Why Labour does not need the Jews
Rod Liddle says that the government is prepared to alienate Jewish voters in order to win Muslim support There is no ‘Jewish’ vote in Great Britain any more. There used to be, back in the time of Cable Street and Mosley and even up to 20 or so years ago. Jews used to vote, en masse, for Labour. But not now. At the last general election, the Jewish vote was split exactly 50–50 between Labour and Conservative.
Further, there aren’t that many of them left, the Jews. Their number has shrunk by one third since 1945, largely as a result of their propensity to integrate and their readiness to become assimilated: they marry outside of their communities, much to the consternation of the Chief Rabbi. They have always been happy to identify with British values.
And finally, the 300,000 Jewish people who remain are widely dispersed. There are still some famous Jewish enclaves, of course — Stamford Hill and Golders Green in London, parts of Manchester, Leeds and Bradford and so on. But a large proportion of that 300,000 are scattered to the wind, apparently happily so, from Truro to Thurso.
All of which means that, electorally, there is no point in courting the Jewish vote, because there isn’t one as such. The Jews have become an electoral insignificance and so will not be an issue in the forthcoming general election. Except, however, indirectly. Because it follows that if there’s no point in courting the Jewish vote, then equally there is no harm in offending Jewish people if electoral advantage can be gained among another section of the population by so doing.
Certainly, right now, Labour seems to be going out of its way to antagonise the Jews. Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, recently told a Jewish reporter that, in doing the bidding of the Daily Mail group of newspapers, he was behaving in a manner similar to that of those Jews who acted as guards in the Nazi concentration camps. This may simply have been another example of Ken’s ad hoc arrogance and offensiveness, with which we are all by now familiar. There may, too, have been some of that unconscious anti-Semitism which has historically infested the far Left; many psychoanalysts believe that the Left’s aversion to capitalism is simply a displaced loathing of Jews. But what struck me was not so much Ken’s original comment, nor his laughable attempts to justify the fact that he, too, had worked for Northcliffe House as a restaurant reviewer despite ‘20 years of harassment’ from that institution. What really struck me was his refusal to say sorry to the reporter and, more importantly, his readiness to hold press conferences and issue statements where he cheerfully restated his comment and in the process just happened to take a couple of swipes at the Board of Deputies of British Jews and, in passing, attack Israel. What on earth was he up to, the Mayor? Clearly his every utterance made matters worse. What was he hoping to gain?
Perhaps it becomes a little clearer when you look at the behaviour of Ken’s New Labour colleagues and, having done that, study the psephology. Recently we have seen Labour unveil two campaign posters that seemed calculated to offend Jewish people: one depicted Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin, two of Britain’s most prominent Jewish politicians, as flying pigs. The other displayed Howard peering down his nose holding a fob-watch in a conscious or unconscious echo of Fagin. Labour did not apologise for the posters; rather, Alastair Campbell reportedly bragged that the controversy had secured his party millions of pounds worth of free publicity. Then there was the article by government minister Mike O’Brien begging for votes in the Muslim News. It said, ‘Ask yourself, what will Michael Howard do for British Muslims?’ The article was entitled ‘Can We Dream The Same Dream?’ This, I think, is the key. Labour has indeed done an awful lot to help British Muslims dream the same dream in the last year or so, not least introducing a fatuous new law against inciting religious hatred (which O’Brien referred to in his article), a law so badly conceived that the government has been forced to change its wording. We have had senior Labour politicians ‘defending’ Muslim women’s ‘rights’ to wear the hejab (most notably Fiona Mactaggart, whose constituency is Slough) and senior Labour politicians (including Livingstone) acting as cheerleaders for Muslim clerics such as al-Qaradawi, who believes suicide bombers are fine and that it’s OK to beat up women when they get a bit gobby, as they inevitably do from time to time. Right now, there is nothing Labour won’t do to protect its Muslim vote — and the reason for that is very, very simple.
There is a Muslim vote, and it is crucial. Muslims now outnumber Jews by six to one and, further, Muslims have always tended to vote en bloc. Take the example of Bradford West, once one of the safest Labour seats in the country: as soon as the Tories put up a Muslim candidate, the seat became marginal.
There are at least 13 extremely marginal parliamentary seats in which the Muslim vote could swing the result and — Ken Livingstone will be aware of this — seven of them are in the Greater London area. And there are a further seven seats where the Muslim vote registers at more than 25 per cent of the total electorate. So 20 parliamentary seats could conceivably change hands unless the Muslim population is appeased.
Until recently, Labour felt it could take the Muslim vote for granted — and it was pretty much right to think so. One poll suggested that before 2001, some 88 per cent of (Muslim) Bangladeshis voted Labour. Not now. A telephone opinion poll for the Guardian last year suggested that Muslim support for Labour was waning rapidly, a result of the war against Iraq (opposed by 70 per cent of Muslims) and the anti-terrorist measures adopted by the government at home. This poll reinforced the message of Labour’s poor showing in strongly Muslim areas during the last round of local council elections. Labour knows it is extremely vulnerable — hence the plaintive, pleading tone of Mike O’Brien’s article — and it is doing everything it can to cling on to its Muslim constituency.
In the end, ask yourself this: why did Labour choose those particular images for its posters? And would there not have been a very swift apology had it been Muslims, rather than Jews, who were offended? Why are Labour politicians, in theory committed to female emancipation, now supporting the hejab? Why did Ken Livingstone not only refuse to apologise to the Jewish reporter he offended but instead restated the allegation and, swathed in ineffable self-importance, boasted about his ‘stand’ against Israel?
There are no opinion polls which show that Muslim voters, moderate or less moderate, leap up and down with glee when Labour politicians gratuitously offend the Jews. But my guess is that they do. Is it possible, or even likely, that Labour has made the very same guess?
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