I emailed Neville Nagler, distinguished English civil servant and former leader of the Board of Deputies of British Jews:
I was curious about these sentence about you on an anti-Jewish website and wondered if they were accurate? “Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Nagler was the head of the Home Office Department responsible for race relations matters. The Jewish Chronicle has boasted of the influence of this Pinner, Middlesex, Synagogue official. It revealed that whenever a Cabinet Minister made a speech on the subject of race relations, notes for the text were always drafted by Nagler.”
Mr. Nagler replied:
Dear Luke,
Thanks for your email.
I had seen this quote several times before. I used to work in the Home Office, and from 1980–83 was head of the division that dealt with race relations. At the same time I was Treasurer of our local synagogue. It was no secret that I was Jewish, and the Home Office Ministers at the time knew this. My job did require me to draft some speeches for Ministers, but the quotation is an exaggeration: I was certainly not responsible for preparing every speech a UK Government made on the subject of race relations, and the implication that I influenced government policy improperly is of course untrue and unacceptable.
At the end of 1994, Neville Nagler wrote to the British journal Spectator about William Cash’s article on Jews in Hollywood:
SIR: William Cash’s article about Jewish influence in Hollywood has caused a great deal of offense and outrage. His suggestion that the founders of a new studio venture are more likely to succeed if they are Jews is bizarre… The reference to a ‘rabbinical blessing’ from an individual who is a Jew but has no pretensions to rabbinical status is crudely offensive…
Mr. Cash refers to a possible ‘Jewish cabal’ and asks pointedly whether this cabal seeks to exclude or discriminate against non-Jews. This language perpetrates the discredited old myth about a Jewish conspiracy and a Jewish monopoly of power which is allegedly used to disadvantage and exclude non-Jews. There is no credible evidence to support the evidence of a ‘Jewish cabal’ operating to exclude non-Jews. The deeply offensive reference to a ‘Jewish cabal’ is compounded by sneering references to ‘a socially maladroit and culturally nihilistic white sock meritocracy’ or a ‘white sock mediocracy’.
Overall this is a deeply unpleasant and distasteful article…It should not have found a place in a serious journal.
Neville Nagler Chief Executive, The Board of Deputies of British Jews London
