3 min read
By the time you read this, the General Election will be over, bar the shouting, of which there will be more than usual. While we wait for that to begin, let me draw your attention to one of the most remarkable features of the election - remarkable because the media has taken it for granted: the Jewish Vote has come of age.
Three weeks ago, I provided JC readers with an analysis of the Survation poll of Jewish voting intentions commissioned by this newspaper. As recently as 20 or so years ago, such a poll, commissioned by such a newspaper, would have been unthinkable.
In 1974, as a young academic specialising (among other things) in electoral politics, I began researching the then unwritten history of how Jews had voted in parliamentary and local elections in the UK. This research came to the attention of the late Martin Savitt, then chairman of the Board of Deputies' defence committee, and I was asked to meet him and the then head of the Board's defence department, Dr Jack Gewirtz.
These noteworthies came straight to the point: it was wrong of me to pursue this line of research (the word "dangerous" was used), and I must certainly not publish my findings. Why? Because even to pursue such research would suggest to the non-Jewish majority among whom we dwelt that there was something different, something distinctive, about British-Jewish political preferences, and that in turn might trigger a public debate about whether (in Savitt's words) we were "not quite British" and (worse still, he insisted) that we might be pursuing, via the ballot box, a "Jewish" agenda rather than a "British" one.
We've come a long way since that grim meeting, haven't we? Over the past few weeks, I've given umpteen interviews to the media worldwide on the politics of the UK's Jewish electorate, which I may remind you numbers only around 218,000 or so in an electorate of over 46 million. Of course, the media's sudden interest in the British-Jewish vote is a direct outcome of the demise of the two-party system and the fragmentation of the UK's electoral landscape.
It was feared that critics would point to a Jewish agenda
On the one hand, party leaders and (more importantly) their backroom advisers are alive to the importance of even a few score of Jewish voters in the now relatively large number of highly marginal constituencies. On the other, the relationship between those leaders and the UK's Jewish communities is now deemed to be of significance in a wider sense.
Think, for example, of the SNP's recent pledge to protect shechita if it formed part of a Westminster government. This pledge was not given because the SNP needs Jewish votes. It doesn't. It was given (I suspect) to counterbalance the SNP's perceived anti-Israel bias and in particular the call made by its former leader in May 2011 for economic sanctions against the Jewish state.
Nor must we forget that the Labour leader is a Jew - the first Jew to lead the party and aim to become the first Jewish prime minister since Benjamin Disraeli. There can be no doubt that Ed Miliband's Jewishness was a factor in the election campaign that has just concluded. How could it have been otherwise? Disraeli was a card-carrying member of the Church of England. But that did not prevent his political opponents (chiefly Gladstone, of course) from exploiting his Jewish origins unashamedly for political purposes.
Miliband's condemnation of Israel's most recent military assault upon Gaza may well have reflected a genuine abhorrence of bloodshed. But it was surely voiced in order to reassure Muslim voters.
In this connection, I must come to the partial defence of Gulzabeen Afsal, a Tory council candidate (since suspended by the party) in Derby, who in an apparent reference to Miliband, indicated in a Facebook exchange that she would never support "al yahud"- the Jew.
This was in no sense a slur on the Labour leader - nor was it (as the Jewish Leadership Council tried to insist) "an antisemitic slur." Afsal simply told the truth. She and her fellow British Muslims are perfectly entitled to take ethnicity into account when deciding on their political loyalties. And we, in turn, are entitled to draw our own conclusions from this very public prejudice.