We have been conned into believing that anti-Semitism is now a disease of the left. In reality, it is still found mostly in racism’s historic home: on the right. But right-wingers use coded language for it.
In the 1930s, campaigners for a deal with Hitler started by arguing that Britain should not fight the “Jews’ war”. Then they got cleverer. My father was one of them, and Richard Griffiths, an expert on the far right, writes that John Beckett and others used the terms “usury”, “money power”, “alien” and “cosmopolitan” as coded references to Jews.
Today, one code is “north London metropolitan elite”. Danny Cohen, until 2015 the BBC’s director of television, was furiously attacked by newspapers for firing Jeremy Clarkson, and the Times called Cohen a “fixture of the north London metropolitan elite”. The comedian David Baddiel tweeted: “Surprised Times subclause doesn’t add, ‘and y’know: a rootless cosmopolitan of east European stock’.” Dave Cohen, the author of Horrible Histories , tweeted: “ Times calls Danny Cohen ‘part of north London metropolitan elite’. We hear what you’re saying, guys.”
The tradition is that of Dornford Yates and Bulldog Drummond, memorably satirised by Alan Bennett in Forty Years On : “. . that bunch of rootless intellectuals, alien Jews and international pederasts who call themselves the Labour Party”. Clarkson is a perfect opponent for a member of the north London metropolitan elite – a privately educated, British Bulldog Drummond figure for our age.
Another fully paid-up member of the north London metropolitan elite is Ed Miliband, and the attacks on him before the 2015 general election had an unmistakably anti-Semitic edge. Colin Holmes, the author of Anti-Semitism in British Society , points to the Daily Mail ’s
attack on Miliband’s academic father, Ralph.
“The word ‘Jew’ doesn’t have to be mentioned,” says Holmes. “All you have to do is make it clear that Ralph Miliband was a refugee from Nazism, and then suggest he has no loyalty to the hand that succoured him. His allegiance was to Moscow. He was one of those rootless cosmopolitans. That theme of Jews owing no allegiance can be found throughout the history of British anti-Semitism. The depiction of Miliband drew strength from the prehistory
of such sentiments linked to Jews, treason and Bolshevism.”
So the Mail article tells us, correctly, that Ralph Miliband was an immigrant Jew who fled Nazi persecution. A couple of paragraphs further on, in case we have forgotten that he wasn’t really English, we read about “the immigrant boy whose first act in Britain was to discard his name, Adolphe, because of its associations with Hitler, and become Ralph”.
It follows Miliband to Cambridge, where he was no doubt taught by several tutors, but only one of them is mentioned: the Jewish Harold Laski, “whom some Tories considered to be a dangerous Marxist revolutionary . .. One is entitled to wonder whether Ralph Miliband’s Marxism was actually fuelled by a giant-sized social chip on his shoulder as he lived in his adoptive country.” What exactly is the purpose of the last seven words of that sentence?
Calling Ed Miliband “weird” was another code, and the argument that we should have had David Miliband, not Ed, because he looked and sounded better was a coded way of saying that he looked and sounded less Jewish.
Yet when, come the 2015 general election, I worked for the Labour candidate in my north London constituency, Finchley and Golders Green (which has a higher proportion of Jewish voters than any other), I found not anger at anti-Semitic attacks on Labour’s leader but a belief that anti-Semitism was Labour’s virus. In vain, I pointed out that we were offering not just the first Jewish prime minister since Disraeli but a Jewish MP in Sarah Sackman.
The constituency was awash with rumours – none of which have ever been substantiated – of Labour canvassers saying anti-Semitic things on the doorstep.
On voting day, I did the early morning shift at my polling station. The first words that my Conservative counterpart said to me were: “I hope you’re ashamed of the way your party has campaigned.” It turned out that the tabloid press had run a story that morning to the effect that Labour canvassers had telephoned Orthodox Jews to tell them that they should not vote for the local Tory MP, Mike Freer, because he was gay.
He is gay, but no evidence has been offered to back up the story. I have written to Freer (still, alas, my MP), asking for chapter and verse. He has not replied.
Labour isn’t guiltless. Shami Chakrabarti’s widely attacked report last summer made that clear, and the home affairs select committee found disturbing instances. Part of the reason why Labour gets more than its fair share of the odium is the eagerness with which its warring factions use the charge of anti-Semitism to smear their rivals.
But, as no less an authority than Deborah Lipstadt, the pre-eminent historian on Holocaust denial, has said, “It has been so convenient for people to beat up on the left, but you can’t ignore what’s coming from the right.”
My foolish father started out as a left-wing Labour MP in the 1920s. But once he embraced anti-Semitism, he quickly moved to the right in all of his other opinions as well. For then, as now, the spiritual home of anti-Semitism, as with any form of racism, is on the right, not on the left.
One of the clichés about celebrity life is that all celebrities know each other. Back in the Eighties, when we were moderately famous, Ben and I did often bump into other famous people, and because of mutual recognition, there was a sort of acquaintance, if not friendship.
There was a random element to it, as well. Some celebrities you might never catch a glimpse of, while others seemed to pop up with an unexpected regularity.
In 1987, the car we drove was a 1970s Austin Princess, all leather seats and walnut dashboard. In many ways, it symbolised what people thought of as the basic qualities of our band: unassuming, a little bit quirky, a little bit vintage. We’d had it for a year or so, but Ben was running out of patience. It had a habit of letting us down at inconvenient moments – for instance, at the top of the long, steep climbs that you encounter when driving through Italy, which we had just recklessly done for a holiday. The car was such a novelty out there that it attracted crowds whenever we parked. They would gather round, nodding appreciatively, stroking the bonnet and murmuring, “ Bella macchina. . .”
Having recently banked a couple of royalty cheques, Ben was thinking of a complete change of style – a rock’n’roll, grand-gesture kind of car.
“I wanna get an old Mercedes 300 SL,” he said to me.
“What’s one of those?”
“I’ll let you know next time we pass one,” he said.
We were driving through London in the Princess, and as we swung round into Sloane Square, Ben called out, “There’s one, look, coming up on the inside now!” I looked round at this vision of gleaming steel and chrome, gliding along effortlessly beside us, and at the same moment the driver glanced over towards our funny little car.
