Member

Why did I, a boy from Burnley, become a Member of another place and then of this House? Because my father, who was the world’s most reasonable man, thought that I should understand politics from a very early age. When the Manchester Guardian, as it was called, dropped through the front door of our house every morning, I was sat down and told the news and how important it was that the democracy that my father was proud to have joined should continue, and that we should not hear any more of antisemitism. My father, who died in 1989, would be shocked today to hear that, in the years since his death, that has continued. My mother, who was younger than him and lived until 2013 to a magnificent and occasionally troublesome old age, often reflected how shocked my father, her beloved husband, would have been by the continuation of antisemitism in this country.