Two weeks before the general election, the Jewish Chronicle commissioned a Survation poll to map the voting intentions of British Jews. To our surprise, we found that unlike the rest of the country, the Tories were just ahead in the community, by nine percentage points. The stain of the Corbyn years, it seemed, had not yet been fully erased.
The following week, however, a second, larger poll was published. This one, by Jewish Policy Research, put Labour 16 points ahead.
It was against this background of ambiguity that amid high drama overnight, the Jewish heartland seat of Finchley fell to Labour’s Sarah Sackman, who defeated the Conservative candidate, Alex Deans, by 4,581 votes. The result was particularly poignant given the fact that the seat had previously been held by Mike Freer, who had stood up for the Jews and Israel for 14 years before a shameful act of arson made it all too much. A fighter to the end, he was pictured canvassing for Deane on the very last day of the campaign.
As the late Rabbi Lionel Blue famously said, ‘Jews are like everybody else but more so’. This is especially true in politics, where radical movements that are subversive to western values inevitably come for the Jews first.
A question that has been foremost in the minds of many British voters over the past six weeks has been whether Labour – and Sir Keir Starmer – have changed. Just five years ago, it was a party of cranks, extremists, bigots and anti-Semites. Just five years ago, Sir Keir appeared to do his utmost to put their hempy chieftain in No. 10. Could the country trust him........