UK's Jewish Labour Movement head talks Keir Starmer to 'Post'

Polls indicate that the United Kingdom is set for significant wins for the Labour Party on July 4. The party, in the minds of many Jews in Britain and around the world tainted for a long time with pervasive antisemitism under former head Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, has undergone fundamental reform under Sir Keir Starmer, Jewish Labour Movement national chair Mike Katz told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. Under Starmer’s leadership, Katz said that UK Jews are willing to give the Labour party another chance.

“Since the very first day of Keir’s leadership, he promised to tackle antisemitism,” said Katz. “He’s been doing this work. He’s completely transformed the Labour Party, both in terms of tackling antisemitism and carrying out the recommendations that our equalities watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said that they needed to do after it found the party guilty of breaking Equalities law under Corbyn.”

The Jewish Labour Movement, a Jewish Zionist socialist Labour Party-affiliate, has been providing training to the party, from the Labour shadow cabinet to its members of parliament, regular members, and activists. JLM has also been involved in candidate selection, nomination, and support for those who reject Corbynite values. Katz credits the movement’s cooperation with Starmer with helping to “change the culture of the party.”

“I know there is a fear of some Jewish readers that Starmer could win and then within a month, he’d be replaced by somebody of a similar political outlook to Corbyn. That really is not the case,” said Katz. “There is change from top to bottom, much for the better. That’s reflected in his position in the polls.”

Corbyn was expelled from the parliamentary party over an antisemitism row last month, and Katz said that the former leader continues to be a “marginalized figure.”

“Jeremy Corbyn is so far out of the picture that he’s now running as an independent in this election in his constituency,” Katz said. “He’s been thrown out of the party; he hasn’t sat as a Labour MP for a long period of time.”

SOME HAVE debated if Corbyn himself was antisemitic, ignored the antisemitism, or as Katz suggested, wasn’t competent enough to control the party and subjugate antisemitic elements.

“If he wasn’t able to control his party, how could he solve all the problems that the country faced?” Katz remarked. “And that was the problem that Labour had under Corbyn. Now they see it has a strong leader who controls his party, who has shifted his party back to the political center, made it electorally respectable, and is tackling antisemitism and not showing tolerance to it, [which] is exactly very much part of that whole package.”

Significant changes in the Labour Party

One of the indications that the party had changed was JLM’s increased participation in the campaign. While the group had been affiliated with Labour for more than a century, it had gone on a campaign strike in 2019 in response to Corbyn’s leadership.

“We basically only campaigned for a couple of MPs who were either our members or Jewish, or there was a very good reason to campaign for them,” said Katz. “Otherwise, we didn’t do anything. For the whole Jewish community, that election was a really, really difficult time because they were basically faced with the choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, and they didn’t really want to endorse either person.”

The difference in way that JLM was treated under Corbyn and Starmer’s tenures has been significant, according to Katz, allowing them to return to campaigning and promotion for Jewish and non-Jewish candidates and MPs as part of the “journey back to respectability and back to basically giving Jewish people a real choice in this election.”

The movement was working “to get a load of new Jewish candidates elected,” said Katz. “It would be great to get them elected, particularly those that are standing in areas that have a strong Jewish community, and particularly in bits of North London, where there’s a strong Jewish community. There are Jewish candidates running, and we hope they’re going to be successful.”

The amount of Jewish Labour MPs and candidates in the upcoming election was also indicative of the change in the party, Katz said. Labour had eight Jewish candidates and five MPs seeking office.

YET THE greatest indicator of Starmer’s reforms is the reception that it has received from Jewish voters.

“In those heavily Jewish parts of North London, it’s looking positive,” said Katz. “I think we have lots of people that are willing to give Labour under Starmer another chance. Lots of them feel like it’s time for change, and the only thing stopping them from voting for Labour previously was because they didn’t feel that they were able to trust Labour.”

One of the bellwethers for Jewish sentiment was the 2022 Labour victory for control of the Barnet London Borough Council, an area that has a large Jewish population.

Katz said that he believed that many British Jewish values overlapped with Starmer’s Labour. Without antisemitism being an issue, voters could act on those values, and have more electoral choice.

“We’re not expecting a Jewish person to vote Labour – far from it,” said Katz. “No minority community is politically homogenous. We’re all going to vote differently, we have different values, and that’s going to reflect in the way that we vote. 

“But it is absolutely about making Jewish people feel safe. They’ve got a choice,” he said. “They can vote Starmer, they can vote [Prime Minister Rishi] Sunak, they can vote Labour, they can vote Tories. It’s about who they think will do the best job, who has the best policies for the country going forward. 

“We’ve had so many conversations around the last general election and in the elections before that, under Corbyn, you get a normal Jewish lady at the door and she’s like, ‘Well, I’ve been voting all my life, but I can’t support Corbyn,” Katz said. “It’s terrible because I don’t like Brexit, and I don’t like Boris Johnson, I don’t like the Conservatives, but I don’t know what I’m going to do because I don’t care for Labour as Corbynites.’ 

“That is what’s changed: We’ve given people some hope back,” the JLM chairman said. “There are plenty, and I would argue, there’s plenty of overlap between mainstream Jewish values and labor’s values when it comes to social justice, when it comes to ensuring growth and wealth creation to make sure we can pay for good public services, and building more houses so that voters, children and grandchildren, have somewhere decent to live that they can afford, investing in the National Health Service, investing in local services.”

One issue that may be of vital importance to British Jewish voters is the rise of antisemitism in the country. The Community Security Trust 2023 annual summary recorded a 147% increase in antisemitic incidents compared to the previous year. 2023 was a record-breaking year with 4,104 antisemitic incidents documented by the trust. London has seen regular protest marches against Israel, often featuring heavily charged rhetoric and even support for terrorism.

“There’s been a huge spike in antisemitism immediately after October 7 – actually even before the war even started,” Katz said. “There’s also been a rise in Islamophobia, but a huge spike in antisemitism. It’s a problem across society. You get some of that reflected in small pockets in the Labour Party – also more widely on the Left, don’t get me wrong – but what’s happening in the Labour Party is very much a microcosm of what is happening in wider society, whereas in 2019, it was purely a problem for the Labour Party.

“Keir was very, very clear. He spoke in our conference in January, and he said there are people who are peacefully advocating for Palestinian rights, and that’s absolutely a fine and valid thing to do – we also see people who are on the margins who are using it to be antisemitic, crossing the line by rejecting the right [of Israel] to exist and for Jewish national self-determination instead of just criticism of the government. We recognize that goes on. We see these people. We’re not going to tolerate it if it comes up in the Labour Party.”

Antisemitism at the protests is the responsibility of those organizing the marches, said Katz, noting that he had seen some stickers, for example, using very antisemitic language.

Concern about antisemitism is not the only strong feeling roused with the war. Many British Jews are worried about Israel and the safety of friends and family in the Jewish state. According to Katz, the Labour Party has a clear policy on Israel, which is not a departure from its allies such as the United States.

Labour and JLM hold aspirations for “an eventual two-state solution working with other governments across the world, to create the conditions for that. But the foreign policy of Labour under Kier and [shadow foreign minister] David Lammy is absolutely squarely in the direction of having a two-state solution, and having a safe Israel as well.”

If the Israel-Hamas war would continue into a Labour-led government, Katz said that the return of hostages would be a top priority alongside having a ceasefire to allow aid to come into Gaza. From the beginning of the war, with the October 7 massacre, he said that the party had expressed solidarity and empathy with the victims.

The success of Starmer’s reforms will be tested in July, but to Labour’s Jewish supporters, the reformed party has more than proven that it has changed for the better – and they believe that fellow Jews should give the party a second chance.