The Labour Party is being rocked by allegations of anti-Semitism from a number of sources. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has claimed that Jeremy Corbyn is leading Labour into a “dark place of ugly conspiracy theories”, while many Jewish supporters of the Labour Party are distressed at what they perceive as a growing anti-Semitic strain in a party that has traditionally had a strong appeal for Jewish voters.
But, as George Orwell pointed out in his 1945 essay on “Anti-Semitism in Britain”, there has always been prejudice against Jews, on the left as well as on the right. The working-class attitude to Jews was often hostile. He quoted “a very eminent figure in the Labour Party” who said to him, of Jewish immigrants: “We never asked these people to come to this country. If they choose to come here, let them take the consequences.”
These days, left-wing anti-semitism is fuelled by hostility to Israel and sympathy for Palestinians, but some is also old-style anti-Semitism in new livery.
Some left-wingers say that they can’t be anti-Jewish because they have always been against racism. But the roots of anti-Semitism make it different from other forms of racism.
When I was researching the life of William Joyce, “Lord Haw-Haw”, I came to see that while racism was often based on a sense of superiority and power – from white people who assumed that they were better than people of colour – anti-Semitism was often based on envy and jealousy. And also a feeling of inferiority towards Jewish people as high achievers and brainy successes. Even philosemites (those who are pro-Jewish) make that point: that so many geniuses have been Jewish, from Albert Einstein to Mark Zuckerberg.
Once the horrors of the Holocaust were fully grasped, there was a general decline in anti-Semitism, thankfully, and of course it should never be tolerated. But some members of the Labour Party believe that Jeremy Corbyn has allowed this noxious weed to appear once again. He rejects such claims, but they could bring about the end of his leadership.
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Pope Paul’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, which has occasioned many reflections on its 50th anniversary, was a significant moment in the history of the “contraceptive revolution” which emerged with the Pill.
As the French feminist Françoise Giroud said: “The Pill influenced you whether you took it or not.” She was saying that a medication that promised absolute control of fertility altered the mindset of millennia: pregnancy was no longer an inevitable risk of sexual congress.
It wasn’t the pharmaceutical itself, but the knowledge it imparted. Everything touching fertility today is affected.
For example, a Scandinavian app which offers to track fertility called “Natural Cycles” is in trouble with the Advertising Standards Authority because some women have become unexpectedly pregnant while using it. This is considered scandalously unacceptable.
Meanwhile, in Britain, the opposite occurred when the supermarket Asda sold pregnancy tests which led a woman to believe, wrongly, that she was pregnant. Equally shocking!
The Pill revolution introduced the idea that we have absolute control over fertility and “total autonomy” over the human body. And any time Nature decides differently, it’s now seen an outrage against our rights.
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Present divorce law strikes a balance: it obliges a couple to wait five years before a marriage may be finally dissolved. That means a divorce cannot always be obtained automatically – as happened to Mrs Tini Owens, aged 68, who wanted her marriage dissolved sooner. There was much public sympathy for Mrs Owens’s position after she lost her Supreme Court challenge.
But there is another side to the story. Mrs Owens’s husband, Hugh, 80, claims there is nothing wrong with his marriage. The unhappy wife – who lives in a separate house from her spouse and is free to do as she pleases – will get a full divorce in 2020.
You never know what the undercurrents are in any matrimonial situation, so who can judge what is really going on. But if the spousal roles were reversed – if the husband demanded a divorce, and the wife pleaded that she did not wish to be discarded – would attitudes be different? Would a man be regarded as a wife-abandoning bounder?
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