Gripped By Anxiety?

Try and imagine Ephraim Mirvis voting Labour. Try and imagine him voting anything other than Conservative. You can't. Of course you can't. Some people are just obviously Tories, in the way that some people are just obviously not. Mirvis is blindingly in the former camp.

But then, his predecessor, Lord Sacks, is a Mike Pence speechwriter and a Jordan Peterson enthusiast who was involved in a march through East Jerusalem that featured the chant, "Death to the Arabs!"

In any case, "Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth" is a ridiculous vanity title, since the United Synagogue, which the bearer of that moniker heads, has 40,000 members in a country of 66 million, and there are 270,000 Jews in the United Kingdom, never mind in the Commonwealth.

270,000. That is really not very many. The Jewish population of Britain is smaller than the number of people who voted to re-elect Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party in 2016, and in 2015 66 per cent of British Jews voted Conservative even though the Labour Party was at that time led by a Jew. We are talking about the core Conservative vote here, and about an extremely small section even of that.

The heavily publicised "Enough Is Enough" demonstration attracted fewer people than would protest against an unwanted road scheme or housing development in any country town, and it was largely made up of non-Jewish politicians, of their paid staff, and of the paid staff of the Israeli Embassy. The counter-demonstration probably featured more Jews, and it certainly featured more Jews who held only British nationality.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews does not represent, either the 50 per cent of British Jews who are not members of synagogues, or the large and rapidly expanding Haredi ("ultra-Orthodox") community that is often highly critical of Zionism and of Israeli policy, and which has close and longstanding ties both to Corbyn and to Diane Abbott. Again, everyone from the Board of Deputies is always a blindingly obvious Tory.

The Jewish Leadership Council is plain and simple astroturfing by what little remains of the once-mighty Conservative Party machine in London. The Campaign Against Antisemitism is a textbook example of a fake charity, and it ought to be deregistered accordingly. The Community Security Trust is an arguably illegal paramilitary organisation. The combined readership of the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Telegraph and the Jewish News is infinitesimal, and they are all hardcore Conservative-supporting newspapers.

And so on. Alas, though, most Labour MPs will still be as in thrall to all of this as all over MPs will be. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham, against a Labour candidate who, like all of them including Corbyn, has signed up to the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, which is a denial of BAME, refugee and migrant experience of the kind that leads to Windrush and to Grenfell Tower. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.