Lord Jonathan Mendelsohn is a politically connected lobbyist who has been a Labour member of the British House of Lords since 2013. He’s the shadow spokesperson for business, innovation and skills, and he has also served as trustee and director of Bnai Brith Hillel Foundation and the Holocaust Educational Trust. He was in Toronto recently and spoke to The CJN.

Tell us about your trip to Toronto. What brings you here?

I came to Canada in my capacity as president of the Commonwealth Jewish Council, a long established organization that is being revitalized and relaunched. I came to see the Canadian Jewish leadership about their participation.

Is Canada going to participate in this project?

Yes, I believe so. We’ve had very useful conversations in Canada, and I’m optimistic we’ll have some of those representations fairly soon. It’s unthinkable to do this without Canadian Jewry, the largest Commonwealth Jewish community. It has such clear expertise in community development, political activity and other forms of support that Jewish communities need and that Israel needs.

I think a lot of Canadians would be surprised that a Jew can be a member of the House of Lords. I think the image is that its members are aristocrats.

It is not the case that a number of Jews have suddenly joined the landed aristocracy. The House of Lords was reformed some years ago, and there are more life peers now than the hereditaries. The hereditaries still exist, but only a small number still sit in the House of Lords. I was appointed by my political party, and by the leader, at that time.

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There are a large number of Jewish members in the House of Lords. In fact, probably somewhere over 10 per cent of the overall members are Jewish. It’s a high, disproportionate association, which I think speaks not just to the political involvement in the community, but also that it draws from leading figures from the scientific, legal and other great communities of achievement in society. There is more than a minyan. There’s a veritable small community there.

We’ve seen Labour MPs being suspended by your party for various anti-Semitic statements. Does the Labour party have a problem with anti-Semitism?

The answer is yes, but let’s put it into a context. All political parties have some degree of problems. Some years ago, we would have said the Liberal Democrats were more difficult.

It’s also the case that after the last Gaza conflict, we saw in the United Kingdom a huge rise of anti-Semitism, and much of that was contained within the ultra-left and also some discordant voices in the Muslim community, who started to adopt some traditional notions of anti-Semitism, almost unthinkingly, as a way of criticizing Israel. As part of the election of [Labour Leader] Jeremy Corbyn, a large group of those sorts of people have become members of the Labour party. So a small problem became a big problem.

However, the really big problem of the Labour party is that we haven’t gripped this issue, and the leadership hasn’t gripped this issue, and that we have still a lot of problems to tease out.

Now, they have appointed some reviews and some inquiries, we have suspended some of the members, but the test will be how firm and effective the leadership is in rooting this out.

Nineteen people in Labour have been suspended, but one of them was reinstated. How serious is the party taking this if an MP has already been reinstated?

I think the history of the resolution of some of the suspensions tells the story of two tales. One is an MP named Naz Shah, who came from an area that has a particular character to it in Bradford.

Before she was an MP, she posted a statement on social media and she was horrified to learn that the statement related to anti-Semitism. [Shah posted in 2014 that Israelis should be transferred to the United States to solve the Israel-Palestine problem.] She issued a fulsome apology. She has gone out of her way to ensure she understands the situation and she addresses it. And in many ways those who have unwittingly fallen into this anti-Semitism, because it has been so culturally strong within her community, and who are now acting very well in dealing with it, those are the people you want to encourage.

You then have other cases. We had a recent suspension, someone who is the vice-chair of the Momentum Movement, a faction supporting Corbyn, whose suspension was lifted, quite incorrectly in my view, who showed absolutely no remorse, and undoubtedly this person will be a problem in times ahead. It shows a rather strong and stark problem among Corbyn’s supporters and the group called Momentum.

Finally you have the particular problem of Ken Livingstone. He threw oil into the flames, to try to be as provocative as he tries to be on these sorts of issues.

He is the former mayor of London, not exactly a backbencher.

I have always harboured deep reservations about his approach to these sorts of political matters. I believe he had not changed his views since the early 1980s, since the time he [co-edited] the Labour Herald [a far-left paper that published cartoons comparing former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to Nazis] and adopted Lenni Brenner’s attitudes in that particular period. [Brenner is a Marxist who claims Zionists co-operated with the Nazis.]

I was never convinced that the presentation Livingstone made to the community and to others of a different sort of politics was entirely true. And it gives me no comfort whatsoever today that it has proved right, that he held and harboured the same sort of politics through that period. I think it has been a dangerous circumstance and certainly what happens to Ken Livingstone is an utterly key test of the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn had a very interesting exchange in Parliament with Prime Minister David Cameron recently over whether Hamas and Hezbollah were “friends.” Does it concern you that Mr. Corbyn referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as friends?

I do not share the views of my leader on the Middle East. I do not share the views of many of the people who are part of that group. I don’t think they have a view that enhances peace, that talks about the need for the Israelis and Palestinians to come together and resolve matters amicably. I do think their politics leads more to conflict than it does to peace, and I argue that very robustly with them.

Given the high number of Muslim immigrants coming to your country and reports they harbour some of these attitudes, can we expect British politicians to make more of these anti-Israel, anti-Jewish statements?

No. I wouldn’t like to try to call the high point of where anti-Semitism is in the United Kingdom at this stage. But I do think the signs are encouraging, and we have had for a long period of time ambivalence toward how we integrate certain communities and how we deal with values and other sorts of things.

I think it’s very important that governments continue to try to bear down on extremism and governments look for ways in which you can build a viable British Muslim identity.

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I think also the election of Sadiq Khan as London mayor, who has a very sensible attitude toward these matters, is a very encouraging sign that you probably now have a group of allies and a group of leaders in the Muslim community who can start to bear down on some of the problems we face.

It’s certainly not the case to believe that there are no very sensible voices in the Muslim community. They do have some problems, but it’s certainly not the case to condemn all or fear the future. I think there are more signs to be optimistic about the future in Britain than to be negative.

There have been stories about European Jews, particularly French Jews, who are very worried about their future, and some have left. Do British Jews have similar fears about their future?

I think we are different than many other parts of Europe. There are very difficult circumstances in some countries. France is an acutely difficult environment at this stage, and we support the French Jewish community as much as we can.

I think the U.K. is slightly different. We’ve had tremendous support from the government for a whole range of things, politically, in security terms and the government also contributes toward the Jewish community’s security at schools and other places. We have a very active community growing and developing in the U.K., in fact, even demographically growing in a way it hasn’t done before, albeit strongly influenced by the haredi community. We have a large investment in education, schools and a whole range of things.

We do have a problem with anti-Semitism, no different in the U.K. to the problems we had previously, perhaps in some areas more difficult, with a greater degree of complexity. We aren’t seeing a withdrawal of Jews to other places for fear of the situation. That’s not to say people aren’t fearful for the future. But some of those fears are significantly muted and people aren’t packing their bags in order to go. In the U.K. we have a long way to go before we get to that sort of position. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.