Pat McFadden: Labour must not become an intolerant cult

In a speech at the annual meeting of centre left group Labour First at Brandhall Labour Club in Oldbury, the Wolverhampton South East MP said Labour had so far “failed the test” when it came to dealing with anti-Semitism – but warned that the party’s problems ran far deeper.

It came after nine MPs quit Labour last week over anti-Semitism and Brexit, with one of them, Dudley North MP Ian Austin, saying that the party had been taken over by hard left extremists under Jeremy Corbyn.

In his speech Mr McFadden, a former Government Minister in Gordon Brown's administration, said the events of last week – which also saw three Tories quit their party - showed there were “big questions” to answer for both Labour and the Conservatives.

“And for us the question is deeper than the specific issues of anti-Semitism and Brexit,” he said.

“It is about our political culture, our view of the world, our understanding of how to secure prosperity and security in the 21st century.

“This is a matter of both culture and policy. It needs its own radical purpose. It needs ideas as well as organisation. In short, stay and fight has to mean something more than just stay.

“Our voters deserve better than that. The people who look to us to support them, to protect them and to give them a platform to make the most of their lives deserve better than that.

“Are we going to become a faction, expert at vitriol and internal control but incapable of building the broad electoral coalition needed to govern? Or can we reach out beyond our core to give answers to the genuine problems faced by the country? That’s the task for any great political party and it has always been the task for us when we have been at our best.”

Mr McFadden, who was sacked as Shadow Europe Minister by Mr Corbyn in 2016, said Labour needed “a political culture which is suited to a great and open political party, not one geared for a narrow sect or an intolerant cult”.

Reflecting on what he called “the most significant break in the party system in a generation”, Mr McFadden also hit out at the Labour leadership’s response to allegations of anti-Semitism that have dogged the party in recent years.

He said: “The awful current of anti-Semitism which has targeted Jewish MPs is an appalling stain on a party which prides itself on being a home for people of every faith and of none.

“I know that most Labour members are not anti-Semites. And most Labour members are appalled by what is being posted and said about Jewish MPs. But the response to this issue has so far failed the test.”

Questioning why anti-Semites believed that Labour was their “political home”, he added: “This was not an issue in the Labour Party in the past.

“The anti-Western world view which divides the world into actors and reactors, the oppressors and the oppressed, where those in conflict with the West are always defined as victims and where the West itself is instinctively seen as the source of the problem is completely at odds with the best traditions of the Labour Party.

WATCH: Ian Austin on why he quit Labour

“It is the seedbed which gives rise to a hierarchy of victimhood, where some are allowed to be victims, and some are not.

“It is not enough as a leadership response to this to point to a record of campaigning against racism.

“Indeed the signal that can send out is that people who share your views can’t be doing anything wrong.

“After all, they would all say they were anti-racist too. Instead the response needed is to call this out properly, root it out and make clear that those who hold those views have no place in the Labour Party.”

Mr McFadden also addressed criticisms of Labour’s Brexit policy, saying: “There is no such thing as a jobs first Brexit. There are degrees of damage limitation. “But every study of every scenario – including the Government’s own – makes clear that there is no set of arrangements outside the EU that does not make our country poorer than it would otherwise be.”

He said the Labour Party had to be “about an economy with fairness hard wired in”. “We have to be for more than a left-wing conservatism,” he added. “The response to decades of change has to be more radical than looking for a rewind button simply to unwind the economic changes that have taken place.”