From Chartists and Suffragettes to Irish republicans and today’s Palestine activists, the treatment of hunger strikers exposes a consistent pattern in how the British state represses those it deems political prisoners, says KEITH FLETT
THE right-wing Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh recently castigated the “hard left” for its strident opposition to capitalism.
She told Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys that “anti-capitalist politics are at the root of anti-semitism.” Humphrys is no friend of the left, but was taken aback. He asked her whether she believed that “to be anti-capitalist you have to be anti-semitic.” Astonishingly, she replied: “Yes.”
It was an appalling slur by a Labour politician on everyone who is consciously fighting poverty, austerity, homelessness and zero-hours contracts in capitalist Britain to label them anti-semitic, but it also revealed the ignorant and harmful stereotypes that are actually shared by rightwingers about Jews, even those that think of themselves as pro-Jewish. McDonagh thinks all Jews are rich capitalists.
TONY CONWAY assesses the lessons of the 1930s and looks at what is similar, and what is different, about the rise of the far right today



