173: The Antisemitism Spectrum

0:00This is Matt Rogers from Las Culture East us with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture Research with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try a new food and suddenly it's like, okay, hold on, I got a new favorite food. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Kewpie mayo. Yeah, it's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it at the grocery store. And this mayo is different. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Kewpie only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, almost buttery.

0:31Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. egg sandwiches, fries, burgers. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. People who really care about flavor use it. Put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand. Kewpie, the original Japanese mayonnaise. That sound could mean a lot of things. And when something's going wrong at home, the hardest part can be figuring out what the problem actually is. At Thumbtack, you can upload a voice message or a photo, and our AI-powered search will help diagnose your project. Plus, the pros we know have over 14 million five-star reviews, so you can hire with confidence.

1:09Bumtech. We know homes. Hire the right pro today. Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name's Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the iStudio with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen and Ian Hislop. If you're watching this, you may have already voted in the local elections. You might even know the results. But one really interesting thing about the whole campaign is that so much of it has focused on what we would think of previously as the edges of British politics on right and left, reform and the Greens. It seems increasingly quite hard for the Conservatives and Labour, traditionally quite big players here.

1:47You've missed out the Lib Dems again. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Which is the theme of the campaign. Literally, the Lib Dems are complaining, our polls, they were consistent. No one even mentioned us. Yeah. It's very unfair. So I just thought I'd mention them. Is that a fair summary, Helen? I think that the Greens and Zach Polanski have taken up a vast majority of the oxygen in these campaigns for a very good reason. A lot of the seats that are being defended are Labour seats that are kind of green-facing. Some of them are reform-facing. They expect to lose a huge number of seats. So that's almost been kind of factored in at this point.

2:22If Labour even do slightly better than you think, everyone will kind of fall about themselves with shock. I'm bracing myself for a both reform and Greens saying the mainstream media underrated us but look how well we've done. This will be a lie if they say this. Everyone expects them to do incredibly well. And one of the things I found most interesting, I was reading Jim Wharton's very good newsletter, London Centric, in which he referred to the fact they'd got their hands on last year Reform's local elections playbook, their canvassing handbook. And one of the things they'd say to their candidates are let Nigel deal with the national issues.

2:55you just focus on on you lez or whatever it might be on potholes on the housing estate that no one wants built whatever it might be that's one thing and the other thing is don't post anything on social media at all don't think that this is now your time to air your thoughts about the middle east peace process and so i think having been through that mega storm of lots and lots of reform candidates being found out to have unpleasant views they there's something the party is very aware of as a problem. The Greens are further back on that learning curve, I would say. So we have two people who've been arrested on allegations of anti-Semitism.

3:29One of them's seen campaigning out for the Greens after that. You have the Greens deputy leader, Mothin Ali, saying to people who've been accused of anti-Semitism, you know, think about challenging the party on this. You know, we shouldn't give in to these smear campaigns. So that fight that the Corbyn era Labour Party went through in the years 2015 to 19 is now happening in very much the glare of publicity for the Greens. We should say, of course, this is in the wake of the Golders Green stabbings and renewed focus on anti-Semitism in British public life. It was prior to that as well. It was very obvious, even prior to the stabbings in Golders Green last week, that there was a concerted campaign of violence and intimidation against the Jewish community.

4:08So there were firebomb attacks on most notoriously the ambulances, but also a couple of attempted arson attacks at synagogues in North London. So it was quite clear that that sort of stuff was going on. And even prior to the Golders Green stabbing. Zach Polanski came out and said one of the most idiotic things that we needed to be wary of whether this was Jewish people feeling unsafe or whether it was just a perception they had of unsafety, which, I mean, there's quite a lot of clear evidence in there and firebombs attacks. I would feel quite unsafe. Yeah. And the stabbing outside Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester as well.

4:37I mean, if you look at the figures, the Jewish community in Britain is very small and it is enormously disproportionately affected by hate crimes. There isn't a synagogue or a Jewish school out there that doesn't have security around it, that doesn't have walls. And I think this is a community that has felt that it has been living in fear for really quite a long time now. Now, every party, I would say, has had its own problems with anti-Semitism in its ranks. I don't know about the Lib Dems, actually. They may have managed to dodge it. I'm not sure. But certainly, this was a problem in Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.

5:11There seemed to be lots of credible evidence this is now a problem in the contemporary Green Party. Again, one shouldn't forget that the leader of the Reform Party had quite a well-publicised incident during his school days, which 24 people gave evidence about and which has now been dismissed and it's considered bad taste to bring it up, so I thought I would. But it's not entirely gone, has it? Reform candidates, mostly now, are being discovered to have Islamophobic or whatever you want to call it, tendencies but there was a period where they were pretty anti-Semitic. Yeah, I think it's an interesting insight into the evolution of anti-Semitism in Britain is that it was the casual prejudice of choice, well, one of them, on the right in the 60s and 70s.

5:59And since then it has been, yeah, there are still neo-Nazis out there, but it has also now become associated with a particular left-wing form of anti-Semitism which bleeds into some things that are legitimate. I mean, this is always the problem with everybody draws their line in a different place, But it bleeds into criticisms of Israel, particularly the Gaza war, and also some of the tropes on the left about, you know, a global elite or a 1 % or billionaires. And some of those are perfectly legitimate. And then some of those go into Rothschilds, you know, Illuminati, Protocols of the Elders of Zionist controlled government.

6:32And then it gets closer, you know, and closer to overrank anti-Semitism. So I think that that is, you know, there has been an evolution in where you would imagine the prejudice would come. And for the right, as you say, Ian, the people who are now to be afraid of are Muslims. And you will hear all these tropes about a Muslim invasion of Europe, you know, this idea of kind of armies of rapists overtaking us. And so the kind of poles of the kind of the racism have switched. The far right are very keen on Israel now. So alongside the St. George flags, you had demonstrations where there was St. George.

7:05Oh, and the state of Israel. that's a long way for British fascism to move which has been pretty solidly anti-Semitic right the way through. Now it isn't. Tommy Robinson was invited over to Israel, wasn't he? By, I think, the President's office which is an extraordinary kind of fusion of people. But there's another thing I've noticed that's really interesting is the sort of bandwagoning by the right onto this anti-Semitism and blame that all on Muslim communities as well which goes along with that they are being made the scapegoat for absolutely everything by the right. But the idea that anti-Semitism in this country has somehow been imported in on the small boats and it's another migrant, it's a migrant community who are completely to blame for that as well, which is sort of equally inaccurate.

7:46I mean, Keir Starmer, I know, is trying to make the point at the moment that this is itself evidently a massive problem for society and it's something that we should all be ashamed of. And to kind of move it on into just trying to scapegoat someone else seems to be as useless a reaction to it as any other, really. Right. Now, I wasn't on the podcast last time. So can I just check? Is this all just an attempt by you three to have another go at poor old Zach Polanski, who is doing his best under very trying circumstances to offer hope and change? Damn it, he's spontaneous. Just facing this sort of sneering cynicism from the media.

8:23is that well okay so uh just to give you a glimpse behind the scenes while you were away um probably doing actually something actively green rather than uh the stuff the green party's more into these days um we got criticized by zach polanski for not understanding the appeal of the greens uh and ian stands indicted of the crime of saying they don't seem to talk about environmentalism very much they are more a left-wing populist party and i i know and i remember this as the as i live in lewisham which is a contest between labour and the greens as the green leaflet Big picture of Zach Polanski on the front, dropped through my letterbox.

8:56Can you guess how many times environmentalism was mentioned in that leaflet, Andy? I'm going to say double figures at least. You're going to say none, because it was none. It was about their populist economic proposals, the£15 minimum wage, for example. And the way that Zach Polanski phrased this in his interview with the Times, essentially, well, paraphrased by decorating it for him, was everyone knows that they're in favour of green issues. That's sort of taken as a given. So actually they're going to talk about cost of living issues instead. one of the things I found quite unpleasant was the fact that Rachel Millwood, the other Green deputy leader apart from Mothin Ali, was on Question Time and she was asked about the Golders Green stabbing and the rise of anti-Semitism and she attributed it to the cost of living crisis and I think that is yeah I know but it's basically like austerity has made a lot of people feel very angry and what struck me about that is that is a mirror image of things you will hear from reform supporters who say essentially it's very hard not to be racist these days because, you know, all these people coming over and taking our jobs, right?

9:53And in both cases, there is this idea that economic insecurity gives people a sign-off, essentially, for finding a scapegoat. And I was quite surprised to hear that the Green Party deputy leaders signing off that something that they would attack very heavily when the right used that same language. Can I just say at this point, I would like to be unpopular on all fronts and say that there is classically a problem with Islamism and anti-Semitism. I made a documentary about anti-Semitic precedents and ended up, you know, witnessing the Cairo book fair a couple of years ago where they're actively selling Mein Kampf.

10:30And a lot of cartoonists in Arab newspapers literally would not get published anywhere else on the grounds of anti-Semitic tropes. So we can't ignore it. And I think it is it is worth saying that the eye has tried, which is usually a failed policy of saying we are against Israel's behavior in Gaza, but we're not very keen on anti-Semitism. after our Gaza cover, there was nothing but letters saying, you know, the eye is absolutely anti-Semitic, despite the number of literally every issue we write about, anti-Semitism online, Elon Musk, all of those things. But we do run pieces saying, guess what's happening in the West Bank?

11:14It's not great. Dr. Grimm runs those pieces. So attempting nuance is unacceptable in the new bipolar world. And that makes this issue even worse because everyone deliberately, you say, you know, the borders between the two get confused. I think they're deliberately confused by people who want to play in that space. And you've had experience of this a lot over the years because of the acid test of the letters page. Yes. You know, and whoever's complaining most, and it's normally when someone is popular, someone is new, as Zach Polanski undoubtedly is at the moment, someone that seems to be offering something different before mass disillusionment has kicked in, as happens in every single political career.

11:55It's part of the process. You experience that in real time, you know. Yes, and people are furious. They write letters, and it used to be the Scots Nats. They were easily the most prolific and bad-tempered letter writers about any mention of Nicola Sturgeon at all. Any suggestion that anything in Scotland had gone wrong in any way was just, you know, Sassanac, whinging, and you know, sort of, what you want, Boris then. UKIP originally, you've never seen so many letters. Tory's briefly the Boris cult, any mention of him, particularly the overflowing lavatory suggesting that was his legacy, I think there was a staggering number of letters.

12:38That was the cover, right? That was the cover with a literal toilet on it. I wanted to complain about that. It was so horrible. Yes, it was horrible. But the volume is, And the Greens are out now. Yeah. They are very, very offended by any criticism of Zach and any criticism of themselves. And I think it's when you get this rush of popularity, it doesn't occur to you that the thing that comes next is accountability. Yeah. Because you might be in. And by the time I say this, he might well be in charge of a party that's running a lot of councils. People are going to ask you things. and if they ask you things that you don't like or you don't particularly want to answer, that doesn't mean they're mainstream media smear merchants.

13:21I mean, you've just got to get beyond that. Otherwise, you know, you end up saying, I don't want journalism. I think about all the people we've had in politics in my lifetime, there has been a real difference between what you might call the populists and the mainstream. The mainstream just moan a lot less about journalism, right? And that's one of the things that I think is very different about them. Well, there was a very fun piece last week, I think, in The Economist, analysing 35 ,000 likes by Zach Polanski on Blue Sky, which is his social media platform of choice. I mean, he's filming all the time, he's writing all the time, and he's on it all the time, clearly.

13:56And he will like anything that mentions him positively. And he will also like quite a lot of stuff that's incredibly rude about anyone who's been even slightly critical of him. Right. And it's just... I don't have time to like 35 ,000 things on Blue Sky. I don't know how someone running a major political party does. But that speaks to what he's very good at, which is content creation. He's very visible. He turns up, he's pushing out his message. These are the things I will give him credit for, is that that is part of the role of party leader now. It's something that Keir Starmer is obviously failing at and terrible at.

14:29What does Keir Starmer think we're going, or how do you think we get there? Very hard to tell you now, even. He's just not communicating those things. Zach Kalansky is. I mean I think it's all completely different to what he believed 10 years ago and he's never really accounted for how he's changed his mind but we certainly know what he's promoting. He's apologised to Jeremy Corbyn. That's the one thing that he's apologised for is essentially the Labour Party being too tough on anti-Semitism. And he was fooled by the propaganda. What the Lib Dem propaganda? No the propaganda around Corbynism. Oh I see.

14:58The idea that there was any anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Yeah that's the bit he's apologised for. I'm suggesting that might have been the case. Yeah. Go on, say it. No, I'm going to stick my feet in the socket because one of the things that has been really interesting with the Greens that they were very good at expelling people for was expelling gender critical feminists. So Shahar Ali in fact took the party to court and he felt that they had discriminated against his lawful views. So I would say yes, I would take the fact that there has been a huge intake of new candidates and their vetting has been delayed by that.

15:30However I would say it is also reasonable to say you had a very bright line about what views on sex and gender you were not permitted in this party. And as a political party, that is your right. There's not an imposition of free speech. People that hold those views are just not compatible with being in the Green Party, sure. However, you are, I think, more reluctant to do this on views about anti-Semitism, and I think the rest of us are allowed to comment on that and disagree with it, actually. And when you talk about vetting, I mean, when Farage said, I don't have time to vet these candidates, I thought, well, you could knock off two hours in the pub and read the list.

16:06He's got spare time now. He's not doing his cameo videos anymore. He can get up at five o 'clock in the morning and do a bit of vetting instead. And the same with Zach. Rather than dress up in green clothes and pose for the Sunday time green photo shoot, you could have had a coffee and looked over the list. Here's an idea. Ollie Robbins is looking for a job at the moment, isn't he? He's got some experience of vetting. They could get him in. Before we move on from this bit, we should say just a little bit about exactly why Nigel Farage has been able to afford to give up doing videos on Cameo for 75 quid a time.

16:39It's because he's on Celebrity Traitors. He's the only person who isn't. Which is the last week we've learned that he received in 2024 a gift of£5 million, which was not taxed, from Christopher Harbourn, who is a Thai-based crypto businessman. and I believe billionaire I did a little calculation just in case you're interested Keir Starmer could have bought 2 ,000 pairs of nice glasses and still not come up to the level Surely Maheen Ali could have bought that many pairs of glasses for Keir Starmer He doesn't buy his own In fact that is the total in the whole glasses gate it was many many more pairs of glasses than that you could get this does not seem to have attracted the attention that I think it ought to.

17:34Farrah's got in very early with a defence. You know exactly how that happened, didn't you, Helen? Well, so the Guardian, who had this story, according to them, went to them for comment on it. Yeah. And according to the Guardian, the reformed press office stalled them and said, we need more time. Then they said, oh, you've directed it to the wrong press officer, actually. And in the meantime, a very sympathetic piece, I think my Gordon Rayner in the Telegraph appeared with the headline, I was firebombed. And this was lots and lots about... By Farage. By Nigel Farage being firebombed. And this was lots and lots about Nigel Farage's security issues with then a very long way down going.

18:08And in order to resolve these security issues, I accepted this gift. One problem with that, I think you spotted the problem, didn't you, Andy? Yes, it's a timeline thing, which is that the firebombing, the attempted arson attack on Farage's home, which we don't need to say, probably should say, is deplorable, shouldn't happen in any way. Yes, I'm against it. Yeah, we're all against it. That happened one year after Farage accepted a£5 million donation, which is apparently something to do with his security. So either Christopher Harbourn is a psychic, or crypto really is so good that it can predict something that's going to happen in a year's time, or that actually doesn't really stack up.

18:48And it was also a gift made when Farage was not an MP. So they are saying, look, this is completely irrelevant to Mr Farage's political career, which is not true. But I love this. This is always the argument with donations that aren't declared, isn't it? is that technically it didn't have to be declared. And in this case, the excuse is, it was the point where he said he was never coming back as a reform leader and he was done now and Richard Tice was going to take over. And it's just so clearly, I mean, to use a parliamentary term, complete bollocks, isn't it? Because if you're in hock to someone for£5 million, if someone is giving you£5 million, clearly, on principle, that is something you need.

19:16If there is a register of interest, that is an interest. I mean, this is the same argument that our old friend Peter Mandelson made first resignation time around, when he said he didn't think it was relevant that he owed£373 ,000 to another cabinet minister at that point because he'd been lent it by Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house in Notting Hill. Clearly, it's a relevant interest. You don't need to kind of pass it and go into accountancy terms of exact technicalities. And if it comes a few months before you announce not only that you're going back into frontline politics and also that you think this crypto stuff is fantastic and there should be much lower taxes on crypto transactions, and later on Farage has said that he's invested nearly 300 grand in a company that buy and hold Bitcoin.

19:57Yes, you're suggesting that two and two equal four. Yeah, I am, which I'm sure in crypto world is not true due to something clever, but they do. And I love Nigel Farage's phrase of the city. Crystal Harbour has never asked me or anything. He gave you£5 million personally and£17 million to the party. He doesn't need to ask you. You know what. You know what you do with that, don't you? So there is obviously the amusing irony that the leader of a party that complains about foreign people having influence over British politics is now, you know, the largest recipient of the largest amount of money ever by someone who's resident in Thailand.

20:34He probably loves Thailand, but he's also there in order to run a business there without all the encumbrance of British tax and British regulation, which, again, doesn't seem hugely patriotic. Yeah, I think Nigel Farage is recreating the worst bits of MAGA. The involvement in crypto, which is just a deeply scammy industry, I would say any serious politician really should stay away from it. They should stay away from prediction markets. They should stay away from gambling. There's all of that. And organised crime and those sort of things, I would say. Running a sex ring, all of these things I would recommend.

21:08They often turn to shade into dodgy business, and I'm against them. You're so radical. I'm so right-wing. But the other thing is that Zia Yusuf announced on Bank Holiday Monday, he essentially, this sort of weird prisoner's dilemma, where he said, we're going to do mass deportations, we're going to build migrant hotels, and we're going to put them in places that vote green to punish them. So if you don't want one in your place, vote reform. This literally comes with a website as well, where you can put in your postcode, and it will tell you where it looks like you're going to vote reform, so you won't be getting one, or it looks like people are going to be green in your area.

21:43you will be getting it on your doorstep. I mean, I can't think of another situation in an election where there's been a sort of outright threat with menaces like that. Can you? I mean, there's the usual sort of bribery and kind of we will cut your taxes. Oh, yeah, yeah. But an absolute, if your area goes the wrong way, then you're in trouble, man. Yeah. If you vote green, you're going to get more potholes and we're going to cause them. But they think it's very clever, right? They think it's a trap that the left has walked into, which is like, oh, I see, you don't like migrant hotels. I thought you thought refugees were welcome.

22:11Now that is very true of a tiny subset of the Green Party who do believe in completely open borders. But actually there's a lot of people voting Green for a lot of other reasons, including cost of living and economic reasons, who don't feel like that. But this again I think is the MAGA trap. Donald Trump, no squish on immigration, has pulled back from pulling crying children out of the streets, like just bundling people into cars, bundling them off to El Salvador or wherever it might be, because actually it looked cruel and unpleasant and people didn't like it. Even his supporters were not, you know, Stephen Miller gung-ho about it, his effective chief of staff, or his effective prime minister.

22:47But mostly this was not a popular policy. And he sacked the person in charge. And Greg Bovino, who was swaggering around in a very reiki coat, I would say, got his marching orders. So, you know, this just, I think this is, I think that was a really unpleasant announcement. Obviously there's a million ways in which it didn't work. You know, the places that Greens are going to win will be inner cities. If you think you can build anything in most places that elect Greens. Also, if there's one thing that unites every part of the political spectrum in Britain, it's nimbyism. People just hate anything being built in Britain.

23:18Like, good luck with that. But it was also, it was just an odd punitive, as you say, like a sort of punishment beating for not voting for us. And in a way that I think you're right, crossed a line that I hadn't seen crossed before in British politics. And there is a long tradition in British politics of telling the voters you're going to give them free money. Hogarth onwards. You know, our satirical tradition is rich with just politicians saying, would you like something? I'll give it to you. They don't usually say, vote for me or else. That's different. This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

23:55This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try on new food and suddenly it's like, wait. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Kewpie mayo. It's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it in the grocery store before. And if you've ever just walked past it, some people would say that's a huge mistake. Because this mayo is different. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Kewpie only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, and almost buttery. Once people try it, they start putting it on everything.