Can Jews like me trust Keir Starmer’s Labour party?

When I sat down with Sir Keir Starmer this week we had unfinished business to discuss. Foremost in my mind was the central political question in Jewish circles these days, particularly on the left: is it safe to vote Labour again? To answer this, I had to ask him about Jeremy Corbyn.

When it comes to his predecessor, Sir Keir has painted himself into a bit of a corner. As part of his attempt to 'tear anti-Semitism out by the roots' in his party, he has stripped Corbyn of the whip and apologised to the Jewish community. But the fact remains that between 2015 and 2019, he tried his best to put Corbyn in Number 10. In an interview with Andrew Marr in 2019, for instance, he said: 

'I’m 100 per cent behind Jeremy Corbyn. I am working with Jeremy Corbyn to try to win the next general election. I think it is critical.' 

On BBC Breakfast that same year, he suggested that Corbyn was the right man to deal with anti-Semitism in the party. This makes it hard for Sir Keir to sound genuine when he tells British Jews to trust Labour again with their votes, as the local elections loom in May. 

So were Corbyn and his cronies anti-Semitic? The last time he faced this question, in an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live in July 2019, Sir Keir gave a straight answer. 'No, I don’t think they are,' he said. With the benefit of hindsight, did he stand by that answer?

'Jeremy Corbyn made his views very clear when he was leader of the Labour party,' he told me. 'When I took over, I made my views very, very clear. In my acceptance speech, which was two years ago today, almost to the minute that we’re having this interview, my first words as Labour leader included an apology. So that tells you what I thought of Jeremy Corbyn’s record on this.'

Not exactly a straight answer, but an improvement on 2019. In the days following the interview, however, I looked up that acceptance speech. Sure enough, the apology was there: 

'Anti-Semitism has been a stain on our party. I have seen the grief that it’s brought to so many Jewish communities. On behalf of the Labour party, I am sorry.'

Scroll up a bit, however, and the same speech included another gem: 

'I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who led our party through some really difficult times, who energised our movement, and who’s a friend as well as a colleague.' 

Anti-Semitism, it seems, is a crime without a perpetrator.

In the rest of the interview, the Labour leader set out his argument that the party had changed. He provided two pieces of evidence in particular. First, Dame Louise Ellman, who had been hounded out in 2019, returned with great fanfare last year. Second, at party conference, when delegates voted to adopt the EHRC advice to set up an independent complaints process to deal with anti-Semitism, hecklers were drowned out by the majority.

'I think and I hope that the actions of the last two years will begin to persuade people that the Labour party is the party that shares their values, shares their aspirations, shares their concerns, and is a safe space for them,' he said.

A closer look at these two exhibits, however, revealed a more complex reality. When Dame Louise left the party, Andrew Marr questioned Sir Keir about it. 'You’re loyal to Jeremy Corbyn and you’ve spoken in his defence just now,' he said. 'But Louise Ellman says that he is a danger not just to the Labour party but to the entire British Jewish community.'

Notably, Sir Keir replied: 'I don’t accept that. I don’t accept that.' Fast forward to Dame Louise’s return at conference last year, and he struck a rather different note. 'Her courage and dignity instancing up against appalling abuse is testament to her Labour values,' Sir Keir said. Now there he was, putting forward Dame Ellman’s return as proof that the party has changed. Not half as much as you’ve changed, I thought.

'I think it’s very important to put on record that I spoke out on antisemitism when Jeremy was leader of the Labour Party on a number of occasions,' he insisted, 'both publicly and in the confines of the shadow cabinet. And it’s very important that there were people there to make that argument.'

Similarly, the Labour party conference last year, which he recalled in glowing terms, was hardly free of discomfort for Jews. In a sobering demonstration of the party’s continued obsession, more members voted to debate the distant conflict in Israel than the issues of Covid, public services, social care, transport or workers’ rights, which you’d have thought would have mattered more to Labour members. (Not to mention the Uighurs, Iran, Yemen, Russia or any of the other 200 territorial conflicts around the world.)

As Ian Austin points out in the Jewish Chronicle this week, Israel-related motions at conference that year included support for boycotts of the Jewish state, the liberal use of the terms 'apartheid' and 'settler colonialism', descriptions of Israel’s establishment as a 'catastrophe', and comparisons with Spain under Franco. All of which provides a rather different picture from the prettier one Sir Keir tried to promote as he sat opposite me in the nursery room cloakroom where we conducted our ten minute interview.

I wanted to believe that Labour is an OK place now for Jews. I wanted to believe in Sir Keir’s narrative, and in those arguing that his support for Corbyn was merely a pragmatic move, allowing him to wrest back control of the party as soon as an opening presented itself.

I wanted to believe that he declined to attend the landmark 'Enough is Enough' rally against anti-Semitism in Parliament Square in 2018 because he was whetting his fangs like a coiled moderate cobra, hiding in the long grass, preparing to strike.

The problem, however, was that there was not one Sir Keir, but two. And if the first incarnation – as one of the longest-serving members of Corbyn’s team – had been successful in getting the man elected to Downing Street, then the second, the one sitting opposite me in the nursery school, would likely never have come into existence.