We owe this penetrating insight to former MP and mayor of London ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone.
“The Jewish vote wasn’t very helpful,” explained Red Ken with the restrained understatement for which Trotskyists are so justly famous.
My hat’s off to him: Red Ken could have said ‘It’s the Yids what done it”, but politely kept those words from bursting out of his heart. Alas, he hasn’t always been so circumspect.
In 2016 Red Ken was suspended from the Labour Party for insisting that Hitler was a Zionist so loudly that even his close friend Corbyn had to sigh and get rid of him.
Had Ken hung on for just a few months longer, his take on the intimate relationship between Jews and Nazis would have entered the Labour mainstream. He could then have sat at the left hand of Corbyn (assuming that the seat at the right hand was reserved for McDonnell).
Rather than discussing Ken’s understated affection for Jews, I’d like to draw your attention to the mathematics of the issue. That’s partly unfair because, when he attended Tulse Hill Comprehensive, little Ken was mostly interested in reptiles, presumably because they looked like him.
His O-levels were obtained in what he called “easy subjects”: English, Geography and Art. Hence one shouldn’t expect him to display intellectual rigour in more difficult disciplines, such as maths.
Still, we wouldn’t be taking Ken too far out of his depth if we stuck to elementary-school arithmetic. So let’s give it a go, shall we?
Four million more people voted for the Tories than for Labour. The Jewish population of the UK is 250,000. If the same proportion holds true for Jews as for the population at large, about 125,000 of them voted.
Even assuming – and in view of Labour’s rampant anti-Semitism, this is an easy assumption to make – that every one of them voted Tory, the numbers still don’t quite add up, do they?
However, as Pascal explained, the heart has its own reasons. So why can’t that organ have its own maths? Of course it can.
So Ken can crank up his cardiac calculator and explain how 125,000 Jews produced a four-million shortfall in Labour’s popular support. Push another few buttons, and we’ll find out that a handful of Jews control every financial institution in the City and every newspaper in the country.
When you look closely at all those Hasidic Jews, chaps like Rupert Murdoch, Viscount Rothermere and the Barclay brothers, you’ll find payot, the Orthodox earlocks they tuck into their top hats at Ascot. These reprobates rigged the vote against Jeremy, who had tried his best to propagate Ken’s discoveries about that offensive tribe.
Ken, incidentally, tried to do in the ‘70s what his best friend Jeremy did in 2015: gain hard-Left control over the whole Labour Party. Had he succeeded, Britain could have had a Marxist government 40 years ago, and I’d still be living in Texas or perhaps New York.
Jeremy went Ken one better and only fell at the last hurdle, tripped by those crypto-Nazi Jews. Now they, all 250,000 of them, can heave a sigh of relief and relax, for a while at any rate. They don’t have to emigrate to Israel just yet, and many of them would rather not.
After all, unlike Hitler, they may not be Zionists.