Ken and the Jews

But one thing has long been clear: the Mayor has an issue with Jews. Keith Dovkants' piece is thus especially useful in going back two decades and beyond: At the height of his celebrity for Left-wing incendiarism, Ken Livingstone sounded an alarm that echoed around the world. There were in our city, he warned, "paramilitary groups which resemble fascist organisations". It was 1984, a date laden with portent. The IRA was active, as were Hitler-worshipping elements of the National Front. What had Ken discovered?

Nothing more terrifying, it seemed, than the Board of Deputies of British Jews. It was they who were putting together the "paramilitaries", Ken said. In a tirade against the deputies made in an interview with an Israeli newspaper, he claimed the board had been taken over by the extreme Right wing and, he alleged, the venerable institution was being run by reactionaries and near-fascists.

As troubled Londoners scanned the streets in vain for cohorts of fascistic Jewish paramilitaries, Ken - not for the first time - began to look rather silly. And the total lack of evidence, then or now, to support his warning invited a question: why did he launch into such a bizarre outburst?

Many Jews in London think they know. Ken, they say, hates us.

...How can London stay ahead as a great world city, Ken was asked, with a Mayor who says things like Israel should not have been created?

Ken did not reply directly but he said a former Chief Rabbi had himself stated that maybe it would have been better if Israel had never come into being.

Ken has said this before, on a number of occasions. He says he is quoting an interview with Lord Jakobovits in the Evening Standard, just before he retired as Chief Rabbi in 1991. In reality, Lord Jakobovits said no such thing. He was critical of Israel's policy towards the Arabs but he did not say the state should not have been created.

...The party [the WRP] also peddled a virulent anti-Israel and anti-Zionist - some would say anti-Semitic - message through its daily newspaper, News Line.

Ken Livingstone was with them every step of the way. He was an editor of Labour Herald, a soft-Left paper many suspected of supporting Trotskyite entryism into the Labour Party. The paper was printed by a firm based in Runcorn, Cheshire, which also printed News Line and publications sponsored by the Libyan government.

...Although no one doubts Gaddafi was subsidising News Line and Labour Herald there is absolutely no evidence Ken knew about it. But he did support the WRP when it published an extraordinary anti-Jewish rant in News Line.

On 20 March 1983, BBC2 ran an investigation on its Money Programme. Its central thesis was that the WRP's newspaper, Ken's Labour Herald and other publications were being funded by Gaddafi. Looking at the transcript today one sees a thorough, rather measured, piece of journalism. The response was quite different.

Under the heading The Zionist Connection, News Line published an editorial denouncing the Money Programme's investigation. It blamed a "powerful Zionist connection" that ran through the Labour Left, Mrs Thatcher's government, to the BBC. It cited the placing of Stuart Young, a director of the Jewish Chronicle, as chairman of the corporation and the appointment of his brother, David Young, to head the Manpower Services Commission. The Jewish Chronicle, the editorial noted, gave "support and advance publicity" to the Money Programme.

On the day of its hysterical editorial News Line ran a piece in which Ken suggested the Money Programme report was indeed the work of Zionists. In the same piece he blamed "smears" against him on agents working for Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin's government.

...After the News Line tirade, Ken was tackled about anti-Semitism by Sean Matgamna, the Trotskyite theorist and an iconic figure on the Left. Matgamna, now in his mid-sixties, was one of the WRP's most severe critics.

He told me: "The WRP ceased to be a political organisation and was merely a group paid for by Islamic regimes. They were spying on dissident Arabs and Jews for Gaddafi and Saddam, here in London.

"The WRP was taking money from Libya to subsidise Livingstone's paper. He had an accommodation with the WRP. After they ran that piece in News Line, we said to Livingstone: 'That editorial was anti-Semitic - where do you stand on it? Should we shrug our shoulders and accept that anti-Semitism is a legitimate part of the Left?' Livingstone didn't answer."