The role of anti-Semitism in the UK election

The role of anti-Semitism in the UK election

The recent UK election was a huge victory for the Conservatives and a huge repudiation of Labour.

In this interesting piece, Melanie Phillips not only writes of how the working class voters were instrumental in rejecting Corbyn and giving Johnson his huge victory but of the role that Labour’s anti-Semitism played:

Labour is led by the most far-left leadership in its history, supporting terrorists abroad and incubating virulent antisemitism at home. If elected it would have wrecked Britain’s economy, attacked the State of Israel and posed a mortal threat to the security of Britain, its Jewish community and the west.

The working class voters who reversed their previous devotion to the Labour Party did so in part because they recognized the anti-Semitic tilt of that party:

The antisemitism issue had got through to [Britain’s working class voters]. This was thanks to the dramatic warning by the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, that the poison of Jew-hatred was being spread from the top of the party, and also to the constant revelations of the eye-watering antisemitism by party members…

For [working class voters], the antisemitism scandal confirmed their view that the Jews were the potential victims of bad forces within the Muslim world just like them, and were also the victims of those trying to silence such concerns by claims of “Islamophobia”.

And how did the Jews vote in last week’s election? Although they had voted about 2 to 1 for Remain in the 2016 referendum on the subject (according to this poll), by 2017 Corbyn and Labour had already come to alarm them. They were drawn to the Conservative Party from then on:

…67% of Jews voted for the Tories in the 2017 election, and a recent Survation poll finds that 64% will vote Conservative next month. Labour garnered only 11% of the Jewish vote in 2017 and Survation says support for Labour will slump to 6% this time.

We don’t know the exact figures, but it seems clear that a large majority of Britain’s Jews did not vote for Labour and Corbyn. I wrote a piece prior to the election based on polls that indicated that “94% of British Jews will vote for any party but Labour.”

Of course, Britain’s Jews don’t ordinarily determine anything much in terms of their voting behavior, because there are not so many of them. Just to give you an example of what I mean, New York City has between three and four times as many Jews as all of Britain put together, as far as we can tell.

But this article from June of 2017 makes the claim that the Jewish vote in four “London districts with significant Jewish populations” made the difference back then in keeping Corbyn and Labour from stopping May from forming a coalition government. At that time:

The strong opposition toward Corbyn among Jewish voters – a May 30 [2017] poll conducted by the Jewish Chronicle put support for the Conservatives in the community at 77 percent – played a major part in “stopping a clean Labour sweep across the north part of London,” Mendoza said.

It is unclear whether the trends evidenced in the recent election will hold over time for Britain.

And is any of it transferable to our own 2020 election and Trump? Jewish voters have tended to lean heavily Democratic and anti-Trump here, and that may remain the case in 2020. But this article indicates that Trump’s support has grown by leaps and bounds in the small but growing Orthodox segment of the Jewish community, from 54% support for Trump in 2016 to 71% in 2017 to 82% in 2018 and a whopping 89% at present. That’s an impressive increase.

[Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.]

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