There are no Jewish Labour candidates. Er...actually there are. Vote for Margaret Hodge!

One of the curious features of the run-in to election day has been the strange invisibility of Labour's Jewish candidates. Obviously, there have been strenuous efforts to give the impression that the Labour Party as a whole has persecuted its Jewish MPs and Jewish members so that there are none left. Or: OK there are a few left but the only ones still hanging in there are, as Melanie Phillips described them as "bad, treacherous, disloyal, ignorant, malevolent and often psychologically damaged Jews". (Excuse me, Melanie! 'Treacherous Jews'? 'Malevolent Jews'? 'Disloyal Jews?' Hmmm sounds like a bit of classic Jew-baiting to me from the good Melanie.)

So, to talk of Labour hollowing out its Jewish membership and candidates gives a kind of whiff of what the Nazis tried to do: create 'Jewish-free' areas and ultimately a 'Jewish-free' Europe. Labour = Nazi. Gettit? 

This can be amplified by suggesting that hardly any Jews will vote Labour. Or indeed, thanks to the Chief Rabbi, we must think that Jews (or anyone who likes or supports Jews) should not vote Labour. Why this act of communalist politics wasn't greeted with horror by the commentariat is a mystery. Or not. I may be wrong, but even in the face of repeated, persistent and deliberate Islamophobia in the Tory Party, the bodies that represent Muslims don't seem to have said, 'Don't vote Tory!'. Wasn't Peston, Freedland, Cohen just a teeny bit uncomfortable that a religious leader was so politically partisan? It was certainly a concern of Howard Cooper, a Reform Rabbi in Finchley, North London when Rabbi Romain had issued a few weeks earlier, the same kind of politico-religious warning as the Chief Rabbi had. Cooper was concerned that further down the road this kind of intervention by a religious leader can invite hostility.  Oh well, no matter. I guess the gloves are off now. If any Muslim, Methodist, Buddhist, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Catholic leader says, 'Don't vote for X', we should think that'd be OK. No one will say, 'How dare that religious person tell their congregation how to vote!' Hmmm. Interfaith wars, anyone? 

We shall see.

Of course, the Chief Rabbi didn't say, 'Vote Tory!' Good man. But then he didn't need to. With a first past the post election system, it's a two-horse race. Don't vote Labour = victory to the Tories. He knows that. The media know that. We know that. But, hey, let's kid ourselves and pretend that his intervention was merely a warning about rising antisemitism, where he sees it. As I've said before, this kind of conjuring asks of us to believe that it really isn't necessary for the Chief Rabbi or the Antisemitism Tsar or the commentariat to 'notice' the persistent antisemitic sneers of Rees-Mogg, the jibes of Patel, Toby Young, Crispin Blunt and the more sinister frothing of Dominic Cummings. 

But something else: the Chief Rabbi chose not to mention Islamophobia, Windrush or the 'hostile environment' or indeed how austerity has impacted disproportionately hard on people of colour and recent migrants. These are the policies of the Conservatives. So, in saying, 'Don't vote Labour' (which in effect means - let the Tories in) and in not mentioning Islamophobia, the hostile environment and the persistent discrimination against people of colour and migrants all caused by the Tories, the Chief Rabbi was in effect passing on the appalling message: 'Hey fellow-Jews,  discrimination against Muslims, people of colour and migrants doesn't matter as much as antisemitism.' 

Of course, he didn't say that. Of course he wouldn't. However, if he had wanted to eliminate even half a sniff of such a thing, he could easily have given a speech in which he made all his warnings about antisemitism in the Labour Party - which is what he believes - alongside condemnation of Islamophobia, racism against people of colour and xenophobia. That way, he would have eliminated any suggestion that he was doing something dangerous: suggesting that one kind of racism matters more than another. 

This is all based on the fact that we are in a two-horse race and that there are of course Jews in the Labour Party, there are Jewish voters and there are of course of course of course (!), Jewish Labour candidates.

How interesting that the media have been so silent about this. There's Margaret Hodge who only a few months ago was often on TV and radio railing against Corbyn and the antisemites. She frequently made the point that she was on the verge of leaving the Labour Party. I made bad jokes about it. But she has chosen to stay, even as Ellman and Berger have left. 

Repeat: it's a two-horse race. I don't know, but let's take it at face-value, Margaret Hodge has weighed things up and decided that of the two, Labour is better than Tory. The very opposite of what the Chief Rabbi said. The very opposite of what, according to the oft-cited survey says, 87% of Jews say. 

Isn't this news? That the high-profile Margaret Hodge hasn't gone with what they claim is the flow? 

Clearly not. What Margaret Hodge has done is what we call in the biz, 'counter-factual'. It doesn't 'fit the narrative'. So, one moment, Margaret Hodge can be front page news and the next - when she's counter-factual - she isn't. Amazing, isn't it? And the media assume we don't notice. 

But for those of us supporting Labour it means something a bit different. It means that we support Margaret Hodge. For Labour-supporting people under the lash of Margaret's tongue - and of course that includes Corbyn himself - this might seem a bitter pill to swallow. To which, I say, so be it. We are down to the moment of the binary choice - whatever we think of that. Whatever we say and do, should be ruthlessly narrowed down to asking of ourselves, - just as, I suspect the Chief Rabbi did, - 'who does this help?' Or 'Does this thing I am saying, undermine Labour? In which case the racist class-warrior Tories will be helped.'

This is how 'unity in action' works. It's not to ask of us to agree with everything that everybody in the Labour Party says or does. (I'm not even in the Labour Party!). It's to accept that this is the political moment we are in. 

I back Margaret Hodge! Vote for Margaret! 

The Silence of the Manns: Lord John Mann and his selective commenting on antisemitism

Lord John Mann is a public servant, hired by the government to be what the Times called the 'Antisemitism Tsar'. Wags have commented that for the press to call this job a 'Tsar' is at the very least mildly offensive to most Ashkenazi Jews in the UK whose presence in the UK mostly derives from persecution by...the Tsars. It would have been kinda nice if Lord John Mann had perhaps acknowledged this gaffe. He didn't.

Lord John Mann has been given a serious and important job: to investigate and report on antisemitism. This is antisemitism everywhere and anywhere. Some might quibble on why create a post to deal with one form of racism? After all, the government who has hired him has serious questions to answer on what the Conservative supporter and former minister Sayeeda Warsi has described as persistent Islamophobia. We are still waiting for the party's enquiry into its Islamophobia, promised by Sajid Javid and Michael Gove. Not much alarm on that from the mass media. Free pass for Tory Islamophobia then.

Meanwhile, lawyers and public figures have pointed out that the Conservative Party's handling of British citizens from the Caribbean (the so-called Windrush scandal) is a form of racist discrimination and persecution. Reminder: we are not talking here about 'slurs' or contested interpretations of history. This is about the livelihoods and very existence of British citizens of colour, persecuted by their own government - still ongoing.

Leaving all this aside, (though we shouldn't!) we might imagine that Lord John Mann would indeed by pursuing his task with relentless non-partisanship, showing to us all that his target was antisemitism and not, say, antisemitism in the Labour Party or antisemitism on the Left.

Over several weeks, I tweeted at Lord John Mann, the accruing examples of antisemitic jibes and slurs emerging from high profile Conservatives. I mentioned to him the persistence of Jacob Rees-Mogg's comments, in addition to those of Suella Braverman, Crispin Blunt, Toby Young and Priti Patel. These have all been commented on by people other than me including by the British Board of Deputies. Even more serious to my mind has been the comments by Dominic Cummings - not a Tory Party member, but a hired adviser by the Prime Minister's office - who has talked of 'the likes of Goldman Sachs' and in a deposition to a House of Commons committee railed against Goldman Sachs having fingers in every pie in the EU for their own benefit in the 'cess pit' of corruption that is the EU. His singling out of Goldman Sachs (founded by a Jewish family) seems irrationally fervid. He also seems part of the trope which proposes a clean, national alternative to what is perceived as the international corruption of Goldman Sachs. If this isn't a classic Hitlerian trope, what is? (To spell it out, Hitler posed a national, Jew-free economy. This is the antisemitic dream - if you remove Jews from your sphere - or the world, the world would be a better place. At times this has been a form of left-wing antisemitism (e.g. in France prior to the Dreyfus case) but it is in the present era a plank of people like Orban in Hungary and there are strains of it running through the alt Right and Steve Bannon.)

The people who have cried the loudest about antisemitism in the Labour Party are people who know about this new Right agenda but are mostly strangely quiet about it. Now, as I am saying here, Cummings is clearly informed by it and, I would argue so is Rees-Mogg when he describes one of his Jewish colleagues as one of the 'illuminati' (secret cabal) and uses the Soros jibe to imply dirty stuff going on in the Remain camp. (Soros is Jewish and a frequent butt for eastern European antisemites.)

So what about Lord John Mann? Surely he would be mightily concerned about this. After all, neither Corbyn nor any of the other alleged left wing antisemites are in power. Whatever threat to Jews that the Antisemitism Tsar has imagined that Corbyn and the Left pose, it surely doesn't come anywhere near what can be wielded by those at the heart of the government - Rees-Mogg, Cummings, Patel and formerly, Braverman.

On October 10 this year, John Mann MP (as he was then) wrote to me on twitter via Direct Message. I treated it as a confidential message, even though Mann hadn't requested that. (I'll explain why I don't think it's confidential any more in a moment.) In this message he wrote:

"As indep advisor I will not be giving a running commentary on Corbyn, Williamson, Rees Mogg or anyone else."

Fair enough. Perhaps. I thought, maybe John was preparing a dossier on these public figures who I and others were telling him about. Then on Nov 15 on John's time line on twitter he did in fact comment on an individual case: that of a Tory candidate he deemed to be antisemitic. (That's why I've gone public on this.) So now we can ask if John was prepared to comment on n individual case like this, why the silence about Rees-Mogg et al?

I'll say that again, why the silence about Rees-Mogg et al?

What's going on?

I have also furnished Lord John Mann with lower profile cases e.g. on Lee Harpin (who appears to be the disgraced Jewish Chronicle 'journalist', who has just been found by the Press watchdog in a long judgement, to have written untruthful things about a Corbyn supporter).

Lee, rather oddly, suddenly accused me a few weeks ago of being a 'cheerleader for Soros'. This is more bizarre than offensive, and yet the phrase is straight out of the alt Right phrase book. Again, Soros is a kind of cipher for the antisemitic idea of the 'rich, international finagler standing in the way of 'economic nationalism''. What Lee - who is Jewish - thinks he is doing playing around with antisemitic tropes like this, is anyone's guess. I don't expect Lee to answer me about that. He has enough troubles on his hands having been so publicly disgraced by the Press watchdog. It's amazing that the Jewish Chronicle, a journal that aspires to respectability and high status, hasn't junked him - if indeed he is the 'journalist' - mentioned over and over again in the watchdog's ruling.

So Lord John Mann has plenty of information to be working on. He is indeed commenting on individual cases but is strangely silent about the ones I've mentioned here. We are in the middle of an election. On 'Newsnight' last night, they showed a woman coming to the door to a Labour canvasser and talking about 'antisemitism in the Labour Party' as if it was a ring-fenced problem for Labour and nowhere else (or indeed that the racisms of other parties was not a problem either). Needless to say, this was repeated by Emily Maitlis in the studio. This ring-fencing only has traction because public figures like Lord John Mann don't put out there the stuff that I'm writing about here. The phrase 'antisemitism in the Tory Party' doesn't even exist. The fact that Boris Johnson edited 'Taki', the ever-so-witty playboy, churning out haha upperclass antisemitic jokes, in the 'Spectator' some years ago, is never mentioned.

I suspect that in the end Lord John Mann will make some public comments about Rees-Mogg et al. Yes, I think he will. Butonly after the election. (I hope I'm wrong about this. If he reads this, perhaps it will move him to change his mind.) In the meantime, I'll say that I think he is part of the process that is ushering in the racist class warriors of a Johnson government.

We are paying Lord John Mann's salary.

A member of the New North London Synagogue writes:

[I'm reproducing this letter with the permission of its author Jack Shamash, who had posted it on Facebook.]




I've just written this letter to my rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg at the NNLS ( New North London Synagogue). He's actually a very nice man and very genuine. Anyway, this is what I wrote.



Dear Jonathan, I hope all is well.

I have never discussed politics with you - deliberately. As a rabbi it must be hard to retain neutrality in such issues and to reconcile the widely different views of the congregants. I didn't see any point in trying to elicit your political viewpoint.


However I am deeply upset by recent events. As a Jew in Southgate Labour party I have never been made to feel uncomfortable. I have never heard any antisemitic expressions. But as a labour supporter in NNLS I feel very uncomfortable.

Even by the figures produced by the Jewish community, there is almost no antisemitism in this country. (check out the annual reports of the CST) In 2017 and 2018 there was only one serious antisemitic incident in which a jewish person was nearly beaten up - that's all! Yet the chief rabbi - who only represents a small proportion of Jews - is trying to scare his own community and trying to put the blame on the Labour party. I think this is a very dangerous game and entirely irresponsible.

If he succeeds in swaying a large number of Jews, there will almost certainly be a backlash which will affect the community. Rabbi Mirvis, who you suggest is a fine and compassionate man, has claimed that Corbyn supports people who kill Jews. It would just as true to suggest that Mirvis and the Jewish community support people who kill Palestinians and other Arabs. It would even be true to suggest that Mirvis and the Rabbinate idolise people such as Menachem Begin who murdered British soldiers. It seems utterly foolish for a Jewish leader to embark on this conversation.

I was deeply upset to hear one of your younger rabbis, denouncing labour antisemitism in his sermon on shabbat. I attended the meeting at the synagogue when a young member of the labour party burst into tears claiming that he was victimised by labour members. He never told us who had said these bad things or what had been said. I have never heard of an incident of a labour MP saying anything antisemitic. By contrast we have Boris Johnson talking about arabs looking like pillar boxes, black people being picannnies and tank topped bumboys. And unlike Mr Corbyn, he has never apologised for any hurt he has caused. Maybe your rabbis should show more solidarity with the 'picanninies, bumboys and letter boxes'.

I realise that in your letter on facebook site, you have tried to retain a sense of perspective. But unless you take a stronger stance on these matters, it will be very difficult to heal the divisions and make NNLS - once again - welcoming to all sections of society and Jews of all political viewpoints.

yours sincerely

Jack Shamash

If the polls are right...

If the polls are right

and the Tories win

and the last leftist antisemite

the last alleged leftist antisemite

and the last friend of the last alleged leftist antisemite

has been removed from the public stage

there should be no antisemitism left

to worry about.

Is that right?

In power will be Boris Johnson

closely working with Dominic Cummings

who talks of  'the likes of Goldman Sachs

writing cheques for Remain'

with 'fingers in every pie'

in the 'cess pit' of the EU

splashing cash around for their own benefit;

Dominic Cummings 

who tells us how Brexit will free Britain

from this corruption.

The 'likes of Goldman Sachs', he says?

The 'likes of'? 

Whatever could that mean?

Circling around will be 

Jacob Rees-Mogg

with his gags about his Jewish colleague

Oliver Letwin being one of the 'illuminati',

his concerns that Europe is dominated by

Soros - the much-loved antisemitic trope of his 

east European antisemitic friends, 

his retweet of a tweet from the 

far-right Alternativ für Deutschland

his dining with the Traditional Britain Group.

Suella Braverman who used the alt-right 

antisemitic jibe about 'cultural marxists'.

Or Toby Young, educationalist, and 

controversy-lover 

projecting on to Philip Hammond

his thought

that the word 'banker' means 'Jewish.

This is how the Right racialises banking
and racialises a criticism of banking.

But the Right has no problem with banking. 

They hi-jack our fears of what happens

when banks crash

and hitch them to who they think

is the wrong sort of banker.

The problem for them seems to be if it's 

Jews doing the banking. 

They seem to think that Jews get in the way

of some kind of national economy 

that they want to create. 

An economy that is no better for the mass of people

than the one they claim is so bad. 

And this

we shouldn't worry about?

This has no echoes from the past

from people who came to power

claiming that it was the internationalism

of Jewish finance that had brought

their country to its knees?

But when the last leftist antisemite

the last alleged leftist antisemite

and the last friend of the last alleged leftist antisemite

has been cleared away

there will be no more antisemitism to worry about?

Is that it?

And if by chance the eyewatering amounts of 

debt left over from the last crisis

and the eyewatering amounts of debt

that we have as we buy the stuff we

can't buy with our depressed incomes

leads to another bankers' crash

we won't see Johnson, Cummings, Rees-Mogg

and others

telling us that the problem is 

say, the 'likes of Goldman Sachs'

the 'illuminati,'

Soros

or the corrupt influence

of 'cultural marxists'? 

Is that it?

Antisemitism will have left the stage

will it?

But then let's ask what forces might they want to unleash

to create their corruption-free

national economy?

Who will they tell us are in their way? 

How the Right racialises banking

A pattern is emerging of powerful right wing people making persistent antisemitic jibes and slurs.

Let's put some of these together: Rees-Mogg talking about Oliver Letwin (Jewish Tory MP) as one of the 'illuminati' - an obscure reference (wink wink) to an elite 'cabal'; accusing the anti-Brexit movement of being financed by Soros, a Jewish financier who has become a focus of hate for some antisemitic forces in Eastern Europe; Suella Braverman MP talking about the need to fight against 'cultural marxists' (again a nudge-nudge term implying 'Jews' on account of the fact that the real cultural marxists of the Frankfurt School were mostly Jews); Toby Young (right wing 'thinker') projecting his own antisemitic assumptions on to Philip Hammond. Young did this by accusing Hammond of antisemitism as Hammond had mentioned that bankers and speculators might benefit from a hard Brexit. But Hammond hadn't mentioned Jews! The notion that bankers and speculators benefiting from Brexit were 'Jews' was in Young's mind alone. Now we have Dominic Cummings, one time senior adviser to the Tories talking about the Remain campaign as being financed by '...the likes of Goldman Sachs writing cheques for Remain'. (What could he mean by 'the likes of...' What or who are the 'likes of' Goldman Sachs?!). There's also a video doing the rounds on twitter of Cummings talking to a House of Commons Select Committee about Goldman Sachs in Europe with 'their fingers in every pie', conjuring up an image of a svengali banker pulling all the strings, preventing good honest national capitalism from doing its own thing. It's a classic fascist image of the idea that Goldman Sachs are creepy and corrupt getting in the way of a Cummings alternative of what? A clean, national, uncorrupt finance. It's racialised, bogus and Hitlerian.

Now put this little sequence together and we have well-known and powerful right wing figures floating classic Hitlerian ideas about how their ambitions to run the system their way, being thwarted by Jews.

It's a way of racialising the problems and crises of capitalism and racialises criticisms of capitalism.

This is what the classic antisemitism of France in the 1890s, 1930s fascism, US Henry Fordism, Nazism, neo-Nazism and all their spin-offs do. They all have their own vision of 'national' capitalism and use the image of the Jewish banker as the obstacle that prevents them from achieving their vision. In fact, Steve Bannon talks openly of 'economic nationalism'. (see his long interview with Emily Maitlis). What is this if it isn't a cry for an end to trading blocs and 'global finance' because it gets in the way of his vision of a US-dominated national capitalism (the nationalism ('America first') is bogus because the genie is out the bottle - capitalism can't go back to being city-state small scale production)?

What is significant is the way these voices that I've identified are trying out sticking Jewish names on to the 'global' and international obstacles that these right wing figures have identified.

All this poses a particular problem for the left. The left usually doesn't want to be in a position of defending bankers, speculators, and international traders. But let's run a scenario in which the next crash that happens is because a) the big debts from the last crash haven't gone away and b) a huge amount of private debt is being piled up to make up for the shortfall in demand caused by low wages.

If I've smelled this correctly, the Right will not pull back from blaming Jewish international finance (as they see it) for the credit crisis and possible slump, and the vulnerability caused by our private debts, in order to win power for their 'national' model of capitalism.

We will have to say over and over again that to racialise the economic crisis is to beckon in discrimination, persecution, pogroms and worse. If there is a problem with international finance - that is the problem - in those terms. It's not that there are some Jews involved in banking. It's not the supposed, alleged Jewishness of banking that causes a crisis. Of course not! It's the system that has in-built problems to do with the drive for profit and the cut-throat competition between chunks of business and capital.

We may well find ourselves arguing with people who are not well-off who have bought into national and racialised views of what's wrong with rich people screwing up the system and giving them debts.

I believe that these attempts by Rees-Mogg, Cummings, Young, are them flying a kite, just looking to see if people nibble on their racialised view of what stands in their way. They watch what Bannon is on about. They watch what's going on in Eastern Europe and the whole blame-Soros game which has had traction in Poland and Hungary (where the most savage aspects of the Holocaust took place!).

In the short term, we need to be vigilant and vocal about the drip-drip feed of these racialised attacks on bankers and 'intellectuals' because sure as hell, they're mostly being given a free pass by the very people who've been most vocal in their accusations of Labour Party antisemitism.

I'm very curious and slightly alarmed that very few people have picked up on Cummings' Goldman Sachs jibe.

The usual alarm-ringers - Jonathan Freedland, Robert Peston, John Mann - haven't said anything.

I'm Jewish. I'm voting Labour.

1. I've met people who think that there are no Jews left in the Labour Party.
2. I've met people who think that the Chief Rabbi is in some way or another in charge of, or a representative of all Jews in Britain.

Neither of these statements is true or anything like true.

There are several Jewish candidates for the Labour Party. There are thousands of Labour Party members who are Jewish. Several times in the media people have said how it's impossible or 'not safe' for Jews to stay in the Labour Party. It's not impossible. If the media had wanted to, they could have asked Jewish MPs, Jewish candidates in this election 'Is it impossible or unsafe for you to be in the Labour Party?' It has been dishonest of them to have not done that.

There are also Rabbis who have either said that they will vote Labour and/or have expressed great concern over the way Jewish religious leaders (Rabbi Romain and the Chief Rabbi) have intervened in this election. You can read about these Rabbis in the Jewish Chronicle online: Rabbi Danny Rich and Rabbi Howard Cooper.

This tells us that within the religious part of Jewish life, there are people who are worried about how religious leaders have politicised religion. In the past this has been levelled at Muslims for having brought in 'communalist politics'. Commentators like Nick Cohen were particularly scathing about this at the time of, say, George Galloway being elected. The silence in the mass media about the dangers of a religious group saying, in effect, 'don't vote for Party X' are very great. Howard Cooper could see a danger that it could invite persecution.

In this particular election, it is also particularly dangerous because it is a two-horse race. Saying 'don't vote Labour' is in effect saying, 'Let's have a victory for the Tories'. This is no surprise, as the Chief Rabbi welcomed the election of Boris Johnson to the leadership of the Tory Party and blessed him.

Johnson is a bigot and a liar. He and the Tories have been quite content to snuggle up to extreme right wing and antisemitic parties in Europe - like Orban in Hungary. He has also kept quiet about the pattern of antisemitism coming from Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has talked of his Jewish colleagues in the House of Commons as 'illuminati', questioned whether they 'understand' the constitution, he has done the 'Soros jibe' (this is an antisemitic 'trope' about the financier Soros deemed to be an international wheeler and dealer); Rees-Mogg has also retweeted a tweet from the Alternative für Deutschland - the far-right organisation in Germany and he has had dinner with the far-right British organisation, 'Traditional Britain Group'. There are other incidents of antisemitism in the Tory party that Boris Johnson has 'kept silent' about (Crispin Blunt, Suella Braverman, Toby Young).

Yet, the Chief Rabbi is in effect entrusting those who regard him as their figurehead to a Johnson Tory government!

For clarity's sake, the Chief Rabbi may 'speak for' a majority of Jews in the UK but he does not 'represent' them. He is the leader of the United Synagogue which has a congregation of around 40,000. According to the Board of Deputies there are 284,000 Jews in the UK. Half of us are affiliated to synagogues, half of us are not.

In all the surveys of Jewish opinion in the UK, I have never been sure of how the survey of the 142,000 non-religious Jews is done. How do they find us? One survey created a 'panel' having found secular Jews by focussing on Jews in areas where there is a high Jewish population and people having 'Jewish names'. Ahem ahem - apart from Hebrew and Hebraic names there are no Jewish names. Most Jews in this country have German, Polish (if they (we) are 'Ashkanzim' or Sephardi names which may be e.g. Italian or Spanish) and/or we have English names! What's more, since the arrival of many EU citizens, there are many Germans and Poles who have names that before were considered to be 'Jewish' like 'Meyer' - a standard German name that some Jews have.

The surveys may be accurate - perhaps - but this method of polling looks decidedly dodgy. I have challenged this many times on twitter and no one has successfully defended it so far.

I have been asked several times to come on the radio and TV to talk about supporting Corbyn. I have refused. I have said to the producer - 'Do the honest thing, talk to a Labour voting rabbi, and/or a Jewish Labour candidate and/or a Jewish Labour Party member.' The reason why I do that is because
a) I can't answer any questions that the interviewers ask all the time 'Is enough being done? Are Jews being bullied in meetings etc' I don't want to screw up this matter by appearing on programmes and saying 'I don't know...' or 'some of my best friends are Jewish and they tell me....x' It's a trap.

b) The times I have appeared e.g. on al-Jazeera, the method of dealing with me (or Miriam Margolyes or Alexei Sayle) is to say that we represent no one. At one level, I have to say that that is true. I have never pretended and can't pretend and would never pretend that I 'represent' any other Jews. I have no trouble making another claim that I am entitled to have the my views but again, is not great TV in a 2 minute interview!

For the record, for people who are not Jewish: I am no less Jewish than the Chief Rabbi. I was brought up knowing that I was Jewish, and have participated in all my life (read, studied, reflected on, been particularly interested in ) secular Jewish activities to do with Jewish writers, artists, and Jewish history and have of course reflected on this in my writing in hundreds of different ways. I see myself as a poet and performer who has absorbed many traditions one of which is 'aggadic' - that of Jewish story-telling.

To say these things has invited Jews and non-Jews on twitter to call me a 'kapo' (a Jewish concentration camp guard), a 'used Jew' (that from the editor of 'Jewish News'), someone who 'dons the cloak of Jewishness' (a Jewish DJ and actor), one of the 'useful Jewish idiots' (from the commentator Dan Hodges, 'a cheerleader for Soros' (from Lee Harpin political editor of the Jewish Chronicle), and a plea to the BBC to not employ me to present 'Word of Mouth' (from the QC Simon Myerson and the campaigner against antisemitism (!) Euan Philips.

Clearly some people think that the best way to combat antisemitism is to be antisemitic.

Further: the whole question of 'antisemitism' has been fogged by an unknowing or unwilling lack of clarity over distinctions between slurs, prejudice, bias, discimination, persecution, incitement to antisemitic violence, and the violence itself. There are times when you might have thought that UK Jews were experiencing a pogrom.

Secondly, the minimum requirements for a claim that there is a 'problem' in a given area (e.g. antisemitism in the Labour Party) is that it is distinctly and measurably worse than in other places or in society as a whole. If that hasn't been shown , (and it hasn't been) it's not a Labour Party problem it's a societal problem.

I've known Jeremy Corbyn for 30 years. He is no antisemite. He has put his neck on the line hundreds of times in opposing racism, antisemitism, far right fascism, holocaust denial.

For the record the sudden loss of Jewish support for Labour came when Miliband was leader who the Jewish Chronicle described as 'toxic' for Jewish voters. MIliband is Jewish. It was his support for recognition of Palestine before negotiations that did for him, they said. Being Jewish was no shield against this hostility.

Ask me, who am I 'safer' with: a Johnson-led government with its record of the 'hostile environment', persecution of Windrush generation, and persistent antisemitic jibes from leading party members or this Labour Party, and I say, Labour every time.

But I don't look at the election purely through a Jewish prism. It is a clear class issue: a Tory government will continue to ravage the lives of of working class people through attacks on wages, public services, and the disabled. A Labour government will halt these and start to reverse them.

World business ('capitalism') is in crisis: huge levels of debt, massive 'productivity' problems (in their frenzy to compete with each other) a slew towards 'economic nationallism' (the Bannon philosophy ) and Johnson is riding the Bannon bus which is driven by the US. The US are desperate to create a bogus 'free trade' world, which in actual fact is a US-protectionist world. Johnson is backing this as a 'solution'.

I'm voting Labour.

Spoken language: written language

The written language is not the same as the spoken language. Even if we can decode each word, it doesn't mean that we understand the syntax, sequences, clause structure, paragraph structure, narrative methods of continuous prose. How is all that learnt?

When we speak, we do a lot of things that we don't do when we write or read continuous prose (the language of stories, non-fiction, journalism, articles, reports and the like). 

When we speak and chat we do any or all of the following:

not finish the phrase, clause or sentence that we are saying;

hesitate, leaving pauses;

interrupt each other;

complete what the other person is saying or trying to say;

speak in short utterances that are not full 'grammatical' sentences (e.g. when we answer with a 'yes' or a 'perhaps' and the like but there are thousands of other examples);

repeat ourselves in many different ways;

use 'fillers' like, 'you know', 'I mean', 'you know what I mean', 'what it is, yeah' and many others;

use gestures to indicate places, people and even time;

use more pronouns without indicating immediately who we mean (he, she, it etc);

use in general fewer clauses up front in a sentence before we get to the main clause - ie not starting a piece of talk with several clauses that begin e.g. with 'when', 'if', 'although'. We find it easier when we talk to put these after the main clause (or main thought);

use fewer relative clauses (clauses that begin with e.g. 'who' or 'which' etc). We find it easier when we're speaking to start a new sentence and begin these with e.g. a 'This...' or a 'That...' or an 'It..' etc;

use intonation, volume, rhythm in our speech which we can't easily reproduce on the page- this is part of the meaning of speech; 

use many 'contractions' and shortened forms of words which in standard English we are expected to put in their full form e.g. 'I'd've' and many others that we hardly notice;

For anyone interested in this, the best thing to do is to e.g. record some people chatting about something, and then transcribe it, looking out for the details and features that I've mentioned. 

Then, compare what you have transcribed with a piece of continuous prose taken from a book, newspaper, article etc.

In the continuous prose, for example you will find that one of its key features is the way it's constructed around this thing we've invented: the sentence. This is something that was created out of the technology and history of putting argument, science, and story into written prose - especially by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Each sentence was constructed according to rules. 

One of the key features of this complex and sophisticated way of expressing ourselves is that any single given idea can be 'modified' or 'qualified' by other thoughts which tell us such things as when, where, why, how, under what conditions, under what logical contexts, and under what relative additions the single 'main' thought happens. Because these conditions are held within the sentence, there is a way in which the very idea of the sentence is to say that no single thought exists purely on its own. It is always within the circumstances, under the conditions that we add by using these other clauses of time, causation, contradiction, condition, concession and the like. 

This makes continuous prose an ideal vehicle for showing things like logic, abstract ideas, causation in history and science, and flows of feeling full of complexity, and shifts in time-frames that you find a lot in fiction, interior thought as it tries to figure out things - again, as you find a lot in fiction. 

Continuous prose in books can also sustain a longer sequence of thought than we usually do in speech: a kind of arc in meaning where events, characters, structures, narrations, patterns of language and image  are carried through over several or even many pages. We pick up clues, remember stuff that was related several or many pages earlier in order to understand what's going on as we read. We make connections that aren't necessarily stated specifically. We 'pick up' on these so that we 'get' the plot, or 'get' the shifts in character, or understand why a character is doing something based on the motives or history of that character from before. These are, if you like, the longer strategies of continuous prose. 

We can do most - if not all of this in speech but it's much harder to do it, without repeating ourselves, hesitating, interrupting ourselves or other people, asking questions of listeners as to whether they are following etc. Instead, continuous prose, avoids that stuff and just presents these logical sentences as finished and complete. This is usually done through revision: the writer revises as the writer writes and then again through re-drafting. If we revise in speech, we do it in addition to what we've just said, not instead of it. Once it's been said, it's been said. Writing therefore has an artificiality about it, in that appears to be more complete than speech and conversation - but that's only because we eliminated the revision prior to anyone reading it. 

Given how far this type of language is from the everyday speech of children and young people, I find that what I'm talking about here is what many find hard about 'reading for understanding'. 

Continuous prose is in its own way a bit like another dialect: you know it's in your own language (we're talking about English here), but these structures and operating methods seem unfamiliar or hard to follow. 

What are the consequences of this?

Some say, that the key thing to do is teach 'sentence grammar' - and loads of it, and that's how you get to learn the process. Then you import what you learnt from the sentence grammar into writing. 

Some say, me included, that the most crucial thing to do is immerse children and young people in a lot of continuous prose in its most accessible form for the children and students involved: this means as much story, and accessible non-fiction as we can get them to read. That's why it's important to encourage children and young people to read for pleasure in their spare time. 

This way, they are immersed in what I'm calling the 'strategies' of continuous prose, in enjoyable and interesting ways. Those children and young people who read widely and often find it that much easier to access the continuous prose that is given them in all school subjects.