, the Labour leadership candidates are expressing contrition to British Jews and promising that the nightmare they endured over the past four years will not be repeated. But with Corbyn’s acolytes occupying prominent positions throughout the party ranks, it’s difficult to see how anything short of a full-scale purge reversing what Corbyn wrought can redeem what was once Britain’s leading force for social and economic justice. “I think the Labour Party has got a huge amount of soul-searching to do,” Austin said. “It’s not like you had a policy that the public didn’t agree with. This was what had been a mainstream political party—a hugely important institution to our democracy—poisoned with racism against Jewish people. And there’s got to be the most profound apology. You can’t just sort of gloss over that and pretend it was someone else. This was a complete and utter disgrace.”

As is the case with any prominent Corbyn critic, Austin has been subject to vicious attacks by the leader’s cultlike followers. “I’m routinely told that I’m being paid by Mossad, that I’m part of some conspiracy,” he said. While he was still an MP, Corbyn supporters would protest outside his weekly constituency advice sessions and scream at him in meetings. “The hard truth is that they’re angrier at the people complaining about racism than the racists themselves,” Austin says of the hard-left faction that continues to dominate the party’s organizational structures. When I asked Austin if he thought Corbyn himself is an anti-Semite, a designation the mainstream media and even Corbyn’s many critics are extremely reluctant to apply, he bluntly answered, “What do we normally call people who say and do things that are racist?”

If what transpired in Britain sounds eerily familiar to liberals and Democrats on this side of the pond, Austin has a warning. “Five years ago, six years ago, nobody would have thought that what happened to the Labour Party was possible,” he said. “The idea that an institution as robust as the Labour Party and as important to Britain’s democracy could be so vulnerable to takeover by extremists and racists was unthinkable. But that should serve as a stark warning to people in the States that if that can happen to the Labour Party in the U.K., it can happen here.”

The difference with the Democrats, of course, is that the left candidate, Bernie Sanders, is himself Jewish. On the other hand Sanders seems to have surrounded himself with a carnival of antisemitic bigots…