What stopped Crouch End voting for a rabbi?

So, I thought a few months ago, let’s find out who is standing for Labour in my ward. Armed with their names — two of them new to me, one of them I knew to be a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn — I sought out the new candidates on Twitter and followed them.

It took about two minutes for me to be blocked by one of the Labour candidates who supposedly wanted me to vote for him. It was the social media equivalent of a slap in the face.

What on earth would have made him do such a thing? Could it be the part of my Twitter bio which mentions my cats? Could it be my creative activities, writing teen fiction and a musical? Could it be that he saw that I work at the Jewish Chronicle, and also that I’d written a book about modern-day antisemitism?

Maybe he didn’t realise that I was a potential voter — even though my bio locates me in N8. But perhaps his grasp of geography wasn’t that great, because a few weeks later he disappeared from the list of candidates, because, I’ve been told, he didn’t live in the borough and therefore should never have been picked as a candidate in the first place.

I tried not to hold this act against the remaining Labour candidates who came to replace. After all, Keir Starmer and my own rabbi were assuring me that there was no place for antisemitism in the Labour Party. I decided that I would ask the Labour candidates about it, when they knocked on my door, seeking my vote. I would ask as well if they thought that Jeremy Corbyn should be allowed back into the Labour Party.

These questions would help me work out if I could send Keir Starmer the support he was asking me for, whether I could put aside my small niggles about the council’s traffic plans and bin collection — and my larger ones about the poisonous years in which Haringey was a bastion of the hard left — and vote them in for another term of office.

But they never knocked on my door. The Liberal Democrats did, more than once. They sent leaflets every day, Labour managed one. (The other parties didn’t bother.) Meanwhile, elsewhere in the borough a friend was assured on her doorstep that the whole antisemitism thing had been overblown and exaggerated.

Our rabbi campaigned hard to be elected as a Labour councillor. I probably would have voted for him had I been in that ward, but I wasn’t going to vote for a party which seemed so complacent.

As it turned out, Labour’s complacency was well-placed. All three invisible candidates in my ward were elected. Haringey Council’s Labour administration can continue to impose traffic calming schemes and charge residents a fortune to take away our garden waste.
And my rabbi? He didn’t get elected. Even though the other two Labour candidates in the ward did.

He got around 30 votes less than either of them, which means that there were some voters in that ward — in lovely, liberal Crouch End — who were happy to vote Labour for non-rabbinical candidates, but somehow didn’t fancy voting for the one who was very obviously Jewish.

I’d like to find some positive spin to end this column, but I can’t find one. We’re not at war (yet), people aren’t quite starving in the streets (yet), the pandemic is over (sort of). But somehow it feels as though British politics is just as broken as ever.