Anti-Semitism

Eric Ollerenshaw Excerpts

Tuesday 9th December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Mrs Main. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), the chair of the all-party group, on introducing this timely debate and on his non-stop work on this issue. I also congratulate Danny Stone and others who nagged me intensely about it.

For part of my career, I was a local councillor in the London borough of Hackney. I represented the Springfield ward in Stamford Hill, which is nearly 50% ultra-Orthodox, Haredi or strictly Orthodox—whatever we choose to call it. My hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) talked about the divisions and arguments in Israel, but people should come to Stamford Hill if they want to see divisions and arguments.

That was my introduction to a certain section of the Jewish community—it is now becoming a huge section of that community. It is perhaps pertinent to the debate that it is the only part of British Jewry that is visibly Jewish; its members are totally recognisable wherever they are—whether they are in their community in Manchester, or in Hackney and Stamford Hill. Members of the community would regale me with stories about the 1950s, which is not so long ago, when Blackshirts would come down the streets on Saturdays, knowing full well that members of the community could not pick up a telephone to ring for help or get on a bus to go for help, and would smash the cars in the road. That was only 60 years ago.

The community had had some of the worst experiences. Many were refugees in the 1930s. Interestingly, in terms of the present debate on immigration, I once called on a couple in Tower Court—I remember it specifically because I had done some work for them, as a good local councillor would. I called round, as a good Conservative local councillor would, to make sure they were voting the right way, and, for the first time, they asked me in. When the husband stretched out his arm to invite me in, I saw a tattoo on it, and I suddenly realised what it was. I went in and met his wife. They were children—survivors—of the holocaust and the camps. They built a family here and had grandchildren. They were very proud of this country. I had come round because of the vote without knowing the history of this couple. The husband told me he thought he might still be an illegal immigrant, because when he came across to Britain in 1945, the country had wanted bricklayers, but he had actually been an apprentice jeweller under his father. He wondered, in a joking sense, whether he was still safe. However, the majority of that community have always wondered whether they are safe in this country.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Mr Scott) mentioned under-reporting, and I suspect there is massive under-reporting in that part of Stamford Hill by children going to the different schools and colleges, and by others. Most of the men in the community have to go to synagogue at least three times a day to pray, and they are completely recognisable, so they have suffered all kinds of things.

Essentially, however, members of the community have made a massive contribution. One—Councillor Joe Lobenstein—is now getting on. He was the first ultra-Orthodox member of any of the communities I mentioned to put himself forward for election. At the time, some of the rabbis said “Don’t do that, because you’ll expose us.” However, he did, although I do not think he has ever got the recognition he was due for the work he did on behalf of the community. He struck up a relationship in those early days with the incoming Muslim community, and he taught me as a new councillor a lesson, when we voted to support a planning application for the first big mosque in the area. Joe’s view was that one religious community should support another.

I have always wanted to get Ministers—here is an invite—to come to Cazenove road in Hackney on a Friday to see thousands of religious Gujarati Muslims pouring down one end to get into the mosque, and thousands of religious ultra-Orthodox men going the other way, to go to synagogue. Never has there been a problem there, because there is a Jewish-Muslim council for the elders. It does not operate much, but particularly when there are issues in the middle east it comes together to try to calm things down, and works for mutual benefit, usually on the latest synagogue or mosque planning application, or whatever it is; I am sure that ex-councillors will recognise that.



That community taught me a massive amount, but of course those people grew up with the assumption that has been referred to, which is a terrible stain on European civilisation: the acceptance, almost, that anti-Semitism will be there for ever. At the same time, its members were extremely proud of the home that this country had given them, and intensely patriotic.

There has been mention of the interesting statistics from the Community Security Trust, to whose work I pay tribute. In 2013 it recorded 529 anti-Semitic incidents, which was an 18% decrease on 2012. One might therefore talk about all the work that has been done by Governments and Ministers of both parties, by the all-party group—both before my time and now—and by many people in the community, to deal with that terrible stain. This year people have said to me, “Obviously, the number of incidents has gone up and up”, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy asked, why do we assume that the issue in Israel should automatically reverberate as anti-Semitic attacks in this country? Perhaps unfortunately for the chairman of the all-party group, he has many years of work to do yet if people just assume “That would happen, wouldn’t it?” That is how ingrained a situation we are dealing with.

Hon. Members have talked about the new online phenomena. At a meeting of the all-party group on Islamophobia there was discussion of Facebook and all the different ways of dealing with hate crime in that context. I wondered what the impact of that was for anti-Semitism, although it is Twitter that has been mentioned specifically in this debate. I take some comfort from what the Home Secretary said to Jewish News:

“We’re very clear that if something is a crime offline it can be a crime online.”

She added:

“It’s necessary to make sure the right guidance is available for police and other authorities”.

As the chairman of the all-party group, the hon. Member for Bassetlaw, asked, what prosecutions have there been? What is happening? That is why the debate is extremely pertinent. The thing that has emerged that most shocked me came out of some of the demonstrations about problems in the middle east; it was the phrase “Hitler was right”, which apparently then trended on Twitter. I am not a Twitter user, Mrs Main, and you obviously know why I am not and do not want to be.

I sometimes say that when I had a proper job I was a teacher. I taught history, and I remember huge debates about the introduction of the national curriculum for year 9 history, and about whether it was right to examine the history of the holocaust. As a history teacher I said we should do it, and that we should not underestimate children of that age. However, I remember my shock when half of my class of year 9s were in tears over the whole issue at the end of a class. That is either because I was a good teacher or because I was a bad teacher. I distinctly remember two girls saying, “We never knew this happened, sir.” Other hon. Members have talked about the level of knowledge about the subject. Education is critical in giving the right historical context. I support the Government in maintaining the holocaust as part of the history curriculum. Children can deal with it.

Hon. Members have also mentioned the work of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust in taking children to Auschwitz. When I was a history teacher I avoided going; I did not want it to be just a museum, but I did go with the trust three or four years ago, and, as others who have been there have found, the awful impact stays. I also want to mention the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust, in particular in Lancaster and Fleetwood, now that I am its Member of Parliament. The Jewish population there is minimal, but I pay tribute to the work done there by an ex-Labour MP, Stanley Henig, from Lancaster university—and also to Liz Neat, from the National Coalition Building Institute—to preserve the practice of marking Holocaust memorial day every January.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned that it is more important to support and continue such ceremonies in constituencies without a significant Jewish population, particularly in the light of the spike in anti-Semitism; that reminds us that the stain is there, and may unfortunately remain for many a long year. It would be pertinent this January to make sure that Holocaust memorial day was observed throughout the country, Jewish community or no Jewish community. That would be a clear statement of what we can, if we like, call British values. It would show that we recognise that the terrible scourge still exists, the stain that it has put on our history, and that we are determined to continue the commemoration. I therefore commend the work of the all-party group and the hon. Member for Bassetlaw, who brought the matter before the House.