Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Re: UK - The Jewish vote really does count

 notion of distinctive voting patterns among Jews
curioso che Miliband manco venga nominato eh

History suggests British Jewish leaders are wrong to shy away from the
notion of distinctive voting patterns among Jews
o Geoffrey Alderman
o 
guardian.co.uk
, Monday 19 April 2010 12.37 BST
In the early 1970s, as I researched a textbook on the British electoral
system, I became aware of a very significant gap in the then existing
literature on voting habits among the British electorate. A great deal
of material existed, naturally, on socio-economic class and its
electoral impact. There was some material – not as much as there might
have been – on the relationship between religion and voting. And some
research had been carried out into the Irish vote – research that was
principally an offshoot of the much greater body of research into "the
Irish question". But on the relationship between ethnicity and voting
there was very little indeed. I was determined to repair this omission,
and began polling Jewish voting intentions in selected London
constituencies.
A phone call reached me from an organisation calling itself the Board of
Deputies of British Jews. I was invited to lunch with its so-called
defence department. And at that lunch I was ordered – repeat ordered –
to cease forthwith my investigation of Jewish voting habits. Jews, I was
told, voted just like everyone else. To poll a sample of Jews was to
poll a sample of "ordinary" voters – no more and no less. So what was
the point of my efforts? Besides, my hosts added, to ask how Jews were
going to vote, or had voted, was to plant in the minds of the non-Jewish
community, among whom we British Jews lived, the idea that Jews were not
fully integrated into British society. I was told that Jews, in fact,
were fully integrated. There was, therefore, no "Jewish dimension" to an
election, and to suggest otherwise was to place the entirety of British
Jewry in some (ill-defined) jeopardy.
I did not pay attention to these strictures. Or rather, I did pay
attention to them, but only as evidence that could help me answer the
question why the Jewish vote in British politics had been so poorly
researched. Within British Jewry, image is everything. And the fact was
that for generations, the fathers of the community had decreed that
there must be no hint of a special, distinctive "Jewish" vote in the
British body politic.
History, however, tells a different story. The votes of Jewish electors
played a pivotal role in the epic struggle of Lionel de Rothschild
(1847-58) to enter the House of Commons as a professing Jew, because the
constituency for which he repeatedly stood – the City of London –
contained several hundred Jewish businessmen who qualified for the
property-related franchise. The parliamentary career of Samuel Montagu,
a Yiddish speaking banker, was built on his relationship with his Jewish
electors in that most Jewish of constituencies, Whitechapel, for which
he sat as Liberal MP 1885-1900. The near-defeat of the Labour candidate
at the Whitechapel by-election of November-December 1930 was a major
factor in the decision of Ramsay Macdonald's minority Labour government
to ditch its anti-Zionist policy in Palestine.
The Jewish vote was pivotal to the 1945 victory of Britain's last
Communist MP, Phil Piratin, at Stepney, but it was equally pivotal to
the defeat of Maurice Orbach (a self-proclaimed Labour Zionist who had
conspicuously failed to support Israel during the Suez crisis) at East
Willesden in 1959. In February 1974, his Jewish electors saved John
Gorst, a gentile Zionist, from defeat at Hendon North. Four years later,
on the other side of London, the Jews gave the Conservative candidate a
resounding victory at a dramatic by-election at Ilford North, where Sir
Keith Joseph had openly – and most successfully – campaigned for his
Jewish brethren to support Thatcherite economic and immigration policies.
What of the present electoral contest? Jews, however defined, form no
more than half of one percent of the UK population, but they are heavily
concentrated in London and Manchester. Of the constituencies in which
Jews account for at least 10% of the population, seven are Labour held.
One of these – Finchley & Golders Green – is so highly marginal that it
seems bound to be lost to the Conservatives irrespective of any special
Jewish factor.
But in another, the adjacent Hendon seat, which could fall to the Tories
on a swing of about 3.8%, there is an ongoing battle for the Jewish
vote. Andrew Dismore, who has held the seat for Labour since 1997, has
impeccable Zionist credentials (he would not otherwise have become MP
for Hendon), but his constituency standing has been undermined by the
Labour's government's failure to amend the "universal jurisdiction" law,
which currently permits private citizens to apply for the arrest of
prominent Israeli politicians who set foot on British soil, and by David
Miliband's recent condemnation of Israel over the use of fake British
passports in the Dubai assassination of a senior Hamas terrorist. To add
to Dismore's woes, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee is encouraging
its supporters in Hendon to vote for anyone but him. So a curious
combination of Jewish votes and Muslim votes for Matthew Offord, his
Conservative challenger, could hand the seat to the Tories.
But in a nationwide political contest as knife-edge as the present one
appears to be, it isn't only in recognisably "Jewish" constituencies
that Jewish votes count. Jewish voters might prove critical to outcomes
in seats as far apart as "Jewish" Bury South (where Ivan Lewis,
Miliband's second-in-command, is facing a very strong challenge from
Michelle Wiseman, chief executive of Manchester Jewish Community Care)
and East Renfrewshire, Glasgow, in which the comparatively tiny Jewish
community may be persuaded to save Jim Murphy, the Scottish secretary,
who is, naturally, a leading light in Labour Friends of Israel.
Whatever the present Anglo-Jewish leadership may wish, the Jewish vote,
in other words, is very much alive and well.