Has anyone heard from Ed Miliband?

The silence from Ed Miliband over the last three years has been deafening.

In fact, it had taken until July this year for the former Labour Leader to say anything at all on the subject of Labour’s antisemtisim crisis. He eventually called on the party’s ruling National Executive Committee  (NEC) to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in full, urging “the NEC to get on with this at speed”.

However, at the Jewish Labour Movement’s conference at the beginning of September, it was left to former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to take to the stage and passionately call for the party he once led to unequivocally adopt the international definition of antisemitism. His successor had promptly returned to his comfort zone of saying nothing at all.

Clearly feeling this paltry statement meant he had done his part, Miliband maintained his silence as Luciana Berger was forced to attend her party’s conference accompanied by police to protect her. He said not a word as delegates speaking from the main stage pointed comrades towards the despicable Al Jazeera documentary ‘The Lobby’ with a wink and a nudge and as many in the hall waved Palestinian flags not in an act of international solidarity, but in one of domestic Jew baiting. 

To be fair, Miliband was busy. He had to host the pub quiz at Momentum’s The World Transformed festival on the fringe of the main Labour conference.

Miliband’s successor as leader of the Labour party has allowed the oldest hatred, the hatred Miliband so movingly spoke of his late father having to flee as a child, to engulf it. The party that once used to be home to so many in our community now feels like a threat to it, and he has just stood back and watched it happen. And it is shameful. 

He has allowed his colleagues to take up the fight against antisemtism while offering no public support. His Jewish parliamentary colleagues Margaret Hodge, Luciana Berger, Louise Ellman and Ruth Smeeth have been subjected to the most horrific abuse online, had menacing letters left at their parliamentary offices and threatened with deselection by far-left thugs. But instead of publicly standing up for them, Miliband seems is happy keeping his head down. 

Sure he can raise a passionate case when the issue of the Leveson inquiry comes up, but when it’s discrimination against Jews in the party he once led? Better to let the others sort that.

I confess, I always feel slightly uncomfortable turning my pen on a single individual, particularly in something as emotive and complex as as Labour’s antisemitism crisis.  I thought long and hard about writing this. It’s not like the problem of antisemitism in the Labour party is Ed Miliband’s fault. 

I also do not want to pretend that Miliband’s immediate predecessors as Labour leader, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, have done definitively more that he has. However, without providing a running commentary on Labour’s antisemitism crisis, they both have made strident interventions on the issue that have carried real weight. There can be little doubt that the Jewish community feels they are our allies in this fight.

And the truth is, of course, that it does feels different given Ed Miliband’s Jewish heritage and the suffering his family had to endure as a direct result of antisemitism. How could it not? Is it unreasonable to expect just a little more from him than Blair and Brown?

We all make choices, about who and what we are going to stand up for, when we are going to put our head above the parapet. Since he left the leadership, Miliband has clearly made his choice. When the story of this shameful period in Labour’s history is told, Ed Miliband’s silence will sadly show him to have been on the wrong side of history.

 

Charlotte Henry is a journalist and author