Remembrance Alliance

None of this anti-Semitism business is having the slightest impact either on the opinion polls or on actual votes. Anyone would think that London media types who assumed that Britain, like their own circles, was one third Jewish knew nothing about anything very much at all.

But even so. Which entity, exactly, has adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism since the enactment of the Israeli Nation-State Law? Which? Come on. Answer. I am going to keep asking this question until I do get an answer to it. We call that "journalism".

It is probably classified as anti-Semitic to ask that question, as it is to ask for specific evidence that the Labour Party is any more anti-Semitic than society at large.

As it is to point out that the tiny circulation Jewish newspapers that have been given such publicity are in any case viscerally hostile to the Labour Party, that so are the people who run the unrepresentative or downright made up Jewish organisations that are assumed to have the last word on these matters, that several of those people are also outspoken supporters of Donald Trump, that 64 per cent of Jews voted Conservative under Ed Miliband, and that one of those was the earth-shatteringly important Maureen Lipman.

As it is to ask why Israel alone should be exempt from the otherwise routine comparison of any and everyone to the Nazis, and would apparently remain so even if it did indeed start to behave like Nazi Germany, as any country might.

As it is to ask why the Labour Party has not proscribed Labour Friends of Israel in the light of the Nation-State Law, since, while there were plenty of very well-placed Labour friends of apartheid South Africa when Jeremy Corbyn was demonstrating outside its embassy, there was no organisation called Labour Friends of South Africa.

And as it is to question whether MPs and other public figures who happened to be Jewish might have an overriding allegiance to a foreign state that happened to be Israel, even when that is obviously the case, as it is with Louise Ellman and Luciana Berger.

It is not clear that that stricture would apply if the state were Israel but the MP were not Jewish. It is demonstrably the case that it does not apply when the MP is Jewish but the state is not Israel, since Ruth Smeeth is listed as "Closely Protect" by the American Embassy, and there is only one thing that that can possibly mean.

Yet even all of that is before we begin to explore the fact that scores of Labour and almost all Conservative MPs are in thrall to Saudi Arabia, that Liam Fox has highly questionable connections to the regime in Sri Lanka, and that the Conservative Party is awash with Russian money.

Meanwhile, however, it is Jeremy Corbyn who is accused of being somehow a pawn of Russia, of which he has been more critical over the last 25 years than any Prime Minister of either party, and of being an agent of no fewer than three foreign powers (Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the Soviet Union) that have not existed in a generation, but which Thatcherites and anyone who really still is a Trotskyist both have to pretend are still there in order for the world to make any sense to them.

Alas, such people are going to be numerous within the Parliamentary Labour Party for some years yet. But another hung Parliament is coming. We need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

John Woodcock is likely to go down anyway, one way or another. Ellman, Berger, Margaret Hodge and Ian Austin must be defeated, it scarcely matters by whom, although I remain firmly of the view that Audrey White would make a wonderful Liverpool MP. Vote for one of our people if available. Vote for whoever was in second place if not.

Smeeth must be defeated by Marc Wadsworth. Jess Phillips must be defeated by George Galloway. Only Roy Jenkins has ever been an MP for all three of Britain's largest cities of London, Birmingham and Glasgow. Much of his Stechford constituency is now in Yardley, where Phillips is the MP.

But Jenkins did eventually lose his Glasgow seat to Galloway, who has now been both a London and a Glasgow MP, as well as a Bradford one. With its close ties both to Ireland, and to the Islamic world in general and Pakistan in particular, Birmingham is a city made for Galloway. He needs to be the next MP for Yardley.

And I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning, at a General Election that it is now worth emphasising might come at any moment. My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.