This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
Electioneering is full on. Campaigns, mess-ups, sharpened messages, and increasingly combative speeches, TV debates, emotive vox pops, leaflets and unending polls. Too much already, you think.
But as the main parties flood our minds with words, two issues are purposefully avoided: Brexit and Gaza. Pro-Europeans have raised the former in the media and other public spaces, but the latter seems to have been expurgated by the political class.
Gaza is unmentionable, “dangerous”, off-limits. Candidates from the main parties must feel the throbbing urgency, sense voter frustrations and growing fury about such undemocratic and underhand suppression in a free election. Yet they do not engage.
I’ve been talking to people in London, the Midlands, Bristol and Bradford – only a third of them Muslims – about this absence. The youngest is 26, the oldest 68; they go from left to right; and come from various class, race and ethnic backgrounds. Some see it as a “conspiracy of silence”, while many others say they are losing faith in democracy.
As JD, a teacher in an inner city school, put it: “Our elections are not clean, not open, not fair. Born and bred English, I always believed in the system. Not any more.”
Spoil their ballot papers
Eight out of the 34 individuals I spoke to stated they would spoil their ballot papers; three are going to vote for Labour but with heavy hearts; the rest said their votes would go to the Green Party which has been most vocal about Israel’s civilian victims and violent settlers.
We should all be concerned. Many people, myself included, see this silence as “censorship”, which not only imperils the UK’s democratic credibility but makes our nation complicit in Israel’s relentless violence against and displacement of Palestinian civilians. Hamas is utterly ruthless and provoked the war on 7 October by killing Israeli civilians and taking hostages, many of them still captive. Israel has been imprisoning, intimidating, using daily violence and humiliating and dispossessing Palestinians for decades. It acted like a terrorist state while accusing those it persecuted of being terrorists. Our parliamentary reps joined Friends of Israel while this was going on.
A UN expert describes what Israel is doing as “genocide”. Last week, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell stated at a meeting in Luxembourg that Israel seems to have a “clear will” to annex the West Bank “little by little”; that the humanitarian situation is disastrous; and that “unfortunately, it is a war that will test the survival of Palestinians in Gaza”.
Voters are not dumb
The words were timorous and inadequate. The EU, like the UK, carries on backing and arming Israel – but at least he spoke out. As did Emmanuel Macron recently – unlike Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer and their packs currently out and about. In a long, intimate interview with Charlotte Edwardes in The Guardian last Saturday, Starmer spoke emotively about his wife’s Jewish relatives, some in Israel, “who’ve been affected by the war”. He appeared to express no concern about Palestinian fears and casualties.
Voters are not dumb. They can see the naked double standards and smell putrefying ethics.
By the time you read this more Palestinians will have been killed and made homeless. We must care about this. To think and say that is not antisemitism. To march for a ceasefire is not antisemitism, though many with power and influence insist it is. Those who use the accusation to impede all criticism of Israel and any support for Palestinians are devaluing the currency, just as antisemitism, which vilely dehumanises and threatens Jewish people, is getting worse.
Fractures and fears
Politicians are out of step with many Jewish voters too. My dear friend Rachel Shabi, born in Israel to Iraqi Jewish parents, has penned a profound article in Prospect magazine on the war and British Jewry. The fractures and fears are explored, so too new solidarities and challenges: “Standing with Palestinians has left many young people estranged from the mainstream Jewish community. But it has enabled a reconnection to Jewish values that resonate with their progressivism, antiracism and moral compass.”
One of my interviewees, Avi (not his real name), is one of those. He won’t vote because “none of the parties want to stop the genocide. Many of us are revolted by that. If these guys think they are doing Jews a big favour, they need to wake up. Sure, the Board of Deputies and them are for Israel, always, but times and we are changing.”
There’s still time. If they don’t speak up now they should never be forgiven.
Moving forward
I have many invisible, vindictive enemies out there, folk who hate who I am or what I say. Most people in public life have these adversaries and it can bring you down. I have avoided the noxious debates about trans people and women’s rights because I didn’t want yet more abuse.
That is no longer tenable. The horrible, vituperative denunciations of David Tennant and others who feel empathy for trans people is becoming intolerable. Not all feminists agree with JK Rowling and other high-profile women who argue that trans rights threaten female rights. Many of us feel we should be kinder and more understanding. Oh here they come, the hate Y.A.B. posse…
A conversation I had this week
Last Saturday we were invited to Homerton College’s Charter Dinner, an illustrious black-tie event. One of the most diverse University of Cambridge colleges, Homerton elected the first ever black head of an Oxbridge College, Lord (Simon) Woolley, an activist I have known over two decades.
Just as we were getting to Cambridge, Simon rang and asked if I could deliver a short after-dinner speech. Their chosen speaker was ill. Sure, I, said, brightly, thinking a few warm words would come easy. He gave me a few pointers. I got up and found myself delivering a passionate sermon on connectivity, equality, diversity and the futility of identity politics. Simon told me the audience of more than 200 was “dazzled”. Afterwards, several attendees wanted to know how I spoke without notes. Something mysterious happened I replied. It was God wot did it.
Yasmin’s pick
Our son and daughter were tied up on Father’s Day, so I said I would do something nice. We lunched at the exquisite Chinese restaurant Hakkasan in Mayfair – they had a special deal – and then went to the atmospheric Handel Hendrix House nearby. The legendary musicians lived next door to each other, at different times, obviously.
Hendrix’s vinyl collection on display included The Messiah. Music filled the rooms. Dad, who loved both, was elated. Job done.
This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.