Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Get to Know

When Manchester University Press announced the publication of this book, I could see at once that a book like this needed to be written. It is made up of 32 essays all asking how researchers can study the far right ethically. While one well-known journalist (Gary Younge of the Guardian) and two veteran theorists of the far right (Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter) contribute, most of the book is written by PhDs students or recent ex-students. As several authors complain, junior researchers in this field face an unpleasant paradox. Universities like it when researchers study the far-right, the topic is glamorous and attracts research funding; but most of the actual work is done by the most junior researchers, the people who are least equipped to deal with an interviewee seeing them as an enemy to be exposed. Researchers are expected to improvise, alone, techniques of threat-avoidance and self-care.

The book is divided into six parts, each made up of around five essays. I couldn’t summarise each of the contributions without making this review wildly long, so I’ll focus on a few which struck me as the most important.

The first part is concerned with names, with several contributors making the point that the labels we attach to right-wing parties matters, in terms of setting an agenda for how those parties are perceived. George Newth, for example, complains that Italy’s League (previously the Northern League) is usually described in press and even academic accounts as “populist”. When I was a junior researcher, I remember a similar argument. Activists saw a series of parties of fascist origin, in Italy, France and Britain, present themselves as something new. Activists tried to hold on to the labels that these were still fascist or even “Nazi” parties. But journalists swung behind the milder label “far-right”. It seems to me that, 30 years later, we are again arguing about a similar move. Campaigners want to keep the label “far right” alive, often receiving aggressive push-back from the right when they do – judging that it still conveys an element of stigma. Journalists, even at liberal papers, have tended to opt for euphemistic labels which are tolerable to the right. Newth – alongside other contributors to this volume, are trying to keep a critical distance between researchers and the right. “Populist”, he laments, distracts from what he suggests would be the minimum distancing suitable for the party’s actual politics, alternative labels of either “far-right populist” or (perhaps) “racist populist”.

The theme of the second part is “standpoint”. Mondon makes a similar case to Newth, although the structure of his argument is different. He argues that the idea underpinning authors’ determination to speak about the far right in terms the right would accept is a notion of objectivity. That term, he argues, is methodologically white – it assumes some fundamental agreement about politics between liberal researcher and the far-right subject of their research, to the exclusion of the far-right’s predominantly black victims. Another piece, in this section, by Imo Kaufman writes about antisemitism within the gaming community and the verbal tick which explains away racism as an unfortunate act by a minority of white men. Kaufman describes talking about their research to fellow gamers only to be met with Sieg Heil salutes. Aaron Winter’s essay in the same part reflects on the choice he made to write about the far right in the US without interviewing right-wing subjects. That decision spoke to me, as someone who had started a PhD just four years earlier and taken the same decision. I was trying to avoid the mistakes made by the likes of Robert Skidelsky and Stephen Cullen who had fallen for the lies told by them by right-wing sources. By contrast, Winter’s reasoning combined method (a preference for discourse analysis over interviews) and personal history: “I am an unarmed left-wing Jew and they were armed far-right antisemites.”

In the book’s third part, essays cohere around a common theme of memory. Meghan Tinsley, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Chloe Peacock and Sadia Habib, begin with the government’s decision to join in press attacks on the National Trust after it published a report exploring its 500 properties’ links to the slave trade. They go from there to make a series of good sense recommendations as to how to survive as a researcher in a context when every academic article is potentially the starting point for the next culture war. Like Mondon, they are dismissive towards notions of academic objectivity; it is far better, they argue, to own your personal heritage and political influences and to strive for honesty while being shaped by them. They invite researchers to tell neglected stories, to share their research publicly, to create critical spaces for young people, and to recognise the risk of attacks on their careers and their safety.

Care and safety are a main theme of the book’s fourth part. Alice Sibley describes researching the far right on British social media, an experience which led to her receiving rape jokes and invitations to kill herself. Sibley felt anxious for some time, which impaired both her work and personal life. She was in discussions with a university ethics team, she began keeping a diary. She did not follow the messages up with Facebook or (after a first, unsatisfactory response) with the police. “When I received future threats,” she writes, “I will immediately take time to do something that I love, physically and mentally detaching myself.”

The fifth part addresses some of the complexities of carrying out interviews with far-right sources. Joan Braune’s contribution – for me, the highlight of the book – addresses the neglected phenomenon of far-right conversions away from radicalism. Researchers, she complains, love these stories, believe and repeat them. There are, however, several problems with them. Many are inaccurate. In a few cases, far right activists have even posed as exes in order to sustain a new period of activism in defence of their old politics (Braune cites Matthew Heimbach in the US; in Britain, the best example of Tommy Robinson a decade ago). Conversion narratives are structurally akin to the products of state efforts to combat extremism, with the result that ex-rightists often feature heavily as the successes of campaigns such as Prevent. (Anti-fascist researchers have described to me reading the channels in which such “exes” boast, among themselves, of having played along to sustain their activism. Thinking about the issue ethically means, for thinking about it deeply – looking not just at what exes say about what practical amends they make and listening to their victims.

The book’s sixth part is concerned with activism and the dissemination of research. It includes a piece by Gary Younge, reflecting on interview opportunities he turned down (early in his career) with Jean-Marie Le Pen and accepted (mid-career) with Richard Spencer. Younge distinguishes between leaders and followers of the far right. He argues against giving anyone a free ride. He argues against trying to outsmart far-right leaders. The interviewees can get the better of the presenter, “they are far more used to talking to mainstream journalists than mainstream journalists are at talking to them.” Even where the interviewer wins, the victory can be pyrrhic, when they come over as “a bullying clever dick.”

I enjoyed the book; and would recommend it. It shares essential points of technique which aren’t covered anywhere else.

On the IHRA definition and some of its problems

Support for the people of Gaza is the moral test of our generation. At the head of the Israeli regime, politicians and generals have called for the murder of Palestinians. In the Israeli army, the killers have boasted of their actions, sharing them on social media. All the genocides of the last 30 years were marked by old technologies – guns, artillery rockets. Today, the thirteenth-richest society in the world in GDP per capita uses the latest generation of capitalist advance, social media monitoring and artificial intelligence, to flatten homes and kill innocent people.

            Here, I’ll be addressing the legal structures the British state has adopted to make it as hard as possible for people in Britain, to speak out against the killings.

            My focus will be on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, the problems of that definition, and what to do if your employer has adopted it or is using it in disciplinary proceedings.

            The IHRA definition begins as follows, “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews.” It continues, “which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.”

            We do have, already in law a satisfactory definition of racism. Or at least of direct discrimination. Section 13 of the Equality Act provides that “A person (A) discriminates against another (B) if, because of a protected characteristic” (and a protected characteristic might be sex, disability or, as here, race) “A treats B less favourably than A treats or would treat others.” So, racism happens when someone is treated worse (“Less favourably”) because of their race including, potentially, their perceived racial identity as a Jew.

            The IHRA definition says that the way you can tell if someone has done an act “because of” the victim’s Jewish identity is by looking for evidence that the perpetrator had “a certain perception” of Jews. But what perception? The definition does not say.

            Its drafter Kenneth Stern explains the thinking which underpinned the definition. He was a lawyer and an activist in Jewish American circles. He had no historical knowledge of antisemitism. He was out of his depth. “The main purpose of the definition was data collection”. He never thought the definition would be adopted by universities or governments.

            Stern had been toying with more precise language. In testimony before the US Senate, he saif that he wanted to “avoi[d] debates about things such as whether someone who kidnaps a Jew for ransom is antisemitic because he believed that Jews are wealthy, an arguably positive stereotype.” Stern therefore built his IHRA definition around two ideas

            First – that perceptions were key to understanding whether an act was antisemitic

            And second – that if you specified which perceptions were the problem, inevitably someone would push back.

            His answer was to say, in effect, that any perception might be antisemitic. Any perception of Jews, of Jewish behaviour, of anything in any way associated with Jews could potentially be a problem. Suppose I went to Jewish Book Week, and remarked at a literary event how good it was to see other Jewish people reading books. If a decision maker had to ask themselves whether my words reflected “a certain perception of Jews”, there is nothing in the definition to say, yes that is a certain perception, that’s racist. Or no, that’s fine.

            The vagueness is precisely why pro-Israel voices have been so keen on the IHRA definition. Because it says that any comment associated with Jews might be a problem – it provides an opening to people (Christian fundamentalists, far right politicians, serial complainers) who want to stop people protesting against the killings of Palestinians.

            Today, Stern knows his definition has been misused. He is now a campaigner against censoring people for pro-Palestinian speech. He has written for the Guardian and in a book warning against using the definition to identify individual incidents. “The definition was not perfect,” he acknowledges, with rueful understatement.

            Universities, Stern insists, should be a zone of permitted speech. But the way pro-Israel groups use the definition is making free speech impossible:

            Unusually, the IHRA definition came with examples of what constituted antisemitic behaviour. They were prefaced with a note of warning, and by a stress on the importance of context. “Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include…”

            Unfortunately, that “could” has got lost whenever the IHRA is used.

            Several of the IHRA examples feel like they’re almost right. Here, is one: “Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.” You start of reading the definition and you’d think that what it’s saying is true. Killing Jews is antisemitic. Obviously! But that’s not what it’s saying at all. It’s saying, that killing Jews isn’t antisemitic unless the person has justified the killing in terms of Nazism or Islamic fundamentalism. But the biggest murder of Jews the world has seen since 1945 took place in Argentina, under a centre-right military regime which believed that Jews were Communists and fair game. The problem is – the Generals weren’t Nazis. They didn’t like Hitler. They didn’t have a worked out-view of the world beyond the fact that they wanted to stay in power and they saw Jews as troublemakers. Over a 7-year period, they killed 3,000 Jews. Jews were less than 1% of the country’s population and 12% of the government’s victims. Personally, I’d call killing Jews, in that number, antisemitic. But, under this part of the definition – the Generals didn’t have a radical ideology. No matter how many people they killed, the IHRA definition would exclude them.

            In the body of the IHRA definition there is no mention of Israel. However, seven of the eleven examples attached to the definition refer to criticisms of the state of Israel. They include:

• Manifestations [of antisemitism] might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.
• Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour.

            I want to relate the second of these examples to a significant fact of Israeli society: the “law of return”, under which a person can be born within the borders of Israel (including Gaza and the West Bank) and if they are of Palestinian heritage they have no rights in Israeli law. Whereas, if a person was born in Britain or America but they have a Jewish mother and so are for religious purposes Jewish, then they can obtain citizenship in Israel even if they have never vlived there.

            Trying to unpick the logic which says that it is antisemitic to call such laws and practices racist, it seems that the drafters must have believed each of the following, that:

1. Jews are a people
2. All peoples are entitled to their own state (“self-determination”)
3. The present constitution of Israel is the only possible Jewish state imaginable, therefore any criticisms of its laws is to attack the very idea of any country where Jews might live freely (“a state of Israel”)
4. All states are entitled to exclude whole groups of people from citizenship on directly racial grounds
5. To restrict this right from Israel alone is to limit Israel unfairly
6. Because Israel is the state of the Jews, denying Jews alone the chance to exclude other people is to treat Jews unfairly.

            Step iv is a defence of racialised citizenship categories and racial exclusion. It is a politics which treats the postwar “whites only” immigration policies of postwar Australia, Rhodesia, and apartheid South Africa as if they had been the normal ways societies are governed, rather than racist laws which were controversial and defeated by public protest. It is the equivalent of saying that the British are a people, and white, therefore they are entitled to deport all black citizens from that country – or France all its Muslims.

            “It cannot be,” writes Judith Butler, “that the only way to refute the charge of antisemitism in these debates is to embrace injustice, inequality and dispossession.”

            What, then, should people do if their employer is a signatory to the definition? What should you do if someone makes a complaint and asks your employer to apply the definition when deciding that complaint? The logic of all that I am saying is that employers who have signed up to it previously, should be asked to disassociate themselves from it. Or, in the short-term, to at least to agree not to apply it in any disciplinary hearing.

            The reason the definition should not be applied is that it makes no sense, and does not help the decision maker get to what they need to decide – which is has someone brought the employer into disrepute, is their language racist, etc. In the whole history of the Employment Tribunal system, there has only been a single case where the Tribunal (and the employer) was asked to follow the IHRA definition – in the “Miller” case – the Tribunal made no clear finding as to whether the definition was useful or not.

            In practice, it did what any Tribunal would do which was to ignore the definition in favour of what mattered – our ordinary laws relating to unfair dismissal and discrimination.

            You should amplify the many Palestinian voices who have criticised it. You could talk for example to the European Legal Support Centre, the leading body doing advocacy on behalf of pro-Palestine belief. The ELSC monitors how the definition has been used.

            Beyond that, you should look to the large number of people who care about the definition of antisemitism and want to get these things right – and use them as allies.

            One document published in 2020 to bring out the limits of the IHRA definition was the Jerusalem declaration on antisemitism, 200 scholars signed it, including some of the world’s leading scholars on genocide. Wouldn’t you want your employer to adopt a definition chosen by 200 experts – rather than one man who hadn’t thought through the issues?

            Many lawyers have criticised the definition –Hugh Tomlinson KC, Geoffrey Robertson KC, retired Court of Appeal judge, Stephen Sedley. Ask them to support your campaign.

            Going further, I wouldn’t be afraid of asking Stern himself to see if he’d support you. Again, it seems to me that it would hard for employer to justify keeping on with a definition, if its own drafter is telling them to abandon it.

            In everything I’ve been saying – a simple message has, I hope, come through. The people who rely on the IHRA definition don’t care about logic, they don’t care about antisemitism. They have their own agenda, which is to support Israeli actions, and to prevent all criticism of them. If you care about Palestinian life, or the integrity of the institutions you work for, you should invite your employer to disassociate itself from the definition.

(Edited to add: link to Jerusalem declaration here – https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/)

Simon Mullings – a tribute

Simon Mullings – “Spike” – died at the weekend while on holiday in Scotland. Most people reading this would have known him, I guess, as the bass player for 80s indie band The Snapdragons whose songs included Dole Boys on Futons

We were closest between 2020 and 2022. By then, we’d both been working for years as housing lawyers. He had been for more than 20 years at housing firm Edwards Duthie – although he was about to move to a much more “movement” operation, Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre. We’d spoken, once or twice, at meetings of the Housing Law Practitioners’ Association, both coming alive in the moments when that group had to respond to proposed legislative changes which threatened to reduce the viability of the profession – in times when we had to think like a union.

Simon wanted HLPA to take the most radical steps available to it. He also knew we had to keep together a wide range of people, some of them no natural militants. Navigating those two instincts was not straightforward, and we were both looking for allies.

He was in his mid 50s, slender, with Jarvis Cocker glasses, and a salt-and-pepper beard that reached down to his collar.

Simon became co-chair of HLPA just as I was joining its committee. Around this time, he was asked to contribute to another lawyers’ blog. He introduced himself by saying, “I am working from my room in the attic of my house in Forest Gate, East London. You may call me Mrs Rochester, or just plain Bertha if you prefer.”

The lockdown had a strange effect on the legal profession – we had hardly any hearings, but people needed advice. You had to move outside the normal arrangements of client – meeting lawyer at court – and everything going from there. Some lawyers who had been visible beforehand vanished. Others came to the fore.

What Simon missed about Covid was his clients. In his opinion, empathy was the fuel that legal aid lawyers run on.

Simon was good for me. He supported my books on the law in the lockdown, and on simplifying and reducing the law (“Like punk?” he asked). He spoke at one of my launches, using it to deliver a series of jokes about the number of books I wrote. “David’s surname isn’t Renton, it’s Remington. His spirit animal is a Puffin. It’s a Penguin…”

These are some of the things Simon did during lockdown. He wrote a book with Sue James, collecting together all the new law that emerged. He set up a podcast for HLPA, and another one for the Legal Action Group. As chair of HLPA he introduced all sort of new practices that the Association hadn’t really done before, or not on the same scale – attending rules committees, intervening in court cases, lobbying for fine, granular, changes to legislation, spreading a message about how tenants should be treated – fairly.

He was kind, principled, generous with his time, full of energy and righteous anger and laughter. I’ll miss him.

Thoughts for anti-fascists

This weekend will feel awful, but once we’re through it, there are things the left could do to turn the situation around.

The reason why things will feel bad is that Tommy Robinson has rebuilt his street movement, back to where it was in 2018. Robinson has his social media accounts back (thanks to Elon), and we’re back to a situation where he can mobilise around 15-20,000 people whenever the mood takes him. To make things worse, this time, he or his followers been calling local mobilisations rather than relying on the sterile environment of central London rallies. We’ve seen the results this week in Southport, and last night in Sunderland. Between now and the end of Sunday, Robinson still has another 28 local rallies planned – if all happen (many won’t) at least 2/3 of those that do are likely to go unchallenged by anti-fascists. Tonight and tomorrow there will be several more cities go like Sunderland yesterday (a crowd, unchallenged as it attacked Muslim men, and started fires) and fewer Liverpools (where the Robinson supporters were outnumbered and forced to retreat).

Anyone who’s serious about anti-fascism knows the weakness of our tradition over the past 4 years: in the main cities, where there were groups, they are weaker now than they were in 2020. Anti-fascists have picked up many bad habits that would take a lifetime to unlearn (protesting at a mile distance from the threat, militant sounding slogans with nothing behind them…). But rather than dwelling on the bad, I want to focus on the positives – the objective weakness of our enemies, the relatively small number of things we would need to do differently to make anti-fascism work again.

It helps enormously that the main far right group is led by Robinson. Charismatic he may be, experienced, a genuine “name”, all of that is true. But he is also, very obviously, leeching off his own supporters – monetising his relationship to them, while having no idea at all to build beyond this point. Ally with fundamentalist Christians, sell his contact list to Reform, cast big moon eyes at Kemi Badenoch if she won the Conservative election – he would be happy to do any of these, and may well make fumbling steps towards all of them at once, even though they point in opposite directions, make his politics incoherent, and the further he goes down any of those routes the more certain is it that he’ll set one faction of his followers fighting against another.

Further, part of why Robinson’s crowd seems bigger than the left’s is that he can concentrate all his forces (he has no competitor on the street right) while the far left is, quite rightly, trying to do many different things at once: march for Palestine, take direct action against arms companies, occupy universities, protect trans people, etc. Anti-fascism comes quite a long way down our list.

At a certain point, this spreading of left-wing forces can be turned to our advantage. There are many people who also identify with anti-fascism who will be willing to defend a mosque from attack, so long as you have a group of people in your town who are willing to take this work seriously. Leaflet the anti-war marches, that’s where anti-fascists can find a base capable of outnumbering the far right.

Finally, we’ve had examples in the past few weeks of anti-fascism working. France is the best case – where a genuine unity attracting Socialists, Communists, Greens, Trotskyists, and the sorts of people who 20 years ago might have had half an eye on George Galloway – combined to defeat an electoral far right which has spent 40 years doing that and nothing else. There are all sorts of lessons you could draw from that experience: if you want to make unity work it has to be a deep unity, a visible convergence of people who are publicly setting aside their differences; it can’t just be one national network that’s done the same things for 20 years with diminishing returns. But even if people don’t learn those lessons, it’s enough for the moment that we can say that people outside Britain have faced similar problems and they’re holding the line.

They stopped an almost certain far right government. We have our own threat and, like them, we can defeat it.

The left and British Jews; why 2024 isn’t 2018

Six years ago, Jeremy Corbyn was still leader of the Labour Party. He had almost toppled Theresa May’s Conservatives in 2017’s general election. It still seemed most likely that Conservatives would implode under the weight of their own inability to deliver satisfying Brexit deal. On 23 March, Luciana Berger went on to Twitter, where she revealed an old Facebook post by Jeremy Corbyn in which he had questioned the removal of an antisemitic mural painted by the artist Mear One. Labour MPs, in conjunction with some of the ghastly old racists from other parties, held a march to demand that their leader resign. In the press, Corbyn’s seeming blindspot towards anti-Jewish racism was blamed on his long-term association with the far left. We were said to be said to be a collective of antisemites.

The balance of British Jewish opinion was against Corbyn. After he was removed, 750 people attended hustings organised by the Labour-right-associated Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) to listen to the candidates hoping to be Corbyn’s replacement. Even at its peak, and counting only Jewish members, Labour left’s Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) had never had the support of more than a third of this number of people.

JLM had many advantages over JVL, not least its much greater access to the media. But there have been plenty of other times when the left surmounted media hostility, not least during Corbyn’s run for the Labour leadership. Between 2018 and 2010, JLM was able to repeatedly out-manoeuvre JVL. The reason it could was that even on the far left, Jewish opinion was split. Many long-term socialists saw Corbyn’s response to allegations of antisemitism as leaden-footed and unsympathetic, a smaller number concluded that he did indeed have an antisemitism problem. One of JVL could not build beyond its active membership, was the campaign’s seeming insistence that every single allegation of antisemitism was false.

Fast forward 6 years, and there has been no shortage of press voices willing to condemn protesters. The media’s attack on any pro-Palestinian sentiments has, if anything, been more consistent and aggressive than the attacks made on the left in 2018. If you were to count up the names of every academic, school teacher, broadcaster, sports administrator, solicitor, barrister, or student who has been named in the British press and accused of antisemitism since last October, you must be talking about more than 500 people – perhaps more than 1000.

The allegation of antisemitism has been the same, its effectiveness has been completely different.

All the arguments which were mobilised against Corbyn and the Labour Party have been repeated over the past 9 months. And yet, their effectiveness has been much less. Very few Gaza cases have made it through the courts. Of those that have, quite a number have resulted in acquittals or discharges). In the majority of workplace investigations those accused of antisemitism have been cleared. In 2018-2020, if you add together those with soft- and hard-left opinions, a definite majority of left-wing Jews were against Corbyn. By contrast, in 2024, anti-war marches have seen the creation of large Jewish blocks, which have consistently mobilised more people than any pro-war marches.

British Jewish opinion as a whole remains broadly pro-Israel. But if you count only people holding soft- and hard-left opinions, my best guess is that a majority of left-wing Jews are against the war, wish it had never happened, and would support a slogan of Ceasefire Now, even in that meant rejecting all of the Israeli government’s preconditions to peace.

Why then has the reaction been so different?

Obviously, the most important differences are the broader political context. People aren’t stupid, they can see that Palestinian casualties are running at a rate of at least 30:1 higher than Israeli casualties – and probably much higher. They can grasp that on all the markers of cruelty in war (the death of civilians, or of children, the use of mass rape as a means of conducting warfare) the imbalance of cruelty is in at least a similar ratio and probably worse. Defenders of Israel want to create a situation where it is just as much a criminal offence in Britain, as it is already in Israel, to accuse the Israeli state of genocide. It is hard to succeed in that ambition when international courts have given judgments that the occupation is unlawful and subject the Israel state to orders requiring it to stop its genocide.

Also, the left has relearned how to gatekeep. For any outsider movement, making sure you exclude internal troublemakers and other purely negative elements is a part of how you survive and grow. Do it too much, and the result is abusive and undemocratic. But if you don’t do it all, that’s also destructive. One of the reasons why 2018 went so badly is that the immediate response of most faction of the British left was to defend people accused of antisemitism – the likes of Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker and David Miller.

This time around, the likes of Williamson have been kept at arms’ length. The same people who were writing open letters in support of David Miller when the first allegations were made against him, were in 2023 and 2024 writing articles pre-emptively shunning him.

Because the left has been better at gatekeeping, the examples of supposed antisemitism fixed on by the right involve much milder language, with the result that people’s supposed offence in response to them seems naturally more exaggerated. It’s one thing when socialists start defending a mural depicting people with obviously bent noses. It’s something quite different when right-wing commentators try to argue that the slogan, “Palestine will be free, from the River to the Sea,” is innately racist.

That faction of left-wing opinion which believes that you manifest your radicalism by shouting at Jews has largely kept to social media, while largely keeping out of mainstream activist spaces. In retrospect, a key moment was David Miller’s Tribunal victory and in particular his public statement afterwards, which denounced most Palestine activists for not following him down the path of antisemitic conspiracy thinking. In his words, “a genocidal and maximalist Zionism can only be effectively confronted by a maximalist anti-Zionism. The self-justifying and defensive approach of the sort illustrated by many on the left and even in the Palestine Solidarity movement will not work.”

Given a chance to build bridges, Miller preferred to destroy them.

None of these arguments have been won for all time, rather each generation will need to relearn for themselves some old lessons. But it is a much simpler experience being a Jew on the left in 2024 than it was in 2018.

Paul Foot and the revolutionary wager

(A review of Margaret Renn, Paul Foot (Verso))

At the end of the 1980s, when I became an activist on the left, Paul Foot was one of the most impressive figures on our side. Many people knew him as a journalist. Foot used his regular column in the Daily Mirror to expose such miscarriages of justice as the cases of the Birmingham Six, Colin Wallace and James Hanratty. He also wrote for Private Eye, exposing the cronyism and graft at the heart of Thatcher’s government. Every six months or so, he would publish longer pieces in the London Review of Books, denouncing the antagonists you’d expect (Jeffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitken and Neil Hamilton) or finding unexpected heroes: the cricketer Ian Botham, for example, who may have been a lifelong Tory but had spoken out against the racist treatment of his fellow Somerset cricketers, Viv Richards and Joel Garner. After the all-rounder was selected to play against New Zealand, Foot was delighted. “Every Botham six and every Botham wicket,” he wrote, “cocked a mighty snook at the gentlemen of the MCC and the Test and County Cricket Board.”

            Since the early 1960s, Foot had been the most effective recruiter for the Socialist Review Group, which became the International Socialists and later the SWP. He continue to play this role until his death in 2004. He was a smart and funny performer on stage. His speeches would begin with the British Jacobin poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, or the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, or the Paris Commune, or the miners’ leader of the 1920s Arthur Cook. Mid-way through they became an appeal to his audience to give up everything else and devote their lives to the cause of revolutionary socialism. When the workers got organised, he promised us, they had such power that they could change everything.

            Margaret Renn, whose biography of Foot was published this week, worked alongside him at Socialist Worker and then at the Mirror in the 1980s. She has interviewed many of his friends and family members. Her narrative is strong when introducing Foot’s early life and the influence of his Liberal relatives – two of his uncles and his grandfather stood for that party in the 1945 general election. She also does a good job of integrating the memories of Foot’s former schoolfriends, Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and Christopher Brooker who persuaded him to write for their magazine, Private Eye. The contributions from Foot’s sons are lively and act as a counterpart to what might otherwise an overly party-political account of, for example, Paul Foot’s visits to the late 1970s at the SWP’s easter camps at Skegness.

            One place, though, Renn might have dug deeper is in her treatment of Foot’s decisions first to join the Socialist Review Group and then to remain. On leaving university in 1961, privilege beckoned. He had been educated at Ludgrove, Shrewsbury and Oxford. His father had been Governor of Jamaica and Palestine. He had edited the student paper, Isis, and been President of the Oxford Union. His family’s expectations, we can infer, were the same as those of the parents of Lord Lundy, in Hilaire Belloc’s poem, who “intended their son “to be / The next Prime Minister but three”.

            Paul Foot did not follow that intended route. He became a journalist but never a newspaper editor. He saw the route which would take him from there to a safe parliamentary seat, and knew what it would involve: avoiding controversies, doing small favours for right-wingers, making the necessary obsequious noises to sitting Labour MPs.

            He became, instead, a Marxist. Having started as a journalist at the Daily Record in Glasgow, he joined the Labour Party, which had been infiltrated by supporters of Tony Cliff’s Socialist Review Group (today, the SWP) including the future broadcaster and later still minister in Tony Blair’s government, Gus Macdonald. There, Foot rejected not just the Liberalism of his parents but also the parliamentary socialism of his uncle, Michael.

            In Renn’s book, a mere seven pages separate Foot the President of the Oxford Liberals, from Foot the Trotskyists. We are told that he left Oxford for Glasgow, and that he had heated discussions on the Aldermaston march with a socialist lecturer, Colwyn Williamson. We are told that he met Cliff and Macdonald, and that’s all.

            I don’t believe it was that easy. In becoming a revolutionary Foot signed up to an informal code in which certain outcomes were defended (the expropriation of the bourgeoisie) and certain moral acts could not have been undertaken without facing the charge of hypocrisy. From that point onwards, Foot could not have lived in the large country house to which his older relatives were habituated, he could not have been a millionaire. He might, on occasion, partake of some luxury (several anecdotes from his later life involve Foot drinking a class of champagne, and happily accepting friends’ tease that he was a Bollinger Bolshevik). But there were lines beyond which he could not have crossed. Years later, in 1999, Foot suffered a stroke. Afterwards, the members of the Private Eye team gathered around his NHS bed and told him they had arranged a collection and raised the funds which would enable him to be treated privately. Foot was too ill to speak but strong enough to raise his hand from the covers and flash his guests a v-sign. Given where he was for most of his life – in London, ever ready to share his opinions on TV or on radio as well as in writing – there must have been other moments when little temptations were offered him. From 1962, however, he had set the path for his life. From that point on, he rejected them. That must have been a more difficult choice than Renn makes it seem.

            Foot had chosen to narrow his opportunities by joining the left; and yet he gained a great deal from his relationship with the SWP. He found an audience. Foot had a very great deal of admiration for SWP founder Tony Cliff. Renn quotes him remarking at Cliff’s ability “to explain an issue with such clarity and force that I could not help laughing at men inability previously to understand it”, by which Foot appears to have meant not only that he was won to the older man’s theory that the Soviet Union was not in any way socialist rather a form of bureaucratised state capitalism, but something broader, that he found in Cliff a whole way of thinking about socialism that was strange and wonderful and new.  Decades later, Foot was still an awkward student in his dealings with the older man.

            Renn does a good job of describing the office politics of Socialist Worker in the 1970s, including Foot’s decision to leave Fleet Street in order to work for that paper, and then the clashes over the “punk paper”, which led to his removal as editor and journalist, and replacement by Chris Harman. The latter had many attractive qualities, but he lacked the editor’s skills to recognise a striking phrase or to encourage it. Under his control, the newspaper became painfully dull, and has rarely been better since. Paul Foot was on many occasions a loyal party member, at times hackish. But, in private company, he did not forgive the organisation’s refusal to train people to find the news or report it well.

            Foot was a larger, more impressive, person in the presence of a collective. He enjoyed performing in public. He told good jokes, and he liked it when the audience roared back their laughter. Those recruiting speeches helped to make him the journalistic success he was. For 40 minutes, he would speak, for 50 minutes he would field questions. When the session had ended, and he had delivered his summing up, Foot would wait at the speaker’s table and people would come to him asking him for advice on dealing with the problems that afflicted them. Quite a few of the contacts which were made after meetings became, in due course, the source of his columns.

            To remember Paul Foot is to recall a political culture characterised by open air speakers’ corners, and meetings in rooms above pubs. It is to think of politics expressing itself through the music of the spoken voice, rather than the black letters of the written word. It is to mourn a kind of political leadership in which the intended outcome was not the individual striving for originality but the fulfilment of the collective. Many of the great socialists were like that. Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Lafargue, Eleanor Marx all saw their role as being to spread the influence of ideas which other people had formulated. Paul Foot, too.

            Two thousand people attended Foot’s memorial at Golders Green in July 2004. Perhaps half of them were members of Foot’s own party the SWP, for whom he had delivered recruitment speeches and other public talks for more than 40 years. Others remembered Foot for his journalism, for the injustices that he had exposed on the pages of The Mirror. Also present were wider groups still – black campaigners against immigration controls, rail workers in their work clothes, activists from every faction of the British left. For so many years, his words had given us the strength to go on; now, it was our turn to thank him.

Provisional Measures: Three reasons for delight & one point of caution

“The court concludes that the conditions are met”

The decision of the ICJ to impose provisional measures is a vindication for everyone who spoke out against the war – for the Palestinians of course and above all – but also everyone who marched, and for the hundreds of people in Britain, and the tens of thousands of people worldwide who’ve faced the loss of their jobs, threats of jail or deportation for doing so. It creates the possibility of change for the better. We’re living in a world which is teetering on the brink of fascism, not of one war against Gaza, but of dozens of wars as nationalist leaders radicalise to the right. In every continent. Today’s decision is an attempt, on the part of a small group of strategically placed people to pull the handbrake.

From that perspective, here are my three reasons for delight, but also one note of caution.

FOR PALESTINE

Nothing that happened today can bring back the 26,000 people who have already died, or the 10,000 of them children. But it creates the possibility for a ceasefire. And, more important still, it creates the possibility that the people like in Gaza – all of who, without exception – are starving, are short of food and water, might survive the winter. For that to happen, Israel would have to open the border crossings, which remain closed. Which in turn would have to mean that Britain and the US and Israel’s other allies, who have refused to put any pressure on Netanyahu at all, would have to change course.

But, be clear, if that doesn’t happen – the death toll by the summer will many times higher than 30,000 people. The WHO reports that 93% of the population is starving. According to the UN, 4/5 of the hungriest people in the world are in Gaza. People are going to die by the tens of thousands unless pressure is put on Israel – and on Israel’s allies – to permit food to enter. Listening to the judges, this is what they wanted (it was actually a much larger part of their decision than it was of the oral advocacy before them): they want the armies withdrawn, the Palestinians fed. That process is made immensely easier by today’s decision.

FOR SOUTH AFRICA

There is a reason why the South African delegation of lawyers seemed to represent the people of the world: black Africans to the fire, Muslim women, an Irish woman, whereas the Israeli delegation of lawyers was white, was a middle aged white English barrister stumbling over his papers.

It is because South Africa is a country formed by struggle – perhaps the only state in the world which is in any significant sense the product of a revolution. Yes, a passive, incomplete, revolution. Yes, a revolution which handed over politics to two generations of kleptocrats, ones who would raid the state, and another who would have it over to private business. But, despite all of that, many South African institutions remain shaped by the liberation struggle. It’s not exactly dual power, but it is something real, and in a world where the right are winning – its something to celebrate.

WE HAVE TO DEFEAT THE LIBERAL DAYDREAM ABOUT RULES-AND-EMPIRE

At every moment in recent times, when global politics has shifted to the right – the liberal parties had their hands on the machinery of power. In 2008, during the global banking crisis, which has set the tone for so much that has gone wrong since, the response to the crisis was forged by an alliance of Democrats in the US and the Labour Party in Britain.

You can see exactly the same combination at work today: it is Biden who is arming Israel, who is funding the bombs, who is ignoring Congress to do so. And it is Starmer, as our Prime Minister in waiting, who has been insisting here too that Britain will back Israel – no matter how many children die, in fact the more who die the better. That, at the end of the general election, there will be no change in foreign policy.

The liberals can see the growing power of the global far right, and in relation to it they demand that we vote for them, because only the liberal stand up for a rules-based international order which might restrain the kleptocracy of a super-rich who tell themselves don’t even need workers in their factories – they can just invest in finance, they can survive behind the walls of their gated communities, even if that means the whole world burns.

But liberalism does not create a system of rules which would restrain the freedom of capital to do whatever it likes. Rather, for several years, liberalism has been complicit in the destruction of those rules. Faced with the survival of the injunction against genocide – the US and the British ruling class have said, they prefer empire. But you can’t have both.

You can’t pretend that Israel is a part of the liberal order, when it is led by Netanyahu, where it is using all its diplomatic power to boost the far right in the US, and in Eastern Europe.

Somehow, we have to break this fixation that rules-and-empire is a single, joint, strategy to save the world, when rather it is the integration of the rules and imperial power which is the reason why we’re all in the mess.

CAUTION: DON’T SLEEPWALK AWAY FROM TODAY’S DECISION

What I expect to see next is a significant small block of people break away, and try to re-establish new strategies of justifying not at end to the war but its continuation. The Jonathan Freedlands of the world, the people who dominate on the board of the BBC, the people who take a lead from them. They’ll say that everything in Israel is very complex. That the ICJ has done Israel a huge favour. They’ll lie and pretend that a government – which is nothing other than Trumpism in the Middle east, and with even more guns – is still part of an answer. They’ll point to the lawyers stationed in the Israeli army, and they’ll say that after 26 January everything has changed.

To which the answers, I’d say, are simple: either the Palestinians are still being bombed, or the bombing has stopped. Either the Israeli army has withdrawn, or the war continues. Either food is arriving in Gaza at an unprecedented rate – or what is taking place in front of us will still be a genocide. And will still be the first of many yet to come.

For the left, we’ll need to keep on organising – and in larger numbers than ever.

Raphael Samuel – the kindness of the past

Subscribe to continue reading

Subscribe to get access to the rest of this post and other subscriber-only content.

Already a subscriber?

Israel/Palestine: what next?

For years, Israeli politics has been trapped between the impossibility of the only two strategies that seemed to offer any long-term answer: a South African-style dismantling of the hierarchy of racial oppression, or a second 1948 in which such a vast number of Palestinians would be expelled from their homes that you could create what most Jewish Israelis want their country to be – a bit of the West that just happens to be in the Middle East, so that tourists could go to Jerusalem, the way they go to New York or to Melbourne, without any consciousness of the people who once lived there. Israeli clubs in the Champions League. Israeli singers on Eurovision.

Israel couldn’t be South Africa because the Jewish population didn’t want it to be (the part of the people willing to vote for that outcome has been shrinking, slowly, but steadily, for 50 years), and because the countries who might have influenced Israel refused to put pressure on them.

Israel could have chose a second Nakba at any time, but for many years the obstacles to that were almost as significant: most Jewish Israelis didn’t want that option either (even if the minority who do has been growing). The Christian and Muslim population of Israel and Palestine is simply too large, it is an almost exact parity with the Jewish population. The custodians of the state knew better than the politicians that it was a risky task – in a world that had been talking ever more about human rights, there was a risk that Israel might become a pariah state.

Part of the reason why the second Nakba is an easier route just now is because America is changed, Britain is changed, becoming at one time both less social democratic and also less democratic countries, intolerant of opposition. As global politics swung right, Israel has come to seem less exceptional than it did.

In the next few weeks, we are likely to see events in Palestine which will be of greater significance than 1967 or 1973, maybe even than 1948. After all, when people talk about the Nakba, what they are describing is a process in which by the standards of recent yeatrs a relatively small number of killings (Deir Yassin was between 100 and 200 deaths), were magnified by radio, and broadcasts in Palestian settlements, to create such a fear of genocide that 100,000s of people fled, only to find when they tried to return home that soldiers would stop them.

If you listen to the Israeli generals and politicians, the sorts of numbers they seem to be expecting are a war in which something like 30,000 Palestinians would be killed – and 10 or 20 or 50 times that number of more would flee their homes, never to be permitted to return. This isn’t just a matter of Israeli policy, listen to the American politicians and they are giving approval in advance to ethnic cleansing on that scale.

I am not saying any of this is pre-ordained, just that – right now – it is the likeliest thing we are going to be witnessing on our screens over the next few weeks.

There seems to be an expectation that everyone who talks about these events – even to their friends, on social media – must condemn the attacks which began last weekend. How could it be just to condemn them, unless we also condemn the history that got us here, or the future which is opening up in front of us?

I prefer to mourn. I grieve the victims of Saturday, who included Palestinian citizens of Israel, Thai migrant workers, Nepalese students. and Jewish peaceniks as well as many other people who had put themselves in service of the occupation. I mourn those who have been killed since Saturday, the doctors, the teachers, the journalists, both the people who thought they were safe because they worked for a part of the Palestinian state that had some functional alliance with Israel, and those who resisted.

I send my love to anyone who has lost family members, and my solidarity to anyone putting their bodies over the next few weeks in the way of the tanks and the barbed wire.

Decolonising Israel remains the only way to justice.

The BNP in Tower Hamlets: from breakthrough to rout

Thirty years ago today, the BNP’s Derek Beackon won a council election in Tower Hamlets. It was the first time his party had won an election. For me, and for thousands of people in my generation, Beackon’s victory was the moment when we became committed anti-fascists.

We had good reasons to get organised. The previous two years had seen the racist murders of fifteen-year-old musician and football player Rolan Adams at the hands of a street gang in Greenwich in 1991, in 1992 of minicab driver Mohammed Sarwar in Manchester, and of school student Rohit Duggal stabbed outside a Wimpy’s in Eltham. The BNP blamed the killings on their victims, demanding the repatriation of black Britons. The party established a headquarters in Welling, after which racist attacks in South East London tripled. 

The BNP had been building a base in East London since 1990, when it had won the support of around a quarter of white voters in a local election in St Peters Ward. A year before Beackon’s victory, it had polled 20 percent of the vote at a previous by-election in Millwall. 

The reports of Beackon’s victory showed young skinheads in bomber jackets chanting “Isle of Dogs BNP,” over and over again. They threw bottles and bricks at their opponents. The Daily Mirror responded with a headline, “SIEG HEIL … and now he’s a British Councillor.”

Figures from the political mainstream had eased Beackon’spath. Millwall ward is a working-class area, to its voters the Labour Party seemed remote obsessed with tailing the rich rathe r than people like them. Tower Hamlets Liberal Democrats had promised to give preference to the “Sons and Daughters” of “local” residents, a coded message of white preference. These promises did not satisfy anti-immigrantvoters, rather they encouraged them to demand more.

Events in Europe showed how parties of the far right could pull politics to the right. The neo-fascist Italian Social Movement had won over two million votes in the first round of legislative elections in 1992. In France in 1993 the Front National won 12.7 percent of the vote. Anti-fascists here feared that Beackon might become as regular a feature on British TV screens as Jean-Marie Le Pen was in France. We refused to let that happen.

Over the following year, the BNP found it harder to sustain its breakthrough than its opponents had feared. Without ever giving up our differences, the diverse tribes of Britain’s farleft worked with one another: the Anti-Nazi League led by Julie Waterson, Youth Against Racism in Europe, Anti-Fascist Action (AFA), Searchlight magazine. 

The morning after Beackon’s election, local government workers struck, refusing to accept him as a normal politician. Anti-fascists took on the BNP paper-sale in Brick Lane.

In October 1993, a demonstration of 40,000 people marched on the BNP headquarters in Welling. Only the actions of the police, wielding truncheons from horseback, succeeded in keeping the building open. The courts sent thirteen left-wing demonstrators to prison. 

Anti-fascists marched with the family of Saied Ahmed, killedby racists on the same night that pro-BNP graffiti went up on the streets of east Oxford. Anti-racists mourned in Camden, after the stabbing of a 15-year-old-white boy, Richard Everitt. The BNP wanted to make Everitt a white martyr, but his parents refused to let him be used like that.

Beackon increased his vote in the next round of elections in May 1994, by 561 votes, but failed to keep his seat. An Anti-Nazi League carnival in May 1994 saw 150,000 peopledancing in celebration. Black and white took part, new age travellers alongside veteran punks. 

The numbers involved in the campaign were every bit as a large as at any of the better-known moments of anti-fascist history: the Anti-Nazi League claimed 60,000 members. AFA grew to over 30 branches in 1994, rising to more than 40 by the following year. Together, we made ourselves a barricadeof solidarity through which the BNP could not pass.

In the following decade, the BNP was able to enjoy a sustained period of success. From 2002, it won severalelection victories. It secured 6 percent of the vote in the 2009 European elections, and the election of two MEPs. At its peak, the party had 55 elected councillors.

To make itself electable, the BNP broke its ties to extra-parliamentary violence. It renounced the fascism which had been its leaders’ reason for founding the party. Voters accepted the BNP’s message that the party was now more moderate than it had recently been.

In 2009, the BBC invited the BNP’s then leader Nick Griffin onto Question Time. Hundreds protested outside Television Centre. The broadcaster, spooked by the controversy, made Griffin the show’s focus. Under the pressure of hostile questioning, he came over as weak and dishonest. Within eighteen months, the BNP was had lost two-thirds of itselected councillors. The last limped on until 2018.

On both left and right, people were watching and drawing their own conclusions. Beackon could not sustain his victoryin 1993, nor could Griffin a decade later. And yet the BNP had proved that it was possible for right-wing parties to succeed in a space to the right of Thatcherism. Others, also on the far right, would prosper better from the same opportunities. UKIP and its successors were more electable, lacking the BNP’s links to fascism. 

There are no books or murals to celebrate the anti-fascists of the 1990s. Welling has not entered popular memory like the Battle of Cable Street. Yet for those who took part in the campaign, ours was also moment of successful protest. We showed that hate will not win.