Antisemitism in Modern Society
Jonathan Djanogly Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Barry Gardiner
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend and I am glad he has been able to talk about the progress that the NEC is making. I believe that more progress will be coming in terms of education, but it has not been formalised at this stage.
It is important to recognise that the antisemitic views harboured by those people, a small minority within Labour, do not exist in a vacuum. No political party should fool itself that it is immune from this poison, and it would be wrong and dangerous to underestimate the scale of the problem across society at large. A few weeks ago, on Holocaust Memorial Day, a survey revealed that 5% of British adults do not believe the holocaust took place and one in 12 believe that its scale has been exaggerated. Clearly, something has gone deeply wrong with our education and our collective memory. The holocaust was the worst crime of the 20th century, in which 6 million Jewish people were murdered. Every single person in Britain should know that. I thank the Holocaust Educational Trust and Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for the work they do to ensure that this atrocity is never forgotten and never repeated.
Barry Gardiner
I am not taking any more interventions, as I said.
It is only through education that we will protect future generations from falling into these insidious falsehoods—[Interruption.]
Anti-Semitism
Jonathan Djanogly Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Mr Djanogly
My right hon. Friend will, of course, have received an increasing number of complaints from the Jewish community about the rise of anti-Semitism in recent times. Will he take this opportunity to describe to the House the discussions that he has been having with that community?
Sajid Javid
My hon. Friend will know that my Department, along with the Home Secretary and others, engages in a number of discussions. I will say more about that in a moment, and reassure him on the point.
Clearly I am not a member of the Labour party. I speak about this as a concerned citizen, and as a Secretary of State who is responsible for leading on these matters. I will, however, say a couple of things at the outset. First, the Labour party has a long, strong history of rooting out prejudice in our country, from fighting Fascism to establishing sexual equality to passing laws on racial discrimination, a history of which it should rightly be proud. Secondly, the current parliamentary Labour party includes a host of impressive Members of Parliament who have been unwavering in their opposition to anti-Semitism wherever it may appear.
A few weeks ago I stood in the crowd in Parliament Square and had the privilege of listening to some incredibly passionate speeches, not just from the leaders of the Jewish community but from several Labour colleagues, including the hon. Members for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger), for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock), for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) and for Dudley North (Ian Austin), as well as Claire Kober, the former leader of Haringey Council. Let me also pay my respects to the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) for his leadership in chairing the all-party parliamentary group against anti-Semitism, and for being instrumental in calling for today’s debate.
Let us be frank. It is not surprising that in any large group of politically minded activists, a few bigots and oddballs sometimes slip through the net. Over the years, some members of my own party have let the side down on this issue. However, the debate deserves more than attempts to point-score on individual cases. The sensible question is not so much whether someone has ever been associated in some way with these people and their attitudes as whether there is a culture that attracts them and is allowed to fester. Unfortunately, when it comes to the Leader of the Opposition, there are simply too many of his apparently accidental associations to list. As the Board of Deputies of British Jews put it in a letter to the Leader of the Opposition,
“Rightly or wrongly, those who push this offensive material regard Jeremy Corbyn as their figurehead.”
So it really is a question of leadership. Indeed, the first chapter of the Government’s new Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper focuses on the need for exactly that, at all levels of society. We did not expect leadership to be such a problem at such a high level, but, as they say, the culture of an organisation starts at the top.