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Toby Young
Toby Young is the editor-in-chief of the Daily Sceptic, the general secretary of the Free Speech Union and an associate editor of the Spectator.
There’s a small liberal arts college in Washington state called Evergreen State College that has an annual tradition known as a Day of Absence, in which all the African-American students absent themselves from campus for 24 hours so people realise just how vital a contribution they make to college life.
I want you to imagine what Britain would look like without British Jews.
What kind of country would we be if Jews had not been tolerated in Britain since the mid-17th century and fully emancipated since the mid-19th century?
The reason for conducting this thought experiment is in the hope of persuading the prime minister to do more to protect British Jews.
Apparently, common decency – the state’s duty to keep all of its people safe – isn’t enough.
So what would Britain look like if Jews had never found sanctuary here?
Well, for one thing, there probably wouldn’t be a Labour Party.
Jewish trade union organisers in London, Leeds and Manchester played a pivotal role in the creation of the party – the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 lists 39 Jewish unions set up between 1882 and 1902 – and left-wing Jewish intellectuals like Harold Laski and Ralph Milliband provided the party with its conscience.
Without Benjamin Disraeli, that great radical prime minister who passed the 1867 Reform Act, we might not have a Conservative Party either.
Think of the contribution Jews have made to Britain’s academic life, from philosophers like Isiah Berlin, Karl Popper and AJ Ayer, to historians like Lewis Namier, Eric Hobsbawm and Simon Schama.
What about their contribution to science and medicine – and I’m not just thinking of the dozen or so Nobel Prize winners.
Without Rosalind Franklyn’s work, would Watson and Crick have discovered the secret of life?
In music, we wouldn’t have had Yehudi Menuhin, George Solti, Daniel Barenboim, Mark Bolan and Amy Winehouse.
In the arts and architecture, no Richard Rogers, no Jacob Epstein – and if you take the tube home tonight from St James’ Park, look at the wonderful figures Epstein carved above the entrance.
No Lucien Freud, the greatest British figurative painter of the 20th Century.
In film and television, no Alexander Korda, no Lew Grade, no Sid James, no Peter Sellers, no Sacha Baron-Cohen, no Michael Grade.
And what about our Jewish playwrights? How impoverished would the history of London’s West End be without the plays of Peter Shaffer, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard?
And to think, all of this and yet the Jewish population of Britain is and always has been tiny – 450,000 at its peak, 270,000 today.
Prime minister, has there ever been a religious or racial minority in the history of these islands who’ve contributed so much to our national life, who’ve been so public spirited, so eager to contribute, so happy to serve?
And, incidentally, please don’t question their loyalty to this country.
I don’t recall a British Jew ever winning a parliamentary seat and proclaiming themselves to be the MP for Israel.
This is no idle thought experiment, prime minister.
If you don’t do more to protect British Jews, they won’t just absent themselves for a day – they’ll leave and they won’t come back.
We only have to imagine how much poorer our country would have been without the contributions of British Jews over the last 200 years to realise just how much poorer we will be without them in the future.
Prime minister, we need to protect this precious, vital, patriotic minority.
For over 200 years they have shown us in so many ways how much they love our country.
If we want them to stay, it’s time for us to show how much we love them.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
