From Alec Price, Strood Labour Party member
Dear Rebecca,
We note you have hastily affirmed your support for the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) “10 pledges”
These pledges should come with a warning. Far from providing resolution to the accusations of anti-Semitism levelled at the Labour Party, the pledges will be used as a means to hound any future Labour leader into furthering attacks on the rights of Labour members.
The BoD fueled a false narrative, that the Labour Party is institutionally anti-Semitic, which was used to stifle our anti-austerity message. This encouraged those Labour MPs hostile to Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist policies to describe our party as racist and for one MP to describe our leader, a renowned anti-racist, as a “f*cking anti-Semite”. No apology nor action from the leader was ever enough.
What we need is a genuine strategy to defeat racism and fascism in all its forms and the BoD does not provide this.
The BoD want to:
* Gain access to Labour Party members data (Pledge 3),
* Dictate who can and cannot be a Labour Party member (Pledge 4),
* Promote a culture of fear against Labour Party members who show solidarity with suspended or expelled members (Pledge 5),
* Decide which Jewish organisations can and cannot lead the education of Labour Party members about anti-Semitism (pledge 7),
* Control which groups of Jews the Labour Party is permitted to engage with (pledge 8).
The BoD is not a body of the Labour movement and is in no way accountable to it.
Socialists recognise that racism is a weapon used divide working class people. It provides false scapegoats for the poverty and injustice of life under capitalism.
When faced with ultimate crises of the system, capitalists have installed fascist dictators, such as Hitler in Germany with the sole aim of clutching onto power by crushing the working class organisations which threatened it. This paved the way for the industrial murder of the labour parties of the day, Jewish people, the Roma, homosexuals and so many others across Europe.
Today in Britain, the racist “hostile environment” policy has seen some of the Windrush Generation torn from their homes and sent halfway across the world.
In the drive to increase profit, bosses have exploited migrant workers in their attempts to undermine wages, conditions and trade union organisation. Rather than exposing brutal austerity, the right wing media perpetuate scapegoating and scaremongering. This allows the bosses and their system to reward themselves, with greater exploitation leading to greater profit.
Socialists need to provide a clear explanation that the causes of racism are rooted in class society, as well as develop a fighting strategy to overcome it. Otherwise, the propaganda of the far right can cause dangerous divisions between groups of working class people, strengthening the ability of bosses to exploit us further.
My ten pledges to genuinely fight racism
End the scarcity and insecurity that the right wing feed off!
1. End and reverse austerity. Fully invest in public services, including a new settlement for local government and support for a Labour campaign against council cuts.
2. Full employment. End unemployment and under-employment. For guaranteed hours and trade union rights.
3. A mass eco-council house building and renovation program.
4. Free education from the cradle to the grave, including investment in English as a Second Language classes.
5. Democratic public ownership of the key sectors of the economy to be able to plan an economic strategy for growth.
For an active, educated and assertive Labour Party membership
6. Mandatory reelection of all Labour public officer holders, including Westminster MPs.
7. A strengthened trade union link with Labour, ensuring genuine affiliation with all reps and members and not just links with the tops of trade unions and certain committees.
8. A party disciplinary process based on natural justice, genuine fact-finding and context, rather than partisan demands from conservative ideologues alongside a program of thorough going political education within the party.
Protect the rights of ethnic, cultural and religious groups
9. A secular state, guaranteeing freedom of expression including worship, alongside protection against hate speech and incitement to violence.
10. Genuine self-organisation for the liberation of oppressed groups.
Our movement has a proud heritage of fighting racism and fascism. In East London in 1936, when Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists marched on Cable Street, they did not pass because working class Jews stood shoulder-to-shoulder with working class non-Jews. The BoD advised Jews to stay at home that day. The BoD is not and never has been a labour movement organisation. It has no right to decide our principles, policies or practices.
Reject the BoD’s pledges. Instead, support the members of the Labour Party for a socialist world, free of persecution and religious hatred.
January 16, 2020
