Solidarity with Luciana - The Jewish Chronicle

One of the most oft repeated antisemitic themes has been the notion of Jews as disloyal citizens. Luciana Berger is the most high-profile victim of this strand of Jew-hate for some time.

The charge - most disgustingly from Labour's John McDonnell and, perhaps less surprisingly, from union baron Len McCluskey as well as thousands of other Labour activists - is that she has been subjected to a barrage of vicious abuse because of her disloyalty to Jeremy Corbyn.

The truth though is that one of the most faithful servants to the Labour cause has been hounded out of the party by a rabid band of antisemites who have been allowed to wreak havoc on a once great party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.

I know just how loyal Luciana has been to the Labour Party, having worked with her on numerous campaigns as a journalist over the years - especially during my time on the pro-Labour Mirror newspapers. Family connections meant I was able to gain closer contact to her than with many other MPs I have dealt with.

But when it came to my attempts as a hardened hack to get her to betray her colleagues in Labour and offer me some information for a story, Luciana wouldn't budge. In her days within Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet - a time conveniently glossed over by her critics today - I learned nothing of what went on in meetings. Over time I gave up asking her for gossip. I knew she wouldn’t budge, as her loyalty to Labour and indeed to the citizens of Liverpool Wavertree was too great.

Instead we worked only on the campaigns Luciana wanted to get publicity for. There was a dangerous dogs campaign - to try and toughen up the laws around ownership of fighting dogs. There was the campaign around obesity - particularly with regard to failure of advertisers to highlight excess sugar content in kids’ cereals. Then there were campaigns around NHS spending, highlighting then Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt's habit of hiding the true scale of cuts. There was an investigation around the shocking rise in the use of food banks and no end of campaigns around mental health, a cause to which Luciana has devoted so much of her time and energy.

And yet simmering in the background, most notably after Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015, were charges that despite campaigning for improvements for all her constituents, somehow Luciana was disloyal. They cited her previous younger days with Labour Friends of Israel and more recently her role as Parliamentary chair of the Jewish Labour Movement. There were ludicrous claims that somehow deep down Luciana wasn't really one of them - and instead was a Tory who had been parachuted into Liverpool Wavertree in some kind of Jewish conspiracy.

Many of those driving these disgusting warped theories were from the same far-left clique that Mr Corbyn and Mr McDonnell have spent most of their political lives in.

To see the way Luciana's Jewish background - something that rarely impinged on any of the campaigns we worked on together at the Mirror - was abused was an awakening to me, and more obviously to her, on how deep the connection to antisemitism within the far-left remained.

This morning I felt a mixture of pride, sadness and anger as she led the group of seven MPs who announced they were leaving Jeremy Corbyn's party. Proud of the way Luciana had continuously stood up and spoken out against the racist bigots that have infested the Labour Party since 2015. Sad, as one leading light in the Jewish Labour Movement said to me today, that a whole generation of young left-wing activists will now have to correctly follow in Luciana's footsteps and resign from a Labour Party that has traditionally been, but is no longer, our community's best ally.

And angry, that some of our own communal leaders in recent months believed they knew better than Luciana in how to tackle Labour's antisemitism crisis, sitting down as they did for friendly talks with her enemies in the party - instead of standing 100 per cent alongside her in solidarity.

But her departure from the Labour Party is ultimately its loss and not our community's. We must now do all we can to stand alongside and support Luciana, her family, and her overriding belief that Jewish values revolve around trying to improve the lives of all who inhabit this earth.