'Bored of deputies' is not enough

Published in the Jewish Chronicle 10 March 2006

In the competitive world of childcare and nursery schooling, a key boast is the teacher-pupil ratio: the more adults there are to look after the children, the better. If the ratio is as good as, say, one to four, then you know you’re in safe hands.

Well, now our community bigwigs have gone one better. Last week, the Jewish Leadership Council — a 20-strong committee of Anglo-Jewry’s greatest and goodest — announced that it had at last put itself on a democratic footing. No longer could this group be branded a self-appointed, secretive and unaccountable clique of grandees: its seven-member executive had now been elected, fair and square.

Who were the electorate for this admirable exercise in fair and open democracy? Why, the JLC itself. Or rather only those 13 members of it who are heads of key Jewish organisations (rather than the additional seven individuals “chosen for their expertise”).

Put simply, an electorate of 13 voted for an executive of seven. That’s less than two voters for every person elected, a ratio that not even the most exclusive kindergarten could match. Oh, and every single one of those elected was unopposed — a style of election that is handy for those involved and which is, I’m told, particularly popular in North Korea.

I shouldn’t mock. Advocates of the JLC insist that those 13 are, if not directly elected by the organisations they lead, then at least accountable to them. They can plausibly claim to represent the community and therefore have some right, in turn, to choose an inner-circle of leaders. What’s more, several on the executive are people — like Trevor Chinn and Gerald Ronson — who have long served as de facto community leaders, except with no mechanism of accountability whatsoever.

These are the elders, once memorably dubbed the Funding Fathers, who have traditionally bankrolled much Anglo-Jewish activity, and won key decision-making power as a result. Now, say JLC optimists, these movers and shakers will move and shake under an organisational umbrella, where the rest of us will be able to see what they’re up to.

What’s more, the JLC will be the place where this old guard can gradually hand over to the next generation of communal leaders, a process that otherwise might not have happened at all.

Not that that was why the JLC was created. No, the emotion that fuelled this new body was despair. Our communal top brass had spent decades tearing its collective hair out in frustration at the state of what is meant to be British Jews’ central authority: the Board of Deputies.

While there’s great personal respect for the current president, Henry Grunwald — who also leads the JLC — and indeed his predecessors, too many key communal figures admit they’ve essentially given up on the Board as a functioning body.

“The Board is a bit of a joke,” says one head of a major Jewish organisation, with no axe to grind. Another asks: “Is the best way to run a community through monthly meetings of 400 people sitting in a parliament-style chamber, and then putting every decision through a dozen committees?”

He and others answered that question long ago, rejecting the Board as a relic, a structure that might have looked right in the 18th century but not now. They insist they tried to reform it, praising Grun-wald for his own efforts. But, they have concluded, the Board is all but unreformable, a body crippled by institutional inertia. Rather than keep banging their heads against the Board’s brick walls, they have preferred to sidestep the body altogether and set up a new one. The Board will be allowed to carry on doing “day-to-day” work, we’re told, while the JLC will deal with the big stuff.

I can see why all this makes great sense to those involved. I, too, would hardly fancy dedicating valuable hours of my life grappling with the unwieldy, creaky Board. And I can see why the move from a parliamentary model to a boardroom one is appealing: now decisions can be taken and acted upon at a rate slightly faster than glacial.

But a problem remains nonetheless. The Board of Deputies may have been an example of “democracy ad absurdum,” as one critic put it to me, but at least it is democratic. The new JLC’s claim to democracy is much vaguer and thinner.

I know it’s not easy to think of an alternative: how would you begin to organise a direct ballot of all British Jews, for example? But the JLC set-up, on its own, is not good enough. If this was any other aspect of British life, we would call it an unelected quango — and we would refuse to be led by it. Our Jewish lives should be no different.

Posted on March 10, 2006 07:16 PM

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