As we challenged Corbyn, we must also challenge Farage

When the Jewish Labour Movement stood against Jeremy Corbyn and the racism he’d allowed to run rampant in the Labour Party, the Jewish community didn’t just stand with us, they helped us. It was true solidarity in the face of institutional racism. It made me proud to be a member of our diverse community – we were unified in standing against racism even if not uniform in our politics.

It is time to do that again, but this time on the other end of the political spectrum. One thinks it is easy for the Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement to be anti-Reform. And indeed, I am. I deplore their rhetoric, their blame of immigrants, their populist ideology creating seemingly easy clickbait solutions to complex problems. But, what is happening today is deeper than that. It is about racism.

For the past three decades, our understanding of racism has been based on the Macpherson principle, that it is the victim who defines if an incident is racist. So then, we must believe the pupils of Dulwich College when they speak of the racism they experienced at school perpetrated by Nigel Farage.

The revelations from Farage’s former classmates at Dulwich College are disturbing. Peter Ettedgui recalled that “He would sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right,’ or ‘Gas them,’ sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers.” Comments like that stay with you for life. They are etched in your memory. We all have those experiences and know how they changed and shaped us.

Of course, people can grow and change, we must always believe that. But, we cannot ignore the growing evidence base of deplorable comments from Nigel Farge. Farage has repeatedly called the Jewish philanthropist George Soros a “globalist”, a classic far-right term for shadowy wealthy people, often Jews, seeking to subvert Western society.

In 2017, after Farage talked about the “Jewish lobby” in America on LBC, the Campaign Against Antisemitism called for Farage to apologise for his “deplorable” remarks and the Board of Deputies said “Nigel Farage’s clumsy use of the terms Israel and Jewish lobby interchangeably and his reference to their ‘power’ has crossed the line into well-known antisemitic tropes.”

This week, Holocaust survivors spoke out against this pattern of racism. They challenged him on these allegations: “So we ask you: did you say ‘Hitler was right’ and ‘gas them,’ mimicking gas chambers? Did you subject your classmates to antisemitic abuse?”. They know better than anyone what antisemitism looks like. We should listen to them and amplify their voices.

And this is without even mentioning the overwhelming amount of racism against other minority groups, against Muslims and people of colour. At a time when the Jewish community feels alone, with antisemitism at record levels, we must remember to not just to look inwards, but to continue to show the grace we are not always shown. Racism is racism and we must stand, together, against it.

Farage defended himself by saying “I’ve never directly racially abused anybody. No.” He tried to situate himself in the culture of the 1970s where racist comments were commonplace. But these are excuses. Racism does not need to be directed at one individual to be racism. It is in a culture, in stereotyping, in the creation of a norm where one person degrades another. The Equality and Human Rights Commission in its finding against the Labour Party showed us that it’s not just about one person’s comments to another, it’s about cultures that are created.

We must stand together as Jews against racism. Without fear or favour. Whenever it is found. Whether we agree with their politics, whether we don’t. And that is why, just as it was right to challenge the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn over antisemitism, we as a community have a duty to challenge Nigel Farage and Reform.

Cllr Ella Rose-Jacobs is the National Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement