• WE keep hearing that the Labour Party is riddled with anti-Semitism. Jeremy Corbyn has been labelled “the worst anti-Semite on the planet”.

This flies in the face of everything we know about him and Labour. While some Jewish rejection of Labour is an attachment to the Israeli apartheid state, there is another problem.

We are the grandchildren of those who fought at Cable Street alongside our Irish working-class neighbours and beat the hell out of the fascists.

A decade later many of us began to benefit from the 1945-1951 radical Labour government: free university tuition and student grants allowed some of us into the professions and out of the working class. We also had a fully nationalised National Health Service.

Some who did well from the welfare state no longer support these policies. For example, one was recently quoted saying, “If Labour changes back to a centrist party, they’ll get the vote back. British people don’t want extremism…”

It’s that old adage that those who have made it raise the drawbridge behind them. Only the right would call renationalising the NHS, British Rail, etc, “extremist”.

Our choice at this election is another radical manifesto to fund and update the welfare state. Or a frightening Johnson-Trump alliance, with rising racism, including anti-Semitic friends like Orban, warmongering, and privatisation of the NHS and even the BBC.

Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising said: “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.” We must act in that great Jewish tradition.

SELMA JAMES
MICHAEL KALMANOVITZ