In [David] Baddiel’s case, one of these contradictions is between his earlier reputation as a laddish, football-loving comedian and his recent incarnation as a serious intellectual figure with a deep-rooted interest in the social aspects of history and literature. The latter has not only led him to work as a dramatist and novelist, but has now seen him publish a short, angry polemic with the TLS, entitled Jews Don’t Count. At last, he and I have found a subject on which we can stand shoulder to shoulder, without the slightest hint of disagreement.
Baddiel’s central thesis is that so-called “progressives”, who would recoil in horror at the idea of discrimination or bigotry being extended to the most put-upon people in society – he cites the Danish comedian Sofie Hagen’s list as including “black people and people of colour, queer people, trans people, Muslims and people with disabilities” – simply do not accept that Jewish people, who have been historically one of the most oppressed races on the planet, can legitimately claim to be marginalised. Hence the title.
It is a compelling and elegantly expressed argument, but it is regrettable that Baddiel needed to make it at all. Yet if one looks around, the environment in which he is writing is one that seems to be as hostile to Jews as it has ever been. Piers Corbyn, who has recently been arrested for distributing leaflets that have compared the UK’s vaccination programmes to Auschwitz, denied that he was anti-Semitic, saying, “I was married for 22 years to a Jewess and obviously her mother’s forebears fled the Baltic states just before the war because of Hitler or the Nazis in general… I’ve also employed Jewish people in my business Weather Action, one of whom was a superb worker.” (Baddiel wryly remarked, on the juxtaposition of “Piers Corbyn” and “Jewess” trending on Twitter, “what a time to be alive”.)
I will leave it to others to decide whether Corbyn is being sincere or whether not, but it is undeniable that his younger brother Jeremy, and the Labour party under his leadership, has been the source of much of the current antipathy that Jews face in Britain. The stories hardly need repeating, but after the EHRC found in October 2020 that Labour was responsible for “unlawful” acts of harassment and discrimination, saying, “the equality body’s analysis points to a culture within the party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it”, Corbyn angrily argued that, “the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media”, resulting in his suspension from the Labour party and having the whip removed from him. He was readmitted to the party but remains an independent MP. It seems unlikely that Keir Starmer, whose wife is Jewish and whose children are being raised in the faith, will be hurrying to offer his former party leader the whip again.
Yet Corbyn Minor is now a marginal figure. He remains a martyr for a section of noisy “progressive” opinion who believe that he could have led Britain into a socialist utopia, but most others regard him as a rejected party leader who was defeated twice at the ballot box, once marginally and once crushingly. Whether or not he is personally anti-Semitic is essentially irrelevant. His legacy is instead that he has, whether through ignorance, carelessness or design, made an unpalatable idea, that of open bigotry again existing within Britain towards a section of its inhabitants, an unpleasantly toxic part of everyday life.
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Unfortunately, just like Covid-19, this new, virulent and “progressive” strain of anti-Semitism will prove hard to dispel, and no vaccine will be available to act as a panacea. Baddiel (who initially welcomed Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, calling him “a decent man” and “a proper left-wing Labour politician”) will, like Tracy-Ann Oberman, Rachel Riley, Luciana Berger and other prominent public figures of Jewish heritage (women are, perhaps predictably, over-represented) find himself subjected to further abuse for his polemic, which I’m sure that he expects and can take. As his former sparring partner, I can attest to both his tenacity – and intelligence – in debate.
But it is those without a public platform who I have the greatest empathy for. Many are feeling fear and uncertainty in a society where they are being told, in not so many words, that they have no real right to belong. It is not so very far from the idiotic abuse on social media to the catcall in the street. We have to hope that there will not be the sound of broken glass again, and pray that history has not repeated itself in the most brutal of ways, all because the lessons that we needed to learn have been so callously ignored.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
