IN HIS book “Submission”, Michel Houellebecq, a French author, conjures up a France of 2022 ruled by an anti-Semitic alliance of spineless socialists and conservative Islamists. The country gets its first Muslim president, causing Jews, including the narrator’s girlfriend, to flee to Israel. When the novel appeared last year some called it bold satire; others said it was Islamophobic. Its timing heightened its inflammatory effect, coming out on the day of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine, and followed two days later by killings at a kosher supermarket.

To judge by some recent newspaper headlines (especially in America), one might think Britain were becoming the France of Mr Houellebecq’s lurid imagination: “Britain’s raging anti-Semitism scandal”, “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?”, “Why the Labour Party won’t confront British Muslim anti-Semitism”.

The subjects of these stories, it is true, have a faintly Houellebecquian aura: in the past weeks each day has brought a new example of what some in the party insist on calling its “issues around anti-Semitism”. A Labour councillor suggests Islamic State is an Israeli front. Another compares Israelis to Nazis. The co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club resigns and claims many of its members “have some kind of problem with Jews”. Jeremy Corbyn, the party’s far-left leader, a self-declared friend of Hamas and a former presenter on Iran’s Press TV, only reluctantly suspends Naz Shah (an MP in Bradford) for suggesting that Israel be “transported” to America. To crown it all Ken Livingstone, a leading Corbynista and the former mayor of London, unburdens himself of the assertion that Hitler supported Zionism before he “went mad and ended up killing 6m Jews”.

Coming at a time when anti-Semitic attacks in Britain have risen (some Jewish schools now hold terror-attack drills), these developments have the country’s Jews understandably worried. Jay Stoll, of the Jewish Labour Movement, describes a Passover service during which, before prayers, the rabbi pointed to Mr Livingstone’s comments as proof that they “may not be so secure” in Britain. It is thus tempting to lump Labour’s ongoing moral degradation in with the broader rise of anti-Semitism in Europe.

In truth, however, the British picture is more complex. According to Jonathan Boyd of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, anti-Semitic sentiment among Britons is “fairly stable in general”, whereas “levels of antipathy among non-Jews towards Jews are higher in more or less every European country but the UK”. Jonathan Arkush, president of the Jewish Board of Deputies, agrees that although communal anxieties have increased—partly because of the attacks in Paris and Brussels—the public’s attitude towards Jews is “not fundamentally changing” and the government is committed, in word and deed, to protecting them.

Britain remains a much better place to be a Jew than France, where just leaving the house wearing a yarmulke is much riskier than it is across the Channel. In London (unlike Paris) the old establishment’s antipathy to Jews (Harold Macmillan once moaned that Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet contained more “old Estonians” than old Etonians) has gone. While one source says some 5,000 French Jews have moved to Britain in the past few years, there is, Mr Arkush notes, no question of British Jews leaving for, say, Israel in large numbers. When Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, urged them to do so, several Jewish groups issued a terse rebuff rejecting his entreaty and its premise.

Far from metastasising through British society, anti-Semitism is largely confined to certain pockets within it. One is the electorally moribund far right. Large parts of British Islam are another, where antipathy to Jews becomes especially prominent when nerves jangle in the Middle East (for example during the Gaza crisis of 2014, when a placard reading “Hitler would be proud” loomed above a peace march in London). And then—only sometimes linked to Islamic anti-Semitism—there is the far left.

There, too, the picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest: it is not clear whether socialist anti-Semitism is now on the rise, or just noisier and more prominent than before. Asking Jewish Labourites what they make of it all, Bagehot frequently encounters the observation that the comments and opinions now making the news have long existed among spittle-flecking old lefties—for whom Israel’s alliance with America relegates Jews, even British ones, to the very bottom of the hierarchy of victims deserving sympathy—and in depressed northern towns, like Bradford, with large, Labour-voting Muslim populations. By winning the party leadership last September Mr Corbyn, in the words of Howard Jacobson, a Jewish writer, merely emboldened and gave new voice to “something that had been there all along”. Mr Arkush agrees: “What has become so plain for everyone to see in the past weeks is something the Board of Deputies has been warning about for some time, but has not been heeded.”

No submission

The rise of anti-Semitic incidents should worry Britons—and guard against any complacency born of the comparison with other European countries. Yet visions of a monolithic anti-Semitism sweeping British society are unhelpful. First, they are flat-out inaccurate and alarmist. Second, they distract attention from the ugly exceptionalism of those narrow segments of British life where the virus stubbornly thrives, and as such let the likes of Mr Corbyn off the hook. (Labour’s leader, in whose circle Mr Livingstone’s implicit conflation of Israeli government policy with Jewishness is virtually de rigueur, can barely bring himself to admit that the problem exists.) Third, the suggestion of a blanket anti-Semitism taking hold of the country gives London’s former mayor and his ilk headlines they do not deserve. Mr Livingstone is not some tribune of social change but an embittered old man whose views are still gratifyingly repellent to the vast majority of Britons. By his solitude may he be known.

Economist.com/blogs/bagehot