Faith, Politics and Me: Peter Prinsley
4 min read
Seun Matiluko talks to Peter Prinsley, Labour MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket.
Peter Prinsley is late for our meeting because his appointment at John Simon Hair Care, Parliament’s in-house hair salon, ran over. The Labour MP says he enjoys “all the gossip about other people getting their hair cut”.
Prinsley entered Parliament only last year, after winning a formerly safe Tory seat covering Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket in Suffolk. He is not the first member of his family to make it to the Commons: not one but two of his uncles were Labour MPs – his uncle Santo for five years in the 1940s, and his uncle George for 26 between 1945 and 1971.
His family are descendants of Jewish immigrants who moved from eastern Europe to the North East towards the end of the 19th century. His ancestors “got on boats in Hamburg, headed for America, and the boat landed in Newcastle and Gateshead”. Prinsley grew up in Middlesbrough, where he and his brother were two of the “few Jewish children in town”. After training as an ear, nose and throat surgeon at the University of Sheffield, he moved to Norwich.
Like Middlesbrough, Norwich does not have a large Jewish community – around 0.2 per cent on the last census. (Speaking of his nearby constituency, Prinsley notes: “When we first went to Bury [St Edmunds], shortly after I got selected, I’m pretty sure my political agent had never met anybody who was Jewish before.”) Norwich does have a notable Jewish history, however.
Jurnet’s House, along King Street in Norwich, was the home of a Jewish money lender called Isaac Jurnet in the 12th century. In the same century, Norwich became the centre of the world’s first recorded ‘blood libel’ – the antisemitic claim that Jewish people kill Christians for their blood.
Jurnet’s House is believed to be the oldest Jewish residence in Britain. Prinsley and his wife Marian, the former sheriff of Norwich, the MP, are part of the team trying to get the house restored and returned to the Jewish community as a heritage centre. Prinsley suspects he will no longer be an MP by the time the project is finished.
Still, despite his commitment to uplifting Jewish history and his regular attendance at Norwich Synagogue, the MP does not think of himself as a particularly observant Jew.
“I’m more community-focused than religiously focused. I believe in the power of the community. I think the faith is, in a sense, a hook on which to build a community rather than the other way around.”
He credits his belief in people power to his parents and grandparents, and hopes to inspire his children to give back to the community too. He tells The House that his daughter Jane has recently been promoted to investigations correspondent at the Jewish Chronicle.
So, if Prinsley is not a firm believer in Judaism, why does he go to synagogue every Saturday?
“It’s a peaceful interlude in the week,” he says. “A contemplative moment in what is otherwise a pretty mad life that I’m leading at the moment… being an MP is a pretty mad life.”
As mad as it is, he says it was more difficult to be a Labour supporter under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
“There was a time a few years ago when Labour was under different management, when it was pretty difficult, actually,” Prinsley explains. “I think we’re over that period now. Thank goodness.”
Much of the progressive left is critical of Israel. But as the 2020 Equality and Human Rights Committee investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party showed, sometimes these criticisms can be antisemitic.
Prinsley questions why there is an “obvious” and “curious” focus on “events in the Middle East compared to some of the events which go on around the rest of the world”.
“The anti-Jewish hate which has arisen at this time, in this country, as a result of what has happened – there is a huge problem. I think our government is dealing with it as best it can from here. But our capacity to actually influence events there is pretty limited,” he says.
“Something must be done to improve the situation. But quite what that is, I don’t know.”
