Julia Bard

7th October 2023

I’m writing with great regret to tell you that I am leaving the Labour Party. I have a long and growing list of reasons, which add up to a catalogue of destruction being wreaked on the humane and egalitarian principles and policies that members have thought about, debated, agreed and acted on over many decades.

We are familiar with the litany of heartless and regressive decisions made without reference to the membership over the last three and a half years. We all know that, even while Jeremy Corbyn was leader, officers of the party who had no respect for him nor for his popular mandate from a huge majority of the membership, were a law unto themselves, suspending, expelling and disciplining members without reason, due process or recourse to challenging the decisions. And this has continued, not least directed against our exemplary, hardworking and principled MP himself.

In the wider picture, summary decisions by the party leadership range from ditching renationalisation of public services to undermining the trade unions in their bitter fight for liveable wages and decent conditions; from burdening students with a lifetime of debt to punishing children by retaining the two-child benefit cap; from encouraging profiteering corporations to pick over the remains of our formerly world-leading NHS to outbidding the government’s vicious, racist attacks on migrants.

When life expectancy in Britain is falling and a million children are sleeping on floors, when desperate migrants are left to drown and households are too poor to pay for food and heating, when thousands of people are living on pavements in our cities, the Labour Party is metaphorically joining the revellers who spit on them as they pass by. What a contrast to Jeremy Corbyn, who never passes a homeless person without talking to them and helping them, and who they treat with contempt while having the chutzpah to demand, in the latest orders handed down, that members “[l]isten to others’ viewpoints, participate inclusively, challenge appropriately…” and “always act in an appropriate and respectful manner to others.”

Most devastating to me, as a Jewish person from an immigrant community – whose grandparents all came here escaping from persecution – is the inhumanity and racism directed at migrants, refugees and those with migrant and refugee histories. The party I have supported and worked and campaigned for is callously threatening to close borders, pandering to racists and fascists, turning a blind eye to hatred and viciousness at every level, from street thugs attacking asylum hostels, and police threatening, beating up and killing ethnic minority citizens, through to the illegal and hate-filled policies of a government in league with far-right, racist, antisemitic regimes across Europe and the rest of the world. All the Labour Party has said is that the government’s policies on immigration are chaotic, inefficient and cost too much. This is not opposition and it’s not humane.

And this is the party that claims to be rescuing people like me – who have faced and challenged antisemitism all our lives – from antisemitism. Enough has been written, spoken and reported on about this cynical use of antisemitism to taint good people, and the terrible damage it has done to the genuine struggle to protect and defend Jews and Jewish communities. I will just add one personal note. In November 2020, almost three years ago, a number of Jewish members of Islington North Constituency Labour Party wrote to Keir Starmer as the leader of the party and as MP for a neighbouring constituency, outlining concerns and asking for “a friendly and constructive Zoom meeting” with him to try to jointly address the alarming rise of antisemitism in this country, and across Europe, the USA and other parts of the world. We never received a reply from the party leader who is now ordering members to  “listen to others’ viewpoints”.

Worst of all, though, and the reason why I can’t stay in the party any longer, is the fact that any mechanisms for changing policies have now been dismantled, ignored or trashed. While I thought there was even a remote possibility of reintroducing some humanity into the party, I was prepared to try to achieve that alongside some dear friends and comrades, including Jeremy Corbyn, who have spent their lives working to make the world a better place. The rule book which, despite its inadequacies and lack of coherence, was predicated on democratic norms, is now irrelevant. The party is being run by factional dictat focused on driving out the merest hint of egalitarianism or social justice, and any element of democracy has been or is being excised. What has frightened me most is the ease with which members have retreated into, if not total silence, an accommodation to this threatening regime.

I have huge respect for everyone who is staying to fight on for humane values in the Labour Party, but for me, the tipping point has been my realisation that all channels of communication upwards, from the members to the leaders, have been cut.

There is no shortage of work for us, uniting our ethnic, local, cultural and other communities against rising racism and fascism and for a vibrant, resourceful and strong multicultural world, defending workers’ rights and challenging poverty, fighting for housing and public services for all, and challenging corrupt, unelected governments that are destroying not only our lives but our precious planet.

Fighting a losing battle in the misnamed Labour Party, from absurd diversions at branch level to bitter and destructive actions from the most senior structures is – I believe deliberately – undermining this increasingly vital and urgent work. I think that I will be of more use if I devote my time, energy and skills to more productive and useful political work, where I can be true to my principles and beliefs, and make a difference.

I will very much miss being part of Islington North CLP, where I have done my best to contribute to the work of my ward and the constituency party, and have made good friends who I greatly respect and enjoy spending time with. I will continue to do everything I can support Jeremy Corbyn as my MP, a valued comrade and a good and trusted friend.

Searching for some ultimate bedrock of our identity is not a useful or progressive basis on which to fight for justice and human rights.

This article was first published in Jewish Socialist No 77 Autumn/Winter 2022. Click here to subscribe.

The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has just been won by Professor Svante Pääbo for his groundbreaking work on paleogenetics. He has sequenced the genome of Neanderthals as well as working out the genetic makeup of a previously unknown human species, called Denisovans. This amazing work will explain some important things about human prehistory. On the other hand, getting your DNA analysed by a “heritage and ancestry” industry that’s raking in millions is less amazing. Apart from problems with the science, it’s predicated on some highly problematic ways of defining our identity.

myheritage.com enthusiastically claims: “Your DNA reveals your unique heritage – the ethnic groups and geographic regions you originate from”. This really doesn’t pan out. It may connect you with particular individuals, and enable you to trace specific family members through the generations (including people who might be shocked to discover that they’re related to you). This kind of information is hard to find if you’re from a community whose history has been fractured by enslavement, persecution, war or poverty. More meticulous existing records “going back to William the Conqueror” are generally the preserve of those who have continued the tradition of conquest and want to ensure that the proceeds are kept in the family.

But you really shouldn’t get excited about discovering that you are 14% Latvian or 5% Sephardi or 25% Celtic. To start with, there’s the flawed science: when you do one of these tests, your DNA is not compared with the entire population of the world; it is compared with that of a pool of other people doing the same thing. This is weighted towards affluent countries, so there is much less data on Africans, for example, which skews the results. But whatever floats your longboat – if it interests you to discover that some of your ancestors were Vikings (whatever that means), there’s no harm done.

But there are serious problems with delving backwards in time for the essence of “who you are”. “Ethnic group” is an imprecise and highly contested term. Ethnicity has much more to do with interaction between mobile, fluctuating human groups that have shifting, overlapping historical and current experiences, than with genetics. If we try to attach it to our DNA we’re getting close to theories of race that are not only nonsensical but are extremely dangerous.

Ditto “heritage”. If you’re interested in discoveries about built-in immunity, then it’s fascinating to know that Neanderthal genes might confer some inherited protection to certain diseases as measured across populations. But that doesn’t seem to be what people are looking for. They want to find out where they came from – as if they can find a thread that will lead them back to the earliest origins of “their” people. They want to discover that somewhere, at some time, th were indigenous – that there was a Garden of Eden which is the bedrock of their identity.

And so we come to the use and misuse of the term “indigenous”. In science this is a (not very precise) term to mean something or someone native to an area, whether we know its distant origins or not. It is also a (not very precise) political term, described at some length by the United Nations. As well as a longstanding connection to a particular place, this description adds that Indigenous Peoples are defined by suffering rights violations, disadvantage, minority status, vulnerability, colonisation, destruction of their land, cultures and languages, and that they share a common experience with other such peoples across the world.

The UN definition of Indigenous Peoples is truly, like the proverbial camel, “a horse built by a committee”. They are “inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment” and “have retained social, cultural, economic characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live”. What a tangle of vague ideas that seem designed to cover all bases. “Dominant societies”? It goes without saying that those “dominant societies” are incomers in relation to the Indigenous Peoples, who, by definition, were already there. But the stratification and fracture lines are drawn in the wrong place.

The defining feature of the oppression of First Nation / Indigenous / First Peoples everywhere is that they’ve been conquered, colonised, exploited and murdered. They are, above all, the victims and targets of racism. They do share common experiences and common struggles with others in similar situations across the world. But they also share experiences with peoples who have been forced to migrate into their territory – not conquerors or colonists but refugees from conquest, colonisation, climate catastrophe exploitation and murder in far off places. Some have been prised off the land that sustained them; others, like Gypsy, Roma, Traveller people – and Jews – have been persecuted for not being attached to a piece of land.

It’s disturbing to hear Jews and Palestinians arguing for their rights to the same territory not on the basis of the desperate necessity for justice now, but because they claim to be indigenous. The settlers’ justification for their violence, theft and demolition of Palestinian property and lives is encapsulated in their insistence that they have a right to “Judea” and “Samaria” going back to biblical times. People arriving from New York are saying “this is our land”, and claiming to be on a par with groups like First Nation Americans in having suffered an existential loss at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70CE. Even if this was factually correct, which it is not (Jews come from a nomadic tradition and have an almost continuous diasporic history interspersed with short, settled periods on that particular bit of land), this would not justify their actions.

Our opposition to the occupation, to the apartheid laws, to the racial discrimination, to the relentless violence designed to drive the Palestinians down and out must be based on our conviction that humans can and must coexist if we’re not to face oblivion. The case against settler colonialism won’t be made by arguing about who got there first. Neither the Palestinians nor any other conquered, colonised or oppressed peoples will move a single step in that direction by competing on the highly dubious grounds that one or other group is most “indigenous”.

Indeed, anyone who can work out who is indigenous to that particular piece of land on the eastern Mediterranean will truly deserve a Nobel Prize.

On Sunday 1st November I spoke on behalf of the Jewish Socialists’ Group at a meeting to defend Jeremy Corbyn and the anti-racist, socialist politics he represents, following his summary suspension from the Labour Party. The meeting had 27,000 live views and was organised by the Radical Alliance. You can watch a recording of the event, which was chaired by Daniel Kebede and included Laura Pidcock, John McDonnell, James Schneider, Nadia Jama, Ian Lavery, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and Andrew Feinstein, among others.

Seeing so many people there to defend Jeremy Corbyn made me hopeful that the left will be strong and determined enough to challenge this injustice, which is not only an attack on him but on everyone who shares his vision of a world in which human lives and human dignity are prioritised above all other considerations.

Here is the speech I gave.

Thanks to the Radical Alliance for organising this meeting. I’m honoured to be here.

The Jewish Socialists’ Group was founded in the 1970s by people who cut their political teeth fighting fascism and poverty in the 1930s. We have inherited their legacy together with the legacy of the Bund, the Jewish Socialist movement in eastern Europe. That movement fought against nationalism and for the rights of all minorities wherever they live in the world. They knew, as we do, that the only secure future for Jewish people is one based on solidarity with the exploited, oppressed and discriminated against and their allies. Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely one of those allies.

In the continuing row about antisemitism in the Labour Party so many non-Jews are turning up on television to tell us how Jewish people feel. I don’t entirely blame them because the institutions the media listen to – the Board of Deputies, the Chief Rabbi and – a recent invention, the Campaign Against Antisemitism – claim to speak on behalf of all of us. But they never have, and they never will.

They are all on the political right – and in the case of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, on the extreme right. They want to stifle dissent from the left, even though it is leftists within the Jewish community who have always been the backbone of the struggle against antisemitism, fascism and all forms of racism.

This fundamental political divide in the community is overlaid by another division, over the centrality of Israel in Jewish life. This has allowed right-wing leaders to drag us away from our natural allies. It has also allowed the pro-Israel non-Jewish right to present themselves as defenders of Jews everywhere.

This Israel-centred politics has had disastrous consequences for Jews in places such as Argentina under the Junta where at least 10% of the Argentinians who were disappeared by the Junta were Jews. The regime that carried that out were using arms supplied by Israel.

Racism and fascism are growing today in India, America, Poland, Brazil, Hungary and the UK, all, coincidentally close allies of Israel and supporters of the Occupation. We have to acknowledge, too, that conspiracy theories and other antisemitic ideas are also surfacing within the left. The last five years in which antisemitism has become so entangled with the right-left battle within the Labour Party has made antisemitism on the left more difficult to challenge. Nevertheless, both Jews and non-Jews have a responsibility to challenge it.

But the principal threat to Jews and other minorities is from those right-wing governments and the movements that derive confidence from them.

So who should we go to for support and solidarity? Institutions that have declared their support for Trump; who refuse to criticise the Tories for their close relationship to fascists across Europe and beyond? Or should we turn to the people who we know are are allies – people like Jeremy who has antiracism and antifascism woven through his political being?

We stand by the words of Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who survived the war and who remained a Jewish Socialist and anti-nationalist all his life. For me, his motto “Always with the oppressed, never with the oppressors” epitomises Jeremy Corbyn.

Solidarity!

A marketing device that uses crass assumptions to slice society into “generations” has leached into general conversation, transforming those assumptions into self-evident truths. Building on a long tradition of belittling and ridiculing old people, the right-wing press is full of insulting stereotypes based on age, scapegoating those born in the decade and a half following World War II for ruining life for those who came after them.

We can see why neoliberals who advocated the breakup, privatisation and commodification of public services might want to offload responsibility for the destruction of the economy and people’s lives, but tragically this one-dimensional analysis has gained a following among sections of the left.

Allowing ourselves to be divided along spurious lines is dangerous – and in this pandemic it has proved deadly.

To encourage people to think again, and to challenge ageist hostility, I proposed a motion that my Labour Party branch has passed overwhelmingly and which I hope will be supported by the Constituency Party as a whole.

Here is the motion, followed by the speech I made in proposing it.

Time to Fight Discrimination

Despite the experience, creativity and activism of many older Labour Party members, the Party has not been prominent in challenging discrimination and oppression based on age. Coronavirus has exposed and exacerbated inequalities but the Party has been slow to respond to a particularly deadly form of discrimination.

UK care homes have recorded 19,394 coronavirus deaths – 47% of the official total of  41,486 (both almost certainly underestimates). During the spring peak, old people were triaged out of hospital and into care homes without being tested. Many of them and their carers, disproportionately Black, ethnic minority and migrant workers, lost their lives.

We have known from early on that older people are particularly susceptible to Covid-19. But instead of that triggering extra protection, they were knowingly exposed to the virus. This, together with the straitened situation of care homes before the pandemic, should have been high on the left’s agenda.

However, while campaigning effectively on PPE, furlough payments and tenant protection, the Labour Party seemed paralysed about defending the rights of old people. This enabled the government to pursue a eugenicist policy, downplaying these deaths as “only” affecting “older people with underlying health conditions”.

As schools and workplaces reopen, older people, particularly from poorer and/or minority backgrounds are again disproportionately vulnerable. Many live in multigenerational households, caring for grandchildren, and where working family members will encounter the virus on public transport and workplaces.

Nevertheless, we increasingly hear socialists expressing a simplistic, almost conspiratorial, explanation of inequality, environmental destruction and economic decline as caused by “the older generation” rather than by capitalist structures and interests based on class, which affect all ages in different ways. Routine ridiculing, degradation and blaming of old people in the cultural mainstream and on social media has allowed the government to treat them as collateral damage as they prioritise the economy over lives.

St George’s Ward urges the Labour Party to challenge this ageist hostility. Instead, drawing on its fundamental aims of ending discrimination and oppression, it must actively challenge the pervading culture and ideology of ageism, within as well as beyond the Party.

Proposal speech

One of the things I treasure most about being in this Labour Party branch is the mixture of generations – young adults through to people in their 90s who work collaboratively and in solidarity. This was so striking when we were out canvassing in the last two general elections, but that fruitful way of working is predicated on the fact that we don’t make assumptions about each other based on age or anything else.

Last weekend I heard David Willetts (not my favourite Tory, if we can grade Tories) on Radio 4 giving a generational analysis of the decline in the economy – admitting he has done well at the expense of the young. There are some key ingredients missing from this so-called analysis, most notably class, and I look forward to the day when rich, upper middle class people accept responsibility for impoverishing the working class.

This myth has permeated certain sections of the left, who divide up the world into so-called generations – something that’s usually done for marketing purposes – and stereotyping and blaming one particular age group for having grabbed everything and run off with it at the expense of the young. Like all myths, there’s a strand of truth in this one. My generation who grew up in the three decades after the Second World War did benefit from hard-won but functioning public services and an economy that wasn’t as completely skewed and distorted as it is now.

But you couldn’t grow up in those post-war decades and ignore the devastating impact of class on people’s lives, life chances and life expectancy. This is all being laid bare in this public health crisis but it’s not new. The miners of my generation whose industry, communities and lives were destroyed, the former chemical workers in the North East who are suffering an epidemic of depression, the shipbuilders, textile workers and car workers – they were the majority of baby boomers. They took nothing from anyone, and their children have inherited the devastation that was wreaked by Margaret Thatcher and the governments that followed her, whose politics was not a product of their ages.

There have been failures. Most older people failed to support the students in their struggle against student fees. It is equally true that young people have been pretty absent from the struggle against the privatisation of social care. The point is that neoliberalism – which turns services into commodities and us into customers – affects all of us. What has been striking, amongst other things, about the media in this pandemic, is the absence of the voices of both old people in care home and of children in schools. What we urgently need to understand is that our needs are not in competition but are linked, and the struggles to meet those needs are also linked.

We can see what happens if we don’t link those struggles: it’s deadly. The scandal of deaths of people being cared for in their own homes might turn out to overshadow even the devastation in in care homes. This could only happen in a society that treats human beings as commodities and where the media collude with the government by devaluing, ridiculing and silencing old people, leaving the government free to treat them as collateral damage in the battle to save the economy. And they haven’t even managed to do that!

One thing we can do in the Labour Party is to challenge the ideological devaluation of old people that allows governments of all ages but generally of one class to triage them out of having their needs met and abandoning them to a deadly virus.

Please support this motion.

This recipe makes two large loaves. For one large loaf or two small ones, halve the quantities.

Ingredients

400ml (16fl oz) water
960g (2lb) strong white flour
6 level tsp caster sugar
14g dried yeast or 28g fresh yeast
4 level tsp salt
4 tbsp olive oil
3 large eggs
Poppy seeds or sesame seeds

Method

Heat the water until it is tepid but not hot, and pour into a bowl.

Add one third of the flour, the sugar and the yeast. Mix until smooth, cover with a teatowel and leave for 20 minutes until it looks frothy.

Add the salt and olive oil. Beat two of the eggs and add them with the remaining flour.

Mix with a spoon and then, if it’s easier, with your hands until it forms a dough. Knead for 10-15 mins until it is smooth.

Form the dough into a ball and place it either in an oiled bowl and cover with oiled clingfilm, or in an oiled polythene bag, loosely fastened, leaving enough room for it to double in size.

You can now either leave it in the fridge overnight to rise slowly, or keep it at room temperature until it has doubled in size – usually 1-2 hours.

If it has been in the fridge, leave it at room temperature for about 30 min after you have taken it out before shaping it.

Knock back the dough (knead it for 2-3 minutes), then divide it into two equal pieces.

Divide each of these into three pieces, form each piece into a ball, then roll them into sausage-shaped strands about 30cm long.

Press the strands firmly together at one end, then plait without leaving gaps,. but without stretching the dough.

Repeat with the second piece of dough.

Alternatively, you can make a six-strand plait, which looks beautiful and makes a taller loaf. Braiding six strands is very counterintuitive and the best way to learn is to watch a video of it in practice, like this one: How to Braid a Six Strand Loaf.

Place the loaves on baking sheets lined with non-stick baking parchment. Cover them with oiled clingfilm and leave to prove (rise) until the dough springs back when touched with a finger – usually around 30-50 min.

While you are waiting, turn on the oven to 220C (425F, Gas Mark 7).

Beat the remaining egg and brush the loaves with it. Scatter poppy seeds or sesame seeds over the top.

Bake for around 45 min until dark golden brown. Test to see if they are ready by tapping on the base of the loaf. When they are cooked they will sound hollow.

Under lockdown in London, protecting ourselves and each other from our own generation’s virulent plague, four groups co-sponsored a virtual Seder on 9th April 2020, the second night of Passover. The tremendous efforts of three people, Naomi Wayne, Danny Rich and Mike Cushman, with added input from a number of us to the Haggadah and on the night itself, brought about the miracle of more than 200 people from across the world joining each other to share the Jewish tradition of telling the story of the exodus from Egypt of the Hebrew slaves.

I chose to read an excerpt from the the Black American sociologist and civil rights activist, W E B du Bois, who made three visits to Poland including one in 1949 which transformed his understanding of racism and oppression. He wrote:

I have seen something of human upheaval in the world: the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta; the marching of the Ku Klux Klan; the threat of the courts and police; the neglect and destruction of human habitation; but nothing in my wildest imagination was equal to what I saw in Warsaw in 1949. … There had been complete, planned and utter destruction. Some streets had been so obliterated that only by using photographs of the past could they tell where the street was. And no one mentioned the total of the dead, the sum of destruction, the story of crippled and insane, the widows and orphans.

… Then, one afternoon, I was taken out to the former ghetto. Here there was not much to see. There was complete and total waste, and a monument. And the monument brought back again the problem of race and religion, which so long had been my own particular and separate problem. Gradually … I rebuilt the story of this extraordinary resistance to oppression and wrong …, with enemies on every side: a resistance which involved death and destruction for hundreds and hundreds of human beings; a deliberate sacrifice in life for a great ideal in the face of the fact that the sacrifice might be completely in vain.

The result of [my] three visits … was not so much clearer understanding of the Jewish problem in the world as … a … more complete understanding of the Negro problem. … [T]he problem of slavery, emancipation, and caste in the United States was no longer … a separate and unique thing as I had so long conceived it. It was not even merely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics, which was particularly a hard thing for me to learn, since for a lifetime the color line had been a real and efficient cause of misery. It was not merely a matter of religion. I had seen religions of many kinds – I had sat in the Shinto temples of Japan, in the Baptist churches of Georgia, in the Catholic cathedral of Cologne and in Westminster Abbey. No, the race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which … caused endless evil to all men. … [T]he ghetto of Warsaw helped me to emerge … into a broader conception of what the fight against race segregation, religious discrimination and the oppression by wealth had to become if civilization was going to triumph … in the world.