VOICE OF THE JEWISH NEWS: The government’s Green party stance is to its credit

Last week our front page made it clear that, given the Green Party’s adoption of a motion designed to stigmatise the majority of Jews, other parties urgently needed to establish a cordon sanitaire, making it clear they would not ally with the Greens while such a policy was in place.

This week, the Labour party has responded, publicly confirming that it will not ally with the Greens after the next general election, and asking its local branches to write to the Greens making clear that if they do not disavow their party’s bigotry, any extant coalitions will cease.

One key lesson from the last decade of politics in the Western world, on both the Left and the Right, is that unless people are willing to stand firm, to draw a line and not deviate from it, what is deemed politically acceptable can move terrifyingly quickly. When that happens, local Jewish communities inevitably suffer. We would not be where we are now if more political parties had stood firm, on a variety of issues, and said ‘if you do this, you are putting yourself outside the bounds of what we can consider acceptable, and you will have to bear the consequences of that’.

It is for that reason that we praise Labour now. We have condemned the government for a variety of actions it has recently taken – and we will no doubt condemn it for certain steps it takes in the future, but at this moment in time it is important to say, clearly, that the Labour party has done the right thing here.

The Liberal Democrats should follow suit. It is true that Labour traditionally has had more of a direct say on how its local government groupings operate, but the idea that Liberal Democrat leadership is completely powerless to act appears to us to be pure sophistry. Despite individual Liberal Democrats rightly speaking up, the party’s leader has appeared silent on the issue – and at a local level, at least one Liberal Democrat group in London – in Southwark – has already decided that remaining in a power-sharing arrangement with the Greens apparently matters more to them than combatting bigotry. They should be ashamed – and decent people, whatever their political stance, will no doubt be taking note.