In Britain we sometimes imagine that populism lurks in our future or over there, in Donald Trump’s America or Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Even those who are alarmed by the prospect of populist politics and all it entails take comfort that we’re not there yet, that it’s still some time, or distance, away. But what if that’s wrong? What if it’s already here?
If populism is a politics that pits the virtuous mass of ordinary people against a wicked, corrupt elite, then Britain was an early adopter. The leave campaign won in 2016 by suggesting the noble British people had been cheated of their democratic birthright by the evil bureaucrats of Brussels. Now the Brexit party offers textbook populism, railing against an establishment bent on thwarting the “will of the people”.
But populism in Britain does not begin and end with Nigel Farage. Boris Johnson is remoulding himself into a populist figure too, not least to take on Farage. His refusal to rule out the suspension of parliament to drive through a no-deal Brexit is a move that would make even Orbán blush. Like all populists, the Hungarian leader would happily argue that only the will of the people matters and that all other institutions that safeguard liberal democracy – the rule of law, an independent judiciary and civil service, a free press – are obstacles to be cast aside to ensure that will is done. He calls it “illiberal democracy”.
While Orbán has sought to emasculate the courts and the press, even he has not yet dared to bypass parliament. Johnson, however, refuses to rule out that very move, just as he trashed the principle of a non-partisan, professional civil service when he failed to defend Britain’s ambassador to Washington, effectively firing Kim Darroch for the crime of giving expert advice.
So much for Britain’s main party of the right. What of the main party of the left? This week has been shaming for Labour, as BBC’s Panorama revealed that the leader’s office had interfered in the handling of antisemitism cases within the party, even as they insisted they had nothing to do with the process, driving their own complaints staff to despair and depression.
Labour’s former head of disputes, Sam Matthews, told how he had witnessed “a deliberate attempt” by Jeremy Corbyn’s most senior aides “to redefine what constituted modern day antisemitism – mainly so they could let their mates off the charge.”
On Thursday the Guardian reported that as many as 30 whistleblowers were ready to testify to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, currently conducting what is only their second statutory investigation into a political party for race discrimination. The first was into the British National Party.
It’s easy to get lost in processes and procedures – including the jaw-dropping revelations of party officials deleting potentially damaging emails, and discussing cases of anti-Jewish racism on non-party email addresses, apparently to avoid scrutiny. But the key question lies elsewhere: why would a party that defines itself as anti-racist have attracted antisemites in the first place?
Some try to say that any mass membership organisation will always reflect the wider society, and since Britain includes antisemites, so too will the Labour party. But that doesn’t wash. Britain includes a fair number of meat-eaters, but you wouldn’t expect to find any in the Vegetarian Society. Others say that it must have something to do with the Middle East, as if antisemitism is bound to arise when people feel so strongly against Israel and for the Palestinians.
But that misses the fact that huge chunks of the egregious anti-Jewish racism spewed out in left circles and on social media has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine: it’s all bankers and Rothschilds, control of the media and Holocaust denial. Of course, sometimes “Zionism” is deployed as a handy codeword, but today’s anti-Jewish racists have often left the Middle East behind. It’s Jews they’re obsessed with.
Which brings us back to populism. For antisemitism is populism in perhaps its purest and most distilled form. It says that politics is indeed a battle between the virtuous masses and a nefarious, corrupt elite – and that that elite is “the Jews”. That’s why antisemitism carries so many of populism’s distinguishing features, from the fear of an enemy within, to its insistence that the media is bent on distorting reality. Earlier this year a global study by the Guardian found that a distinguishing feature of those with a populist worldview is a willingness to believe conspiracy theories, whether on the climate crisis, vaccines or aliens from outer space. Antisemitism is nothing if not an all-encompassing conspiracy theory, suggesting that Jews are the secret rulers of the world.
This gets us closer to that question, of why any antisemite would feel Corbyn’s Labour is the party for them. It’s tempting to link it with Corbyn’s fierce hostility to Israel, and his long record of not seeing anti-Jewish racism even when it’s right in front of him. But the subtler view is that, under Corbyn, Labour has shifted towards a left populism.
In a fascinating critique from the anti-capitalist left, Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts argue that Corbynism’s big move is away from seeing capitalism as a system with its own unalterable dynamics, compelling all within it to operate according to its own logic, to seeing its cruelties instead as the work of malign individuals. “From this perspective,” they write, “capitalist crises, poverty and inequality are wholly avoidable phenomena. They are the result of an immoral minority wilfully using the power of money, financial trickery and ideology to undermine – or, indeed, ‘rig’ – a society based on ‘real’ production which would otherwise work to the benefit of all.”
Such a view of capitalism – focusing on individuals, not structures – doesn’t necessarily end in hatred of Jews: you might blame some other “immoral minority”. But this is the problem with talking endlessly of the “many, not the few” (a sinister slogan which I loathed when Tony Blair was using it). Pretty soon, and especially after the 2008 crash, people will ask: who exactly are this few, working so hard to deny the rest of us our utopia? The antisemite has a ready answer.
The point is, this is not a problem that can be solved with a few tweaks to Labour’s disciplinary code. This is a political problem, one tied to a strand of left politics and with roots centuries deep. We see it now because that version of leftism currently controls Britain’s main opposition party and because we are living through a new age of populism. Tackling it will require not a change to the rulebook, but a change in the very way Labour’s leaders see the world.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
