This Thursday Britain will vote for its next government, and if the opinion polls are correct the only real question is how much of a catastrophe the Conservative Party will suffer at the hands of the electorate. Will it merely be a defeat of historic proportions, or will the party that has governed the UK for the past 14 years be completely obliterated?
My focus is elsewhere, though, because this General Election has also been notable for another reason: the sheer number and variety of candidates with openly antisemitic views, and the possibility that their campaigns will attract enough votes to influence the outcome in some constituencies - or perhaps even win a seat or two.
This is not a problem of the main political parties. Unlike the previous General Election in 2019, when there was so much focus on anti-Jewish racism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, this is about the smaller parties and independent candidates that are playing a significant role in the 2024 election. Labour have put their house in order over the past five years, to the point that even Corbyn himself is not allowed to run as a Labour candidate, and broadly speaking the three main parties - Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats - have the processes in place to prevent any antisemitic candidates from emerging, alongside the knowledge and education to suspend any who might slip through the net.
If only the others could say the same. It has been almost impossible to keep track of the number of antisemitic statements and social media posts by candidates from the Green Party, Reform UK, the Workers Party of Britain and the anti-Labour Independent candidates, and those parties seem, to varying degrees, either not to care at all, or to fail to grasp why this is happening to them. That this is happening on left and right tells us much about how anti-Jewish racism works nowadays.
There is Ben Aston, the Reform UK candidate in Bournemouth West, who tweeted “Many of the powerful groups agitating for the mass import into England of Muslims from the Third World are Jewish. The resultant societal problems have been visible for decades.” This a loud echo of the Great Replacement Theory, a conspiracy myth ubiquitous on the far right that believes powerful Jews have orchestrated mass immigration into western societies to undermine white civilisation, and Reform UK’s response was shockingly complacent. Our candidates “have views of their own and are as free to express them as anyone else”, they told The Times, “even if they are not shared by all their party colleagues. Ultimately, they are responsible to the electorates of their constituencies, who are perfectly capable of making up their own minds.”
Other Reform UK candidates have shared content online saying Hitler created Israel, that Israel was behind 9/11, that the Rothschilds are behind the climate change movement, and so on. One posted a video by David Icke blaming “Rothschild Zionism” for all sorts of things. Some of these candidates have been suspended, others haven’t, and generally the party seems either disinterested or unable to address this problem in a systematic way.
At the other end of the political spectrum, The Green Party have experienced similar problems - and seem equally unable to deal with it. Several of their candidates are accused of making antisemitic remarks or posts, including justifying or denying Hamas’s terror attack on October 7. One candidate, Nataly Anderson in Woking, tweeted a very strange conspiracy theory about alleged links between Zionists, Mossad, Freemasons, the Vatican and human trafficking. It’s all a far cry from environmental campaigning, but then the Green Party seems to have changed in recent years. Rather than the focus on climate change that most people know them for, they seem to have broadened into a home for the kind of radical, ‘fight the power’ conspiracism that has become commonplace across the progressive left in recent years.
It may not be a coincidence that many people who left Labour, voluntarily or otherwise, when Keir Starmer replaced Corbyn as leader found a political home in the Green Party, and the Greens didn’t seem to understand why this might bring them the same kind of problems with anti-Jewish racism that caused havoc in the Labour Party under Corbyn. They have now announced an investigation into these allegations, but I’m not convinced that they truly understand why this is happening.
In this light, it was very disappointing to see Zack Polanski, the Greens Deputy Leader, tweet that the Board of Deputies of British Jews should be renamed “Board of Deputies for the Israeli government”, because he disagreed with a statement they had issued relating to the conflict. I don’t see how this is any different from Douglas Murray describing Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf contemptuously as “the First Minister of Gaza” for his comments on the conflict, and Polanski, who is Jewish, really ought to know better.
While the Green Party and Reform UK at least make an effort, however inconsistent and ineffective, to give the appearance of not wanting conspiracy cranks as candidates, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain (WPB) seems to positively welcome them. Steve Cooke has been assiduously cataloguing all the examples and last week posted a thread of 20 different WPB candidates who are reported to have said or posted antisemitic, racist or conspiracist views. There’s Julie Lowe in Chesterfield, who thinks Zionists and Satanists are trying to create a “One World Order”, doubted whether six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and claimed the Titanic was “bombed” to kill opponents of the Rothschilds. There’s Harry Boota in Bradford South, who posted that “the world’s financial institutions are controlled by Jews” and that he is up against “the Synagogue of Satan”. Or Hoz Shafiei - WPB’s National Elections Coordinator, no less - who thinks “Zionist C**ts” control the government, opposition and the media, and “want all the goyim [a derogatory word for non-Jews] as their slaves.”
Given that the WPB is led by George Galloway, who was sacked by Talk Radio in 2019 after expressing on air what the station described as “antisemitic views”, and Chris Williamson, who presents the Palestine Declassified TV show on Iran’s Press TV alongside David Miller, it is perhaps to be expected that they don’t see a problem. More surprising is the number of WPB candidates who have expressed support and admiration for far right leaders like Jayda Fransen, or who have expressed Islamophobic views. The old categories of left and right have lost their distinctiveness in the whirlwind of social media-driven, conspiracist, grievance politics.
Some of these candidates, like Harry Boota, have apologised. However, the party’s response to Steve Cooke’s investigative work was to accuse him of using “fake foreign accounts from Israel”, which tells you all you need to know about where they stand on antisemitism. When Labour’s Lisa Nandy tweeted a call for a ceasefire in Gaza, WPB responded by tweeting a photograph of her at the head of a march against antisemitism in London in November, alongside the Chief Rabbi - as if opposing anti-Jewish racism and calling for a ceasefire are in some way contradictory.
Then there are all the Independent candidates around the country, some of whom are openly supportive of Hamas, or who appear to admire Iran and think we live in “Zionist occupied UK”. Many of these Independents were previously ejected from the Labour Party, or have emerged from Muslim community activist networks and are making Gaza front and centre of their campaigns. Campaigning for Gaza is not antisemitic, but it does promote a sense of communal division, of candidates who only seek to represent a section of their constituency. Several Independent candidates are backed by The Muslim Vote campaign in a deliberate effort to target seats with large Muslim electorates, which reinforces this sense of an identity-based campaigning approach.
This is not the first General Election featuring large numbers of fringe candidates with antisemitic or extreme views: the British National Party and the National Front used to stand hundreds of candidates in past elections, and their views were often openly neo-Nazi. The difference is that, with the odd exception, hardly anyone voted for them and they rarely got close to winning a Parliamentary seat.
This time it’s different. The reduction in support for mainstream parties has opened up spaces on left and right for smaller parties to hoover up disenchanted voters, and in many places they are offering candidates whose publicly-stated views are profoundly disturbing. It is entirely possible that some of these candidates will get enough votes to swing the outcome in their seats, or possibly even win, and it is almost certain that parties who have shown themselves to be either incapable or disinterested in removing antisemitic candidates from their ranks will be represented in Parliament, if not by those candidates themselves then by others. It’s another sign of how anti-Jewish racism has become part of mainstream politics and society - and how the boundary between what is mainstream and what is extremist has become very porous indeed.
“ claimed the Titanic was “bombed” to kill opponents of the Rothschilds. “
—a conspiracy theory I haven’t heard of before.
Would love to see you write about the French election which is infinitely more concerning from a Jewish snd democratic perspective. The complacency of Jews towards Le Pen is shocking.