A few days after the 2017 election, I received a lunch invitation. It was from a communal “macher” — someone who has spent many years devoting himself to the well-being of the community. I assumed it would be an opportunity for us to take a look at the field of play after what was a hugely surprising 40 per cent share of the vote by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
After all, this was a pretty terrifying result. Since Mr Corbyn had emerged as the likely winner of the Labour leadership in the summer of 2015, the JC had led the way in revealing his unsavoury attitudes and actions, and those of his allies and comrades. And yet the British people had given him a huge number of votes, meaning he was here to stay — and, with a minority government, could even become PM.
When I arrived for my lunch, I saw that the man who had invited me was not alone. There were two other community leaders at the table. None held any formal role, but all were regarded as serious and influential figures.
We started off — of course — bewailing the result. How awful it was that 40 per cent of the British public could vote for a man like Mr Corbyn. And then the real point of the lunch emerged. “You have done well journalistically in exposing Corbyn and Labour,” my host told me. “I imagine you have been reflecting on it,” he went on. “And I am sure you have come to the same conclusion as we have. It seemed like the right thing to do — we all thought so — but with hindsight, it was a mistake. All we have done is make an enemy of Labour and Corbyn, and now they are even more popular and we have an even bigger problem.”
The gist of it was that I was being told that by exposing Labour antisemitism, I was doing a disservice to my fellow Jews. Better, you see, to have said and done nothing to antagonise the Corbynites.
“We have to accept that he is here to stay,” I was told. “So we have to find a way to reach an accommodation with Labour. That means we cannot have the JC carrying on its campaign against him.”
Angered as I was by this craven and wrong-headed approach, it was nonetheless one I knew well. Because from the first moment we started to expose Mr Corbyn, there had been some in our community who were pursuing good relations with Labour and they tried everything they could to stop our attacks on the party.
I will always be proud of how the JC not only ignored such attempts at appeasing antisemites but of how we stepped up our journalism. Backed by our then chairman, and with a team of senior editors who were as committed to the cause as they were talented, we treated the craven idea that a Jewish newspaper should ignore an antisemitic party leader with the contempt it deserved.
When he became leader in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was unknown to all but political anoraks. But not to us: we have long reported on obscure MPs whose behaviour we think needs to be noted. So our archive had many stories about Mr Corbyn, from his description of terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” and his support for Holocaust denier Paul Eisen to his praise for blood libel cleric Raed Salah and notorious vicar Stephen Sizer.
In August 2015, we used that knowledge to pose a series of questions to Mr Corbyn on the paper’s front page. That issue of the paper was, if I say so myself, seminal. It alerted the rest of the media to the views held by the man who was about to become Labour leader. And from then on, to varying degrees, the Corbynites’ attitude to Jews became a recurring theme in British politics.
The JC was far from the only newspaper that unearthed vital evidence of the cancer that had taken over Labour, but we broke an astonishing number of stories and we were relentless in pursuing these appalling people. I pay tribute here to our political editor, Lee Harpin, a one-man Labour scoop machine, who deserves high praise for his role in exposing the greatest threat to the Jewish community since 1945.
And now, Labour has been declared in breach of the Equality Act by the EHRC. It would be wonderful if we could all now move on to discuss the issues democratic politics should be about but — as we say in our leader column this week — this is the beginning, not the end.
The Corbynites repeatedly accused our coverage of being politically motivated. Such smears — I choose the word deliberately —have never bothered me because all of us at the JC know that, far from being an attack on Labour, the campaign to rid it of antisemitism is about returning the party to decency — and thus, of course, making it electable. It was the antisemites who took Labour to its catastrophic defeat in December, not the JC.
After that result, I confess my thoughts turned back to that lunch two years before. I wonder if they still think appeasing the Corbynites was the right thing to do?
Stephen Pollard is the editor of the Jewish Chronicle
