Jonathan Freedland notes that Labour MP Tam Dalyell’s statement that Tony Blair is influenced by a Jewish cabal has not received the condemnation it deserves. Typical is Peter Mandelson’s laughing away of the remarks by calling Dalyell “incorrigible”.
I’ve written a lot about anti-Americanism being an acceptable prejudice in Europe. Antisemitism attracts more criticism, but remarks like Dalyell’s are accepted to a degree that would not be tolerated in the US. Sometimes British antisemitism has more subtlety than Dalyell’s. During the first Thatcher administration, former Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan remarked that her cabinet had “more old Estonians than Old Etonians”. That at least had the benefit of being very witty, as well as antisemitic.
Having grown up in comfortable Chicago suburbs and attended a sophisticated university, I had never personally encountered antisemitism until I arrived in England in 1978. At Oxford, it was common to hear casually antisemitic remarks. And I later silenced a dinner following a cricket match I played in by telling the opposing captain we didn’t tolerate racist jokes (as he was about to launch into one of his carefully honed after-dinner quips). I guess it’s the price paid for being a very small — but reasonably visible — minority in a country (there are about 200,000 Jews in Britain).
In my experience, a lot of that unthinking antisemitism has abated, but Dalyell’s comments show it’s still there.