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I have some sympathy for Behr, and even for Labour right-wingers expressing solidarity with him.
It's undeniable that Behr - and many other people - genuinely saw Labour under Corbyn as unreliable on antisemitism...
It's undeniable that Behr - and many other people - genuinely saw Labour under Corbyn as unreliable on antisemitism...
to the point where they
(a) genuinely felt that, in the event of a resurgence of political antisemitism, Corbyn and his followers couldn't be relied on to be on the right side - and
(a) genuinely felt that, in the event of a resurgence of political antisemitism, Corbyn and his followers couldn't be relied on to be on the right side - and
(b) at least seriously entertained the suspicion that Corbyn being in government would make a resurgence of political antisemitism more likely.
Imagine that suspicion floating up in your mind. Wildly unlikely, maybe, but impossible? You wouldn't be able to dismiss it.
Imagine that suspicion floating up in your mind. Wildly unlikely, maybe, but impossible? You wouldn't be able to dismiss it.
This is where I have some - grudging - sympathy with the position of the Labour Right: lots of people are alarmed by the horrible things they believe (or the horrible suspicions they're willing to entertain) about Labour, and it should be a priority to put their minds at rest...
...not to dismiss their concerns & by implication them by just telling them , there's nothing to worry about, they're all wrong, they've been lied to by anti-Corbyn propagandists.
(Even if those things were true.)
(OK, wait a minute.)
(Even if those things were true.)
(OK, wait a minute.)
The trouble is, at the end of the day "lots of people believe X" only gets you so far - particularly when it's a matter of "lots of people believe X, which is in the same general area as Y, which reminds them of Z".
There were facts of the matter - readily-ascertainable factual answers to questions like "do Corbyn and his followers support or advocate antisemitic policies, or turn a blind eye to people suffering antisemitic discrimination?"...
...and political reporters, of all people, should have let the answers to those questions weigh more heavily in the balance than the kind of vague and baseless suspicions that they couldn't help entertaining.
They didn't, I think, in large part because - for a lot of authoritative voices on the centre-left - the big story of the last five years was the story of some Commie oiks who should never have been allowed anywhere near the levers of power (and how they got kicked out).
The Corbyn antisemitism story was just too big a stick not to use - too big a smear not to treat as if it was true. Not that people picked it up cynically, necessarily, but they were certainly very slow to put it down.
And now look where we are.
And now look where we are.
The whole episode shows the weakness in the "Caesar's wife" approach advocated by Owen J among others - that "yes, I know it's only a small issue, but it shouldnt' be an issue *at all*!" line of hectoring. Simply, it wasn't about that.
Behr and people with similar beliefs/concerns/faint suspicions weren't motivated by Rothschild-conspiracy tweets from soon-to-be-ex-Councillor Joe Beria in Hastings - and they weren't mollified when the party sent Joe packing, or even several Joes.
Antisemitism in the Labour Left was a small issue - a tiny one, both numerically and in terms of its actual influence on the party.
The problem wasn't that we couldn't respond to our critics by claiming to be squeaky-clean if we still had Councillor Joe in the party.
The problem wasn't that we couldn't respond to our critics by claiming to be squeaky-clean if we still had Councillor Joe in the party.
The problem was that, for our critics, it was a huge problem, which pervaded the party from top to bottom and made it unfit to govern; whether we'd washed our hands of ex-Councillor Joe or not was neither here nor there.
Anyone who weighed the evidence seriously knew that this wasn't true. Unfortunately a lot of people got so caught up in the game of kicking out the Commies that they let themselves act as if it was true, and justified it with the 'faint suspicion' line.
I have some sympathy with Behr and his defenders - suspecting, however faintly, that you're under an existential threat from the main opposition party must be awful - but I also think they've lied to a lot of people about a hugely important issue for political advantage.
(Even if they lied to themselves first.)
