South Yorkshire mayor Oliver Coppard: I reconnected with Jewish identity amid Corbynite hostility

In a period of politics dominated by calls to “stop the boats”, and in which leaders seemingly compete to sound tougher on immigration, Coppard is mindful of the very reason he’s alive.

Both his maternal grandparents escaped Europe, his grandfather from Austria and his grandmother from Czechoslovakia, via a small boat: “In the hull of the herring boat, she got here through a canal in Amsterdam, from Prague, and made it here.”

“Most of the rest of the family died in the concentration camps… we were really lucky that my grandparents made it out.

“And I'm always very aware that if it wasn't for this country giving us a home, if it wasn't for the way in which we were welcomed in and then integrated into our communities, I wouldn't now be sitting where I am.”

Despite not wanting to be pigeonholed as just “a Jewish mayor” – “I'm South Yorkshire Mayor first and foremost” – his outlook was inevitably moulded by his family’s experiences and story.

“Whilst I've never been a particularly religious person, I think lots of people in the Jewish community will understand what that feels like, which is to be influenced and shaped by the experiences that precede me. Not just my family going back to the Second World War, but before that as well.

South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard (Image: SYCA).[Missing Credit]

“Clearly, that shapes you as a person, as a family, and the influences it has on you in ways that I don't think you always understand, certainly growing up. 

"But I feel very lucky to have the opportunity now as a mayor, to do things on behalf of my community and this country, and hopefully give back to this community that gave my family a home and supported me and supported us. And I do feel that responsibility quite keenly.”

Apart from a couple of incidents as a youngster, Coppard says he hadn’t really experienced antisemitism growing up.

It wasn’t until Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party that he “acutely” felt his Jewish identity.

He describes “feeling as though I wasn't at home in the Labour Party because of the approach taken at the time by the leadership towards the Jewish community. And that was really difficult”.

Much of his life was spent with the Labour Party as an active campaigner, including canvassing for the party from a young age.

“My dad used to take us leafleting for Labour and trade union candidates. When I was about six, my sister and I used to get 20p for around leaflets with my dad … So largely it was bribery that got me into politics in the first instance,” he chuckles.

But the hostility of the Corbyn years didn’t push him into silence or to leave the party he’d devoted much of his adult life to.

“If anything, it made me feel more keenly my Jewish identity, and be even more proud of who I am, and be more keen to speak out on those issues”.

It felt like my family was turning against me”

It was during this period that Coppard, living in London at the time, got more involved with the Jewish Labour Movement and started going to shul on a regular basis.

He warmly reminisces about his time at Alyth, where he connected with his heritage in the face of a hostile environment within Labour: “I was doing lessons on a Wednesday night, a couple of hours after work, and learning a bit more about what it meant to be Jewish, because I've never had that bar mitzvah experience.

“I'd never had that teaching when I was a kid. So just wanted to learn more and understand more and be part of something bigger than myself, and be part of a Jewish community that, at the time, certainly in the Labour Party, felt like it was being targeted by some people, and it felt more important to be able to kind of actually understand it and engage with it and speak out about it.”

Coppard had some national profile already, having come close to unseating Nick Clegg, the then-deputy prime minister, at the 2015 general election. But he publicly refused to stand for Labour again in 2019, citing Corbyn’s handling of antisemitism scandals within the party.

“It was hard to overstate the sadness of that moment for me. When you grow up in the Labour Party, and the Labour Party becomes, to a greater or lesser extent, a family… you fall out with your family sometimes, of course… But this felt different.

"It felt like my family was turning against me.”

This hostility wasn’t just something he read about in the abstract, but came literally close to home.

It was in a speech to Sheffield Momentum where Corbynite Chris Williamson, at the time the MP for Derby North, famously said that the party had been “too apologetic” about antisemitism.

Coppard says there has been a radical change since Sir Keir Starmer succeeded Corbyn: “He promised to rip [antisemitism] out by its roots, and that's certainly my experience. The Labour Party is no longer a safe space for antisemites, and I think at one point it felt like it was.”

When it comes to the conflict in Gaza, which dominates both parliamentary time and internal party discussion, Coppard says he “broadly” agrees with the approach taken by Starmer’s government.

“When you look at what's going on in the Middle East right now, it's hard not to feel deeply passionate about those issues, certainly the fate of the hostages, of course, but also the fate of innocent Palestinian children and families.”

But, unlike some in both parliament and local government, he won’t spend his time and political platform opining on the war: “I'm focused on trying to make South Yorkshire the best possible place it can be every single day. And that's my job, not watching the Middle East every single day and trying to give advice to the government on what I think they need to do.”

For him, what has been lost in much of the public debate Gaza is the ability to disagree respectfully.

“I think we're all shouting at each other, and I just don't think it's helpful.

"The vast, vast, vast majority of us – not just in South Yorkshire, but across this country – want to see a peaceful end to the conflict. 

"They want to see children and families and people protected in both Israel and in Palestine. They want to see a two-state solution to that crisis”.

On the domestic front, Coppard has good relations with all Sheffield Labour MPs, including Clive Betts and Abtisam Mohamed, both of whom have gained notoriety for their robust criticism of Israel in the Commons.

“I know they are thoughtful and heartfelt and committed MPs who are doing their very best to navigate a very complex issue on behalf of their communities, rightly, as representatives of their communities, that's their job, just like it's mine, and we may come out in different places on that issue”, he says.

And he understands why some politicians have felt the need to speak up about the situation in Gaza – as the JC has previously reported, often more than issues they directly control, such as the NHS – they’re “driven by the things that their communities care about, and that's how democracy rightly works”, but as mayor his primary focus will always be on what he can control.

First elected to the post in 2022, he was returned to office last year, gaining the additional responsibilities of Police and Crime Commissioner.

Asked what his biggest achievement in office is, Coppard says it was the decision to bring the region’s bus services back under public control was something fundamentally important to his local community.

South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard (Image: SYCA).[Missing Credit]

“In South Yorkshire, we've got a muscle memory of world-class public transport. When I was growing up, buses were everywhere … and then Margaret Thatcher's decision to privatise the buses, meant that was taken away from us, slowly but surely, and now we have this shell of a bus network, which we're trying to restore back to its former glory.”

Cynics might scoff, but these issues are, according to Coppard, “really important to people on a day-to-day basis”.

“It doesn't inspire marches through towns and city centres – of course it doesn't, I understand why that's the case – but that doesn't mean it's any less important to a load of people who live here.”

The impact of the properly-running bus system has an understated impact on the daily lives of South Yorkshire residents, affecting the ability to get to medical appointments on time, to socialise and to get to a job or college placement on time (“and at a price that's fair”), he says.

Yet, for him, running the devolved mayoralty isn’t just a case of telling people what they want to hear and blaming Westminster when things don’t go to plan.

Shortly after our interview, Coppard announced that Doncaster Sheffield Airport would remain closed to holidaymakers until at least 2028, despite local campaigning to keep it open, because of concerns it would not be financially viable for the region’s taxpayers.

There were people who were not prepared to admit to the truth of what was happening here

Arguably one of the main reasons residents of South Yorkshire may feel alienated towards the political class – and the main reason the region has been in national headlines in recent years – is the grooming gangs scandal that blighted Rotherham.

An estimated 1,400 predominantly white working-class girls were groomed and abused by gangs of men, largely of Pakistani heritage, between 1997-2013; similar patterns of abuse were later revealed in towns including Rochdale, Telford and Oldham.

The prime minister initially resisted calls for a national inquiry into grooming gangs – including from Rotherham MP Sarah Champion – instead asking Baroness Casey, who a decade earlier had written a devastating report into the failures of Rotherham Council to protect young girls from exploitation, to carry out an audit on group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse.

It was only after the publication of Casey’s report, and its author changing her view to recommend a national inquiry, that the prime minister accepted the move.

Having had the spotlight shone on Rotherham – in the form of national press coverage and two official reports, one by Casey and another by professor Alexis Jay – Coppard says that South Yorkshire is now “probably at the forefront of dealing with some of those issues, because we were essentially the canary in the coal mine”.

He added: “The change that's happened in South Yorkshire is probably, I think, a change that is going to need to be done and need to be seen in other parts of this country”.

Coppard defends Starmer from some of the criticism he has faced in his handling of the issue: “I don't think a politician who doesn't want to uncover an uncomfortable truth, who doesn't want to engage with a challenge, brings in someone like Louise Casey and says, ‘tell me what to do’.”

He continues: “In South Yorkshire, there were people who were not prepared to admit to the truth of what was happening here, who weren't prepared to take on difficult arguments and difficult conversations with communities who needed to hear those home truths … The people in charge at that point were not prepared to do that, and so Louise had to come in and make sure that everybody did listen.”

Jay’s 2014 report found that Rotherham was “subject to institutionalised political correctness, affecting its decision-making on sensitive issues”,  a conclusion re-emphasised by Casey.

A situation where an inconvenient truth is pushed aside for the sake of political correctness will never happen on Coppard’s watch, he says, but he refuses to be complacent.

“There might be things happening right now that we do not know about. We can never say never in South Yorkshire. And nor should anyone else say ‘this is not happening here’. Until you look, you do not know, and you have to keep on looking.”

He continued: “We will keep on working and keep on supporting victims, keep on putting victims at the forefront of what we do and survivors at the forefront of what we do, and we will go from there.

"But no, there will never be any inconvenient truths that we are not prepared to take on. And that is my commitment to the communities of South Yorkshire.”