What does the ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ saga say about us as a nation?
- I think it says first that our media are in far too few hands, and are collectively guilty of a colossal failure. They failed consistently to examine any of the accusations, simply assuming guilt at every point, and gleefully stoking the flames. It was an abhorrent spectacle, Guardian and BBC at the forefront of it. This alone should justify a public enquiry of some kind.
2. Many people in this country are extremely angry. Not just about this, but about all kinds of other things. Some of that anger is legitimate, some not, people will of course differ as to which is which. But our national mood goes beyond just routine bellyaching. A crowd of lockdown protesters stormed what they believed to be a BBC building, now in fact a daytime ITV studio. They were simply a rampaging mob, yelling, fighting security guards. Out of control. Purposeless, senseless mayhem. Rage is everywhere.
3. Many people seem entirely unable or unwilling to do even the most rudimentary fact-checking, on anything. The ‘antisemitism crisis’ saga is a spectacular example of this: it would literally take a few minutes on google to check these things, and yet many, possibly most, people simply do not. Never seems to occur to them.
4. We are in serious trouble. If a lifelong anti-racist such as Jeremy Corbyn can be transformed into a raging antisemite, what else is possible? What else could they persuade us of? Put all this together, put together the waves of rage, the overwhelming power of our media, state and commercial, and the woefully inadequate weaponry our citizenry have to fight it, and the result is what we have just witnessed; a moral panic, a witch hunt, a baying mob, hounding and persecuting innocent people, driven on by relentless media smears and lies, told who to hate. We are in serious trouble.