John Mann calls for Jewish staff groups in workplaces to tackle antisemitism
Football supporters’ groups have provided a successful way for fans to seek support, he tells an event at Lloyd’s of London
The UK parliament’s antisemitism adviser John Mann has told an audience in the City that all workplaces need the equivalent of the “phenomenally successful” Jewish supporter groups that football clubs have set up.
At Chelsea, Arsenal and elsewhere, fans who had a problem with the club had someone to talk to and Lord Mann said those groups worked brilliantly. He told the audience at event at the Old Library at Lloyd’s of London that all large workplaces could benefit from similar Jewish groups.
He spoke of two senior workers in the City who had left their jobs in the past year and gone to rival organisations because of antisemitic attitudes. “They’re people at the top of the profession. But I’m thinking: what if I’m a new, younger person, not at the top?”
Mann was speaking alongside Lord (Danny) Finkelstein and Jonny Newton of CST about the rise in antisemitism.
The event was organised by Henrietta Gordon, a divisional director at the insurance broker Howden, who told the audience she had sought to educate herself about the antisemitism around her and in the wider community and was still learning.
“Many of those I spoke to do not realise that being Jewish is an ethnicity,” she told Jewish News, a sentiment Mann reinforced at the event. “They believe that in speaking up they are involving themselves in politics and religion and so stay silent as they do not want to get involved.”
Gordon said employers in the Square Mile needed to make clear their support for their Jewish workers. She wanted the City to “take up the mantle” and educate its workforce by making public statements and putting anti-Jewish racism firmly on the D&I (diversity and inclusion) agenda.
She added: “We cannot solve the problem of anti-Jewish racism overnight, but we can begin to create environments where our colleagues feel safe enough to share who they are and to make clear that antisemitism is not tolerated in any guise within the City or the insurance industry.”