Baroness Hodge: I proudly wear my star of David because I’m not going to hide my identity

The 82-year-old former minister is speaking to the JC about her memoir Battleaxe, which chronicles her life from growing up in Alexandria to becoming leader of Islington Council and the MP for Barking. First elected in 1994, Hodge reached ministerial office and fought both the BNP and the Corbynite left – as well as battling for corporate tax transparency as chair of the Public Accounts Committee. 

Her parents, both Jews – whom she describes as “assimilators” more likely to attend embassy parties than synagogue – found sanctuary in Egypt before the Second World War. They were then forced to flee Alexandria following an antisemitic attack on her father’s business.

It was only recently that Hodge considered herself one of the estimated 750,000 Jews forced out of Arab countries following the creation of the state of Israel.

“When I did a bit of research for the book, I saw there were less than 10 Jews now living in the whole of Egypt. I suddenly realised, what a dramatic expulsion.”

Listening to former Board of Deputies Vice President Edwin Shuker’s life-story in Jonathan Freedland’s play Jews. In Their Own Words also made her think about the circumstances of her arrival in Britain: “I thought, well, that's such a similar story to mine.”

Hodge’s mother died when she was just 10 years old in 1954 and her father in 1985, but there was much about her family history that she would only uncover later in life.

Dame Margaret Hodge (centre) surrounded by her parents and siblings soon after the family arrived in the UK[Missing Credit]

“I wish I talked to them more,” says Hodge about her parents, adding that they, as well as other relatives and Jewish family friends, understandably did not wish to discuss the horrors they or their families had endured or witnessed.

“I think the whole approach to death is so different. The only way [for them] to deal with death is to put it in the past and think about the present and the future,” adding much of what she knows about her family’s history has been discovered in “rich” diaries and “masses of letters”.

In 2024, during a Holocaust Memorial Day debate, she shared an account from her grandfather’s diary.

“He described his last visit to his parents’ graves in Vienna, in tears because he would never visit those graves again. He recalled how his parents, my great-grandparents, visited the graves of their own parents, my great-great-grandparents, in Poland, in tears because they were driven out of their homes by pogroms – a never-ending cycle of violence.”

She also described his arrival in Britain in 1939 and subsequent internment in Huyton in 1940.

Despite the turmoil of her early life, Hodge has a CV many politicians would envy.

In Islington Council, she presided over a huge increase in council homes in the 1970s and would later lead the council in the 1980s.

As a minister in Blair’s government she oversaw the rollout of family support service SureStart – a policy which current communities secretary Angela Rayner credits with having transformed her life.

But smaller interactions – and being told of the positive impact she has had – make up her biggest memories.

“Westminster Council was housing its refugees from the Kosovan War in Barking… And I met this family with this young girl, and they just couldn't get their immigration stuff sorted. So, we sorted their immigration, and then I met her 20 years later, and she said she'd got a degree from Oxford. And she said, ‘I'd have never done this if you hadn't managed it’.

“It's easy to think about the big things, but sometimes these other things that are the things that you live with … They get you. They get your emotions,” she added.

Despite having helped those from all backgrounds, Hodge’s critics in the 2000s sought to label her a racist for articulating the concerns of local residents in her constituency of Barking about level demographic change taking place.

The far-right British National Party (BNP) sought to exploit the changes in the area, winning seats on the local council. The party’s then-leader Nick Griffin even unsuccessfully challenged Hodge at the 2010 general election.

Former Labour Minister Margaret Hodge demolishes the threat from the BNP’s Nick Griffin[Missing Credit]

“I never, ever, ever caved into the racism. Whatever they [her critics] said, I never did,” she says adding that she simply acknowledged the concerns of local residents.

“If your community changes, if the faces in the school change, if you suddenly go to the greengrocer and they're selling different veg. That is unsettling, and it's all very well for us in our – you know we tend to be middle class if you're an MP – enclosed environment,” she said, adding that some politicians have failed to understand the impact mass migration can have on poor communities.

“You've got to listen to it, but it doesn't mean you cave in,” Hodge added, saying that understanding the grievances and articulating them could burst the “bubble of hostility and [create] a positive discourse”.

Hodge wasn’t the only female Labour MP monstered for raising concerns about what are now topics politicians cannot ignore.

Ann Cryer, then-Labour MP for Keighley, raised the issue of grooming gangs of mainly Pakistani men preying on mainly white working-class women and girls in the 2000s.

Despite subsequent inquiries producing harrowing details of what victims had been subjected to, Cryer, like Hodge, was labelled a racist by some of her critics.

“She and I used to talk a lot about that,” says Hodge.

Although she is happy Labour is moving in the right direction, a lot of hassle would have been saved if her and Cryer had been listened to at the time.

Hodge’s book offers incredible insight into the chaos of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and the abuse she was subjected to. She notes, for instance, that some of the material used by the BNP to attack her was re-circulated by pro-Corbyn elements of the party.

BRIGHTON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 26: Labour former minister Dame Margaret Hodge (2L) and former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth (2R) listen to speeches in the main hall on day two of the Labour Party conference on September 26, 2021 in Brighton, England. Labour return to Brighton for their in-person 2021 conference from Saturday 25 to Wednesday 29 September. This will be Keir Starmer's first conference as party Leader. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)Getty Images

In the book, she also shares an anecdote about confronting Ed Miliband for staying silent about the antisemitism in the party under Corbyn’s leadership, but says that she has now forgiven him for it.

There is a behind-the-scenes account of her altercation with Corbyn, after which she was threatened with suspension from the Labour Party. She also reveals that she did not vote for Corbyn in 2019 when she was living in his Islington North constituency.

Despite being able to reflect on the struggle against antisemitism, she “hated” it at the time. “It was just horrible because it was internal… people who were supposed to be my friends and colleagues and comrades and all that sort of stuff.”

One Labour leader she was sorry to see go was Sir Keir Starmer: “Unlike bloody Corbyn – we wanted him out – all of us wanted Keir to succeed. I thought, even after those disastrous local authority elections in May, I thought getting rid of him wouldn't solve anything.”

Though initially apprehensive having agreed to serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, she is full of praise for Starmer’s tackling of antisemitism within the Labour Party.

Asked, however, if Andy Burnham is a better politician than him, she replies “100 per cent”.

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“He's come in and he's doing actually what I did in Barking, really, in a funny way, isn't he? He's showing empathy, listening to what people's concerns are, and I think it came across most when he had that difficult thing about prison release, because it's impossible. And the way he handled it by saying, ‘I've tried to listen to what people want done, and within the circumstances, I've done my best.’ People get that.” She says she doubts Starmer would have been able to handle the situation any better.

Hodge speaks fondly of Burnham, under whom she served while he was culture secretary.

“He was mad on sport. Absolutely mad. I was mad on culture. So, it was a really good partnership. It was a difficult time because my husband was ill in the middle, so I went off on compassionate leave, but he was a really nice guy. He let me get on with it and we were well suited.”

When it comes to Israel, Hodge says she is “not quite where the JC is” and defends the government’s decision to sanction Israeli settlements.

Though proud to call herself a Zionist, she has felt “uncomfortable with successive administrations going right back to the Six Day War” and, in her view, the settler violence in the West Bank justifies the government’s actions.

“We had to do something. Now, there's been our arguments about was the timing being wrong, you know. Yes, there are arguments on both sides there.”

While she says she is worried about whether the measures could “lead to more antisemitism facing us in Britain”, she is relieved that “so far it hasn’t”.

However she says that the “behaviour of Netanyahu and Smotrich and Ben-Gvir” forced the government to act.

Hodge defends the government from criticism by some communal organisations: “I don't think I don't think the Jewish community is entirely represented by the communal organisations. They don't, including I'm afraid the JC, represent really the entirety of views that Jews feel. A lot of my Jewish friends feel as uncomfortable as I do.

“It's really hard. I hate being in that position,” she adds.

Having taken on one party leader prone to interventions on Israel, what does she make of Zack Polanski?

“Oh God! I can't, I can't take him ...Well, I know I've got to take him seriously. I mean, the answer is populism on the extreme left and populism on the extreme right are both deeply frightening and unacceptable features of present democracy. I feel that the job of us in the mainstream parties is to actually set the agenda, and whether it's left of centre, right of centre, [to make sure] that it becomes mainstream again, and that we don't fall into the extremism of both sides. So, you know, I don't have any time for him.”