Communities

Writing in the JC, Geoffrey Alderman leaps in once again with a robust attack on "Night Mayor" Ken Livingstone. Many, including this blogger, will agree with Alderman's conclusions about Livingstone, particularly his recounting of the fact that after his election to the leadership of the GLC in 1981 Country Hall pursued a foreign policy: "the central element in this foreign policy was a visceral hostility to the state of Israel. The Labour Herald, of which Livingstone was an editor, regularly attacked in the crudest terms both the Jewish state and those who supported it."

What is slightly less reassuring about Alderman's approach to the issue of Livingstone, however, is his determination to dig up old inter-communal hostilities, particularly the hostility felt by some in London's black and Asian communities towards Jews. Writing about the "alliance of convenience" forged in London after the Tory victory of 1979 "between unrepentant socialists, angry trade-unionists, disaffected black and Asian minorities, and elements of the pro-IRA London-Irish", he adds:

It is an unfortunate but undeniable fact that black antipathy towards Jews constituted one element of this alliance. I can recall meeting (as part of my research) a black group in Tooting and being shocked at the ease with which my hosts articulated familiar anti-Jewish stereotypes. It is equally true that anti-Zionism formed a significant element in the doctrinal canon of these malcontents.

Later in the piece, we read:

Livingstone brazenly compared the alleged sufferings of Northern Irish Catholics to Holocaust victims. In December 1984, he apparently overruled his own chief whip in permitting County Hall to be used for a bizarre rally (“Black People’s Solidarity with the Miners”) in which the PLO and Sinn Fein took part, and which paraded outspoken speeches against Israel. In an interview with the Israeli Labour Federation’s newspaper, Davar, Livingstone accused Jews of “organising here in London and throughout Britain into paramilitary groups which resemble fascist organisations.” As far as I’m aware, he has never apologised for this outrageous statement.

While many of Livingstone's actions and statements during this period were without question indefensible, it seems to me that in the manner of his condemnation of a leftist alliance that is now in the past - mercifully, part of history - Alderman is in some sense attempting to suggest that the past may be repeating itself, and that the same alliances are now at work in our society.

I think this is a mistaken approach: the period Alderman is describing - that of the early 1980s - was also a period that saw the last major attempt by the mostly discredited "International" led and funded by the Soviet Union and its satellites (mainly the DDR) to influence public opinion in the West, using labour issues. separatist conflicts (such as Northern Ireland) and the "nuclear threat" as levers. At this time, the USSR still pretended to be the champion of African liberation movements, and the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow still paraded itself with cynical hypocrisy as an institution that combated racism and racist oppression around the world. Livingstone's GLC was undoubtedly manipulated by the communists at this time - but we are no longer living in such a world.

While some of the hostility Alderman describes may still exist in London's ethnic communities, the notion that black people pose a threat to Jews in our society seems to me off the mark. In particular, the rise and growth of the Black Church in London, with the moral and spiritual guidance it offers, has tended to marginalize extremists of the kind mentioned in the article.

By all means let us condemn Ken Livingstone's misguided views on Israel, the Middle East, and international politics in general - but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater by suggesting ethnic tensions where few exist.