IN THE summer of 2018, when the media was dominated by daily stories about Labour’s anti-semitism crisis, Brian Klug, one of the world’s foremost academic experts on anti-semitism, issued a plea for reasoned and informed thinking on the issue in place of the kind of moral panic which was ensuing.

At that time, the supposed touchstone of Labour’s commitment to addressing anti-semitism was its willingness to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-semitism unamended and with no additional accompanying text.  

Klug’s forensic piece illustrated the illegitimacy of this argument, but ended with a heartfelt warning. “Part of me,” he wrote, “feels the hopelessness of appealing to reason, a sense of swimming against a mighty and unmindful current of opinion… rallying around the IHRA text as if it were the eternal word of God.”