I’m a big fan of the actor Mark Ruffalo. Or actually, now I give it a little more thought, I’m a big fan of the way the actor Mark Ruffalo looks in a leather jacket in The Kids Are All Right, and I have a modest preference for him as the Incredible Hulk over Edward Norton. This morning, though, the main thing I am thinking about Mark Ruffalo is, “what does this Hollywood superstar imagine he knows about the experiences of my great aunt twice removed up in Hendon?” And I am wondering if the answer to that question is, actually, that he hasn’t even thought about her, or anybody like her, for a single second.
Ruffalo is a signatory to an open letter sent this weekend in support of Jeremy Corbyn. Well, sent-ish. Actually, the only place it seems to have arrived was NME, which had it as an exclusive. “NME?” you may now be thinking, “The music newspaper? Mark Ruffalo? What?” To which I’m afraid I can only reply that I don’t get to shape reality, but just to write about it, and we’re all in this together.
Most of the celebrity signatories don’t appear to have said much about this letter after signing it, even on their own social media feeds. Bringing to mind the troubling philosophical question, “is an open letter still open if you aren’t terribly open about it?” The list includes some people I generally admire (Steve Coogan, Rob Delaney, Mark Rylance), and some I admire only for very specific things (Mike Leigh for films, Michael Rosen for children’s books, Mark Ruffalo for wearing leather jackets) and some on whom I’ve frankly never been that keen. All agree, anyway, that they are “outraged that Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong committed anti-racist, is being smeared as an antisemite by people who should know better”.
It seems likely that the “people” they are referring to include the signatories of another open letter last week. This one was signed by people such as David Cornwell, Fay Weldon, Joanna Lumley, William Boyd and our own Sathnam Sanghera. “We refuse to vote Labour on December 12,” it concludes. Having said, along the way, “Mr Corbyn has a long record of embracing antisemites as comrades”.
That one strikes me as a much better written letter, if you’ll forgive the likes of me patting John le Carré and William Boyd on the back for their prose skills. In particular, you may notice that saying “Mr Corbyn has a long record of embracing antisemites as comrades” is a quite different thing from calling him an antisemite. What I like particularly about this phrase is how neatly it encapsulates precisely what Labour’s antisemitism problem has been these past four years, and how easily Corbyn could have dealt with it. But only, perhaps, if he had been somebody else.
“You know what?” he could have said. “I have embraced antisemites as comrades! I see that now! I mean, it’s undeniable, isn’t it? Sheesh! Dodgy clerics, Chris Williamson, Raed Salah, the bloke who painted that mural, my friends from Hamas and Hezbollah, that dead wreath guy, and so on! Wow, put like that? So here’s why it happened, and here’s why I regret it, and here’s why I wouldn’t do it again.”
Instead he has reluctantly conceded to the half-arsed cleansing of his membership by various officials, like a pop diva who studies her nails while her record company throws her hometown friends out of the afterparty. Never once has he seemed to consider himself culpable for there being a problem in the first place. Indeed, if there is a link between the Jeremy Corbyn who stood alongside all those antisemites and the Jeremy Corbyn who now presides over a party that the Equality and Human Rights Commission is investigating for institutional racism against Jews, then Jeremy Corbyn still doesn’t seem capable of recognising what it is. And, as a result, it’s not so strange if, despite his oft-trumpeted anti-racist credentials, many of Britain’s Jews aren’t 100 per cent confident he’s totally their guy.
I know an awful lot of people who didn’t quite get this three years ago but today I find that most people do. Plenty of them, though, will vote Labour anyway, albeit often in some anguish. Some simply think that the route to a better Labour Party is by voting for this one. Others think of Brexit, or austerity, or the more straightforward and jovial racism of Boris Johnson, or believe that when it comes to tackling the broader failures of capitalism, only Labour is on anything like the right track.
Many others, still, regard Corbyn as a fundamentally nice and moral person, who has simply blundered into a mess he’s not quite agile enough to comprehend. Having met him, I’m actually not sure that’s wrong. Some people, I can tell, feel quite guilty even talking to me about all this. They shouldn’t. Life is complex, and Labour’s greatest and saddest failing is to have put them in this situation. It is not for me to condemn their choices. Even if, like Team Lumley, I’ll make a different one.
To not even feel that anguish, though? Even now? To put your name to a letter expressing “outrage” that your man is being “smeared”, conferring upon him not even the smallest smidgeon of blame? For that, I think, you need to have spent a serious amount of time very studiously not listening to people who, themselves, have spent a long time pleading for your attention. Or failing that, perhaps you need to have signed this letter quite bizarrely, while living far, far way, like some kind of big, green stupid idiot who knocks down walls with his shoulders whenever he walks through a door.
