The truth about the Auschwitz ‘gimmick’ row is that Labour exploited Jewish sensitivities
David Cameron, said the Times last Saturday, ‘was facing intense political criticism last night after including student “trips to Auschwitz” on a list of government gimmicks.’ The Daily Mail was more shrill: ‘Pressure was piling on David Cameron last night to apologise,’ said the paper. ‘Senior figures from the Jewish community expressed dismay after an attempt by the Conservative leader to attack the Prime Minister spectacularly backfired.’ The Guardian confined itself to saying that Mr Cameron had ‘found himself at odds’ with Jewish leaders after including student trips to Auschwitz ‘in a list of “Gordon Brown’s 26 gimmicks”’. Meanwhile Stephen Pollard, in his Spectator blog on 22 February, was expressing horrified disbelief at Cameron’s remark.
So I found and studied the Tory briefing note which had caused all this trouble. It is hard to conclude that most of Cameron’s critics had read it properly, or that some of them had read it at all. Nobody who did so would be left in any doubt that what the Conservative leader had been criticising as gimmickry was not the idea of sponsored trips to Auschwitz for older schoolchildren, but the implication that central government would pay for it all. The truth (the Tory press release said) was that schools would have to find £100 per student from their own budgets, while the government would pay the rest (about £250).
So I looked up the Department for Children, Schools and Families announcement to see whether Cameron was right to claim that the government had implied the whole thing was being funded by a new grant from Whitehall. He was indeed right. ‘Two pupils from every sixth form and college in the country,’ said the departmental press release, ‘will be able to visit Auschwitz and learn about the Holocaust thanks to £4.65 million of funding to the Holocaust Educational Trust announced by Schools Minister Jim Knight today.’ There was no mention (even in the more detailed background notes for editors) of the £100 per pupil that the Department was not providing: a silly little attempted spin which spoiled what would have been a perfectly good announcement even had it conceded that the government was not paying fully for the initiative.
There was no need to dissimulate. The plan was worthwhile and the funding substantial. Had the minister said his department would match every £1 provided by schools with more than £2 from central funds then the announce ment would have sounded generous without being misleading.
I went back to Cameron’s briefing. Headed ‘Government by Gimmick’, there was a list of 26 ‘announcements which have sought to grab the headlines but amounted to nothing’. That last phrase — ‘amounted to nothing’ — was unfair in the Auschwitz case; but anyone who thought the Conservative leader was implying that in each of the 26 cases the whole idea was hollow would have quickly discovered that he was implying nothing of the sort. In case after case the idea of the announced initiative was attractive, but the funding didn’t match the promise.
‘A community kitty for every neighbourhood’ was less generous than it sounded, said the briefing; 100 per cent relief for local authorities for flooding meant 100 per cent relief only above a stipulated threshold.
Gordon Brown’s proposal for honours to foreign sportsmen only restated the existing position, the briefing continued; and his promise to fund a new border police force extended only to new uniforms. The Titan prisons proposal was far less concrete than implied; ‘1,300 new railway carriages’ was more like 650. Brown’s ‘deep cleaning’ of hospitals was not being properly funded and starting very slowly. ‘Screening tests for cervical cancer’ in fact involved no new proposals, while the promise that those hospitalised under the NHS would be screened for MRSA and C. difficile had been described as impractical by the Health Secretary.
The 1,000 troops home for Christmas was 430. The Chancellor’s proposals to save couples paying inheritance tax hardly added to the existing reliefs. The promised five hours a week of ‘culture’ in schools was a vague and unfunded aspiration. The announced charge on foreign nationals seeking a UK passport wouldn’t raise anything like what was being implied. Not nearly as many knife scanners were being provided to police forces as ministers had suggested. And the idea of giving citizens new powers to petition was more limited than it appeared.
In not one of the 26 promises he called gimmicks was Cameron disparaging the ambition. It was the gap between ambition and reality he was targeting. So far as I know, no network of cancer sufferers or MRSA victims has protested that he belittled them by calling announcements of new screening programmes a gimmick. The families of troops who have returned are not incensed by his mocking the ‘1,000’ figure as gimmickry. Foreign sportsmen have not declared themselves insulted by the suggestion that Brown was promising less than it appeared. The whole point of Cameron’s list was that most of the promises were attractive ideas.
So what happened to cause the Jewish ‘fury’ that the media duly reported, once a handful of spokesmen for Jewish organisations had been prodded into expressing objections? These spokesmen played (mostly unwittingly) into the hands of a well-orchestrated and quickly organised campaign by Labour ministers and sympathisers, led by the unscrupulous Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, and assiduously supported by a peer, Lord Janner of Braunstone, described as ‘the Chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust’ in at least one newspaper which did not go on to mention that Greville Janner is a former Labour MP.
Lord Janner’s commitment to Jewish causes is as passionate and long-standing as his commitment to the Labour party and he could not have intended to compromise either by conflating the two; but that was the effect of his remarks. Purporting to speak for the entire Jewish community, which he said had found Cameron’s briefing ‘hurtful and offensive’, Janner called it ‘a low form of politics’ and implied that the Conservative leader was undermining all-party support for education about the Holocaust.
No, it is this sort of reaction which undermines all-party support for Holocaust education. Whoever wrote that Tory briefing ought to have been sharper-eyed, and spotted the opportunity it handed to people who wanted to construe Cameron as calling Holocaust education a gimmick. It is possible to put such a construction on the words used, but impossible — indeed, insulting — to believe for a moment that this was the intention.
So my worry would be different from Lord Janner’s. It would be that Jewish sensitivities have been used by people like Ed Balls to insult, and score politically against, an opposition leader who palpably intended no offence. Leaders of the Jewish community have fallen into the trap of reacting with instant outrage to anything represented to them as being offensive, instead of thinking about the motives of ministers in search of anti-Cameron headlines.
This does no good at all for Jewish causes, and will simply have sown in the memories of some who stand a good chance of being the next British government a vague feeling of irritation at what took on the appearance of a Jewish-driven campaign, but was in reality a Labour party operation. And that really is a low form of politics.
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