Must the British Jewish community really challenge Nigel Farage?

Since the beginning of last month, a number of public figures have written comment pieces for Jewish News, arguing that it is incumbent upon the Jewish community to take a stand against Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

Now, I am the last person to tell Jews — or anyone else — how to vote. But it seems to me that, before exhorting their fellow Jews not to fall into sin by voting too far to the right, those who wish to keep Mr Farage out of power should think first of the other parties, and of their responsibility to win votes for themselves by offering something with greater positive appeal.

For Jews and many others at the present moment in time, that is likely to mean, above all, a more convincing promise of safety. ‘Don’t vote for the racist or you’re a bad person’ wasn’t good enough to thwart Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions in 2016 or 2024, and I’m far from convinced that it will play any better in the UK right now.

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So I would like to help the ‘stop Farage’ crew to understand why many good people in the Jewish community are likely to ignore their admonishments.

First up, comparisons between Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn are misplaced. Jews overwhelmingly turned against the Corbyn-era Labour Party neither because of comments its leader had made as a child, nor because clever people had explained to them that a generally innocuous word that he sometimes uses takes on sinister additional meanings when used by racists. Rather, they did so because he was a committed, lifelong, and very public antizionist, seen as a terrorist sympathiser, and an admirer of some of the Jewish people’s worst enemies. This is to say that they recognised that Corbyn was running on an antisemitic platform and, once elected, was likely to enact policies to the detriment of Jewry. He was, to put it bluntly, a direct and obvious threat to Jewish safety, whether in Israel or in the UK.

It’s probably fair to say that much of the non-Jewish population turned against Corbyn for the same basic reason: millions of ordinary British people recognised his behaviour around antisemitism as a part of the same general anti-Britishness that led him to suggest, after Russia’s attempted assassination of the Skripals in Salisbury, that a sample of the offending poison should be sent to Russia so that they could tell us whether it was theirs or not. They understood that the country they loved would be unsafe with him in charge.

Again, I’m not one to tell people how to vote. But I think that democracy works best when people vote according to their assessment of the general kinds of choices that they expect a party and its leader to make when in government. And, while it would be utterly wrong to accuse Keir Starmer of antisemitism (and I mean that very sincerely), his government certainly gave no great impression of willingness to stand up to the extremist takeover of British streets and university campuses that followed the 7 October pogrom. Watching that takeover in bafflement and horror, many British people seemed to see their country — a country that had been safe for Jews — slipping away before their very eyes, in a sea of Palestinian flags.

That is why the Union Jack and the St George’s Cross have made such a comeback in recent months. And it is also — in large part — what is driving Jewish and non-Jewish support for Reform UK. Because, until current cabinet ministers give people a reason to expect something different, a vote for the Labour Party will feel like a vote for more of the same: more protests, more disruption, more extremist entitlement. More keffiyehs. More khaybar-khaybar and from-the-river-to-the-sea.

This is not, of course, the whole story behind the march of Reform UK. The big issue is, as we all know, immigration — which surged under Boris Johnson, discrediting the Conservative Party in the eyes of many who might otherwise be feeling inclined to vote for it now. And I hear the objections already. How illogical, how hypocritical it would be for British Jews to vote for an anti-immigration party when so many of them are children and grandchildren of immigrants!

Except that it wouldn’t. For one thing, there’s a difference between (on the one hand) wanting to put a brake on immigration and (on the other hand) hating immigrants who are already here — which is why you can find strong supporters of immigration controls within many other British communities whose roots are overseas. But that’s not all.

The sad truth is that, if anyone in Britain is threatened by immigration, it’s the country’s tiny Jewish minority.

As the ADL Global 100 survey confirms, the UK is one of the world’s least antisemitic countries, and is embedded within its least antisemitic region, i.e. Western Europe (specifically, the historically Protestant part thereof). What does it mean to be one of the world’s least antisemitic countries? It means that about 12% of the adults who live here hold what the ADL considers to be ‘elevated’ levels of antisemitic attitudes. That is 12% too many — but, across the Middle East and North Africa, the figure is 76%.

To transfer large numbers of people from more antisemitic places to less antisemitic places is — self-evidently — to raise levels of antisemitism in the latter. And it won’t just be the Children of Israel who pay the price for the transference: this may come as a shock to many on the left, but Jews are not the only group towards which British attitudes are (shall we say) more progressive than the global norm.

If the state were making some sort of effort to integrate newcomers — as the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of so many in today’s Jewish community once integrated themselves — then this wouldn’t be quite so terrifying. But we all plainly see what is happening, and it isn’t that.

Maybe one of the two main parties will succeed in convincing ordinary British voters — Jewish and otherwise — that it has their back. If that happens in time for the next election, then we probably won’t see a Reform UK government within the next few years. If it doesn’t, then Jewish community leaders will inevitably find themselves working with Nigel Farage, because no amount of moralising over his childhood opinions will keep him out of Number 10.

Those in the Labour and Conservative Parties who wish to avoid that outcome would do well to get to work on the task of winning back trust through credible policy and concrete action. Sermonising the voters won’t cut it. Lobbying party leaders to take their justified concerns about failed integration and spiralling religious extremism more seriously — well, that just might.