The one topic that’s never come up in all my time as JC political correspondent is whether aliens could be Jewish. That was, until I sat down for a chat with Charlotte Nichols. The 34-year-old MP for Warrington North since 2019 was keen to recount her first ever trip to Limmud, over the Christmas recess.
“I deliberately tried to avoid a lot of the political stuff, that was obviously something that felt like work,” the Jewish Labour backbencher recalls.
Instead, she was enticed by a session entitled “Hilchot Doctor Who”, involving discussions on whether a frum Time Lord should pause for Shabbat on a journey through the space-time continuum in the Tardis if it began just before sunset.
Another session on “an exploration into exotheology [the theological implications of alien life] and Judaism: what did the sages think about aliens” asked whether Jewish thinkers would have accepted extraterrestrials (“Maimonides, yes; Nachmanides, maybe”, apparently).
It’s not the first time the former trade union official has brought up Judaism’s less familiar byways. In a 2024 Commons debate on a proposal for Jewish history month, Nichols addressed professional wrestling.
She says: “I thought it might be illustrative for the House if, in demonstrating that every part of British history and culture is also Jewish history and culture, I brought together two seemingly unrelated parts of my parliamentary work to highlight the Jewish contribution.”
Nichols retains a detailed relish for the subject: “Thanks to the historian Bradley Craig, I know of ‘Jewish Flash’ Al Lipman from Aldgate, who was an immensely popular lightweight wrestling star in the 1940s.
“In the wake of the war, there was a major show in Manchester in aid of Jewish charities, in which the ‘good guy’, who was Jewish, defeated the ‘bad guy’, who was portraying a Nazi.”
The interest in wrestling may be apposite for a politician who tussled with controversy before she was an MP.
In 2018, she was widely criticised for joining then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at a Passover seder organised by radical far-left group Jewdas.
Would she go again? Nichols replies the group seems to have “died a death”, adding her participation was “of a time”. Back then, she was even deemed a right-winger by more radical anarchist members of Jewdas. Now, she feels, there is more room for left-wing voices within a Jewish community which isn’t “one kind of monolithic bloc”. In her synagogue, she says, no topic is off-limits for discussion.
What does arouse her passion is the nuclear industry, which brings “highly paid, highly skilled unionised jobs that you can build a whole career in … contributing to the country's national security in terms of our energy resilience”, including an estimated 8,000 employees in Warrington.
Charlotte Nichols MP (Image: Facebook)[Missing Credit]
Although elected to Parliament under Corbyn’s leadership, she isn’t considered one of the far-left “usual suspects” currently making trouble for Sir Keir Starmer, although she has criticised the leadership’s decision to block Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham from standing at the Gorton and Denton by-election.
As a younger activist, she backed Corbyn in 2015 “fairly wholeheartedly”, because “it was kind of crossroads within the Labour Party” and she wanted “something that was different and not more of the same… a change in direction which he represented”.
She says she was far less enthusiastic in his 2016 campaign, prompted by a leadership challenge by his MPs, although she wasn’t won over by defeated contender Owen Smith. “I might have been a bit more open to supporting someone else.”
Charlotte Nichols (bottom) with volunteers after a day of campaigning on Saturday[Missing Credit]
“I don’t think I was ever a dyed-in-the-wool Corbynite despite what has been said over the years, because, actually, I joined the Labour Party when I was 16. I have been loyal to the party, not our leader at any given time.”
Labour Party membership is, for Nichols, akin to being part of “a slightly dysfunctional family”: “You argue, you disagree, you have times where you agree more or less with the kind of overall direction, but at the end of the day, you’re a family.”
Although friendly with members of the Corbyn-loyalist group Momentum, she was never one herself, and she says before 2019 some of them resented her for looking to when the MP for Islington North was no longer leader.
“I used to say things like, ‘Where's the kind of succession plan for after Corbyn?’ … and people viewed that as a kind of heresy.”
She says she was warned: “‘You’re talking about someone doing in Corbyn.’
“Coming from the left of the Labour Party, I want there to be a future for the left of the Labour Party, the more that becomes just about one person that's not a political movement, that's a cult of personality. And that's obviously intensified since he [Corbyn] left the party.”
Another former comrade is Zarah Sultana, now known for her hardline anti-Israel stance, who left Labour to set up far-left Your Party alongside Corbyn and other pro-Gaza independents.
She and Nichols were in the youth wing of Labour together, and went on to campaign jointly for more kosher and halal options on the menu in Parliament. Yet now it is almost two years since they last spoke, Nichols says.
Despite Sultana’s often incendiary comments while a student activist, Nichols had initially “always been willing to defend her”, given their positive personal interactions and her hope that apologies for her remarks were genuine.
Nichols says they were “close”, as part of the 2019 intake which was quickly “forged through fire” amid the Covid outbreak.
But Sultana’s public statements after October 7 became “more extreme”, Nichols says. “She just seems to have been sort of swept up in it, which is a shame, because I always thought she was talented and a good communicator … I don’t really recognise her any more, I don’t think I’ve even probably spoken to her in about two years, which is a shame really.”
[Missing Credit]
Nichols speaks with pride about her local Jewish community in Warrington, its history going back to the 19th century: “There's a question mark over whether there was a Warrington synagogue or whether it was just some guy’s house.” There’s also a sizeable Egyptian Jewish community which arrived in the 1950s following persecution by President Nasser.
Despite the challenges since October 7, she says that, locally, her Jewish identity has enabled her to engage with a variety of religious groups who value “the role of faith in our communities”, allowing for some “really lovely” cross-faith engagements. After the Heaton Park terror attack, the Muslim Mayor of Warrington drove her to Manchester, where they paid their respects together.
Proudly left-wing, Nichols is acutely aware her views aren’t necessarily shared by the mainstream of British Jewry and delighted at the rise in the number of Jewish Labour MPs in the 2024 general election.
When a 2022 Jewish Telegraphic Agency piece called her possibly the “only Jewish woman” in the Commons, she says it “felt like an awful lot of pressure because I recognise that a lot of my positions on things, both politically and religiously, aren't necessarily always in the kind of Jewish mainstream”.
She adds: “I think it felt like there was a lot of pressure and burden of responsibility to represent that in a way that I now feel like I don't have to, because there's a bit more of a multiplicity of voices.”
She bemoans how the demands on MPs’ time would be “almost impossible” for a strictly Orthodox MP: “I think that's a shame.”
But Nichols welcomes how some newer MPs don’t only represent traditionally “Jewish” areas and can reflect concerns of smaller communities or even isolated Jews.
“When we think about things like security, it's a very different proposition, for example, a Jewish school, then it is at school where there might be a Jewish child.
“And the response needs to be different in both of those places.
“Both of those things are represented” – from Sarah Sackman representing Finchley and Golders Green to Peter Prinsley in Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket: “It feels like we're going to get better outcomes for the community through that.”
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