I didn’t get up yesterday morning intending to go on a political demonstration – my first despite a lifetime of political activity. Like a typical Conservative, I’ve avoided marching in the streets or proclaiming on street corners, respecting the ballot box rather than the bully pulpit. But listening to ‘Today’ during the school run, I cracked. When the call went out to demonstrate against Labour’s anti-Semitism, I knew I had to be in Parliament Square.
Back in the mid 1990’s, as a BBC reporter, I interviewed Jeremy Corbyn in his house for a programme about Islington’s radical heritage. He was a charming interviewee, refreshingly delighting in ideas rather than party machinations.
Fast forward a few decades, and despite all the anti-British causes that Corbyn has espoused and the sinister and the growing spectre of anti Semitism that has found a home in Labour under his leadership, I was still shocked by ‘muralgate’. The leader of the official opposition had endorsed an image that would befit a neo-Nazi. As the speaker on the Today programme said, enough is enough.
And so it was that I found myself chanting along with the crowd in Parliament Square. I am not Jewish but my late father was. Images just like the one Jeremy Corbyn has refused to apologise for associating with exemplify the racism that turned my father into a child refugee fleeing Poland in 1939, and which murdered the rest of his family that didn’t make it out. These things happened in apparently civilised countries in living memory, and yet in 2018 the age old prejudice which should have been stamped out in the mid 20th century is finding new succour: anti-Zionism (an established thread in left thinking) has transmogrified to the explicit anti-Semitism of the mural.
To tourists in Westminster yesterday afternoon British democracy would have looked in fine fettle, rallying against forces that would do it harm. Slightly confusingly for a rookie demonstrator, I first encountered a march of enthusiastically flag waving Remainers. Once in Parliament Square their colourful banners gave way to the sombre black and white placards with their simple hashtag message ‘Enough is Enough’.
It appeared an atypical demonstration, predominantly middle aged, puffer jacketed and quietly straining to hear the under-powered PA system. I doubt I was the only inexperienced demonstrator – this was not a crowd of firebrands but a group of people driven to this action through frustration and increasing alarm. At first there was room to mill around in the crowd, but as speakers got underway the square filled with what must have eventually been around 1500 people or more.
I spotted Lord’s Tebbit and Daniel Finkelstein and later Sajid Javid, but this was clearly a Labour event. I suspect Conservative MPs concluded that their attending would have given Momentum an excuse to deflect attention away from the core message which was the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn from within his own party. Accordingly, several Labour MPs addressed a crowd whose solemn demeanour suggested it had come as much in sorrow as in anger.
But anger there was too, expressed vehemently by Clare Kober, former labour leader of Haringey Council, whose resignation has revealed so much about the malign influence of Momentum. Ms Kober told the crowd she was aghast that Ken Livingstone remained a member of her party. She recounted the demonstration mounted by Momentum against a motion decrying anti Semitism, passed by her group in council. There was most definitely anger in the uncompromising address from Wes Streeting MP who called on his party to “drain the cesspit of anti Semitism”, as well as referring to the Chakrabarti Report as a “whitewash ..that got someone a place in the Lords”.
I had attended as a supporter of a different party appalled by some on the fringes of Labour (some who were also present in limited numbers on the fringes of the demonstration) and I was deeply impressed by the Labour MPs who spoke, and their determination to do the right thing in the face of denial and intimidation.
Their unflinching criticisms coaxed the crowd out of its respectful passivity to conclude with a chant of “enough is enough”, which was throaty, good spirited – and loud enough to cover the noise from a far smaller counter demonstration. As the speeches concluded and the MPs went off to face Jeremy Corbyn at the PLP meeting, a man next to me in the crowd said that he was feeling encouraged. He felt the event had marked a turning point.
Let’s hope so.
