Jewish groups and campaigners have condemned commentators and media including Nigel Farage and GB News for calling Grant Shapps a “globalist”, a term which has associations with antisemitism and the far right.
John Mann, the former Labour MP who is now a non-affiliated peer and is the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, called for GB News to sack both Farage and another of its presenters, Dan Wootton, if they did not rescind the language.
After Shapps, who is Jewish, was appointed in place of Suella Braverman, a series of rightwing commentators and politicians used Twitter to paint his elevation as part of a plot in which anti-Brexit “globalists” were taking over Liz Truss’s government.
Tweeting about Braverman’s exit, Farage called it a “a coup”, and labelled Shapps “Remainer and Globalist”.
Richard Tice, who replaced Farage as the leader of the Reform party, the successor to the Brexit party, used the term in two tweets, saying the replacement of Braverman by Shapps, and of Kwasi Kwarteng, the former chancellor, by Jeremy Hunt, amounted to “a coup by pro EU pro unlimited immigration globalists”.
Marie van der Zyl, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: “Antisemitism experts such as the Anti Defamation League identify ‘globalist’ as a common antisemitic trope based on conspiracy theories about international Jewish power. Politicians should avoid using the term, particularly when referring specifically to Jewish individuals.”
Dave Rich, the head of policy at the Community Security Trust, a charity that works for the safety of Jewish people, said: “I saw those tweets yesterday and they sent a chill down my spine. ‘Globalist’ is one of those terms that can have a neutral meaning or a sinister one, but Nigel Farage in particular has a record of using language that echoes antisemitic conspiracy discourse when the person he is criticising is Jewish, and at some point the benefit of the doubt runs out.”
Catherine McKinnell, the Labour MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group against antisemitism, said: “Calling a Jewish man a ‘globalist’ plays into age-old antisemitic conspiracism. Some people will know this and do so deliberately, others may be naive, but there is no excuse for it whatsoever.
“No one in public life should be using language that perpetuates racist anti-Jewish tropes. It’s as simple as that.”
Tice vehemently rejected any antisemitic intent or meaning. “The Oxford dictionary definition of ‘globalist’ is ‘a person who advocates the interpretation or planning of economic and foreign policy in relation to events and developments throughout the world,’” he told the Guardian. “It is a term used across the globe by millions of people.”
“Any suggestion that it is antisemitic or far right to use this word is clearly nonsense and my lawyers advise it is actually libellous.”
Farage told the Guardian: “Since last Friday I have described events in government as a globalist coup. Jeremy Hunt is pro-EU, pro-CCP [Chinese Communist party], pro-WEF [World Economic Forum] and is a globalist politician. Grant Shapps is cut from the same cloth and is also an open border, pro-EU globalist.
“The OED of a globalist is ‘advocating the operation or planning of economic and foreign policy on a global basis’. I had no idea that Mr Shapps had Jewish roots. In this confected outrage, I can only think that people are worried that I might make a political return.”
Farage has been criticised several times before for using this and similar tropes associated with antisemitism, such as references to supposed plots by Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros.
The former Ukip leader repeatedly aired such views in interviews with Alex Jones, the far-right US radio host and conspiracy theorist, who had recently been ordered to pay vast damages for claiming the Sandy Hook US school shooting was faked.
A GB News spokesperson said: “GB News abhors antisemitism and all other forms of hate and racism. Nigel and Dan were referring to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the term globalist, meaning ‘advocating the operation or planning of economic and foreign policy on a global basis’.
“They were in no sense referring to a racial, ethnic, or cultural group.”
