Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party, and Public Belief (Review)

First paragraph (in lieu of an abstract):

I was keen to review Greg Philo et al.’s Bad News for Labour because I assumed that it would be a serious presentation of the academic case against the views of left-wing antisemitism presented in recent monographs by such authors as Dave Rich, David Hirsh, and Robert Fine and Philip Spencer. Reviewing it alongside works of that nature would, I thought, enable me to consider both sides of a scholarly argument, weighing up the evidence for each. But such was not to be: Bad News for Labour turns out to be a slapdash and hastily constructed cut-and-paste job which makes almost no reference to significant scholarship on left-wing antisemitism—or indeed on any other subject. It gives consideration to just one substantial piece of scholarship on its primary topic, which is Alan Johnson’s 2019 report (presumably because that is the only extended treatment of the subject written by an academic to be available online as a free PDF).1 However, Philo et al.’s treatment of that work makes no mention of the enormous volume of evidence assembled therein, instead blithely opposing Johnson’s claim that racism exists within the BDS movement with the irrelevant claim that the tactics of BDS are effective,2 and observing (without irony) that “Palestinian voices appear rather sparsely in Johnson’s report on antisemitism in the [UK] Labour Party.”3 (Emphasis added.) Palestinian voices also appear “rather sparsely” in Philo et al.’s book—but given that the topic is a British political party, that is not entirely surprising.