Jon Lansman, the founder of left-wing pro-Corbyn Labour Party faction Momentum, revealed that he would find it hard now to speak to the former Labour leader.
In a wide-ranging interview, he said his Jewishness had become more important, that he had been to synagogue on the High Holy Days and that he would feel uncomfortable on pro-Palestine marches.
Having served on the Labour Party’s governing body under Corbyn, Lansman said, “I haven’t spoken to him. I happened to pass him in the House of Commons the other day, and I nodded at him when I saw him, and he nodded back … I haven’t had any other contact with him for some time.”
While he “wasn’t seeking to have a conversation” with Corbyn, he would “find it difficult to have a conversation with him, and I suspect he may well find it difficult to have a conversation with me”.
Lansman, a 67-year-old grandfather of seven, said while he did not regard the former Labour leader as an antisemite and that he thought the veteran MP for Islington North had been treated “unfairly procedurally” by his former party, “the things led to his exclusion from the Labour Party, he most certainly shouldn’t have said”.
Corbyn refused to accept the conclusions of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) report on antisemitism in the Labour Party under his leadership, claiing the issue had been “dramatically overstated” by his rivals and the media. He was suspended from Labour four years ago and expelled after he stood as an independent MP in July’s election.
Veteran left-winger Lansman, who has been active on the Labour left since he was campaign co-ordinator for Tony Benn’s bid for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in 1981, rejected the charge that it was his wing of the party that was the problem.
Jon Lansman with Tony Benn in the 1980s, and as a pundit on a Chinese television station in 2014
Critics claim that, as with Benn’s campaign, fringe far-left groups alien to the Labour Party were attracted by the left’s platform and helped create a toxic environment: “I’m sorry, but I think there are people on the right of the party who turn out to be undesirable as well”, Lansman said, adding: “we don’t choose all of the people who are in practice our allies. And that’s true on all sides of politics.”
But Lansman revealed that his “Jewishness has become more important in my life, largely because of what happened in the Corbyn era”. Because of “the experience of antisemitism, including antisemitism directed at me from sections of the left and but not only the left”.
This year, he said, “I was in shul in Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which I haven’t been for quite a long time. I’m not a religious person, but my Jewishness is important to me, and these are very troubled times.”
Speaking on the morning after Donald Trump’s election, he continued: “I worry most about Ukraine. And I worry about the Middle East. This is very good news this morning for Netanyahu, and like most British Jews, I am extremely worried and critical of Netanyahu.”
Asked how he found his recent visit to shul – to Kehillah North London, a progressive community in Stoke Newington – after a lengthy pause he said: “It was very emotional. It was comforting.”
The community “was a place where a prayer was recited, not only for Israel, but for Israel and Palestine. And so, it was perhaps a non-typical service, but I felt at home there.”
While some of Lansman’s comrades have left the Labour Party since Corbyn’s departure from office, he said he “never had any hesitation about staying in the Labour Party.” Those who have left have departed “the only organisation in which the left can make political advances in this country”.
The veteran left-winger, whose father was a Conservative councillor in Hackney, does not see the emergence of independent MPs elected on an explicitly pro-Gaza stance as a positive development: “There are clearly lots of people who are prepared to vote for independents now, particularly amongst British Muslims. I don’t like to see politics demarcated along religious lines.
“I don’t think that’s a healthy political culture, but it’s what’s happened. It’s happened in the context of the war in Israel and Palestine, which is having effects across, well, across the politics of the world.”
Lansman spends some of his time volunteering on behalf of Omdim Beyachad/Standing Together, a grassroots Israeli Jewish and Palestinian group campaigning for a shared society in Israel and for peace. “It exudes hope for a positive future in Israel, which Netanyahu does not”, he said.
He leafletted the Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool in September on behalf of the group.
But he was saddened by the reception this pro-peace and coexistence group received from some left-wing Labour members, “I was often leafleting on my own and I was very depressed by the kind of stony silence of so many people on the left to whom I handed leaflets,” he said.
Although over the years Lansman has been on plenty of pro-Palestine marches, he said he would not now as he would not feel “comfortable” on them.
“I do think that the vast majority of hundreds of thousands of people who go on those marches go for perfectly decent reasons,” he explained. I don’t think that they are all ‘bad people’. But yes, there are Hamas supporters amongst them”. And although these were “quite a small minority”, he was saddened because he thought “people there are not very open to the to the messages from Omdim Beyachad”.
Although he found the recent Haaretz conference at JW3 uplifting, “it was horrible having to go through that hostility”, he said in reference to aggressive pro-Palestine protesters who targeted it.
“I had to brave the demonstrators outside. You know, being shouted at with hatred by people using slogans, many of which I agreed with, you know, ‘stop the war’. I’m in favour of ending the war”, Lansman said.
