The scale of any potential antisemitism in the Labour Party is worth putting into perspective. In April 2018, the party membership stood at 540,000. At that time, there were 70 cases under investigation. That’s not proven. That’s under investigation.
That is 0.00012963%.
So one Labour member of every 12,963 in the party may harbour antisemitic views.
This isn’t very scientific, but let’s at least attempt to work out what damage these potential racists are going to do on a constituency level. The unscientific bit is that I’m just going to divide members by constituencies. I know full well that the level of support changes a great deal, but at this point, I can’t really be arsed doing the legwork to get exact CLP numbers. This will do for now.
540,000 members in 650 constituencies breaks down at around 831 members per consituency, rounding up to the nearest whole number.
Going by the sums above, 1 in 12693, and taking the rounding into consideration that is 0.0064 potential anti-Semites per CLP. That’s why I’m not too bothered about the crude method of division. The numbers are so low that even a CLP with particularly high numbers is never going to muster enough support to mould Labour into a new version of NSDAP.
Sure, some will say that Labour hasn’t done enough, and that there should be more than 70 cases under investigation. I will say that if you look at the details of the cases already being investigated, a good many of them are going to be criticism of Israeli policy rather than an irrational hatred of our Jewish brothers and sisters.
Look at the cold hard numbers, and the hysteria coming from the pro-Zionist lobby looks disproportionate. That, unfortunately, is a term too often associated with that political movement’s activities. It’s unfortunate because it deserves much harsher criticism for pretty much every outrage it unleashes.
Fortunately, I think it may have stretched the bounds of credibility a bit too much on this one. The harsher criticism is already happening.
