The Chakrabarti Inquiry was an inquiry into antisemitism, and other forms of racism in the British Labor Party in 2016. The reason the inquiry was held by the party was because there had been a whole series of Labor party members and activists including quite senior people who had allegedly made anti-semitic remarks and some of them had been suspended from the party and some had even been kicked out. This reached a head in April 2016 when a Labor member of parliament, Naz Shah who is the MP for Bradford West, was revealed to have put various statements on Facebook in 2014 at the time of the conflict in Israel and Gaza, which many people consider to be anti-semitic. One such statement was a map of Israel superimposed onto the United States of America with a title saying a proposed solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, relocate Israel to the United States, and Shah endorsed this idea, and made a joke about it on Facebook, and other comments as well. These emerged in 2016. After two days of provocation, the party suspended her membership and launched an investigation into her comments. Then the very next day, Ken Livingstone, who is one of the best known politicians in this country and a very senior figure in Labor party politics for 30 years, went onto the BBC to defend Naz Shah. In so doing, made some really quite outrageous comments about Hitler and about Zionism. He said that Hitler was supporting Zionism in the 1930s, and only after that he in Livingston's words "Went mad and ended up murdering 6 million Jews". He also claimed, as Ken Livingstone often claims, that there is some kind of conspiracy to use this smear of antisemitism as he sees it to silence criticism of Israel. Ken Livingstone was then also suspended from the party and in order to really put a stop to this snowball and even more, the party announced an inquiry and it was going to be headed by Shami Chakrabarti who had just recently resigned as the head of one of Britain's leading human rights organizations. So that was the immediate cause. But really what had happened before then was that there had been a drip drip effects of lots and lots of Labor Party people allegedly making anti-semitic comments, and there was a whole question about anti-semitism around the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn himself. The Labor Party has a long tradition of support from British Jews, and has long upheld a lot of things British Jews really care about, including support for Israel over many years. But in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the party and he comes from the hard left of British politics. From an anti-Zionist left, from a left which is extremely hostile to Israel anti-Zionism which really does not have much connection to the Jewish community at all. Jeremy Corbyn himself at the time that he was standing for leader was accused of endorsing or sharing platforms with various unsavory people, some of whom were accused of Holocaust denial, others of making various anti-semitic comments. Corbyn himself was on video in 2010 making a speech in which he called Hamas and Hezbollah's friends, and he described Hamas as a movement for social justice and political justice. Which coming from someone on the left is a language that really means an ideological connection, and Corbyn didn't answer these questions very well, in fact, he didn't really like being asked them. So this whole question of antisemitism hung around the Labour Party. It came to a head in April 2016 with the suspensions of Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone. It made antisemitism a national political story in Britain, a headline story for the first time in decades, and to try and get control of the story, the party launched the inquiry. Now, sad to say it didn't work. Partly because the content of the inquiry report didn't really go deep enough into the problem. It addressed some of the symptoms, it talked about some of the language that people shouldn't use. For example, it recommended that it was not a good thing for Labor Party members to compare Israel's to Nazi Germany, or to use the word Zion as an insult. Which you think would be pretty obvious things for an anti-racist policy. But it didn't really go into the question of why these things have become prevalent in parts of the left, and whether it's connected to a really obsessive emotional hatred of Israel that exists in some parts of the Left. The issue of antisemitism never went away. There was a continuous bubbling up of stories emerging, some of them old, some of them new, some of them about the structures of the Labour Party failing to deal properly with antisemitism, some of them about things that Corbyn had said and done. It bubbled up again and it increased and certainly, the Jewish community became more worried because Corbyn became more powerful. There was a video emerged from Jeremy Corbyn when Corbyn had been recorded really denouncing a couple of people who he called Zionists. He said the Zionists don't understand the irony that the Palestinian ambassador was employing. He said they've lived in England all their life but they still don't seem to understand English irony. Again, it becomes then a matter of interpretation and Corbyn said this was just about language, but many, many people saw in that statement a kind of authoring of British Jews. Of saying that British Jews live here but they're not really of us and that was quite a big event. The Jewish community having had a remarkable degree of unity and consensus, began to say that it's important for them that Labour adopts the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Which is a framework, a set of guidelines to help Labour decide, understand what is antisemitic and what isn't. Of course, the anti-Zionist activists hate IHRA, because IHRA is explicit that certain kinds of hostility to Israel should be understood to be possibly or potentially antisemitic. The formal adoption of IHRA I think calmed everything down again a little bit in the way of Chakrabarti, and in the time after that in the autumn, the fall of 2018, the Brexit issue came to the fore again and became a really compelling discussion. It's now the very beginning of January 2019, the Brexit date is March 29th, 2019, it's in three months time, and we have no idea what's going to happen. What frightens me in terms of antisemitism is this, that the events in the Labour Party have been creating, educating a Qaeda of activists to believe that the Zionists are their key enemy. The Zionists or the Jewish community stand between us and socialism, between us and our best chance in a generation to have JC, Jeremy Corbyn in power. On the right, the discourse also can be seen as a conspiracy theory, we're being run by Europe, by the EU, by the foreigners, the elite, the cosmopolitan elite, the citizens of nowhere are bringing in immigrants to undercut Labour, and this whole discourse about cosmopolitans and citizens of nowhere and the elite from the cities who are really in charge is itself not antisemitic, but it's very close to an anti-semitic narrative. So there's a Qaeda on the left educating itself its formative political experiences that the Jews stand between us and socialism, and there's a Qaeda on the right educating itself to believe that the will of the people is being betrayed by a globalist, anti-democratic, cosmopolitan, citizen of nowhere, elite. I think if there's a political and/or economic crisis, then this pair of Qaeda's, of political people which have been created over the last few years might grow and get a hearing and become powerful and important, and I think either of them could develop into much more explicitly antisemitic movements. That's the danger I see.
