Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the weekly podcast with me, Steve Richards,

and as MPs head off for the sun or walking holidays or whatever they do in August.

The sort of political themes inevitably continue seamlessly anti-Semitism in the Labour Party

and inevitably Brexit.

The anti-Semitism crisis in the Labour Party is like many British political crises. There is a sort of intangible

core at the centre of it all. It's quite hard to work out the precise allegations being made

against Labour is the allegation that Corbyn himself is anti-Semitic?

When I did a documentary about Corbyn for the BBC recently, we asked all our interviewees, including Margaret Hodge, whether they thought he, Corbyn, was personally anti-Semitic, and they all said without hesitation,

no, including Margaret Hodge, actually.

She evidently changed her mind in the row over the definition of anti-Semitism, which blew up subsequently.

But a row over definition of anti-Semitism isn't proof of anti-Semitism.

Then you get the other dynamic, which is that some around Corbyn are, I think, genuinely convinced

that the story is being partly to use that awful term,

weaponised by Corbyn's opponents either internal or outside the party.

So they respond angrily because they genuinely think that

and don't see much evidence of anti-Semitism.

And sometimes in their crass, crude

anger, they are accused of being anti-Semitic and they become the anti-Semitic story, even though they were denying the anti-Semitism in the first place. Then there is all kinds of conflation. I read a piece,

I think in the Times the other day, which began with the quote from Margaret Hodge, and Margaret

Hodge was angry and she deserves to be taken seriously. She's a formidable figure and a radical one.

And so you begin with that, but it's not quite clear whether she,

the anger is based on anything more than the anger of the moment,

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