Like many others, Jews and non‑Jews alike, I was horrified to read your leader on Jeremy Corbyn and antisemitism (The Guardian view on Labour and antisemitism: two cheers for Keir Starmer, 15 February). It is simply neither sufficient or even accurate to say, as you do, that “Mr Corbyn has a formidable record fighting against racism and in speaking up for many persecuted peoples, but in this case he was too slow and too defensive. To show how much better he was than some of his critics allowed, he should have tried harder to engage with their criticisms.”
The truth is that he was not slow or defensive. He simply did not act. He failed to engage with those who pointed out how toxic the party had become for Jews. He consistently failed to accord antisemitism the status of racism – which it undoubtedly is. He has been selective in those causes he has taken up – and rising antisemitism, including within his own party, apparently was not worth worrying about. Meanwhile, due to his inaction and failure to understand, he made absolutely miserable the lives of several Jewish MPs in his own party. To name but a few, Louise Ellman, Luciana Berger, Margaret Hodge and Ruth Smeeth all had a terrible time and had to put up with the vilest of hate campaigns on social media. Some even left the party. These women are not wimps. It was Corbyn who presided over that toxic atmosphere growing and breeding further hatred, and who did nothing to defend them from abuse.
Surely the Guardian can do better than this, and recognise – and praise – the fact that Keir Starmer has changed the culture of the Labour party so that antisemitism is no longer tolerated. Starmer has reassured British Jews that the Labour party, were it to be in power, would treat them fairly and cherish them, when just a few years ago British Jews were demonstrating in Parliament Square, saying “Enough is enough”, and many were considering leaving the country. The Guardian, champion of liberal values as it has always been, needs to stand up against antisemitism, and stop apologising and making allowances for a leader who allowed it to fester within his own party.
Julia Neuberger
House of Lords
• Like many other people, particularly my fellow Jews, I was surprised, dismayed and disappointed by your editorial. It is extraordinary that the Guardian should devote a formal editorial to defending Jeremy Corbyn only three years after his toxic crankery led to the unprecedented shame of an Equality and Human Rights Commission investigation into racism in the Labour party – and a Tory landslide. That investigation, as well as Corbyn’s apparent affection for murderous dictatorships in Russia, Syria and Iran, repelled many Labour voters but also alarmed most British Jews.
With craven bad faith, the editorial criticises Corbyn with faint fault then praises him on the very grounds for which he was so widely and rightly rejected by decent people. To celebrate his “formidable record fighting against racism” and “speaking up for many persecuted peoples” masks both the extreme selectivity of those stands and Corbyn’s strange affinity for repressive, bigoted regimes and organisations. It also shows contempt for the EHRC, which found the party responsible for “unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination”, not to speak of Labour MPs like Luciana Berger and many Jewish members who found the environment so hostile that they left the party.
To suggest his sole fault was that he was “too slow and too defensive” would be laughable if it was not so deliberately dishonest. Worst of all, the editorial implies that antisemitism is something other than racism. In doing so, it makes light of centuries of anti-Jewish racism. It is almost as if your editorial was carefully crafted to hurt Jewish people. If this genuinely reflects the policy of the Guardian and the Scott Trust, this is a heartbreaking moment in the history of a newspaper that was once the champion of equal rights and liberal values.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
London
• Your editorial not only failed to acknowledge the devastating experience of Jewish people in the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn but also managed to undermine the EHRC’s findings, which explicitly found “specific examples of harassment, discrimination and political interference” in their evidence and that there was “a lack of leadership within the Labour party on these issues, which is hard to reconcile with its stated commitment to a zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism”.
The notion that “Jeremy Corbyn was wrong in his initial response” suggests no responsibility or culpability from the man at the head of a political party for five years. This is a rewriting of history and a slap in the face to all those who suffered under Mr Corbyn’s Labour party and to all those who stood up to this poison, at great personal cost.
To claim Mr Corbyn has a “formidable record fighting against racism and in speaking up for many persecuted peoples” makes a mockery of one minority group, denying their experience of anti-Jewish racism. It’s as if Mr Corbyn and his allies are the victims here, not those who were victims of antisemitic hate.
Karen Pollock
Chief executive, Holocaust Educational Trust
• It is disappointing to read that the Guardian continues to give the benefit of the doubt to Jeremy Corbyn. To be clear: this editorial was occasioned by the EHRC giving Labour a clean bill of health, following its devastating and unprecedented report on how the party under Corbyn broke the law and discriminated against Jews.
Your assertion that he had “a formidable record fighting against racism” will elicit a hollow laugh from the many Jewish Labour Movement members who suffered racist bullying and harassment – let alone the Jewish MPs hounded out of the party – all under his watch.
Corbyn doesn’t deserve the credit you give him. His reluctance to show any remorse and his continual denial and downplaying of the problem makes him the author of his own demise and negates any claim he can make to actually being anti-racist.
It’s a shame the Guardian doesn’t properly recognise this. Or is it simply that Jews really don’t count?
Mike Katz
Chair, Jewish Labour Movement
• I hope Keir Starmer reads and heeds your admirable leader. When Harold Wilson said the Labour party is a moral crusade or it is nothing, I don’t think he had in mind a crusade against itself. Jeremy Corbyn was not a good leader. Antisemitism is always and everywhere loathsome. But some of the policies that Corbyn and John McDonnell advocated in 2017 had an appeal that went well beyond the confines of the far left.
One can surely ask more of Labour than to use up so much political capital in defining itself in opposition to its own past. It worked for Tony Blair – a better communicator than Starmer – in more propitious political and economic conditions. It may not work again. There is a graver threat to the country than the political ghost of Corbyn. It is the party currently in office that has brought this nation to the brink of ruin.
Glyn Turton
Baildon, West Yorkshire
