Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Tuesday, 12 March 2019
Monday, 11 March 2019
We exclude the Labour left from British politics at our peril
Jeremy Corbyn’s project could solve Britain’s problems. But we will never know if we focus only on its flaws, not its policies writes Andy Beckett in The Guardian
The wilderness years: how Labour’s left survived to conquer
Yet the unforgiving standards by which he is judged are also applied to the Labour left as a whole. Despite Corbyn’s two enormous democratic mandates, the left is endlessly said to have “taken over” the party; to be a “sect”, a “cult”, an alien “virus”. The language has become so commonplace, it is rarely pointed out how loaded it is. The Labour left has been othered.
Many people in the rest of the party, and wider British politics and the media, don’t consider the left to be a legitimate Labour tribe, let alone legitimate rulers of the party, let alone a legitimate potential government. This is rarely stated explicitly. Excluding a large and currently vibrant group from mainstream politics can be an awkward argument to make in a democracy – especially when the radical right of the Conservative party has never been othered in the same way. Instead, starting with Margaret Thatcher, it has often run the country. But once you appreciate the implacable hostility the Labour left arouses, it explains a lot of otherwise puzzling British political phenomena.
In recent weeks, MPs at a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party have reportedly applauded the Independent Group breakaway, despite the immense damage it has done to the chances of a Labour government. Tom Watson, in theory Corbyn’s loyal deputy, has said things that could end up on Tory election posters, such as “I love this [Labour] party but sometimes I no longer recognise it.” He has also set up the Future Britain group, scheduled to meet for the first time on Monday night , for “social democratic” Labour MPs to assert themselves against “doctrinaire utopianism”, which sounds like none-to-subtle code for the left.
Meanwhile, as ever, seasoned political journalists, who spent decades tolerating the dark arts of Alastair Campbell and New Labour’s other arm-twisters, have declared themselves horrified at the “bullying” of opponents by Corbynistas. Tom Bower, biographer of Gordon Brown and a dozen other bruisers, gives his current book on Corbyn the subtitle Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power. Corbyn supporters may be tempted to reply: we should be so lucky.
Despite, or, rather, partly because of, all the panics about the Labour left, it has rarely been dominant in the party. The last leftwing leader before Corbyn was George Lansbury, in the 1930s, another relatively elderly London radical, who lasted three years before being forced to resign by more centrist figures who did not like his pacifism. The fact that Labour’s leader in the early 1980s, Michael Foot, is also often regarded as a leftwinger, when he actually spent much of his tenure frustrating and arguing with the left, and its key player Tony Benn in particular, is a sign of how exaggerated the conventional picture of the Labour left’s strength can be.
“Labour leaders tremble at the relentless advance of Benn’s army,” warned the Express in May 1981, after Benn launched his famous bid for the party’s deputy leadership. And yet, in large part because the press othered him so effectively, as a kind of foreign demagogue – “Ayatollah Benn”, according to the Sun, after Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini – he did not win.
Poverty and climate more important than Brexit, says Corbyn
Labour centrists often talk about the need for the party to be “a broad church”. Rather less often, they accept that control of it ought to alternate between its different tribes, in a roughly representative way. Eight years ago David Owen, the former Labour minister and SDP co-founder, told the New Statesman that after the defeat of Jim Callaghan’s centrist government (in which Owen served) at the 1979 general election: “It was not unreasonable for those on the left to try to shift the balance of power in the party closer to their views.”
But back in the 80s Owen was rather less willing to let the left have its turn. He co-founded the SDP partly to block it. The SDP’s founding document, the 1981 Limehouse declaration, which he helped draw up, denounced “the drift towards extremism in the Labour party”, supposedly being led by Benn, as “not compatible” with the party’s “democratic traditions”. Last month, at the launch of the Independent Group, Leslie caricatured Corbynism in almost exactly the same way. Labour, he said, had been “hijacked” by “the hard left”.
Does it matter that so many people don’t want British politics to include a left of any significance? Even if you’re not at all leftwing, recent British history suggests it does. Between the fading of Benn’s influence in the mid-80s and Corbyn’s leadership win in 2015, the Labour parliamentary left – effectively the entire Commons left – dwindled to a few dozen MPs, occasionally admired, more often patronised and derided, almost always marginal to the making of government policy. Meanwhile more mainstream, supposedly more realistic politicians gave us Thatcherism, frequently disastrous wars, the financial crisis, austerity, and an increasingly dysfunctional version of free-market capitalism.
Now that we are living with the aftermath of all that – with a Conservative right promising further destructive experiments; and a Labour centre-left that has come up with almost no fresh ideas since the heyday of Blairism, two decades ago – it seems an odd time to decide that British politics can do without a leftwing alternative. Corbyn’s Labour project is rickety, incomplete and overambitious. It may be easier to concentrate on its flaws and scandals than to evaluate its policies, and then decide whether any of them are solutions to the country’s multiple crises. But if Britain could, somehow, finally, stop questioning whether the Labour left belongs in mainstream politics, it may even discover that the left has things to offer.
Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA
Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is on borrowed time. That assumption has hung over it throughout his three and a half years in charge. It’s there during every Labour crisis. It’s there before every perilous election – such as the local polls this May. And after every bad or even so-so Labour result the end of Corbyn’s leadership is there in the minds of his many enemies, of many commentators, of many anxious Corbynistas.
When the party is doing better under him, such as during and immediately after the 2017 election, this sense that he is on perpetual probation recedes, but never completely and never for long. In June 2017, two days after Labour had won its largest general election vote since Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, the then Labour MP Chris Leslie told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We shouldn’t pretend that this is a famous victory. It is good … but it’s not going to be good enough.” Twenty months later, without waiting to see if his scepticism about Corbynism’s electoral potential was justified, he left the party to co-found the Independent Group.
Some of the temporary, besieged feel of the current Labour regime is down to Corbyn himself: his initial reluctance to fill Labour’s leadership vacuum, his relative lack of conventional political skills, his advanced age for a modern British party leader. He will turn 70 in May, shortly after the local elections, which will be handy for his political obituarists if Labour does as poorly as polls currently suggest.
Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is on borrowed time. That assumption has hung over it throughout his three and a half years in charge. It’s there during every Labour crisis. It’s there before every perilous election – such as the local polls this May. And after every bad or even so-so Labour result the end of Corbyn’s leadership is there in the minds of his many enemies, of many commentators, of many anxious Corbynistas.
When the party is doing better under him, such as during and immediately after the 2017 election, this sense that he is on perpetual probation recedes, but never completely and never for long. In June 2017, two days after Labour had won its largest general election vote since Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, the then Labour MP Chris Leslie told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We shouldn’t pretend that this is a famous victory. It is good … but it’s not going to be good enough.” Twenty months later, without waiting to see if his scepticism about Corbynism’s electoral potential was justified, he left the party to co-found the Independent Group.
Some of the temporary, besieged feel of the current Labour regime is down to Corbyn himself: his initial reluctance to fill Labour’s leadership vacuum, his relative lack of conventional political skills, his advanced age for a modern British party leader. He will turn 70 in May, shortly after the local elections, which will be handy for his political obituarists if Labour does as poorly as polls currently suggest.
The wilderness years: how Labour’s left survived to conquer
Yet the unforgiving standards by which he is judged are also applied to the Labour left as a whole. Despite Corbyn’s two enormous democratic mandates, the left is endlessly said to have “taken over” the party; to be a “sect”, a “cult”, an alien “virus”. The language has become so commonplace, it is rarely pointed out how loaded it is. The Labour left has been othered.
Many people in the rest of the party, and wider British politics and the media, don’t consider the left to be a legitimate Labour tribe, let alone legitimate rulers of the party, let alone a legitimate potential government. This is rarely stated explicitly. Excluding a large and currently vibrant group from mainstream politics can be an awkward argument to make in a democracy – especially when the radical right of the Conservative party has never been othered in the same way. Instead, starting with Margaret Thatcher, it has often run the country. But once you appreciate the implacable hostility the Labour left arouses, it explains a lot of otherwise puzzling British political phenomena.
In recent weeks, MPs at a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party have reportedly applauded the Independent Group breakaway, despite the immense damage it has done to the chances of a Labour government. Tom Watson, in theory Corbyn’s loyal deputy, has said things that could end up on Tory election posters, such as “I love this [Labour] party but sometimes I no longer recognise it.” He has also set up the Future Britain group, scheduled to meet for the first time on Monday night , for “social democratic” Labour MPs to assert themselves against “doctrinaire utopianism”, which sounds like none-to-subtle code for the left.
Meanwhile, as ever, seasoned political journalists, who spent decades tolerating the dark arts of Alastair Campbell and New Labour’s other arm-twisters, have declared themselves horrified at the “bullying” of opponents by Corbynistas. Tom Bower, biographer of Gordon Brown and a dozen other bruisers, gives his current book on Corbyn the subtitle Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power. Corbyn supporters may be tempted to reply: we should be so lucky.
Despite, or, rather, partly because of, all the panics about the Labour left, it has rarely been dominant in the party. The last leftwing leader before Corbyn was George Lansbury, in the 1930s, another relatively elderly London radical, who lasted three years before being forced to resign by more centrist figures who did not like his pacifism. The fact that Labour’s leader in the early 1980s, Michael Foot, is also often regarded as a leftwinger, when he actually spent much of his tenure frustrating and arguing with the left, and its key player Tony Benn in particular, is a sign of how exaggerated the conventional picture of the Labour left’s strength can be.
“Labour leaders tremble at the relentless advance of Benn’s army,” warned the Express in May 1981, after Benn launched his famous bid for the party’s deputy leadership. And yet, in large part because the press othered him so effectively, as a kind of foreign demagogue – “Ayatollah Benn”, according to the Sun, after Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini – he did not win.
Poverty and climate more important than Brexit, says Corbyn
Labour centrists often talk about the need for the party to be “a broad church”. Rather less often, they accept that control of it ought to alternate between its different tribes, in a roughly representative way. Eight years ago David Owen, the former Labour minister and SDP co-founder, told the New Statesman that after the defeat of Jim Callaghan’s centrist government (in which Owen served) at the 1979 general election: “It was not unreasonable for those on the left to try to shift the balance of power in the party closer to their views.”
But back in the 80s Owen was rather less willing to let the left have its turn. He co-founded the SDP partly to block it. The SDP’s founding document, the 1981 Limehouse declaration, which he helped draw up, denounced “the drift towards extremism in the Labour party”, supposedly being led by Benn, as “not compatible” with the party’s “democratic traditions”. Last month, at the launch of the Independent Group, Leslie caricatured Corbynism in almost exactly the same way. Labour, he said, had been “hijacked” by “the hard left”.
Does it matter that so many people don’t want British politics to include a left of any significance? Even if you’re not at all leftwing, recent British history suggests it does. Between the fading of Benn’s influence in the mid-80s and Corbyn’s leadership win in 2015, the Labour parliamentary left – effectively the entire Commons left – dwindled to a few dozen MPs, occasionally admired, more often patronised and derided, almost always marginal to the making of government policy. Meanwhile more mainstream, supposedly more realistic politicians gave us Thatcherism, frequently disastrous wars, the financial crisis, austerity, and an increasingly dysfunctional version of free-market capitalism.
Now that we are living with the aftermath of all that – with a Conservative right promising further destructive experiments; and a Labour centre-left that has come up with almost no fresh ideas since the heyday of Blairism, two decades ago – it seems an odd time to decide that British politics can do without a leftwing alternative. Corbyn’s Labour project is rickety, incomplete and overambitious. It may be easier to concentrate on its flaws and scandals than to evaluate its policies, and then decide whether any of them are solutions to the country’s multiple crises. But if Britain could, somehow, finally, stop questioning whether the Labour left belongs in mainstream politics, it may even discover that the left has things to offer.
Saturday, 9 March 2019
For 2,000 years we’ve linked Jews to money. It’s why antisemitism is so ingrained
From Judas to Shylock, Jews have been blamed for the evils of profit and capitalism. To some leftists, that story still appeals writes Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian
John Harris deftly explained the point on these pages this week, writing that Labour has embraced a form of left populism that “tends to present the very real failings of modern capitalism not as a matter of anything systemic, but as the work of a small group of people who are ruining things for the rest”. Such thinking immediately invites a question: who, exactly, are these people who have wrought such havoc? Who makes up this wicked cabal? Antisemitism is there to provide an answer, the same answer it has provided for so long and in so many places: the Jews.
That Momentum recently felt the need to produce a video urging its members not to be seduced by the age-old conspiracy theory that the Rothschilds secretly rule the world confirms that a certain kind of leftist – one who blames capitalism’s deformities on evil individuals, rather than structures – can be susceptible to the lure of antisemitism. But that should scarcely come as a shock, especially in the western societies of Christian Europe, including – perhaps especially – Britain. For in these societies capitalism – money – has always been linked to, even deemed synonymous with, Jews.
Hence my suggestion of a research trip. On 19 March, the Jewish Museum London will open an exhibition both fascinating and deeply unsettling. It’s called Jews, Money, Myth, and it makes clear that the tendency to connect Jews and money is a habit centuries – indeed millennia – old.
Perhaps you’d be unsurprised by the 20th-century examples, including the grotesque caricatures of rich, fat Jewish bankers controlling the globe, sometimes rendered as repulsive, multi-legged, insect-like monsters. (The equality commissioners might be struck by the echo here of the image that Labour officials deemed unworthy of sanction when shared by a party member: it showed an Alien-style creature, marked with a Star of David, clamped to the face of the Statue of Liberty.)
Entering the Victorian era, the casual visitor might nod with similar familiarity at the nutcracker in the shape of Fagin, Charles Dickens’s miserly Jewish pickpocket, a reminder that Jews were mocked for being both too poor and too rich, caricatured as both beggars and bankers, pedlars and plutocrats – a premonition of their later fate, to be blamed for both communism and capitalism. Even so, some of the cartoons might still shock in the ugliness of their depictions of Jews as more akin to rats or insects than people. You head back 400 years and think, “Of course, Shylock” – Shakespeare’s Jew who says, “I did dream of money-bags tonight.” Back through the centuries you go, to the York massacre of 1190, which left an estimated 150 Jews dead, thanks to mob violence stirred by one Richard de Malbis, filled with resentment at the Jews to whom he owed money.
You keep going until you find yourself at Judas, ready to betray the son of God himself for “30 pieces of silver” – a phrase that lives on, incidentally, in social media posts hurled at Jews or their defenders. Now, of course, all the 12 disciples, like Jesus himself, were Jews – yet, as this new exhibition shows, it was Judas who western art chose to depict as the Jew, often with the red hair that marked him out as a betrayer, alongside his mysteriously fair-haired, fair-skinned fellow apostles. The power of the Judas story lives on: Judas a byword for traitor, the word Jew and Judas almost indistinguishable in several languages, including German.
The historical explanation for this enduring linking of Jews and money is that Jews were pushed into financial roles by a church that barred Christians from, say, lending money for interest, and barred Jews from doing much else, such as owning and farming land. As Anthony Julius – whose Trials of the Diaspora is the definitive history of English antisemitism – puts it, in a feudal society in which Jews could be neither peasants nor lords, there was “no other niche” available. But psychological explanations also suggest themselves, starting with the notion that Christian society was able to split off that aspect of itself it regarded as sinful – its pursuit of wealth and profit – and project it instead on to a hated other: the Jew.
Whatever its origins, the archetype of the avaricious Jew acquired its place in the culture. It can operate at the level of playground insult – “Jew” as a synonym for stinginess – and at the level of global conspiracy theory, with Jews, or “Rothschilds”, the hidden hand pulling the strings of world capitalism and its necessary corollary, imperialism. It is planted deep in the soil of western civilisation, in Britain, the land of Fagin and Shylock, especially. It is deep enough to shape our thinking – there to be reached for when a crisis, such as the 2008 crash, requires an easy, explanatory villain – but also so deep that it is almost buried, out of sight.
The result is that sometimes we can’t even see it, even when it is right in front of us. Recall that Jeremy Corbyn’s first response on hearing that the notorious mural depicting Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the poor was to be removed, was to ask, “Why?” He literally could not see the problem. (An image of that mural will be included in the exhibition, alongside other examples of antisemitic depictions of supposed Jewish power.)
Given the 2,000-year-old history of this equation between Jews and the wickedness of money, it is absurd to imagine any one of us would be immune to it. Inevitably, plenty of Jews have themselves internalised it – including no less than Karl Marx, whose writings are peppered with anti-Jewish sentiment, who referred to money as “the jealous god of Israel”, and who looked forward to “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism”.
It is equally absurd to think that merely announcing yourself as an anti-racist automatically inoculates you from this history. It doesn’t. Instead it has to be brought into the open and confronted. But first we have to admit that it’s there.
Illustration by Matt Kenyon
I’m reluctant to add to the workload of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which this week announced the first step towards a statutory inquiry into Labour and antisemitism. If it goes ahead, it will be only the second time the commission has seen fit to investigate a British political party for racism – the first related to the BNP – and, given the number of complaints that have been reported, it’ll have its work cut out. Nevertheless, I have a research trip to suggest.
First, though, a word of context. An oft-heard defence of Labour is that a party of its now vastly increased size is bound to reflect the wider population; since that population includes some antisemites, then, sadly but inevitably, so will Labour. But that swerves around a gloomier possibility: that anti-Jewish racism might exert a particular appeal to some on the left – even, paradoxically enough, those who might otherwise proudly regard themselves as anti-racists.
I’m reluctant to add to the workload of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which this week announced the first step towards a statutory inquiry into Labour and antisemitism. If it goes ahead, it will be only the second time the commission has seen fit to investigate a British political party for racism – the first related to the BNP – and, given the number of complaints that have been reported, it’ll have its work cut out. Nevertheless, I have a research trip to suggest.
First, though, a word of context. An oft-heard defence of Labour is that a party of its now vastly increased size is bound to reflect the wider population; since that population includes some antisemites, then, sadly but inevitably, so will Labour. But that swerves around a gloomier possibility: that anti-Jewish racism might exert a particular appeal to some on the left – even, paradoxically enough, those who might otherwise proudly regard themselves as anti-racists.
----Also read
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John Harris deftly explained the point on these pages this week, writing that Labour has embraced a form of left populism that “tends to present the very real failings of modern capitalism not as a matter of anything systemic, but as the work of a small group of people who are ruining things for the rest”. Such thinking immediately invites a question: who, exactly, are these people who have wrought such havoc? Who makes up this wicked cabal? Antisemitism is there to provide an answer, the same answer it has provided for so long and in so many places: the Jews.
That Momentum recently felt the need to produce a video urging its members not to be seduced by the age-old conspiracy theory that the Rothschilds secretly rule the world confirms that a certain kind of leftist – one who blames capitalism’s deformities on evil individuals, rather than structures – can be susceptible to the lure of antisemitism. But that should scarcely come as a shock, especially in the western societies of Christian Europe, including – perhaps especially – Britain. For in these societies capitalism – money – has always been linked to, even deemed synonymous with, Jews.
Hence my suggestion of a research trip. On 19 March, the Jewish Museum London will open an exhibition both fascinating and deeply unsettling. It’s called Jews, Money, Myth, and it makes clear that the tendency to connect Jews and money is a habit centuries – indeed millennia – old.
Perhaps you’d be unsurprised by the 20th-century examples, including the grotesque caricatures of rich, fat Jewish bankers controlling the globe, sometimes rendered as repulsive, multi-legged, insect-like monsters. (The equality commissioners might be struck by the echo here of the image that Labour officials deemed unworthy of sanction when shared by a party member: it showed an Alien-style creature, marked with a Star of David, clamped to the face of the Statue of Liberty.)
Entering the Victorian era, the casual visitor might nod with similar familiarity at the nutcracker in the shape of Fagin, Charles Dickens’s miserly Jewish pickpocket, a reminder that Jews were mocked for being both too poor and too rich, caricatured as both beggars and bankers, pedlars and plutocrats – a premonition of their later fate, to be blamed for both communism and capitalism. Even so, some of the cartoons might still shock in the ugliness of their depictions of Jews as more akin to rats or insects than people. You head back 400 years and think, “Of course, Shylock” – Shakespeare’s Jew who says, “I did dream of money-bags tonight.” Back through the centuries you go, to the York massacre of 1190, which left an estimated 150 Jews dead, thanks to mob violence stirred by one Richard de Malbis, filled with resentment at the Jews to whom he owed money.
You keep going until you find yourself at Judas, ready to betray the son of God himself for “30 pieces of silver” – a phrase that lives on, incidentally, in social media posts hurled at Jews or their defenders. Now, of course, all the 12 disciples, like Jesus himself, were Jews – yet, as this new exhibition shows, it was Judas who western art chose to depict as the Jew, often with the red hair that marked him out as a betrayer, alongside his mysteriously fair-haired, fair-skinned fellow apostles. The power of the Judas story lives on: Judas a byword for traitor, the word Jew and Judas almost indistinguishable in several languages, including German.
The historical explanation for this enduring linking of Jews and money is that Jews were pushed into financial roles by a church that barred Christians from, say, lending money for interest, and barred Jews from doing much else, such as owning and farming land. As Anthony Julius – whose Trials of the Diaspora is the definitive history of English antisemitism – puts it, in a feudal society in which Jews could be neither peasants nor lords, there was “no other niche” available. But psychological explanations also suggest themselves, starting with the notion that Christian society was able to split off that aspect of itself it regarded as sinful – its pursuit of wealth and profit – and project it instead on to a hated other: the Jew.
Whatever its origins, the archetype of the avaricious Jew acquired its place in the culture. It can operate at the level of playground insult – “Jew” as a synonym for stinginess – and at the level of global conspiracy theory, with Jews, or “Rothschilds”, the hidden hand pulling the strings of world capitalism and its necessary corollary, imperialism. It is planted deep in the soil of western civilisation, in Britain, the land of Fagin and Shylock, especially. It is deep enough to shape our thinking – there to be reached for when a crisis, such as the 2008 crash, requires an easy, explanatory villain – but also so deep that it is almost buried, out of sight.
The result is that sometimes we can’t even see it, even when it is right in front of us. Recall that Jeremy Corbyn’s first response on hearing that the notorious mural depicting Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the poor was to be removed, was to ask, “Why?” He literally could not see the problem. (An image of that mural will be included in the exhibition, alongside other examples of antisemitic depictions of supposed Jewish power.)
Given the 2,000-year-old history of this equation between Jews and the wickedness of money, it is absurd to imagine any one of us would be immune to it. Inevitably, plenty of Jews have themselves internalised it – including no less than Karl Marx, whose writings are peppered with anti-Jewish sentiment, who referred to money as “the jealous god of Israel”, and who looked forward to “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism”.
It is equally absurd to think that merely announcing yourself as an anti-racist automatically inoculates you from this history. It doesn’t. Instead it has to be brought into the open and confronted. But first we have to admit that it’s there.
Thursday, 7 March 2019
Is anti-Zionism the same as anti-Semitism?
All over the world, it is an alarming time to be Jewish – but conflating anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred is a tragic mistake writes Peter Beinart in The Guardian
It is a bewildering and alarming time to be a Jew, both because antisemitism is rising and because so many politicians are responding to it not by protecting Jews but by victimising Palestinians.
On 16 February, members of France’s yellow vest protest movement hurled antisemitic insults at the distinguished French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. On 19 February, swastikas were found on 80 gravestones in Alsace. Two days later, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, after announcing that Europe was “facing a resurgence of antisemitism unseen since World War II”, unveiled new measures to fight it.
Among them was a new official definition of antisemitism. That definition, produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, includes among its “contemporary examples” of antisemitism “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”. In other words, anti-Zionism is Jew hatred. In so doing, Macron joined Germany, Britain, the United States and roughly 30 other governments. And like them, he made a tragic mistake.
Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic – and claiming it is uses Jewish suffering to erase the Palestinian experience. Yes, antisemitism is growing. Yes, world leaders must fight it fiercely. But in the words of a great Zionist thinker, “This is not the way”.
The argument that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic rests on three pillars. The first is that opposing Zionism is antisemitic because it denies to Jews what every other people enjoys: a state of its own. “The idea that all other peoples can seek and defend their right to self-determination but Jews cannot,” declared US Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer in 2017, “is antisemitism.”
As David Harris, head of the American Jewish Committee, put it last year: “To deny the Jewish people, of all the peoples on earth, the right to self-determination surely is discriminatory.”
All the peoples on earth? The Kurds don’t have their own state. Neither do the Basques, Catalans, Scots, Kashmiris, Tibetans, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Lombards, Igbo, Oromo, Uyghurs, Tamils and Québécois, nor dozens of other peoples who have created nationalist movements to seek self-determination but failed to achieve it.
Yet barely anyone suggests that opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot. It is widely recognised that states based on ethnic nationalism – states created to represent and protect one particular ethnic group – are not the only legitimate way to ensure public order and individual freedom. Sometimes it is better to foster civic nationalism, a nationalism built around borders rather than heritage: to make Spanish identity more inclusive of Catalans or Iraqi identity more inclusive of Kurds, rather than carving those multiethnic states up.
You’d think Jewish leaders would understand this. You’d think they would understand it because many of the same Jewish leaders who call national self-determination a universal right are quite comfortable denying it to Palestinians.
Argument number two is a variation on this theme. Maybe it is not bigoted to oppose a people’s quest for statehood. But it is bigoted to take away that statehood once achieved. “It is one thing to argue, in the moot court of historical what-ifs, that Israel should not have come into being,” argued New York Times columnist Bret Stephens earlier this month. However, “Israel is now the home of nearly 9 million citizens, with an identity that is as distinctively and proudly Israeli as the Dutch are Dutch or the Danes Danish. Anti-Zionism proposes nothing less than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those who cherish it.”
But it is not bigoted to try to turn a state based on ethnic nationalism into one based on civic nationalism, in which no ethnic group enjoys special privileges.
In the 19th century, Afrikaners created several countries designed to fulfil their quest for national self-determination, among them the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Then, in 1909, those two Afrikaner states merged with two states dominated by English-speaking white people to become the Union of South Africa (later the Republic of South Africa), which offered a kind of national self-determination to white South Africans.
The problem, of course, was that the versions of self-determination upheld by the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and apartheid South Africa excluded millions of black people living within their borders.
This changed in 1994. By ending apartheid, South Africa replaced an Afrikaner ethnic nationalism and a white racial nationalism with a civic nationalism that encompassed people of all ethnicities and races. It inaugurated a constitution that guaranteed “the right of the South African people as a whole to self-determination”.
That wasn’t bigotry, but its opposite.
I don’t consider Israel an apartheid state. But its ethnic nationalism excludes many of the people under its control. Stephens notes that Israel contains almost 9 million citizens. What he doesn’t mention is that Israel also contains close to 5 million non-citizens: Palestinians who live under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza (yes, Israel still controls Gaza) without basic rights in the state that dominates their lives.
One reason Israel doesn’t give these Palestinians citizenship is because, as a Jewish state designed to protect and represent Jews, it wants to retain a Jewish majority, and giving 5 million Palestinians the vote would imperil that.
Even among Israel’s 9 million citizens, roughly 2 million – the so-called “Arab Israelis” – are Palestinian. Stephens says overturning Zionism would mean the “political dispossession” of Israelis. But, according to polls, most of Israel’s Palestinian citizens see it the opposite way. For them, Zionism represents a form of political dispossession. Because they live in a state that privileges Jews, they must endure an immigration policy that allows any Jew in the world to gain instant Israeli citizenship yet makes Palestinian immigration to Israel virtually impossible.
They live in a state whose national anthem speaks of the “Jewish soul”, whose flag features a Star of David and which, by tradition, excludes Israel’s Palestinian parties from its governing coalitions. A commission created in 2003 by the Israeli government itself described Israel’s “handling of the Arab sector” as “discriminatory”.
So long as Israel remains a Jewish state, no Palestinian citizen can credibly tell her son or daughter that they can become prime minister of the country in which they live. In these ways, Israel’s form of ethnic nationalism – Zionism – denies equality to the non-Jews who live under Israeli control.
My preferred solution would be for the West Bank and Gaza to become a Palestinian state, thus giving Palestinians in those territories citizenship in an ethnically nationalist (though hopefully democratic) country of their own.
I’d also try to make Israel’s ethnic nationalism more inclusive by, among other things, adding a stanza to Israel’s national anthem that acknowledges the aspirations of its Palestinian citizens.
But, in a post-Holocaust world where antisemitism remains frighteningly prevalent, I want Israel to remain a state with a special obligation to protect Jews.
To seek to replace Israel’s ethnic nationalism with civic nationalism, however, is not inherently bigoted. Last year, three Palestinian members of the Knesset introduced a bill to turn Israel from a Jewish state into a “state for all its citizens”. As one of those Knesset members, Jamal Zahalka, explained, “We do not deny Israel or its right to exist as a home for Jews. We are simply saying that we want to base the existence of the state not on the preference of Jews, but on the basics of equality … The state should exist in the framework of equality, and not in the framework of preference and superiority.”
One might object that it is hypocritical for Palestinians to try to repeal Jewish statehood inside Israel’s original boundaries while promoting Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. One might also ask whether Zahalka’s vision of Jewish and Palestinian equality in a post-Zionist state is naive given that powerful Palestinian movements such as Hamas want not equality but Islamic domination.
These are reasonable criticisms. But are Zahalka and his colleagues – who face structural discrimination in a Jewish state – antisemites because they want to replace Zionism with a civic nationalism that promises equality to people of all ethnic and religious groups?
Of course not.
There is, finally, a third argument for why anti-Zionism equals antisemitism. It is that, as a practical matter, the two animosities simply go together.
“Of course it’s theoretically possible to distinguish anti-Zionism from antisemitism, just as it’s theoretically possible to distinguish segregationism from racism,” writes Stephens. Just as virtually all segregationists are also racists, he suggests, virtually all anti-Zionists are also antisemites. You rarely find one without the other.
But that claim is empirically false. In the real world, anti-Zionism and antisemitism don’t always go together. It is easy to find antisemitism among people who, far from opposing Zionism, enthusiastically embrace it.
Before Israel’s creation, some of the world leaders who most ardently promoted Jewish statehood did so because they did not want Jews in their own countries. Before declaring, as foreign secretary in 1917, that Britain “view[s] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, Arthur Balfour supported the 1905 Aliens Act, which restricted Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom.
And two years after his famous declaration, Balfour said Zionism would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb”.
In the 1930s, the Polish government adopted a similar tack. Its ruling party, which excluded Jews, trained Zionist fighters on Polish military bases. Why? Because it wanted Polish Jews to emigrate. And a Jewish state would give them somewhere to go. You find echoes of this antisemitic Zionism among some rightwing American Christians who are far friendlier to the Jews of Israel than the Jews of the US. In 1980, Jerry Falwell, a close ally of Israel’s then prime minister, Menachem Begin, quipped that Jews “can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose”.
Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2005 said, “we have no greater friend in the whole world than Pat Robertson” – the same Pat Robertson who later called former US air force judge Mikey Weinstein a “little Jewish radical” for promoting religious freedom in the American military.
After being criticised by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2010 for calling George Soros a “puppet master” who “wants to bring America to her knees” and “reap obscene profits off us”, Glenn Beck travelled to Jerusalem to hold a pro-Israel rally.
More recently, Donald Trump – who told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” – invited Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, who has said Jews are going to hell for not accepting Jesus, to lead a prayer at the ceremony inaugurating the American embassy in Jerusalem.
In 2017, Richard Spencer, who leads crowds in Nazi salutes, called himself a “white Zionist” who sees Israel as a model for the white homeland he wants in the US.
Some of the European leaders who traffic most blatantly in antisemitism – Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria’s far-right Freedom party and Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany, which promotes nostalgia for the Third Reich – publicly champion Zionism too.
If antisemitism exists without anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism also clearly exists without antisemitism.Consider the Satmar, the largest Hasidic sect in the world. In 2017, 20,000 Satmar men – a larger crowd than attended that year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference – filled the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a rally aimed at showing, in the words of one organiser: “We feel very strongly that there should not be and could not be a State of Israel before the Messiah comes.”
Last year, Satmar Rebbe Aaron Teitelbaum told thousands of followers: “We’ll continue to fight God’s war against Zionism and all its aspects.” Say what you want about Rebbe Teitelbaum and the Satmar, but they’re not antisemites.
Neither is Avrum Burg. Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, in 2018 declared that settlement growth in the West Bank had rendered the two-state solution impossible. Thus, he argued, Israelis must “depart from the Zionist paradigm, and move into a more inclusive paradigm. Israel must belong to all of its residents, including Arabs, not to the Jews alone.”
Other Jewish Israeli progressives, including the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy and the activists of the Federation Movement, have followed a similar path.
Can one question their proposals? Of course. Are they antisemites? Of course not. To be sure, some anti-Zionists really are antisemites: David Duke, Louis Farrakhan and the authors of the 1988 Hamas Covenant certainly qualify. So do the thugs from France’s yellow vest movement who called Finkielkraut a “dirty Zionist shit”.
In some precincts, there’s a growing and reprehensible tendency to use the fact that many Jews are Zionists (or simply assumed to be Zionists) to bar them from progressive spaces. People who care about the moral health of the American left will be fighting this prejudice for years to come.
But while anti-Zionist antisemitism is likely to be on the rise, so is Zionist antisemitism. And, in the US, at least, it is not clear that anti-Zionists are any more likely to harbour antisemitic attitudes than people who support the Jewish state.
In 2016, the ADL gauged antisemitism by asking Americans whether they agreed with statements such as “Jews have too much power” and “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind”. It found that antisemitism was highest among the elderly and poorly educated, saying: “The most well educated Americans are remarkably free of prejudicial views, while less educated Americans are more likely to hold antisemitic views. Age is also a strong predictor of antisemitic propensities. Younger Americans – under 39 – are also remarkably free of prejudicial views.”
In 2018, however, when the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans’ attitudes about Israel, it discovered the reverse pattern: Americans over the age of 65 – the very cohort that expressed the most antisemitism – also expressed the most sympathy for Israel. By contrast, Americans under 30, who according to the ADL harboured the least antisemitism, were least sympathetic to Israel.
It was the same with education. Americans who possessed a high school degree or less – the most antisemitic educational cohort – were the most pro-Israel. Americans with “postgraduate degrees” – the least antisemitic – were the least pro-Israel.
As statistical evidence goes, this is hardly airtight. But it confirms what anyone who listens to progressive and conservative political commentary can grasp: younger progressives are highly universalistic. They’re suspicious of any form of nationalism that seems exclusive. That universalism makes them suspicious of both Zionism and the white Christian nationalism that in the US sometimes shades into antisemitism.
By contrast, some older Trump supporters, who fear a homogenising globalism, admire Israel for preserving Jewish identity while yearning to preserve America’s Christian identity in ways that exclude Jews.
If antisemitism and anti-Zionism are both conceptually different and, in practice, often espoused by different people, why are politicians such as Macron responding to rising antisemitism by calling anti-Zionism a form of bigotry?
Because, in many countries, that’s what communal Jewish leaders want them to do.
It is an understandable impulse: let the people threatened by antisemitism define antisemitism. The problem is that, in many countries, Jewish leaders serve both as defenders of local Jewish interests and defenders of the Israeli government. And the Israeli government wants to define anti-Zionism as bigotry because doing so helps Israel kill the two-state solution with impunity.
For years, Barack Obama and John Kerry warned that if Israel continued the settlement growth in the West Bank that made a Palestinian state impossible, Palestinians would stop demanding a Palestinian state alongside Israel and instead demand one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, that replaces Israel.
Defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism reduces that threat. It means that if Palestinians and their supporters respond to the demise of the two-state solution by demanding one equal state, some of the world’s most powerful governments will declare them bigots.
Which leaves Israel free to entrench its own version of one state, which denies millions of Palestinians basic rights. Silencing Palestinians isn’t a particularly effective way to fight rising antisemitism, much of which comes from people who like neither Palestinians nor Jews. But, just as important, it undermines the moral basis of that fight.
Antisemitism isn’t wrong because it is wrong to denigrate and dehumanise Jews. Antisemitism is wrong because it is wrong to denigrate and dehumanise anyone. Which means, ultimately, that any effort to fight antisemitism that contributes to the denigration and dehumanisation of Palestinians is no fight against antisemitism at all.
It is a bewildering and alarming time to be a Jew, both because antisemitism is rising and because so many politicians are responding to it not by protecting Jews but by victimising Palestinians.
On 16 February, members of France’s yellow vest protest movement hurled antisemitic insults at the distinguished French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. On 19 February, swastikas were found on 80 gravestones in Alsace. Two days later, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, after announcing that Europe was “facing a resurgence of antisemitism unseen since World War II”, unveiled new measures to fight it.
Among them was a new official definition of antisemitism. That definition, produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, includes among its “contemporary examples” of antisemitism “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”. In other words, anti-Zionism is Jew hatred. In so doing, Macron joined Germany, Britain, the United States and roughly 30 other governments. And like them, he made a tragic mistake.
Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic – and claiming it is uses Jewish suffering to erase the Palestinian experience. Yes, antisemitism is growing. Yes, world leaders must fight it fiercely. But in the words of a great Zionist thinker, “This is not the way”.
The argument that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic rests on three pillars. The first is that opposing Zionism is antisemitic because it denies to Jews what every other people enjoys: a state of its own. “The idea that all other peoples can seek and defend their right to self-determination but Jews cannot,” declared US Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer in 2017, “is antisemitism.”
As David Harris, head of the American Jewish Committee, put it last year: “To deny the Jewish people, of all the peoples on earth, the right to self-determination surely is discriminatory.”
All the peoples on earth? The Kurds don’t have their own state. Neither do the Basques, Catalans, Scots, Kashmiris, Tibetans, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Lombards, Igbo, Oromo, Uyghurs, Tamils and Québécois, nor dozens of other peoples who have created nationalist movements to seek self-determination but failed to achieve it.
Yet barely anyone suggests that opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot. It is widely recognised that states based on ethnic nationalism – states created to represent and protect one particular ethnic group – are not the only legitimate way to ensure public order and individual freedom. Sometimes it is better to foster civic nationalism, a nationalism built around borders rather than heritage: to make Spanish identity more inclusive of Catalans or Iraqi identity more inclusive of Kurds, rather than carving those multiethnic states up.
You’d think Jewish leaders would understand this. You’d think they would understand it because many of the same Jewish leaders who call national self-determination a universal right are quite comfortable denying it to Palestinians.
Argument number two is a variation on this theme. Maybe it is not bigoted to oppose a people’s quest for statehood. But it is bigoted to take away that statehood once achieved. “It is one thing to argue, in the moot court of historical what-ifs, that Israel should not have come into being,” argued New York Times columnist Bret Stephens earlier this month. However, “Israel is now the home of nearly 9 million citizens, with an identity that is as distinctively and proudly Israeli as the Dutch are Dutch or the Danes Danish. Anti-Zionism proposes nothing less than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those who cherish it.”
But it is not bigoted to try to turn a state based on ethnic nationalism into one based on civic nationalism, in which no ethnic group enjoys special privileges.
In the 19th century, Afrikaners created several countries designed to fulfil their quest for national self-determination, among them the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Then, in 1909, those two Afrikaner states merged with two states dominated by English-speaking white people to become the Union of South Africa (later the Republic of South Africa), which offered a kind of national self-determination to white South Africans.
The problem, of course, was that the versions of self-determination upheld by the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and apartheid South Africa excluded millions of black people living within their borders.
This changed in 1994. By ending apartheid, South Africa replaced an Afrikaner ethnic nationalism and a white racial nationalism with a civic nationalism that encompassed people of all ethnicities and races. It inaugurated a constitution that guaranteed “the right of the South African people as a whole to self-determination”.
That wasn’t bigotry, but its opposite.
I don’t consider Israel an apartheid state. But its ethnic nationalism excludes many of the people under its control. Stephens notes that Israel contains almost 9 million citizens. What he doesn’t mention is that Israel also contains close to 5 million non-citizens: Palestinians who live under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza (yes, Israel still controls Gaza) without basic rights in the state that dominates their lives.
One reason Israel doesn’t give these Palestinians citizenship is because, as a Jewish state designed to protect and represent Jews, it wants to retain a Jewish majority, and giving 5 million Palestinians the vote would imperil that.
Even among Israel’s 9 million citizens, roughly 2 million – the so-called “Arab Israelis” – are Palestinian. Stephens says overturning Zionism would mean the “political dispossession” of Israelis. But, according to polls, most of Israel’s Palestinian citizens see it the opposite way. For them, Zionism represents a form of political dispossession. Because they live in a state that privileges Jews, they must endure an immigration policy that allows any Jew in the world to gain instant Israeli citizenship yet makes Palestinian immigration to Israel virtually impossible.
They live in a state whose national anthem speaks of the “Jewish soul”, whose flag features a Star of David and which, by tradition, excludes Israel’s Palestinian parties from its governing coalitions. A commission created in 2003 by the Israeli government itself described Israel’s “handling of the Arab sector” as “discriminatory”.
So long as Israel remains a Jewish state, no Palestinian citizen can credibly tell her son or daughter that they can become prime minister of the country in which they live. In these ways, Israel’s form of ethnic nationalism – Zionism – denies equality to the non-Jews who live under Israeli control.
My preferred solution would be for the West Bank and Gaza to become a Palestinian state, thus giving Palestinians in those territories citizenship in an ethnically nationalist (though hopefully democratic) country of their own.
I’d also try to make Israel’s ethnic nationalism more inclusive by, among other things, adding a stanza to Israel’s national anthem that acknowledges the aspirations of its Palestinian citizens.
But, in a post-Holocaust world where antisemitism remains frighteningly prevalent, I want Israel to remain a state with a special obligation to protect Jews.
To seek to replace Israel’s ethnic nationalism with civic nationalism, however, is not inherently bigoted. Last year, three Palestinian members of the Knesset introduced a bill to turn Israel from a Jewish state into a “state for all its citizens”. As one of those Knesset members, Jamal Zahalka, explained, “We do not deny Israel or its right to exist as a home for Jews. We are simply saying that we want to base the existence of the state not on the preference of Jews, but on the basics of equality … The state should exist in the framework of equality, and not in the framework of preference and superiority.”
One might object that it is hypocritical for Palestinians to try to repeal Jewish statehood inside Israel’s original boundaries while promoting Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. One might also ask whether Zahalka’s vision of Jewish and Palestinian equality in a post-Zionist state is naive given that powerful Palestinian movements such as Hamas want not equality but Islamic domination.
These are reasonable criticisms. But are Zahalka and his colleagues – who face structural discrimination in a Jewish state – antisemites because they want to replace Zionism with a civic nationalism that promises equality to people of all ethnic and religious groups?
Of course not.
There is, finally, a third argument for why anti-Zionism equals antisemitism. It is that, as a practical matter, the two animosities simply go together.
“Of course it’s theoretically possible to distinguish anti-Zionism from antisemitism, just as it’s theoretically possible to distinguish segregationism from racism,” writes Stephens. Just as virtually all segregationists are also racists, he suggests, virtually all anti-Zionists are also antisemites. You rarely find one without the other.
But that claim is empirically false. In the real world, anti-Zionism and antisemitism don’t always go together. It is easy to find antisemitism among people who, far from opposing Zionism, enthusiastically embrace it.
Before Israel’s creation, some of the world leaders who most ardently promoted Jewish statehood did so because they did not want Jews in their own countries. Before declaring, as foreign secretary in 1917, that Britain “view[s] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, Arthur Balfour supported the 1905 Aliens Act, which restricted Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom.
And two years after his famous declaration, Balfour said Zionism would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb”.
In the 1930s, the Polish government adopted a similar tack. Its ruling party, which excluded Jews, trained Zionist fighters on Polish military bases. Why? Because it wanted Polish Jews to emigrate. And a Jewish state would give them somewhere to go. You find echoes of this antisemitic Zionism among some rightwing American Christians who are far friendlier to the Jews of Israel than the Jews of the US. In 1980, Jerry Falwell, a close ally of Israel’s then prime minister, Menachem Begin, quipped that Jews “can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose”.
Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2005 said, “we have no greater friend in the whole world than Pat Robertson” – the same Pat Robertson who later called former US air force judge Mikey Weinstein a “little Jewish radical” for promoting religious freedom in the American military.
After being criticised by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2010 for calling George Soros a “puppet master” who “wants to bring America to her knees” and “reap obscene profits off us”, Glenn Beck travelled to Jerusalem to hold a pro-Israel rally.
More recently, Donald Trump – who told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” – invited Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, who has said Jews are going to hell for not accepting Jesus, to lead a prayer at the ceremony inaugurating the American embassy in Jerusalem.
In 2017, Richard Spencer, who leads crowds in Nazi salutes, called himself a “white Zionist” who sees Israel as a model for the white homeland he wants in the US.
Some of the European leaders who traffic most blatantly in antisemitism – Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria’s far-right Freedom party and Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany, which promotes nostalgia for the Third Reich – publicly champion Zionism too.
If antisemitism exists without anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism also clearly exists without antisemitism.Consider the Satmar, the largest Hasidic sect in the world. In 2017, 20,000 Satmar men – a larger crowd than attended that year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference – filled the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a rally aimed at showing, in the words of one organiser: “We feel very strongly that there should not be and could not be a State of Israel before the Messiah comes.”
Last year, Satmar Rebbe Aaron Teitelbaum told thousands of followers: “We’ll continue to fight God’s war against Zionism and all its aspects.” Say what you want about Rebbe Teitelbaum and the Satmar, but they’re not antisemites.
Neither is Avrum Burg. Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, in 2018 declared that settlement growth in the West Bank had rendered the two-state solution impossible. Thus, he argued, Israelis must “depart from the Zionist paradigm, and move into a more inclusive paradigm. Israel must belong to all of its residents, including Arabs, not to the Jews alone.”
Other Jewish Israeli progressives, including the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy and the activists of the Federation Movement, have followed a similar path.
Can one question their proposals? Of course. Are they antisemites? Of course not. To be sure, some anti-Zionists really are antisemites: David Duke, Louis Farrakhan and the authors of the 1988 Hamas Covenant certainly qualify. So do the thugs from France’s yellow vest movement who called Finkielkraut a “dirty Zionist shit”.
In some precincts, there’s a growing and reprehensible tendency to use the fact that many Jews are Zionists (or simply assumed to be Zionists) to bar them from progressive spaces. People who care about the moral health of the American left will be fighting this prejudice for years to come.
But while anti-Zionist antisemitism is likely to be on the rise, so is Zionist antisemitism. And, in the US, at least, it is not clear that anti-Zionists are any more likely to harbour antisemitic attitudes than people who support the Jewish state.
In 2016, the ADL gauged antisemitism by asking Americans whether they agreed with statements such as “Jews have too much power” and “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind”. It found that antisemitism was highest among the elderly and poorly educated, saying: “The most well educated Americans are remarkably free of prejudicial views, while less educated Americans are more likely to hold antisemitic views. Age is also a strong predictor of antisemitic propensities. Younger Americans – under 39 – are also remarkably free of prejudicial views.”
In 2018, however, when the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans’ attitudes about Israel, it discovered the reverse pattern: Americans over the age of 65 – the very cohort that expressed the most antisemitism – also expressed the most sympathy for Israel. By contrast, Americans under 30, who according to the ADL harboured the least antisemitism, were least sympathetic to Israel.
It was the same with education. Americans who possessed a high school degree or less – the most antisemitic educational cohort – were the most pro-Israel. Americans with “postgraduate degrees” – the least antisemitic – were the least pro-Israel.
As statistical evidence goes, this is hardly airtight. But it confirms what anyone who listens to progressive and conservative political commentary can grasp: younger progressives are highly universalistic. They’re suspicious of any form of nationalism that seems exclusive. That universalism makes them suspicious of both Zionism and the white Christian nationalism that in the US sometimes shades into antisemitism.
By contrast, some older Trump supporters, who fear a homogenising globalism, admire Israel for preserving Jewish identity while yearning to preserve America’s Christian identity in ways that exclude Jews.
If antisemitism and anti-Zionism are both conceptually different and, in practice, often espoused by different people, why are politicians such as Macron responding to rising antisemitism by calling anti-Zionism a form of bigotry?
Because, in many countries, that’s what communal Jewish leaders want them to do.
It is an understandable impulse: let the people threatened by antisemitism define antisemitism. The problem is that, in many countries, Jewish leaders serve both as defenders of local Jewish interests and defenders of the Israeli government. And the Israeli government wants to define anti-Zionism as bigotry because doing so helps Israel kill the two-state solution with impunity.
For years, Barack Obama and John Kerry warned that if Israel continued the settlement growth in the West Bank that made a Palestinian state impossible, Palestinians would stop demanding a Palestinian state alongside Israel and instead demand one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, that replaces Israel.
Defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism reduces that threat. It means that if Palestinians and their supporters respond to the demise of the two-state solution by demanding one equal state, some of the world’s most powerful governments will declare them bigots.
Which leaves Israel free to entrench its own version of one state, which denies millions of Palestinians basic rights. Silencing Palestinians isn’t a particularly effective way to fight rising antisemitism, much of which comes from people who like neither Palestinians nor Jews. But, just as important, it undermines the moral basis of that fight.
Antisemitism isn’t wrong because it is wrong to denigrate and dehumanise Jews. Antisemitism is wrong because it is wrong to denigrate and dehumanise anyone. Which means, ultimately, that any effort to fight antisemitism that contributes to the denigration and dehumanisation of Palestinians is no fight against antisemitism at all.
Tuesday, 5 March 2019
The Aldi effect: how one discount supermarket transformed the way Britain shops
When Aldi arrived in Britain, Tesco and Sainsbury’s were sure they had nothing to worry about. Three decades later, they know better. By Xan Rice in The Guardian
On a Thursday morning in April 1990, in the suburb of Stechford in Birmingham, a strange grocery chain started trading in the UK. It only stocked 600 basic items – fewer than you might find in your local corner shop today – all at very low prices. For many products, including butter, tea and ketchup, only a single, usually unfamiliar brand was offered. To shoppers accustomed to the abundance of Tesco and Sainsbury’s, which dominated the British grocery sector with thousands of products and brands, delicatessens, vast fridges and aisles piled high with fresh fruit and vegetables, the range would have seemed dismal.
The managers of this new shop, which was called Aldi, had not bothered to place a single advert announcing its arrival – not even an “Opening soon” sign outside the store. Strip lights illuminated the 185 sq metre store, and from the ceiling hung banners listing prices for the goods stacked on wooden pallets or displayed in torn-open cardboard boxes on metal shelves. A £1 deposit allowed you to borrow a trolley but there were no baskets. The checkout assistants, who had been trained to memorise the price of every item in the store, were so fast that shoppers experienced what some would come to call “Aldi panic” – the fear that you cannot pack your goods quickly enough. The store accepted cash but not cheques or cards. Customers seeking itemised receipts left disappointed.
Information on Aldi’s owners was as limited as the decor. Most news reports noted merely that the company belonged to a frugal and spectacularly rich pair of German brothers, Karl and Theo Albrecht, who had both fought in the second world war and whose desire for privacy had reached extremes after Theo’s high-profile kidnapping for ransom in 1970s. The Albrechts had an extremely popular chain of bleak discount stories in Germany: the brothers had divided the country into separate fiefs, with each controlling the market in one half of the territory.
But most people were confident they would fail in Britain, where there was a discernible snobbery about discount stores. When a reporter from the Times visited an Aldi store in Birmingham the following year, he thought it represented the “anonymous, slightly alarming face of 1990s grocery shopping”, without any pretence of sophistication. “One looks in vain for avocados or kiwi fruit.”
The British supermarket giants, whose 7% profit margins were the world’s highest, were even more dismissive. Sainsbury’s remarked on the absence of service, which was important to British customers. “We welcome the advent of Aldi and others to come,” said Tesco managing director David Malpas. “We can live quite happily in our part of the market and they can live in theirs.”
For a long time it looked like he was correct. In 1999, when Walmart bought Asda, the UK’s third biggest grocery chain, the Financial Times noted that Aldi had made “little impact in Britain” because customers were not as price-sensitive as Americans or continental Europeans. German shoppers, notoriously, took this to extremes: one of the country’s biggest electronics retailers, Saturn, even adopted “Thriftiness is sexy” as a marketing slogan. By 2009 – after nearly two decades – Aldi’s market share was just 2%, similar to that of Lidl, its German rival and imitator, which had launched in Britain soon after Aldi.
But today, the boasts of Tesco and Sainsbury’s read like a classic example of business hubris. While the major supermarkets dozed, convinced that many people would not be seen dead in a discount store, the German chains quietly turned the sector on its head. Nearly two-thirds of households now visit an Aldi or Lidl branch at least once every 12 weeks, according to the research firm Kantar Worldpanel.
In 2017, Aldi overtook the Co-op to become the UK’s fifth largest retailer; today it has a 7.5% market share, closing in on fourth-place Morrisons, with 10.6%. Lidl has 5.3%, more than Waitrose. What’s more, the two discounters are still growing quickly – opening an average of one new store every week, often in more affluent towns.
By sucking in shoppers and, as former Aldi UK CEO Paul Foley puts it, “sucking the profitability out of the industry” – profit margins of 2-3% are now the norm – the two German-owned companies have forced the “big four” supermarkets to take drastic measures. Morrisons has closed stores and laid off workers, while Sainsbury’s and Asda, desperate to cut costs and stop losing market share, announced a proposed £13bn merger in May, which the UK competition watchdog now appears likely to block. Tesco, meanwhile, has slashed its product range and bought the discount wholesaler Booker. In September, in a belated acknowledgement that the major threat to its business comes from Aldi and Lidl, Tesco launched its own discount chain, called Jack’s.
These industry shifts often lead the news, because supermarkets are so important to the economy: with more than 300,000 staff, Tesco is the UK’s biggest private-sector employer and the biggest retailer of any sort. But we also follow these stories closely for a more sentimental reason: grocery shopping is an intimate part of our lives. We don’t need to buy books or fancy trainers, but we do need to eat.
Most of us shop weekly, at the same store each time. Traditionally, we chose a shop for convenience – because a particular store was close by and because we knew along which aisles to find a large choice of our favourite products and brands – and loyalty. Research shows that many of us also chose a grocer because of how we perceived ourselves in terms of class and status. In the early 2000s, before Aldi’s rise, Peter Jackson, professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield, noted that British shoppers appeared to want an “environment where they will be surrounded by people like themselves” with whom they feel comfortable.
But the success of Aldi and, to a lesser extent, Lidl, shows that these old conventions no longer hold so true. Aldi, which is still family owned and unburdened by the short-term pressures for profits faced by its stock-market listed rivals, has changed the way we shop.
Today, you will no longer search in vain for avocados and kiwi fruit at Aldi. You will even find sourdough baguettes, prosecco and 36-day aged Scottish Aberdeen Angus sirloin steak, the sorts of items that have attracted customers who previously might have looked down their noses at discount shops. But there’s still only one type of ketchup (45p a bottle). The total number of products – known in retail as stock-keeping units (SKUs) – found in all Aldi stores has tripled since the early 90s to nearly 2,000, although that remains tiny compared to the 25,000 or more in a big supermarket. Most of these products are private labels that are made specifically for the company, even if they are designed to appear familiar to shoppers. In the chocolate aisle you will find Aldi’s own version of Mars and Snickers bars (“Titan” and “Racer”) – although its long struggle to copy the KitKat ended in failure.
The stores’ overall feel is still more gritty than pretty. In the latest Which? magazine survey of its members’ favourite supermarkets, published in February, shoppers ranked Aldi third overall, behind only Waitrose and Marks & Spencer, despite giving it only one star out of five for store appearance. Merchandise is still displayed on pallets, in plastic crates or cardboard boxes – or arranged haphazardly, as in the case of the one-off, bargain-priced goods found in the “middle aisle”, which hosts a rapidly rotating assortment of ultra-discounted oddities.
The famous “middle aisle” is the one place in Aldi where people linger for more time than is absolutely necessary, and it inspires devotion among customers, who know it by an assortment of made-up names: “the WTF aisle”, “treasure aisle-land” and, my two favourites, “the Aisle of Wonder” and “the Aisle of Shite”. You might find yourself walking into Aldi for coffee, pasta and milk and walking out with a discount welding helmet, an inflatable watermelon or a blanket for a horse (even though you don’t own a horse).
As anyone who has tried navigating a ram-packed Aldi on a Saturday afternoon will know, you still don’t go there for the ambience or relaxed shopping experience. “Aldi panic” at the till endures in the electronic age thanks to a simple innovation that allows for instant scanning of goods. Packaged products in all supermarkets come with a barcode, which the checkout assistant will locate and scan. But look closely at a packet of Aldi toilet rolls and you will see not one but four barcodes: two long ones down the sides, and one on each large flat surface. A container of butter has three barcodes; a bag of carrots has two. For kidney beans, a pinstripe barcode is wrapped around half of the can. This means that whichever way the assistant holds the product the scanner will register it.
For Aldi, the panic and rush is an integral part of the shopping experience for two reasons. The first is the happy realisation once you have left the store, and your heartbeat has settled, that you have spent less time shopping than you would have in a typical supermarket. The second, and most important, is what Aldi managers describe, straight-faced, as “the thrill at the till”: your trolley full of goods has cost less than you thought it would. The rushed, no-frills experience isn’t something you merely endure for the sake of saving money; the awareness of your savings makes that experience a pleasure in itself.
“When you leave the store, Aldi wants to think you have paid nothing for the aesthetics – it all goes into the low cost,” said Richard Hyman, a retail expert who has followed the company since it launched in Britain.
That this appeals to such a range of customers – look at the cars outside the next time you visit – shows just how successful Aldi has been in disrupting the supermarket sector, without changing its own business model. Other companies that have upended industries, such as Amazon with books and Uber with taxis, have relied on new technologies – the internet, the smartphone – as the disrupting force. Aldi is still relatively low-tech: without a loyalty programme, it knows little about individual customer preferences and you can’t buy its groceries online. What it has done is disrupt a mindset: the settled wisdom about how we think of ourselves as shoppers, and the basis by which we identify with a particular supermarket. Aldi’s victory was to show that there was no shame – and in fact there was satisfaction – in shopping at a discount supermarket. British mums once worried about their children being embarrassed to find Aldi food in their lunchboxes; now they happily swaddle their babies in Aldi’s disposable nappies, which are now the second-most popular brand in the country, behind only Pampers. “Aldi’s customer profile is now classless,” said Hyman. “The supermarket is as strong with affluent people as it is with people on low incomes.”
Karl Albrecht, who was famously secretive, only spoke publicly about Aldi’s business model on one occasion – in 1953. Its fundamental principles, he said, were “narrow product range and low price, [which] cannot be separated”. It was a strategy his mother, Anna, had followed, when she opened a small grocery store in 1913 in Essen, in western Germany, after her husband had developed emphysema working in the coal mines. Karl and Theo, who were born in the early 1920s, helped in the shop before being conscripted into the army when the second world war broke out. Karl was wounded on the eastern front and later captured. Theo fought in Rommel’s Afrika Korps before being taken prisoner in Italy in 1945.
After the war, the brothers returned to Essen to find the city devastated by allied bombing but the grocery store undamaged. They took over the business, expanding it into a network of small shops. Lacking capital, they stocked only a tight range of staples, such as pasta and soap, planning to widen the offering later. But they soon realised that offering a limited selection of cheap, fast-selling goods kept their costs down and the cash flowing, which they could use to invest in new stores. As the former Aldi executive Dieter Brandes and his son Nils wrote in “Bare Essentials”, their book about the company: “Basically, a completely new business model was created along the lines of a discovery in the natural sciences: by accident.”
Germans, forced into frugality during the war, remained thrifty, and would line up outside the Albrecht stores before opening time at weekends. The chain’s popularity grew further when the brothers decided to adopt the model established in the US by the Memphis grocer Piggly Wiggly (and its imitators, Hoggly Woggly, Helpy Selfy and Handy Andy), launching Germany’s first self-service store in the mid-1950s. Instead of clerks filling orders from behind a counter, customers were able to pick the goods themselves, speeding up the shopping process.
Although they were close, the Albrechts were independent-minded and did not agree on everything. Theo wanted to stock cigarettes, for example, but Karl thought it would attract shoplifters. And so, in 1961, when they had 300 stores, they chose to split Aldi, short for Albrecht Discount, into two parts. The “Aldi equator” ran through Essen, with Theo taking the part of Germany to the north, and Karl the south. Aldi North and Aldi South shared all information, except profits, and conducted some supplier negotiations jointly, but were otherwise run separately, with their stores carrying different product ranges and featuring differently coloured floors – one yellow and one grey.
The brothers had always kept a low profile, but the success of their business did not go unnoticed. In December 1971, while preparing to drive home from work, Theo was kidnapped at gunpoint. His abductors were an unlikely pair: a convicted burglar nicknamed Diamond Paul and his lawyer, who had gambling debts. At first they were unsure that the ordinary looking man in the ill-fitting suit was really their target, and demanded to see Theo’s identification documents. The men kept him hidden in a wardrobe in Dusseldorf for 17 days, during which time Theo haggled over his ransom of DM7m (£1.5m at the time), for many years the highest ransom paid in Germany. The cash was delivered by a mediating bishop from Essen, with Karl contributing half.
Diamond Paul and the lawyer were soon caught, convicted and sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison. Only half the money was recovered. Theo later tried, unsuccessfully, to have the ransom written off as a business expense for tax purposes.
Following the media coverage of his release, he never permitted himself to be photographed again. He travelled to his office in an armoured car by a different route each day, and when checking into a hotel, ascertained the best escape route before even going to his room. But Theo continued to put in long hours at the office, managing even the smallest details in his quest to save money. He wore pencils down to the nubs and turned off the light when entering an office if he judged that his staff could see well enough without it. He once told his board to look at the thickness of the paper used for photocopies. Outside consultants and media interviews were banned, considered unnecessary expenditures or distractions. Asceticism was a virtue in life and business, he believed. “People live more on what they do not eat,” he once said. He wanted Aldi to be a place where “people who don’t hate their money can safely go shopping”.
Karl was more charismatic and less intense than his brother, making time daily for an afternoon nap and to read for 20 minutes, usually biographies and memoirs, with Churchill a favourite subject. But, like Theo, he was fiercely demanding of his employees. Stagnation was unacceptable. Aldi managers were expected to make continuous improvements to the company’s processes, a business philosophy also used by Japanese manufacturers, where it was called kaizen. In their book “Bare Essentials”, Dieter and Nils Brandes argued that Aldi’s embrace of kaizen, its lean management structure and just-in-time approach to inventory – taking delivery of stock only when needed, to cut holding costs – made it the “most Japanese” company in Germany.
By the early 1970s, the brothers were ready to test their model abroad, initially in Europe and then in the US. In 1976, Aldi South, Karl’s company, opened the first Aldi store on the east coast of the US. Three years later, in 1979, Theo’s Aldi North purchased Trader Joe’s, a California chain that sells cheap gourmet foods and enjoys a cult-like following. (The US is still the only foreign market where both Aldis operate.)
In the UK, at that time, Tesco and Sainsbury’s were fighting a price war. But as the 80s went on, the big supermarkets stopped competing on price when they realised they could both make much more money by expanding: instead, they concentrated on buying land and building superstores to encourage customers to spend more. Their profit margins surged. For Aldi, the record profits of the big grocers, along with a recent cut in corporation tax, made the UK a very attractive opportunity. With the US launch now complete, and Aldi senior management free to tackle their next big challenge, Karl Albrecht decided the time was right to bring the company to Britain.
The big British supermarkets didn’t take Aldi’s threat seriously at first. But they – and their suppliers – did not make things easy for the German interloper. Within months of opening the store in Stechford in 1990, Aldi had raised a complaint with the Office of Fair Trading. Quaker Oats was refusing to sell to Aldi at all, while Whitbread, the brewer, had expressed concern over the discounter’s “open aggression on prices”. Cornflakes had to be sourced from France. Aldi blamed the supermarkets for putting pressure on the suppliers.
“The rest of the industry hated us,” said Paul Foley, who was the company’s third employee in the UK, and chief executive from 1999-2009. “I heard us called parasites, leeches, and ‘a plague of locusts landing on our shores’” – because of the company’s record of dragging down prices and profit margins in new markets. “It means nobody will help you: nobody wants to rent you space, organise transport for you, or sell you product.”
Still, Aldi believed eventual success was a “racing certainty” because all the conditions it looks for in a foreign market were present, Foley told me. First, large supermarkets dominated the grocery industry, with no big “hard discount” retailer present. Second, the main chains – the big four as well as the leading “soft” discounter Kwik Save (which stocked a larger range than Aldi) – were listed on the stock exchange. The best way to fight Aldi early on is to slash prices, but few bosses of public companies are happy to accept lower profits, and thus lower bonuses, by pursuing long-term strategies.
Third, the UK is a wealthy country, where most people are unwilling to compromise on the types of food they eat. “In rich nations, the postman and the hedge-fund manager have almost the same basic diet,” Foley said: cereal, bread, cheese, beer, ketchup and so on. That is important for Aldi or Lidl because ultimately they look to develop their own products to rival established brands, without shoppers being seduced by cheaper, substitute foods they don’t stock.
Fourth, and most importantly, the UK is, by global standards, a high-wage economy. This means that labour costs make up a big part of a supermarket’s operating expenses. Here, discounters have a major competitive advantage, because their business model – stocking a small range of products, eschewing delicatessens and promotions, and so on – allows them to operate with fewer, more productive, staff. (The most important performance measure in any Aldi branch is revenue divided by employee hours.) At Aldi there are no dedicated checkout clerks but rather “all-rounders” who work the tills when needed but also clean the floor if there is a spill, and bring merchandise from the stockroom on to the shop floor. Replenishing the shelves is much faster than at other supermarkets because the products are displayed in the boxes they arrived in, rather than arranged by hand. Tesco founder Jack Cohen famously gave his top managers tie-pins with the letters “YCDBSOYA” – “You can’t do business sitting on your arse”. In Aldi, no staff member ever sits on their arse.
When entering a new market, Aldi seeks to magnify this labour-cost advantage in a counterintuitive way: by publicising that it will pay its store staff better than other supermarkets. Today, new Aldi store assistants receive industry-leading pay of £9.10 an hour, and £10.55 an hour in London – the London living wage – while a graduate accepted on to the area manager programme starts on £44,000 and gets an Audi A4 company car. Paying well obviously helps attract and retain staff, who might otherwise go to chains where the pace of work is slower. But it also serves to drive up wages across the industry, which, because of Aldi’s lower overall employee costs, hurts its competitors more.
In those early years, in the 1990s, the company focused on the Midlands and the north of England, where store rents were cheaper, and the customers less affluent, deliberately staying away from London and the south-east. As a private company, with no shareholders other than Karl Albrecht’s family to answer to, it could afford to be patient. “Aldi is very attuned to going into a country, making the investment, and building slowly and steadily,” said Richard Hyman, the retail expert. “Most other companies don’t have a 30-year view – or even a five-year view.”
The fortunes of its bigger competitors varied. Kwik Save foundered and eventually went under. Tesco, which was building an empire of out-of-town superstores, overtook Sainsbury’s to become the leading grocery chain. Profits at the big four remained healthy in the 21st century, even as they chased new streams of revenue: expanding abroad, and launching online shopping, banking and mobile-phone services. Aldi and Lidl were still seen as niche retailers, locked out of the mainstream market.
Then, in 2008, the door blew open. Northern Rock was nationalised, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global economic crisis began. Inflation rose above 5%. Companies laid off staff. Household incomes were squeezed. But the big grocery chains actually raised their prices in line with inflation, to try to maintain their profit margins. “Consumers needed to save money, but rather than recognise the challenge, the bosses of the big four supermarkets decided to milk inflation,” said Clive Black, head of research at Shore Capital. “People were forced out of necessity to try the discounters.”
For Aldi, the timing was fortunate, as it was just reaching critical mass in the UK. It had about 400 stores, and an established network of manufacturers delivering products that were not only low-priced, but also of a reasonable quality. A new phase of rapid growth was inevitable, Aldi’s managers believed; the financial crash brought it on sooner than expected. “Shoppers realised that Aldi was cheap, but not as nasty as they had thought,” said Black. “The service level was simple but efficient. The stores were not too big. And a lot of people shopping there were their neighbours.”
As their sales slowed, the big supermarkets looked for other ways to maintain profits. Charging suppliers to stock their brands, and to promote them if sales reach a certain volume, is standard practice at all big grocery chains. A washing powder manufacturer might, for example, pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to a retailer to have its detergent displayed in the best position – the end of the aisle – where sales can increase as much as tenfold. This income from suppliers, which reduces the cost of goods sold, is known as the “back margin” – the “front margin” comes from selling to the customer – and can mean the difference between reporting an overall profit or loss. At the time, Tesco had 24 different ways of extracting money from suppliers.
Now, the big supermarkets pressurised suppliers to increase these back-margin payments. As a result of Tesco’s desire to boost its fees from stock listing, the number of products on its shelves shot up to as high as 90,000, as did the number of promotions. The company appeared to be as much in the brand advertising business as the grocery business. British consumers, who on average buy fewer than 20 items on each trip to a grocery store, were confused by the huge choice and the up-and-down prices. Even more took their wallets to Aldi and Lidl, some just for the essentials but others for the bulk of their weekly shop. (Most discounter customers still do a top-up at a big supermarket.)
By the time the supermarkets awoke to the structural shift that had occurred in the industry, the damage was done. “The big four bosses were not just sleeping at the wheel,” said Black. “They were comatose.”
In recent years, Aldi has worked very hard to widen its appeal among British shoppers. One morning in October, I drove to Staffordshire to talk with Jonathan Neale, who joined Aldi as a graduate in 2002 and is now managing director of buying. We met at one of the company’s flagship stores in Tamworth. When I mentioned my nearest branch, in Oxford, with its narrow aisles and awkward layout – bread in the first aisle, so it gets squashed in your trolley – Neale winced. Newer and refurbished shops, like the Tamworth one, are brighter, with wider aisles and more space for fresh and chilled food, which appeal to more upmarket customers.
Neale mentioned some of the other changes introduced in all stores to attract more business: five years ago Aldi introduced shopping baskets and started accepting credit cards, and two years later it introduced a small range of newspapers and magazines. It is also following trends more, selling things like manuka honey, protein bars and chia seeds. A caviar-based skincare cream proved hugely successful, and resulted in loads of free advertising: a Daily Mail article ran under the headline “The £7 Aldi moisturiser that’s (nearly) as good as a £292 cream”.
“Ten years ago we had 900 lines, now we have 1,800,” said Neale. “That’s not because we are trying to become a big-four retailer, it’s because consumer tastes have evolved. We are managing the equilibrium between what customers want and costs.”
Ultimately though, cost remains the most important consideration. When it comes to buying groceries online, Britons are tied with Japanese in second place, behind only the South Koreans. But Aldi still has no plans to sell food through its website. (You can buy wine and “middle aisle” products there.) As the large supermarkets have realised, it is very hard to make money from internet sales because the profit margin on groceries is small and the delivery costs are so high – but now they can’t reverse course without losing customers. Andy Clarke, the former boss of Asda, told the Sunday Times last year that if the big four supermarkets had their time again “they wouldn’t have offered home deliveries, full stop”. “Online groceries are a cost drain,” Neale said. “Why should 90% of customers subsidise the 10% who get free home delivery?”
A range of cheese on display in Aldi. Photograph: Peter Summers/Reuters
As we walked through the aisles, a few familiar brands stood out, such as Marmite, and Colgate toothpaste. Nobody has yet managed to launch a successful private-label yeast extract product, Neale said. “And we tried with a private-label toothpaste, but our market data showed us we needed a brand.”
You can also buy Nutella and Coca-Cola, although alongside them you will find Aldi’s own chocolate spread, Nutoka, and its own cola, at much lower prices. All supermarkets have their own private labels: made not by them, but for them, by manufacturers who agree to put their merchandise in a bag or box with the grocer’s logo on it. But Aldi takes this to extremes: more than 90% of the products it sells, from shaving cream to dark chocolate and frozen pizza, are private labels. Some, it gets from suppliers that only produce private-label goods, which they may sell to several different supermarkets. Other merchandise comes from companies that also make branded products, and the occasional error, like when an Aldi customer found a packet of Hula Hoops inside a multi-pack bag of the discounter’s Snackrite hoops. This invariably makes the news, and gives Aldi free advertising.
Stocking mostly own-label goods allows the company to order huge quantities of a single item, to its own specifications, at a low unit cost. Consider ketchup. If a big supermarket orders ketchup, that may be spread among three or more suppliers that each have several different pack sizes and formulations, such as plain, reduced sugar and salt, and organic. Aldi’s entire ketchup order comes from one manufacturer that can operate the same, unchanging product run, all the time, and has no marketing costs to build into the price. “For many SKUs we are the biggest buyer by a country mile,” Neale said.
Similar economies of scale apply to the merchandise in the ever-changing Aisle of Wonder/Aisle of Shite. Most supermarket buyers look for suppliers that keep their shelves stocked year round. Because the goods in this section are one-offs, rather than always kept in stock, Aldi can place a bulk order for delivery at its distribution centres around the country on a specific day. Its buyers look at market trends and then seek out manufacturers with spare capacity or excess stock, anything from champagne to knitting wool and cycling accessories.
Aldi’s low prices on everything from fresh fruit to crisps have led people to question “where we are cutting corners”, Neale said, to which he replies that they aren’t. Among UK suppliers, who have often been treated badly by the big supermarkets, with their pressure for back margin fees and slow payment terms, Aldi has a good reputation. But the company has been criticised for a lack of transparency about its global supply chain. In September, Oxfam ranked British supermarkets according to their “public policies and practices that prevent human suffering” among the workers and farmers who produce their food abroad. Aldi was bottom of the list. (In a statement, the company said: “We respect human rights and have comprehensive checks in place to ensure that everyone in our supply chain who makes, grows and supplies our products is treated fairly … We continue to have positive discussions with Oxfam.”)
When we reached the tills, Neale explained how the multiple barcode strategy helped get customers through quicker. In fact, the whole checkout area is designed for speed. The conveyor belt is long enough to unload a full trolley. But the packing area behind the cashier is so small it can only hold a few items. This is to encourage customers to put their scanned purchases straight back into the empty trolley. Only after paying and pushing the trolley to a counter at the front of the store are you meant to transfer your purchases into carry bags.
I had heard that the rate at which individual employees scan items at the checkout is closely monitored. Neale confirmed this, although he would not be drawn on the targeted number of scanned products per minute, and said that staff were instructed to assist customers who struggled to keep up.
Aldi UK’s corporate headquarters is in Atherstone, about 15 minutes drive from the Tamworth store. A long row of delivery lorries were parked next to an adjoining warehouse, their sides emblazoned with giant Union Jacks and the slogan “Championing Great British quality”. In the reception, a television had on repeat an advert featuring the Olympic triathletes, Jonathan and Alastair Brownlee, who Aldi sponsors, along with Team GB. Lidl, the “official supermarket” of the England football team, has a similar marketing strategy. Fraser McKevitt, head of retail at Kantar Worldpanel, said the strategy of trying to appear more British – as well as adopting more local business practices, such as accepting credit cards – had been effective in helping both companies grow their market share.
From the Aldi reception I followed Neale to one of the most crucial parts of the company’s operations, the testing rooms. Because Aldi stocks so few items, compared to the big supermarkets, it must constantly “forensically examine” all its products against competitors’ merchandise to ensure they stack up, Neale said. In one room, a team was looking at fruit juices and sports drinks. Aldi had asked a supplier if it could develop a paper straw, for environmental reasons, but was told it was not yet possible. Now, another grocer was selling juice with a paper straw, and the buyers were scrambling to find a way to catch up. In another room, a team was looking at brioche burger buns, of which Aldi has 20% of the UK market, Neale said. Two managers from the bakery department were comparing buns purchased from Jack’s, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, with Aldi’s buns, which are baked by a French company and part of its growing “Specially Selected” range of premium products. Neale picked up the Jack’s brioche buns, and noted that they were made locally. “Great – but you know what? I’d prefer mine made by the experts in France,” he said.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Karl Albrecht in 2006. His brother, Theo, never allowed himself to be photographed. Photograph: AP
On another table stood a box of Marks & Spencer apple and cinnamon flakes. Aldi buyers, whose job includes identifying popular items it does not stock and quickly bringing them to market, wanted to see if it was worth making something similar. When copying a branded product, the mimicry often extends to the name and packaging. Aldi sells a cheap, spreadable butter called Norpak, for example, which resembles Lurpak, and Wheat Shreds, in a box that looks like Shredded Wheat.
The large consumer goods companies don’t like this, of course. Paul Foley, the former Aldi CEO, who now runs his own retail consultancy, often tells his clients about his attempts to replicate a KitKat in the 1990s. It turns out this is really hard to do without the chocolate making the wafer soggy. Eventually, Aldi gave up. Foley asked his buyer to contact Nestlé’s UK office to announce Aldi’s surrender and request to stock KitKat. Nestlé would not return his call. So Foley ordered the bars from Germany, where they have a slightly different taste. Soon, Nestlé UK starting receiving complaints about the taste of its KitKats, and traced the problem back to Aldi. When they phoned Foley to complain, he “politely refused to cooperate”.
Aldi vs Nestlé, both huge, global companies with big legal teams, may seem like a fair fight. But Aldi has also got into trouble for appearing to copy the packaging of smaller British brands. In 2014, Aldi was forced to settle a high court case brought by The Saucy Fish Co, a Grimsby-based seafood producer, after the supermarket introduced a copycat product called Saucy Salmon Fillets. This year, the discounter has faced complaints from artisan yoghurtmaker The Collective and the family-owned sausage brand Heck, for selling cut-price look-a-like versions.
Aldi claims that its customers shop there specifically because of its own-label brands, which are packaged in a way that makes them “easily recognisable”. “We go to great lengths to ensure that we adhere to strict copyright guidelines,” the company said.
Many in the industry disagree, saying customers are being duped. David Sables, CEO of Sentinel Management Consultants, which advises suppliers on how to deal with retailers, told me: “When an own label comes in the shape of something that looks and feels like the brand, to rip that off: I would view that as theft.”
In his late 70s, Karl Albrecht bought eight cemetery plots in a graveyard in Essen for himself and his family. Soon after, Theo purchased 14 plots there and, like his brother, left them untended, allowing weeds to grow. The cemetery administrator was compelled to write to the Albrechts, reminding them of their responsibility for maintenance. Finally, an Aldi truck arrived with yew trees, cypresses and rhododendrons – the brothers had been waiting until Aldi had plants on sale. Der Spiegel recounted that anecdote in 2010, following the death of Theo, which it said brought to an end “the story of the most eccentric, secretive and mysterious pair of siblings in Germany’s post-war economic history”. Karl died four years later, the richest man in Germany with a net worth of $25bn. (Second on the list was Dieter Schwarz, the Lidl owner, followed by Theo’s heirs.)
Although the founders’ families still own Aldi North and South, their influence over the companies’ direction is receding. Executives now run the business. Some experts say that as Aldi’s product range increases, it is becoming more like the supermarkets it seeks to undercut. “The Aldi DNA is still strong, but not as strong as it was,” Nils Brandes told me.
Even so, sales and market share continue to soar. In 2017, Aldi South’s revenues reached €52bn, with about 20% of that from the UK and Ireland. In Ireland, Aldi has 12% of the market, and in Australia 13%, behind Woolworths and Coles. Its share in the US is only 2% – but Aldi plans to raise its number of outlets from 1,800 to 2,500 by 2022, which would make it the third-biggest chain in the US by store count, after Walmart and Kroger.
In the UK there is still plenty of room to grow. Aldi hopes to have 1,000 shops in three years, up from just over 800 today. Dave McCarthy, a retail analyst at HSBC, said that given Aldi and Lidl’s expansion plans, their share of the market could peak at more than 20%.
Aldi is increasingly focusing on moving into wealthier areas in the south-east, including Sevenoaks, in Kent, which has a Lamborghini dealership and two Waitroses. This strategy is a sign of the confidence of Aldi – and Lidl, which already has a store there – that the sociology of shopping in Britain has shifted for good.
Five years ago, David Cameron was criticised when he claimed that customers in Waitrose, where he shopped, were “very talkative, engaged people” – far more so than at other supermarkets. Observers interpreted him as saying they were nicer, and more middle class than at other stores. (On other occasions, Cameron was more alert. Asked, during election campaigning, to name his favourite supermarket, he said, very slowly: “Not Waitrose.”)
When Aldi opened the doors of its new Sevenoaks store for the first time at 8am on a late autumn morning, there was already a long queue outside. James McSharry, who had arrived at 6.30am, was at the front, with his 14-year-old daughter, Aislinn. McSharry, 52, very talkative and engaged, worked in finance for JP Morgan for 20 years before retraining as a physiotherapist. He used to shop at Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, before switching allegiance to Lidl, buying 80% of his groceries there. Now he was eager to see what Aldi had to offer.
On a Thursday morning in April 1990, in the suburb of Stechford in Birmingham, a strange grocery chain started trading in the UK. It only stocked 600 basic items – fewer than you might find in your local corner shop today – all at very low prices. For many products, including butter, tea and ketchup, only a single, usually unfamiliar brand was offered. To shoppers accustomed to the abundance of Tesco and Sainsbury’s, which dominated the British grocery sector with thousands of products and brands, delicatessens, vast fridges and aisles piled high with fresh fruit and vegetables, the range would have seemed dismal.
The managers of this new shop, which was called Aldi, had not bothered to place a single advert announcing its arrival – not even an “Opening soon” sign outside the store. Strip lights illuminated the 185 sq metre store, and from the ceiling hung banners listing prices for the goods stacked on wooden pallets or displayed in torn-open cardboard boxes on metal shelves. A £1 deposit allowed you to borrow a trolley but there were no baskets. The checkout assistants, who had been trained to memorise the price of every item in the store, were so fast that shoppers experienced what some would come to call “Aldi panic” – the fear that you cannot pack your goods quickly enough. The store accepted cash but not cheques or cards. Customers seeking itemised receipts left disappointed.
Information on Aldi’s owners was as limited as the decor. Most news reports noted merely that the company belonged to a frugal and spectacularly rich pair of German brothers, Karl and Theo Albrecht, who had both fought in the second world war and whose desire for privacy had reached extremes after Theo’s high-profile kidnapping for ransom in 1970s. The Albrechts had an extremely popular chain of bleak discount stories in Germany: the brothers had divided the country into separate fiefs, with each controlling the market in one half of the territory.
But most people were confident they would fail in Britain, where there was a discernible snobbery about discount stores. When a reporter from the Times visited an Aldi store in Birmingham the following year, he thought it represented the “anonymous, slightly alarming face of 1990s grocery shopping”, without any pretence of sophistication. “One looks in vain for avocados or kiwi fruit.”
The British supermarket giants, whose 7% profit margins were the world’s highest, were even more dismissive. Sainsbury’s remarked on the absence of service, which was important to British customers. “We welcome the advent of Aldi and others to come,” said Tesco managing director David Malpas. “We can live quite happily in our part of the market and they can live in theirs.”
For a long time it looked like he was correct. In 1999, when Walmart bought Asda, the UK’s third biggest grocery chain, the Financial Times noted that Aldi had made “little impact in Britain” because customers were not as price-sensitive as Americans or continental Europeans. German shoppers, notoriously, took this to extremes: one of the country’s biggest electronics retailers, Saturn, even adopted “Thriftiness is sexy” as a marketing slogan. By 2009 – after nearly two decades – Aldi’s market share was just 2%, similar to that of Lidl, its German rival and imitator, which had launched in Britain soon after Aldi.
But today, the boasts of Tesco and Sainsbury’s read like a classic example of business hubris. While the major supermarkets dozed, convinced that many people would not be seen dead in a discount store, the German chains quietly turned the sector on its head. Nearly two-thirds of households now visit an Aldi or Lidl branch at least once every 12 weeks, according to the research firm Kantar Worldpanel.
In 2017, Aldi overtook the Co-op to become the UK’s fifth largest retailer; today it has a 7.5% market share, closing in on fourth-place Morrisons, with 10.6%. Lidl has 5.3%, more than Waitrose. What’s more, the two discounters are still growing quickly – opening an average of one new store every week, often in more affluent towns.
By sucking in shoppers and, as former Aldi UK CEO Paul Foley puts it, “sucking the profitability out of the industry” – profit margins of 2-3% are now the norm – the two German-owned companies have forced the “big four” supermarkets to take drastic measures. Morrisons has closed stores and laid off workers, while Sainsbury’s and Asda, desperate to cut costs and stop losing market share, announced a proposed £13bn merger in May, which the UK competition watchdog now appears likely to block. Tesco, meanwhile, has slashed its product range and bought the discount wholesaler Booker. In September, in a belated acknowledgement that the major threat to its business comes from Aldi and Lidl, Tesco launched its own discount chain, called Jack’s.
These industry shifts often lead the news, because supermarkets are so important to the economy: with more than 300,000 staff, Tesco is the UK’s biggest private-sector employer and the biggest retailer of any sort. But we also follow these stories closely for a more sentimental reason: grocery shopping is an intimate part of our lives. We don’t need to buy books or fancy trainers, but we do need to eat.
Most of us shop weekly, at the same store each time. Traditionally, we chose a shop for convenience – because a particular store was close by and because we knew along which aisles to find a large choice of our favourite products and brands – and loyalty. Research shows that many of us also chose a grocer because of how we perceived ourselves in terms of class and status. In the early 2000s, before Aldi’s rise, Peter Jackson, professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield, noted that British shoppers appeared to want an “environment where they will be surrounded by people like themselves” with whom they feel comfortable.
But the success of Aldi and, to a lesser extent, Lidl, shows that these old conventions no longer hold so true. Aldi, which is still family owned and unburdened by the short-term pressures for profits faced by its stock-market listed rivals, has changed the way we shop.
Today, you will no longer search in vain for avocados and kiwi fruit at Aldi. You will even find sourdough baguettes, prosecco and 36-day aged Scottish Aberdeen Angus sirloin steak, the sorts of items that have attracted customers who previously might have looked down their noses at discount shops. But there’s still only one type of ketchup (45p a bottle). The total number of products – known in retail as stock-keeping units (SKUs) – found in all Aldi stores has tripled since the early 90s to nearly 2,000, although that remains tiny compared to the 25,000 or more in a big supermarket. Most of these products are private labels that are made specifically for the company, even if they are designed to appear familiar to shoppers. In the chocolate aisle you will find Aldi’s own version of Mars and Snickers bars (“Titan” and “Racer”) – although its long struggle to copy the KitKat ended in failure.
The stores’ overall feel is still more gritty than pretty. In the latest Which? magazine survey of its members’ favourite supermarkets, published in February, shoppers ranked Aldi third overall, behind only Waitrose and Marks & Spencer, despite giving it only one star out of five for store appearance. Merchandise is still displayed on pallets, in plastic crates or cardboard boxes – or arranged haphazardly, as in the case of the one-off, bargain-priced goods found in the “middle aisle”, which hosts a rapidly rotating assortment of ultra-discounted oddities.
The famous “middle aisle” is the one place in Aldi where people linger for more time than is absolutely necessary, and it inspires devotion among customers, who know it by an assortment of made-up names: “the WTF aisle”, “treasure aisle-land” and, my two favourites, “the Aisle of Wonder” and “the Aisle of Shite”. You might find yourself walking into Aldi for coffee, pasta and milk and walking out with a discount welding helmet, an inflatable watermelon or a blanket for a horse (even though you don’t own a horse).
As anyone who has tried navigating a ram-packed Aldi on a Saturday afternoon will know, you still don’t go there for the ambience or relaxed shopping experience. “Aldi panic” at the till endures in the electronic age thanks to a simple innovation that allows for instant scanning of goods. Packaged products in all supermarkets come with a barcode, which the checkout assistant will locate and scan. But look closely at a packet of Aldi toilet rolls and you will see not one but four barcodes: two long ones down the sides, and one on each large flat surface. A container of butter has three barcodes; a bag of carrots has two. For kidney beans, a pinstripe barcode is wrapped around half of the can. This means that whichever way the assistant holds the product the scanner will register it.
For Aldi, the panic and rush is an integral part of the shopping experience for two reasons. The first is the happy realisation once you have left the store, and your heartbeat has settled, that you have spent less time shopping than you would have in a typical supermarket. The second, and most important, is what Aldi managers describe, straight-faced, as “the thrill at the till”: your trolley full of goods has cost less than you thought it would. The rushed, no-frills experience isn’t something you merely endure for the sake of saving money; the awareness of your savings makes that experience a pleasure in itself.
“When you leave the store, Aldi wants to think you have paid nothing for the aesthetics – it all goes into the low cost,” said Richard Hyman, a retail expert who has followed the company since it launched in Britain.
That this appeals to such a range of customers – look at the cars outside the next time you visit – shows just how successful Aldi has been in disrupting the supermarket sector, without changing its own business model. Other companies that have upended industries, such as Amazon with books and Uber with taxis, have relied on new technologies – the internet, the smartphone – as the disrupting force. Aldi is still relatively low-tech: without a loyalty programme, it knows little about individual customer preferences and you can’t buy its groceries online. What it has done is disrupt a mindset: the settled wisdom about how we think of ourselves as shoppers, and the basis by which we identify with a particular supermarket. Aldi’s victory was to show that there was no shame – and in fact there was satisfaction – in shopping at a discount supermarket. British mums once worried about their children being embarrassed to find Aldi food in their lunchboxes; now they happily swaddle their babies in Aldi’s disposable nappies, which are now the second-most popular brand in the country, behind only Pampers. “Aldi’s customer profile is now classless,” said Hyman. “The supermarket is as strong with affluent people as it is with people on low incomes.”
Karl Albrecht, who was famously secretive, only spoke publicly about Aldi’s business model on one occasion – in 1953. Its fundamental principles, he said, were “narrow product range and low price, [which] cannot be separated”. It was a strategy his mother, Anna, had followed, when she opened a small grocery store in 1913 in Essen, in western Germany, after her husband had developed emphysema working in the coal mines. Karl and Theo, who were born in the early 1920s, helped in the shop before being conscripted into the army when the second world war broke out. Karl was wounded on the eastern front and later captured. Theo fought in Rommel’s Afrika Korps before being taken prisoner in Italy in 1945.
After the war, the brothers returned to Essen to find the city devastated by allied bombing but the grocery store undamaged. They took over the business, expanding it into a network of small shops. Lacking capital, they stocked only a tight range of staples, such as pasta and soap, planning to widen the offering later. But they soon realised that offering a limited selection of cheap, fast-selling goods kept their costs down and the cash flowing, which they could use to invest in new stores. As the former Aldi executive Dieter Brandes and his son Nils wrote in “Bare Essentials”, their book about the company: “Basically, a completely new business model was created along the lines of a discovery in the natural sciences: by accident.”
Germans, forced into frugality during the war, remained thrifty, and would line up outside the Albrecht stores before opening time at weekends. The chain’s popularity grew further when the brothers decided to adopt the model established in the US by the Memphis grocer Piggly Wiggly (and its imitators, Hoggly Woggly, Helpy Selfy and Handy Andy), launching Germany’s first self-service store in the mid-1950s. Instead of clerks filling orders from behind a counter, customers were able to pick the goods themselves, speeding up the shopping process.
Although they were close, the Albrechts were independent-minded and did not agree on everything. Theo wanted to stock cigarettes, for example, but Karl thought it would attract shoplifters. And so, in 1961, when they had 300 stores, they chose to split Aldi, short for Albrecht Discount, into two parts. The “Aldi equator” ran through Essen, with Theo taking the part of Germany to the north, and Karl the south. Aldi North and Aldi South shared all information, except profits, and conducted some supplier negotiations jointly, but were otherwise run separately, with their stores carrying different product ranges and featuring differently coloured floors – one yellow and one grey.
The brothers had always kept a low profile, but the success of their business did not go unnoticed. In December 1971, while preparing to drive home from work, Theo was kidnapped at gunpoint. His abductors were an unlikely pair: a convicted burglar nicknamed Diamond Paul and his lawyer, who had gambling debts. At first they were unsure that the ordinary looking man in the ill-fitting suit was really their target, and demanded to see Theo’s identification documents. The men kept him hidden in a wardrobe in Dusseldorf for 17 days, during which time Theo haggled over his ransom of DM7m (£1.5m at the time), for many years the highest ransom paid in Germany. The cash was delivered by a mediating bishop from Essen, with Karl contributing half.
Diamond Paul and the lawyer were soon caught, convicted and sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison. Only half the money was recovered. Theo later tried, unsuccessfully, to have the ransom written off as a business expense for tax purposes.
Following the media coverage of his release, he never permitted himself to be photographed again. He travelled to his office in an armoured car by a different route each day, and when checking into a hotel, ascertained the best escape route before even going to his room. But Theo continued to put in long hours at the office, managing even the smallest details in his quest to save money. He wore pencils down to the nubs and turned off the light when entering an office if he judged that his staff could see well enough without it. He once told his board to look at the thickness of the paper used for photocopies. Outside consultants and media interviews were banned, considered unnecessary expenditures or distractions. Asceticism was a virtue in life and business, he believed. “People live more on what they do not eat,” he once said. He wanted Aldi to be a place where “people who don’t hate their money can safely go shopping”.
Karl was more charismatic and less intense than his brother, making time daily for an afternoon nap and to read for 20 minutes, usually biographies and memoirs, with Churchill a favourite subject. But, like Theo, he was fiercely demanding of his employees. Stagnation was unacceptable. Aldi managers were expected to make continuous improvements to the company’s processes, a business philosophy also used by Japanese manufacturers, where it was called kaizen. In their book “Bare Essentials”, Dieter and Nils Brandes argued that Aldi’s embrace of kaizen, its lean management structure and just-in-time approach to inventory – taking delivery of stock only when needed, to cut holding costs – made it the “most Japanese” company in Germany.
By the early 1970s, the brothers were ready to test their model abroad, initially in Europe and then in the US. In 1976, Aldi South, Karl’s company, opened the first Aldi store on the east coast of the US. Three years later, in 1979, Theo’s Aldi North purchased Trader Joe’s, a California chain that sells cheap gourmet foods and enjoys a cult-like following. (The US is still the only foreign market where both Aldis operate.)
In the UK, at that time, Tesco and Sainsbury’s were fighting a price war. But as the 80s went on, the big supermarkets stopped competing on price when they realised they could both make much more money by expanding: instead, they concentrated on buying land and building superstores to encourage customers to spend more. Their profit margins surged. For Aldi, the record profits of the big grocers, along with a recent cut in corporation tax, made the UK a very attractive opportunity. With the US launch now complete, and Aldi senior management free to tackle their next big challenge, Karl Albrecht decided the time was right to bring the company to Britain.
The big British supermarkets didn’t take Aldi’s threat seriously at first. But they – and their suppliers – did not make things easy for the German interloper. Within months of opening the store in Stechford in 1990, Aldi had raised a complaint with the Office of Fair Trading. Quaker Oats was refusing to sell to Aldi at all, while Whitbread, the brewer, had expressed concern over the discounter’s “open aggression on prices”. Cornflakes had to be sourced from France. Aldi blamed the supermarkets for putting pressure on the suppliers.
“The rest of the industry hated us,” said Paul Foley, who was the company’s third employee in the UK, and chief executive from 1999-2009. “I heard us called parasites, leeches, and ‘a plague of locusts landing on our shores’” – because of the company’s record of dragging down prices and profit margins in new markets. “It means nobody will help you: nobody wants to rent you space, organise transport for you, or sell you product.”
Still, Aldi believed eventual success was a “racing certainty” because all the conditions it looks for in a foreign market were present, Foley told me. First, large supermarkets dominated the grocery industry, with no big “hard discount” retailer present. Second, the main chains – the big four as well as the leading “soft” discounter Kwik Save (which stocked a larger range than Aldi) – were listed on the stock exchange. The best way to fight Aldi early on is to slash prices, but few bosses of public companies are happy to accept lower profits, and thus lower bonuses, by pursuing long-term strategies.
Third, the UK is a wealthy country, where most people are unwilling to compromise on the types of food they eat. “In rich nations, the postman and the hedge-fund manager have almost the same basic diet,” Foley said: cereal, bread, cheese, beer, ketchup and so on. That is important for Aldi or Lidl because ultimately they look to develop their own products to rival established brands, without shoppers being seduced by cheaper, substitute foods they don’t stock.
Fourth, and most importantly, the UK is, by global standards, a high-wage economy. This means that labour costs make up a big part of a supermarket’s operating expenses. Here, discounters have a major competitive advantage, because their business model – stocking a small range of products, eschewing delicatessens and promotions, and so on – allows them to operate with fewer, more productive, staff. (The most important performance measure in any Aldi branch is revenue divided by employee hours.) At Aldi there are no dedicated checkout clerks but rather “all-rounders” who work the tills when needed but also clean the floor if there is a spill, and bring merchandise from the stockroom on to the shop floor. Replenishing the shelves is much faster than at other supermarkets because the products are displayed in the boxes they arrived in, rather than arranged by hand. Tesco founder Jack Cohen famously gave his top managers tie-pins with the letters “YCDBSOYA” – “You can’t do business sitting on your arse”. In Aldi, no staff member ever sits on their arse.
When entering a new market, Aldi seeks to magnify this labour-cost advantage in a counterintuitive way: by publicising that it will pay its store staff better than other supermarkets. Today, new Aldi store assistants receive industry-leading pay of £9.10 an hour, and £10.55 an hour in London – the London living wage – while a graduate accepted on to the area manager programme starts on £44,000 and gets an Audi A4 company car. Paying well obviously helps attract and retain staff, who might otherwise go to chains where the pace of work is slower. But it also serves to drive up wages across the industry, which, because of Aldi’s lower overall employee costs, hurts its competitors more.
In those early years, in the 1990s, the company focused on the Midlands and the north of England, where store rents were cheaper, and the customers less affluent, deliberately staying away from London and the south-east. As a private company, with no shareholders other than Karl Albrecht’s family to answer to, it could afford to be patient. “Aldi is very attuned to going into a country, making the investment, and building slowly and steadily,” said Richard Hyman, the retail expert. “Most other companies don’t have a 30-year view – or even a five-year view.”
The fortunes of its bigger competitors varied. Kwik Save foundered and eventually went under. Tesco, which was building an empire of out-of-town superstores, overtook Sainsbury’s to become the leading grocery chain. Profits at the big four remained healthy in the 21st century, even as they chased new streams of revenue: expanding abroad, and launching online shopping, banking and mobile-phone services. Aldi and Lidl were still seen as niche retailers, locked out of the mainstream market.
Then, in 2008, the door blew open. Northern Rock was nationalised, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global economic crisis began. Inflation rose above 5%. Companies laid off staff. Household incomes were squeezed. But the big grocery chains actually raised their prices in line with inflation, to try to maintain their profit margins. “Consumers needed to save money, but rather than recognise the challenge, the bosses of the big four supermarkets decided to milk inflation,” said Clive Black, head of research at Shore Capital. “People were forced out of necessity to try the discounters.”
For Aldi, the timing was fortunate, as it was just reaching critical mass in the UK. It had about 400 stores, and an established network of manufacturers delivering products that were not only low-priced, but also of a reasonable quality. A new phase of rapid growth was inevitable, Aldi’s managers believed; the financial crash brought it on sooner than expected. “Shoppers realised that Aldi was cheap, but not as nasty as they had thought,” said Black. “The service level was simple but efficient. The stores were not too big. And a lot of people shopping there were their neighbours.”
As their sales slowed, the big supermarkets looked for other ways to maintain profits. Charging suppliers to stock their brands, and to promote them if sales reach a certain volume, is standard practice at all big grocery chains. A washing powder manufacturer might, for example, pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to a retailer to have its detergent displayed in the best position – the end of the aisle – where sales can increase as much as tenfold. This income from suppliers, which reduces the cost of goods sold, is known as the “back margin” – the “front margin” comes from selling to the customer – and can mean the difference between reporting an overall profit or loss. At the time, Tesco had 24 different ways of extracting money from suppliers.
Now, the big supermarkets pressurised suppliers to increase these back-margin payments. As a result of Tesco’s desire to boost its fees from stock listing, the number of products on its shelves shot up to as high as 90,000, as did the number of promotions. The company appeared to be as much in the brand advertising business as the grocery business. British consumers, who on average buy fewer than 20 items on each trip to a grocery store, were confused by the huge choice and the up-and-down prices. Even more took their wallets to Aldi and Lidl, some just for the essentials but others for the bulk of their weekly shop. (Most discounter customers still do a top-up at a big supermarket.)
By the time the supermarkets awoke to the structural shift that had occurred in the industry, the damage was done. “The big four bosses were not just sleeping at the wheel,” said Black. “They were comatose.”
In recent years, Aldi has worked very hard to widen its appeal among British shoppers. One morning in October, I drove to Staffordshire to talk with Jonathan Neale, who joined Aldi as a graduate in 2002 and is now managing director of buying. We met at one of the company’s flagship stores in Tamworth. When I mentioned my nearest branch, in Oxford, with its narrow aisles and awkward layout – bread in the first aisle, so it gets squashed in your trolley – Neale winced. Newer and refurbished shops, like the Tamworth one, are brighter, with wider aisles and more space for fresh and chilled food, which appeal to more upmarket customers.
Neale mentioned some of the other changes introduced in all stores to attract more business: five years ago Aldi introduced shopping baskets and started accepting credit cards, and two years later it introduced a small range of newspapers and magazines. It is also following trends more, selling things like manuka honey, protein bars and chia seeds. A caviar-based skincare cream proved hugely successful, and resulted in loads of free advertising: a Daily Mail article ran under the headline “The £7 Aldi moisturiser that’s (nearly) as good as a £292 cream”.
“Ten years ago we had 900 lines, now we have 1,800,” said Neale. “That’s not because we are trying to become a big-four retailer, it’s because consumer tastes have evolved. We are managing the equilibrium between what customers want and costs.”
Ultimately though, cost remains the most important consideration. When it comes to buying groceries online, Britons are tied with Japanese in second place, behind only the South Koreans. But Aldi still has no plans to sell food through its website. (You can buy wine and “middle aisle” products there.) As the large supermarkets have realised, it is very hard to make money from internet sales because the profit margin on groceries is small and the delivery costs are so high – but now they can’t reverse course without losing customers. Andy Clarke, the former boss of Asda, told the Sunday Times last year that if the big four supermarkets had their time again “they wouldn’t have offered home deliveries, full stop”. “Online groceries are a cost drain,” Neale said. “Why should 90% of customers subsidise the 10% who get free home delivery?”
A range of cheese on display in Aldi. Photograph: Peter Summers/ReutersAs we walked through the aisles, a few familiar brands stood out, such as Marmite, and Colgate toothpaste. Nobody has yet managed to launch a successful private-label yeast extract product, Neale said. “And we tried with a private-label toothpaste, but our market data showed us we needed a brand.”
You can also buy Nutella and Coca-Cola, although alongside them you will find Aldi’s own chocolate spread, Nutoka, and its own cola, at much lower prices. All supermarkets have their own private labels: made not by them, but for them, by manufacturers who agree to put their merchandise in a bag or box with the grocer’s logo on it. But Aldi takes this to extremes: more than 90% of the products it sells, from shaving cream to dark chocolate and frozen pizza, are private labels. Some, it gets from suppliers that only produce private-label goods, which they may sell to several different supermarkets. Other merchandise comes from companies that also make branded products, and the occasional error, like when an Aldi customer found a packet of Hula Hoops inside a multi-pack bag of the discounter’s Snackrite hoops. This invariably makes the news, and gives Aldi free advertising.
Stocking mostly own-label goods allows the company to order huge quantities of a single item, to its own specifications, at a low unit cost. Consider ketchup. If a big supermarket orders ketchup, that may be spread among three or more suppliers that each have several different pack sizes and formulations, such as plain, reduced sugar and salt, and organic. Aldi’s entire ketchup order comes from one manufacturer that can operate the same, unchanging product run, all the time, and has no marketing costs to build into the price. “For many SKUs we are the biggest buyer by a country mile,” Neale said.
Similar economies of scale apply to the merchandise in the ever-changing Aisle of Wonder/Aisle of Shite. Most supermarket buyers look for suppliers that keep their shelves stocked year round. Because the goods in this section are one-offs, rather than always kept in stock, Aldi can place a bulk order for delivery at its distribution centres around the country on a specific day. Its buyers look at market trends and then seek out manufacturers with spare capacity or excess stock, anything from champagne to knitting wool and cycling accessories.
Aldi’s low prices on everything from fresh fruit to crisps have led people to question “where we are cutting corners”, Neale said, to which he replies that they aren’t. Among UK suppliers, who have often been treated badly by the big supermarkets, with their pressure for back margin fees and slow payment terms, Aldi has a good reputation. But the company has been criticised for a lack of transparency about its global supply chain. In September, Oxfam ranked British supermarkets according to their “public policies and practices that prevent human suffering” among the workers and farmers who produce their food abroad. Aldi was bottom of the list. (In a statement, the company said: “We respect human rights and have comprehensive checks in place to ensure that everyone in our supply chain who makes, grows and supplies our products is treated fairly … We continue to have positive discussions with Oxfam.”)
When we reached the tills, Neale explained how the multiple barcode strategy helped get customers through quicker. In fact, the whole checkout area is designed for speed. The conveyor belt is long enough to unload a full trolley. But the packing area behind the cashier is so small it can only hold a few items. This is to encourage customers to put their scanned purchases straight back into the empty trolley. Only after paying and pushing the trolley to a counter at the front of the store are you meant to transfer your purchases into carry bags.
I had heard that the rate at which individual employees scan items at the checkout is closely monitored. Neale confirmed this, although he would not be drawn on the targeted number of scanned products per minute, and said that staff were instructed to assist customers who struggled to keep up.
Aldi UK’s corporate headquarters is in Atherstone, about 15 minutes drive from the Tamworth store. A long row of delivery lorries were parked next to an adjoining warehouse, their sides emblazoned with giant Union Jacks and the slogan “Championing Great British quality”. In the reception, a television had on repeat an advert featuring the Olympic triathletes, Jonathan and Alastair Brownlee, who Aldi sponsors, along with Team GB. Lidl, the “official supermarket” of the England football team, has a similar marketing strategy. Fraser McKevitt, head of retail at Kantar Worldpanel, said the strategy of trying to appear more British – as well as adopting more local business practices, such as accepting credit cards – had been effective in helping both companies grow their market share.
From the Aldi reception I followed Neale to one of the most crucial parts of the company’s operations, the testing rooms. Because Aldi stocks so few items, compared to the big supermarkets, it must constantly “forensically examine” all its products against competitors’ merchandise to ensure they stack up, Neale said. In one room, a team was looking at fruit juices and sports drinks. Aldi had asked a supplier if it could develop a paper straw, for environmental reasons, but was told it was not yet possible. Now, another grocer was selling juice with a paper straw, and the buyers were scrambling to find a way to catch up. In another room, a team was looking at brioche burger buns, of which Aldi has 20% of the UK market, Neale said. Two managers from the bakery department were comparing buns purchased from Jack’s, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, with Aldi’s buns, which are baked by a French company and part of its growing “Specially Selected” range of premium products. Neale picked up the Jack’s brioche buns, and noted that they were made locally. “Great – but you know what? I’d prefer mine made by the experts in France,” he said.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Karl Albrecht in 2006. His brother, Theo, never allowed himself to be photographed. Photograph: AP
On another table stood a box of Marks & Spencer apple and cinnamon flakes. Aldi buyers, whose job includes identifying popular items it does not stock and quickly bringing them to market, wanted to see if it was worth making something similar. When copying a branded product, the mimicry often extends to the name and packaging. Aldi sells a cheap, spreadable butter called Norpak, for example, which resembles Lurpak, and Wheat Shreds, in a box that looks like Shredded Wheat.
The large consumer goods companies don’t like this, of course. Paul Foley, the former Aldi CEO, who now runs his own retail consultancy, often tells his clients about his attempts to replicate a KitKat in the 1990s. It turns out this is really hard to do without the chocolate making the wafer soggy. Eventually, Aldi gave up. Foley asked his buyer to contact Nestlé’s UK office to announce Aldi’s surrender and request to stock KitKat. Nestlé would not return his call. So Foley ordered the bars from Germany, where they have a slightly different taste. Soon, Nestlé UK starting receiving complaints about the taste of its KitKats, and traced the problem back to Aldi. When they phoned Foley to complain, he “politely refused to cooperate”.
Aldi vs Nestlé, both huge, global companies with big legal teams, may seem like a fair fight. But Aldi has also got into trouble for appearing to copy the packaging of smaller British brands. In 2014, Aldi was forced to settle a high court case brought by The Saucy Fish Co, a Grimsby-based seafood producer, after the supermarket introduced a copycat product called Saucy Salmon Fillets. This year, the discounter has faced complaints from artisan yoghurtmaker The Collective and the family-owned sausage brand Heck, for selling cut-price look-a-like versions.
Aldi claims that its customers shop there specifically because of its own-label brands, which are packaged in a way that makes them “easily recognisable”. “We go to great lengths to ensure that we adhere to strict copyright guidelines,” the company said.
Many in the industry disagree, saying customers are being duped. David Sables, CEO of Sentinel Management Consultants, which advises suppliers on how to deal with retailers, told me: “When an own label comes in the shape of something that looks and feels like the brand, to rip that off: I would view that as theft.”
In his late 70s, Karl Albrecht bought eight cemetery plots in a graveyard in Essen for himself and his family. Soon after, Theo purchased 14 plots there and, like his brother, left them untended, allowing weeds to grow. The cemetery administrator was compelled to write to the Albrechts, reminding them of their responsibility for maintenance. Finally, an Aldi truck arrived with yew trees, cypresses and rhododendrons – the brothers had been waiting until Aldi had plants on sale. Der Spiegel recounted that anecdote in 2010, following the death of Theo, which it said brought to an end “the story of the most eccentric, secretive and mysterious pair of siblings in Germany’s post-war economic history”. Karl died four years later, the richest man in Germany with a net worth of $25bn. (Second on the list was Dieter Schwarz, the Lidl owner, followed by Theo’s heirs.)
Although the founders’ families still own Aldi North and South, their influence over the companies’ direction is receding. Executives now run the business. Some experts say that as Aldi’s product range increases, it is becoming more like the supermarkets it seeks to undercut. “The Aldi DNA is still strong, but not as strong as it was,” Nils Brandes told me.
Even so, sales and market share continue to soar. In 2017, Aldi South’s revenues reached €52bn, with about 20% of that from the UK and Ireland. In Ireland, Aldi has 12% of the market, and in Australia 13%, behind Woolworths and Coles. Its share in the US is only 2% – but Aldi plans to raise its number of outlets from 1,800 to 2,500 by 2022, which would make it the third-biggest chain in the US by store count, after Walmart and Kroger.
In the UK there is still plenty of room to grow. Aldi hopes to have 1,000 shops in three years, up from just over 800 today. Dave McCarthy, a retail analyst at HSBC, said that given Aldi and Lidl’s expansion plans, their share of the market could peak at more than 20%.
Aldi is increasingly focusing on moving into wealthier areas in the south-east, including Sevenoaks, in Kent, which has a Lamborghini dealership and two Waitroses. This strategy is a sign of the confidence of Aldi – and Lidl, which already has a store there – that the sociology of shopping in Britain has shifted for good.
Five years ago, David Cameron was criticised when he claimed that customers in Waitrose, where he shopped, were “very talkative, engaged people” – far more so than at other supermarkets. Observers interpreted him as saying they were nicer, and more middle class than at other stores. (On other occasions, Cameron was more alert. Asked, during election campaigning, to name his favourite supermarket, he said, very slowly: “Not Waitrose.”)
When Aldi opened the doors of its new Sevenoaks store for the first time at 8am on a late autumn morning, there was already a long queue outside. James McSharry, who had arrived at 6.30am, was at the front, with his 14-year-old daughter, Aislinn. McSharry, 52, very talkative and engaged, worked in finance for JP Morgan for 20 years before retraining as a physiotherapist. He used to shop at Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, before switching allegiance to Lidl, buying 80% of his groceries there. Now he was eager to see what Aldi had to offer.
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