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Is free speech now dead in the UK’s Labour Party؟
20th January 2020 British stooges, Home, Highlights

All five leadership candidates embrace “Ten Pledges” that dictate how they must think, speak and act.
By Stuart Littlewood
The UK Labour Party is saying goodbye to Jeremy Corbyn as leader after its disastrous general election performance and has begun choosing someone else.
Wasting no time, the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) last week published Ten Pledges they wanted Labour leadership hopefuls to sign up to if the party’s relationship with the Jewish community was to be healed.
The BoD claim anti-Semitism in the party became a matter of great anxiety for the UK’s Jews during Corbyn’s four years in office and it will take at least 10 years to repair the damage. Their president, Marie van der Zyl, says: “We expect that those seeking to move the party forward will openly and un#####ocally endorse these Ten Pledges in full, making it clear that if elected as leader, or deputy leader, they will commit themselves to ensuring the adoption of all these points.
“Tackling anti-Semitism must be a central priority of Labour’s next leader,” she insists. “We will certainly be holding to account whoever ultimately wins the contest.”
But is there really an anti-Semitism crisis other than the one caused by the Jewish State itself and mischievously drummed up within Labour؟ As former Israeli Director of Military Intelligence Yehoshafat Harkabi wrote:
It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also Jews throughout the world.
It has been suggested before that so-called anti-Semitism is a matter best resolved by the Jewish “family” itself.
Obedience required
The BoD claim that all the leadership contenders – Sir Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy, Jess Phillips and Emily Thornberry – have signed the Ten Pledges, and three of the five deputy-leader candidates have done so. What are these crisis-busting Ten Pledges they’ve committed the Party to؟
(1) Resolve outstanding cases – all outstanding and future cases should be brought to a swift conclusion under a fixed timescale.
• Absolutely.
(2) Make the Party’s disciplinary process independent – an independent provider should be used to process all complaints, to eradicate any risk of partisanship and factionalism.
• Of course.
(3) Ensure transparency – key affected parties to complaints, including Jewish representative bodies, should be given the right to regular, detailed case updates, on the understanding of confidentiality.
• Except that complainers, including the BoD, have a poor record of keeping even their wildest allegations confidential.
(4) Prevent re-admittance of prominent offenders – it should be made clear that prominent offenders who have left or been expelled from the party, such as Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker, will never be readmitted to membership.
• It is not clear from the evidence that Livingstone or Jackie Walker committed an offence. They were hounded out and not, I think, by any independent arbitrator.
(5) Communicate with resolve – bland, generic statements should give way to condemnation of specific harmful behaviours – and, where appropriate, condemnation of specific individuals.
• This should apply also to false accusers and to the BoD itself if failing to condemn the “harmful behaviours” of their brethren in the Israeli regime towards our sisters and brothers in Palestine.
(6) Provide no platform for bigotry – any MPs, peers, councillors, members or CLPs [Constituency Labour Parties – local parties] who support, campaign or provide a platform for people who have been suspended or expelled in the wake of anti-Semitic incidents should themselves be suspended from membership.
• Unacceptable. Many have been suspended for no good reason. And suspension does not mean guilt.
(7) Adopt the international definition of anti-Semitism without qualification – the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, with all its examples and clauses, and without any caveats, will be fully adopted by the party and used as the basis for considering anti-Semitism disciplinary cases.
• How many times must you be told that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism is a minefield؟ Top legal opinion (for example, Hugh Tomlinson QC, Sir Stephen Sedley and Geoffrey Robertson QC) warn that it is “most unsatisfactory”, has no legal force, and using it to punish could be unlawful. Furthermore, it cuts across the right of free expression enshrined in UK domestic law and underpinned by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which bestows on everyone “the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”. This applies not only to information or ideas that are regarded as inoffensive, but also to those that “offend, shock or disturb the state or any sector of the population.” Labour Party members should know all this. The prohibitive IHRA definition is not something a sane organisation would incorporate into its Code of Conduct.
(8) Deliver an anti-racism education programme that has the buy-in of the Jewish community – the Jewish Labour Movement [JLM] should be re-engaged by the party to lead on training about anti-Semitism.
• The BoD and JLM would do better teaching anti-racism to the Israeli regime and its supporters. Besides, MPs and councillors don’t ‘belong’ to the Labour Party or any other party; they belong to the public who elected them as their representative. No outside body should expect to influence their freedom of thought, expression or action (see the Seven Principles of Public Life).
(9) Engagement with the Jewish community to be made via its main representative groups – Labour must engage with the Jewish community via its main representative groups, and not through fringe organisations and individuals.
• Labour should engage with the Jewish community though any representative organisation or individual it pleases.
(10) Show leadership and take responsibility – the leader must personally take on the responsibility of ending Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis.
• There’s no agreement that anything approaching a crisis exists within the party.
Leadership front-runner Starmer is a former human rights lawyer and ought to know better. Long-Bailey is another lawyer who should hang her head in shame. Thornberry is a former barrister specialising in human rights law – words fail. Jess Phillips, a member of Labour Friends of Israel, wrote Truth to Power: 7 Ways to Call Time on B.S., described as “the little book we all need to help us call time on the seemingly unstoppable tide of bull#### in our lives”. The irony of it seems lost on her. Lisa Nandy is a puzzle as she’s chair of Labour Friends of Palestine.
If this bunch won’t robustly uphold freedom of expression guaranteed by law and international convention, what have they let their hapless party in for؟ Those standing for deputy-leader also have little excuse. Angela Rayner was shadow education secretary, Ian Murray read Social Policy and Law, and Rosena Allin-Khan is a Muslim and former humanitarian aid doctor. They obediently signed the Ten Pledges. Dawn Butler and Richard Burgon declined.
… why would anyone – especially those competing to be Labour Party leader and one day prime minister – agree to dance to the tune of those who pimp and lobby on Israel’s behalf؟
When, a year ago, the French Republic presented its Human Rights Award to B’Tselem (the Israeli human rights group) its Executive Director Hagai El-Ad, thanking the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, said of Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians:
The occupation… is organised, prolonged state violence which brings about dispossession, killings and oppression. All branches of the state are part of it: ministers and judges, officers and planners, parliamentarians and bureaucrats.
On another occasion B’Tselem said:
If the international community does not come to its senses and force Israel to abide by the rules that are binding to every state in the world, it will pull the rug out from under the global effort to protect human rights in the post-World War II era.
When a respected Israeli organisation speaks truth in such stark terms it cannot be ignored. And recent UN reports confirm that the Israelis abuse and torture child prisoners. So, why would anyone – especially those competing to be Labour Party leader and one day prime minister – agree to dance to the tune of those who pimp and lobby on Israel’s behalf؟
Who will punish the false accusers؟
The BoD nevertheless makes some valid points. The Labour Party takes a ridiculously long time to deal with allegations of anti-Semitism, many of which are false or vexatious and could be dismissed in five minutes. Let me tell you about two Scottish Labour politicians wrongly accused of anti-Semitic remarks and suspended. Let’s call them “A” and “B”. Both are regional councillors.
Constituency party officials declared “A” guilty immediately and issued a press statement to that effect without waiting for him to be heard, hugely prejudicing any investigation. This stupidity was compounded by his council leader publicly calling on him to resign as a councillor and saying his thinking belonged to the Dark Ages: “To smear an entire community both past and present, to say he has lost ‘all empathy’ for them is utterly deplorable,” he was quoted in the press.
What was “A”’s crime؟ He had tweeted: “For almost all my adult life I have had the utmost respect and empathy for the Jewish community and their historic suffering. No longer, due to what they and their Blairite plotters are doing to my party and the long suffering people of Britain…” Was nobody in the local party aware that the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies were then leading an obnoxious campaign to discredit Labour and Jeremy Corbyn؟
“B”, a respected woman councillor, was accused of anti-Semitism by a former Labour MP who was already on record as wanting to impose limits on freedom of expression. A Tory MP immediately put the boot in, telling the media it was clear to the vast majority of people that “B” was no longer fit to hold office and suspension didn’t go far enough.
And what was “B”’s crime؟ She had voiced suspicion on social media that Israeli spies might be plotting to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader after three Jewish newspapers ganged up to publish a joint front page warning that a Corbyn-led government would pose an “existential threat to Jewish life in this country”.
She added that if it was a Mossad-assisted campaign to prevent the election of a Labour government (which pledged to recognise Palestinian statehood) it amounted to an unwarranted interference in our democracy. For good measure, she said Israel was a racist state and, since the Palestinians are also Semites, an anti-Semitic one.
“B” was eventually interviewed by party investigators. They surely knew that in January 2017 a senior political officer at the Israeli embassy in London, Shai Masot, had plotted with stooges among British MPs and other activists to “take down” senior government figures, including Boris Johnson’s deputy at the Foreign Office, Sir Alan Duncan. And that Mark Regev, Netanyahu’s former chief spokesman and mastermind behind Israel’s propaganda programme of disinformation, had recently arrived in London as the new ambassador.
Masot was almost certainly a Mossad tool. His hostile scheming was revealed not by Britain’s own security services and media, as one would have hoped, but by an AlJazeera undercover team. Our government dismissed the matter saying: “The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed.” But at a Labour Party conference fringe meeting Israel insider Miko Peled warned that
they are going to pull all the stops, they are going to smear, they are going to try anything they can to stop Corbyn… the reason anti-Semitism is used is because they [the Israelis] have no argument…
Given such a blatant attempt by an Israeli asset to undermine British democracy, with Regev in the background and (quite probably) Mossad pulling the strings, :B”’s suspicions were reasonable enough and she had a right to voice them.
As for Israel being a racistsState, its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and other brutal policies over 70 years make it obvious. And the discriminatory nation-state laws recently adopted by Israel put the question beyond doubt. Her point about anti-Semitism was also well made. DNA research (see, for example, the Johns Hopkins University study published by Oxford University Press) shows that while very few Jews are Semitic most indigenous Arabs in the Holy Land, especially Palestinians, are Semites. The term “anti-Semitism”, long used to describe hatred of Jews, is a misnomer that hides an inconvenient truth.
And it couldn’t have been difficult to establish that the opportunistic Tory MP calling her unfit to hold office was the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Jews, which is funded, supported and administered by the Board of Deputies. The case against “B” should have been dropped instantly and action taken against the troublemakers. Instead, weeks later, “B” was posting on her Facebook page that she was still suspended: “I can’t make any decisions about my personal, political or professional future whilst this hangs over me. I am constantly tired and anxious, and feel I am making mistakes. I have lost paid work because of what has happened.”
Her suspension was finally lifted but she was “advised” not to post about it or she’d risk losing professional work on which her livelihood depended. That’s how nasty the Labour Party disciplinary machine is. Surely, if the party lifts a suspension it should issue a public statement saying so. Must the wrongly accused, after being needlessly humiliated, be left to pick up the pieces and struggle to re-establish their good name؟ In total “B” had to wait 16 weeks under sentence. And all because of a trumped-up allegation that ought to have been immediately squashed.
As for “A”, he stopped answering emails and there has been nothing in the press. Was his suspension lifted؟ Was he similarly threatened if he said anything؟ I simply don’t know, although I phoned and wrote to the party leader and its general-secretary for an explanation. The latter eventually replied that “the Labour Party cannot, and does not, share personal details about individual party members” and placing a member in administrative suspension “allows a process of investigation to be carried out whilst protecting the reputation of the Labour Party”. Bollox. How did the media get news of these suspensions in the first place؟ And never mind the damage done to the cowardly party, what about the reputations of the two councillors and their months of anguish while working for their constituents؟ I wasn’t asking for case details. All I wanted was the answer to three simple questions:
• Had the suspensions been lifted؟
• If so, had the party issued a public statement to that effect؟ And
• Had the false accusers been disciplined؟
Silence, spineless, don’t-give-a-damn silence.
Are these two cases typical of the so-called anti-Semitism crisis؟ I have no way of knowing. But they show how the party is run by enough crackpots on the inside without inviting impertinent interference from the outside.
Jews’ Ten Pledges vs Palestinians’ Eleven Red Lines
Anyone signing up to the BoD’s Ten Pledges should consider at the same time subscribing to the “Eleven Red Lines” of anti-Palestinianism. Examples in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:
(1) Denying the Palestinian people their right to self-determination and nationhood, or actively conspiring to prevent the exercise of this right.
(2) Denial that Israel is in breach of international law in its continued occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
(3) Denial that Israel is an apartheid state according to the definition of the International Convention on Apartheid.
(4) Denial of the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba and of their right, and the right of their descendants, to return to their homeland.
(5) Denial that Palestinians have lived for hundreds of years in land now occupied by Israelis and have their own distinctive national identity and culture.
(6) Denial that the laws and policies which discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel (such as the recently passed nation-state law) are inherently racist.
(7) Denial that there is widespread discrimination against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories in matters of employment, housing, justice, education, water supply, etc, etc.
(8) Tolerating the killing or harming of Palestinians by violent settlers in the name of an extremist view of religion.
(9) Making mendacious, dehumanising, demonising, or stereotypical allegations about Palestinians — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth of a Palestinian conspiracy to wipe Israel off the map.
(10) Justifying the collective punishment of Palestinians (prohibited under the Geneva Convention) in response to the acts of individuals or groups.
(11) Accusing the Palestinians as a people, of encouraging the holocaust.
This working definition of anti-Palestinian racism, described as “hatred towards or prejudice against Palestinians as Palestinians”, holds up a mirror to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and was drafted by Jewish Voice For Labour, one of those fringe representative organisations the BoD insist Labour mustn’t engage with.
So, here’s a simple test for the BoD: if it demands the Labour Party signs up to its Ten Pledges will it itself embrace the Eleven Red Lines on anti-Palestinianism؟








UK Labour enables assaults on free speech


Chris Knight The Electronic Intifada 26 September 2018


On 28 August this year, the New Statesman published an interview with Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s former chief rabbi, in which he described Jeremy Corbyn, the country’s main opposition leader, as “an anti-Semite.”
By way of evidence, Sacks cited comments made by Corbyn in 2013, when the Labour leader and long-standing supporter of Palestinian rights allegedly criticized Zionists for failing to understand English irony. An editorial in the same issue of the London magazine claimed that “Corbyn’s remarks conflated a political position and an identity.”
Even the traditionally Labour-supporting New Statesman, then, was endorsing the anti-Semitism charge.
My initial reaction to these accusations was to dismiss them. How could anyone believe such nonsense؟
I have known and worked with Corbyn since the late 1970s. I cannot think of any other prominent politician who, throughout their entire adult life, has worked as tirelessly against racism in every form.
But on reflection, I think a more considered response is necessary. We need to look carefully at any such allegations. Theoretically, at least, they just might be true.
Corbyn’s remarks were made in reference to an earlier speech by Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to the UK. Hassassian spoke in the British Parliament on 15 January 2013.
We don’t have access to Hassassian’s entire speech but Richard Millett, a pro-Israel activist, recorded it at the time.
The Jerusalem Post also published an extract from Hassassian’s speech, which read: “We, the Palestinians, the most highly educated and intellectual in the Middle East, are still struggling for the basic right of self-determination. What an irony. How long are we going to suffer and be patient with Israel؟ You know I’m reaching the conclusion that the Jews are the children of God, the only children of God and the Promised Land is being paid by God. I have started to believe this because nobody is stopping Israel building its messianic dream of Eretz Israel to the point I believe that maybe God is on their side. Maybe God is partial on this issue.”
Once Hassassian’s speech was over, Millett confronted him over what he had just said.
Corbyn had chaired the whole event and so witnessed this confrontation from close quarters. In a speech a few days later, he then chose to defend Hassassian in the face of what he has since called “deliberate misrepresentations by people for whom English was a first language, when it isn’t for the ambassador.”
Corbyn’s comment was only a short intervention in a much larger event, an international conference in central London titled “Britain’s Legacy in Palestine.” That 19 January 2013 event was organized by the Palestinian Return Centre and its subject was one of Corbyn’s favorite topics: the shameful and often bloody history of the British Empire.
He included in his talk a reference to the widespread opposition to Zionism among the political leaders of the Jewish community a century ago.
Corbyn then said:
It was Zionism that rose up and Zionism that drove them into this sort of ludicrous position they have at the present time. That, for example, the other evening we had a meeting in Parliament in which Manuel [Hassassian] made an incredibly powerful and passionate and effective speech about the history of Palestine and the rights the Palestinian people. This was dutifully recorded by the thankfully silent Zionists who were in the audience on that occasion; and then [they] came up and berated him afterwards for what he had said. They clearly had two problems. One is they don’t want to study history and, secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either. Manuel does understand English irony and uses it very, very effectively.
Some readers may disagree, but I find it impossible to read these words without concluding that Corbyn was referring to Millett and his fellow activists, not to Zionists in general – and certainly not to Jews in general.
In fact, Corbyn’s main target appears to have been just one person, as Millett himself confirmed when he told the Daily Mail that Corbyn was directly referring to him. In a video accompanying the web version of the article, Millett clearly stated that “three days after [the Hassassian] event in Parliament, Jeremy Corbyn said I have no sense of English irony.”
Millett is certainly an interesting character.
Another pro-Israel campaigner, Jonathan Hoffman, reported in 2017 that Millett had to be evicted by police when a pro-Palestinian meeting in Parliament “degenerated into chaos as the group of pro-Israel activists protested.” My friend Tony Greenstein has described on his blog how Millett was banned from Amnesty International events for harassing people.
So, to summarize, Corbyn’s apparent crime was to say that a rather aggressive pro-Israel activist didn’t understand “English irony,” whereas an Armenian-Palestinian born in Jerusalem, whose first language is not English, did. Maybe I’m missing something but I just don’t see how this can possibly be interpreted as anti-Semitism.
Slander
The attacks on Corbyn’s reputation in recent months are merely a culmination of a longstanding campaign against pro-Palestinian leftists in the Labour Party.
Tony Greenstein, Moshé Machover and Jackie Walker all identify as Jewish.
Greenstein was expelled from the party in February this year, in the wake of wholly unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism which were leveled against him back in 2016.
Machover and Walker have also been slandered on grounds quite as flimsy as those now being invoked to discredit Corbyn.
In a party of half a million members there are, unfortunately, bound to be some who are anti-Semitic, and the party certainly needs to deal with this genuine problem. But media coverage has repeatedly, and quite cynically, combined examples of genuine anti-Semitism with examples of criticism of Israel and examples of anger expressed at opponents of Corbyn who happen to be Jewish.
The media have concocted a whole narrative about a Labour Party anti-Semitism problem that bears no relation to reality.
Even the supposedly notorious case of the former London mayor, Ken Livingstone, making a comment about Hitler supporting Zionism, was evidently not an example of anti-Semitism. Rather it was an example of clumsy language concerning a complex historical topic.
Of course, what really angered the pro-Israel lobby was the fact that Livingstone raised the issue of collusion between some Zionists and the fascist movements of the 1930s. As is so often the case, rather than face up to the historical facts, the pro-Israel lobby prefers to simply accuse its critics of anti-Semitism.
We also need to remember that all these attacks on the left happened before the Labour Party adopted the most worrying clauses in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of anti-Semitism.” These clauses now mean that any historian or anti-racist activist in the Labour Party who describes the existence of Israel as an inherently “racist endeavor” – or anyone who draws “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” – risks denunciation as an “anti-Semite” followed by expulsion from the party.
Open season؟
Now that Labour’s national executive committee has adopted the complete IHRA definition, it could well be open season on any of us who dare to criticize the evidently racist policies of the Israeli state.
Even before this policy change, a Labour activist, Stan Keable, was suspended from his job at Hammersmith and Fulham Council merely for having a political disagreement with a pro-Israel protester outside Parliament.
Such blatant assaults on free speech now risk becoming a feature of British politics.
Labour’s executive committee did include an addition to the IHRA definition that, it claims, ensures there will be no undermining of “freedom of expression on Israel.” But, to deny members the right to describe Israel as a “racist endeavor” or to say that certain of its actions are reminiscent of those of the Nazi era – as even some Israeli leaders have done – is evidently a denial of free speech.
So, who will decide what is more important: a ban on such criticisms of Israel or freedom of speech؟
I assume the decision will be left to people similar to those who, in their wisdom, chose to punish Greenstein, Machover, Walker and Keable on such deeply spurious grounds.
So, despite the official claims that this addition on “freedom of expression” will prevent further purges within the Labour Party, it may well make little difference.
Labour’s finance spokesperson, John McDonnell, has stated that “it is anti-Semitic to oppose a Jewish state.”
This surely means that anyone who opposes the idea of a state that prioritizes one religion over another can be deemed anti-Semitic if they apply this basic secular principle to Israel.
Without the freedom to discuss the inherent racism of the Israeli project – and to discuss both its differences to and similarities with the various fascist projects of the 1930s and 1940s – we cannot begin to understand the plight of the Palestinians. That’s why the IHRA definition may well have a devastating impact on both free discussion and on pro-Palestinian activism within the Labour Party.
Vital distinction
Worse than this, it will encourage the McCarthyite tendencies already appearing across higher education in Britain. Pro-Palestinian student activism has already been restricted and at least one academic conference has already been banned.
Labour’s acceptance of the IHRA definition can only encourage the pro-Israel lobby further in its determination to censor pro-Palestinian discussion and activism across Britain’s campuses.
Approximately 200 academics have signed a letter complaining that the IHRA definition “seeks to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism” and may restrict free debate on Palestine.
A well-known lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, commented recently: “A particular problem with the IHRA definition is that it is likely in practice to chill free speech, by raising expectations of pro-Israeli groups that they can successfully object to legitimate criticism of Israel and correspondingly arouse fears in NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and student bodies that they will have events banned, or else will have to incur considerable expense to protect them by taking legal action. Either way, they may not organize such events.”
Ever since this whole “anti-Semitism” controversy broke out in 2016, Britain’s establishment politicians and media have found it politically convenient to conflate the terms “Zionist” and “Jew.”
There is a vital distinction between these two terms. And it will be up to those of us who care about the truth, who care about Palestinian rights and who care about the threat of genuine anti-Semitism to insist on the distinction at every opportunity.
Chris Knight is a member of the editorial board of Labour Briefing, a publication based in London. He writes here in a personal capacity.



A Grave Miscarriage of Justice: the case of Anne Mitchell


Anne Mitchell is an activist in Brighton and Hove, a lifelong antiracist with strong feelings on the Israel-Palestine conflict in particular. She is a well-known local Palestine Solidarity activist.
She was expelled from the Labour Party last October, without a hearing, solely on the “self-evident” basis of a small number of postings on social media.
It was a bizarre process and an appalling judgment.
As Richard Kuper shows below, nothing in what Anne Mitchell posted justified a charge of antisemitism, let alone expulsion.
On this occasion, the Labour Party seems to have lost all sense of proportion – demonising the raising of critical questions and forgetting the important role of education and debate in developing members’ understanding of political issues, including how prejudice works and how to overcome it.
We trust that Keir Starmer’s commitment to overhaul the Party’s disciplinary procedures will ensure that such miscarriages of justice never occur again.
Tue 7 Apr 2020

In summary
• Nothing in Anne Mitchell’s political positions or in her postings suggests that she is in any way antisemitic, understanding by that someone expressing “hatred of or discrimination against Jews”.
• We have repeatedly condemned the procedure whereby she (like others) was accused anonymously and then instructed not to reveal the content of any accusations to others.
• But her case goes further, starting as a routine investigation but ending up as a case of summary expulsion without the right to a hearing and without the right to appeal. The decision to treat it in this way seems not to have been communicated to Mitchell until after she had been asked to submit a response to the charges and had done so cogently and at some length. There is no evidence that this submission, solicited from her, was even read before deciding it was irrelevant to the case.
• Her expulsion in this way is a gross abuse of what appears to be a partial anticipation of new fast-track procedures which Labour introduced to deal with what were termed, in explanation of the new code, egregious cases of antisemitism (and other forms of racism). Hers is certainly not an egregious case. It is not, in our view a case at all.
________________________________________
In this post we give, a brief
1. summary of events
2. summary of the charges
3. response to the charges
4. note on the purpose of disciplinary procedures
These are followed by four Appendices giving a fuller documentation of the case:
________________________________________
1. Summary of events
On 17 May 2018 Anne Mitchell was served with a Notice of Investigation with social media posts. It made it clear that:
“We are currently at the investigatory stage of the disputes process and at no time during an investigation does the Labour Party confer an assumption of guilt on any party. You are not currently administratively suspended ad restrictions have been placed on the rights associated with your membership at this time.”
The material supplied to Mitchell for comment were two social media posts, one to do with Marc Wadsworth, the other with Louise Ellman.
She responded promptly answering the queries and seems to have heard nothing more till 7 February 2019, over 8 months later.
Then she received an email from a new investigating officer in the Governance and Legal Unit (GLU). She was thanked for her reply, received on 31st May the previous year. The tone was friendly, but said that, in the meantime, there had been “an additional complaint” which was sent with this email, asking “further questions about content you appear to have posted on social media”, and saying that “[o]nce the Party has received a reply to these questions we will be able to resolve the matter as quickly as possible.”
This additional complaint amounted to another ten social media postings.
The rest of the email listed the support available to Ms Mitchell: her GP, the Samaritans: Citizens Advice and, lastly, the party’s Safeguarding Unit. It also stressed the issue of confidentiality, saying this was vital to ensure fairness to herself and to the complainant…
A week later, on 14th February, Mitchell responded once again, comprehensively, to the questions posed to her.
Within a matter of weeks now, on 25 March 2019, following a meeting of the Disputes Panel on 13th March, Mitchell received a “Notice of Referral to the National Constitutional Committee and Administrative Suspension” from the NEC.
At this point she was placed under administrative suspension and charged with “conduct prejudicial and/or grossly detrimental to the Labour Party”. She was accused of “public conduct online that may reasonably be seen to involve discriminatory actions stereotypes and sentiments; and/or which undermines the Party’s ability to campaign against racism”.
She was referred again to the support available and the duty of confidentiality stressed once more.
On 25th July 2019 Mitchell received a letter from the NCC offering her a full opportunity to answer the charges levelled against her in anticipation of a hearing by an NCC panel. It included a lot of detail about the NCC panel, the appropriate way and timing for Mitchell to answer the charges, her right to representation at the hearing etc.
It is true, in the section near the bottom of p.2, “Determination of case by NCC”, snuck into the second para, is the phrase ” a panel may decide that it can properly determine a case without a hearing” – but nothing to suggest this was their line of thinking at this stage.
However in the Bundle of papers accompanying the NCC letter (See APPENDIX A), is the NEC request to the NCC to determine the charge without a hearing, resting its cases solely on her social media posts claiming that “the strength of evidence on either side would not be improved through cross examination of Mrs Mitchell, any witnesses she may call, or the NEC presenter”.
This, of course is before Mitchell’s presentation of answers to the charges which the NCC letter has simultaneously asked her to provide should she wish to do so!
She did just that. In response to the charges as now formulated, Mitchell submitted a comprehensive rejoinder on 4 September 2019 (APPENDIX B).
There is no evidence that this was read by the NCC.
The NCC decided on immediate expulsion on the basis that the social media posts involve the derogative stereotyping of Jews and Israelis and are in breach the NEC’s Code of conduct, “largely undermine the Party’s ability to campaign against racism” and that their content “is prejudicial and grossly detrimental to the Labour Party”. The letter is dated 22 October 2019. (APPENDIX C).
Decisions of the NCC are final and not subject to appeal.
2. A summary of the charges
1. The first charge is that Mitchell had said that the Labour Party antisemitism crisis was “manufactured” and that antisemitism was being privileged over other forms of racism.
Two of Mitchell’s social media posts are cited in evidence (items 3 and 7).
2. A further charge is that Mitchell, quoting the title of an article in the Independent discussing remarks made by Sir Gerald Kaufman, without any further comment, is evidence of “apparent endorsement of the suggestion that the government is funded by ‘Jewish money'”.
On the basis of three social media posts (the other ten social media screenshots were not referred to in the charges or the judgment), the NEC asked the NCC to “impose the maximum sanction appropriate”.
The full charges, evidence and interpretation in the NEC document run to a mere 355 words. They are dissected in APPENDIX D.
3. A brief response to the charges
a) Item 3 is the headline of an article in the Electronic Intifada saying “How Israel lobby manufactured UK labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis” which Mitchell reposted.
Item 7 is a response to Daniel J Yates and 5 others saying: “Privileging antisemitism above other forms of race hatred is nothing to be proud about. Neither is supporting Israeli racism and apartheid. Shame on you Daniel Yates”
Other related posts (not cited) suggest that “As socialists we must not privilege one form of racism over others”; that BAME comrades might be being silenced, and that Mark Wadsworth’s treatment was “an absolute disgrace”.
It is evident that Mitchell is expressing her fears that complaint of antisemitism are taken more seriously than complaints of anti-black racism – surely not an unreasonable interpretation of the evidence.
The NEC, however, sees them as evidence “that merely addressing claims of antisemitism places them in a privileged position or that there should be “be less favourable treatment of Jewish complainants”.
These NEC interpretations strike us as unreasonable and bizarre.
b) Item 5, the offending Kaufman-related heading is, in full: “Labour MP Gerald Kaufman accuses Government of being swayed by ‘Jewish money’”. Mitchell reposted it without further comment.
On this one might reasonably ask why she had reposted it. She answers, in her dossier:
“In posting the article I was mindful that if I posted it without comment it could be regarded as an endorsement of Mr. Kaufman’s views and therefore took the view that I should acknowledge his comment and scrupulously ensured that in reproducing the actual headline from the Independent that I too placed ‘Jewish money’ in inverted commas to signify that it is not my view but a direct quotation. This may have been naïve on my part but my inexperience in the use of Twitter at that time, although not an excuse, should at least allow this post to be seen in context. My error was in execution not intent and as an antiracist I obviously regret any distress I may have caused with this post.
Mr Kaufman’s use of the term ‘Jewish money’ is antisemitic and has been rightly criticised and while I do not agree with Mr. Kaufman’s sentiment I posted the article because Mr. Kaufman had come under relentless attack and the article revealed the tense and dangerous situation that pertained in Palestine at the time that may have led to his regrettable outburst…”
We give a more extended evaluation of the charges in APPENDIX D.
4. The purpose of disciplinary procedures
JVL sees dealing with antisemitism, as with all forms of racism, as an educative as well as a disciplinary matter – to eliminate what is blatantly antisemitic behaviour, with expulsions if necessary, but at the same time educating Party members and people more generally about the nuances and harms that may inadvertently be caused. The process must also at the same time preserve and foster the freedom to speak out and debate the injustices of the world, particularly, in this context, concerning the Palestinians.
How can anyone learn anything from a suspension or an expulsion unless they know what it is for؟ What did the individual do to merit such a harsh punishment؟ Without that knowledge all a disciplinary “zero-tolerance” approach achieves is to instil fear, to silence, to censor. It encourages self-censorship and we are all the losers. Our right to free speech, our ability to educate ourselves, our right to free and frank debate – all simply disappear out the window.
We cannot begin to understand what the Party sees as the point of the proceedings against Anne Mitchell’s. Why has the Party not publicised its arguments in this case. Why has it not tried to draw lessons from the experience to guide others in avoiding the pitfalls that the NEC deemed Mitchell to have fallen into, and which the NCC endorsed.
We can only say that in our view these arguments are paper thin and do not stand up for one moment to public scrutiny.








Forde Enquiry: Submission by Labour Against the Witchhunt
August 7, 2020
Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Problems with the Enquiry
• 3. Evidence
• 4. Difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism
• 5. Problems with the IHRA mis-definition of antisemitism
• 6. Examples: conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism
• 7. The political nature of the witch-hunt
• 8. Hypocrisy and ignoring real antisemitism
• 9. Denialism, Chris Williamson and the Wavertree Four
• 10. Leaking of personal data
• 11. Spreading of the witch-hunt into wider society
• 12. Who organised the witch-hunt؟
• 13. Conclusions

1. Introduction
The report ‘The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014 – 2019’ (the Report), gives us irrefutable proof of the plotting and outright sabotage committed against Corbyn, and the hundreds of thousands who joined the party following his election in 2015, to fight for socialist and democratic change.
It is extremely unfortunate that the Report was only produced in the last days of Corbyn’s leadership. Drawing upon primary evidence it shows serious wrong-doing by senior party officials. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the Left to radically transform the Labour Party and effect progressive change, was ruined by the Right in the party. At the same time, supporters of Corbyn were vilified and slandered, their voices silenced and their votes nullified.
Unfortunately, it appears that this was sometimes done with the knowledge, and occasionally even with the active participation of the Corbyn leadership, as in the case of the expulsion of Jackie Walker and the campaign against Chris Williamson.
Politically, the Report maps out an attack on Corbyn and his advisors, who had gained partial control of the NEC in April 2018 when Jennie Formby was appointed General Secretary, by a faction of their political predecessors appointed prior to Corbyn becoming leader. Our submission makes the case against the mistakes committed by both factions within the party machine.
2. Problems with the Enquiry
It is our view that, given its ‘terms of reference’, this Enquiry (the Enquiry) will in all likelihood lead to a whitewash of the current leadership and its supporters on the Right of the party, who are responsible for the vile misogyny and racism on display in the Report. We also think it likely that the Enquiry will attempt to blame Corbyn and his allies for the leak of the Report, as well as the destructive internal party ‘culture’ that is evident in it. At most, we expect that a token couple of Labour Party employees may be thrown to the wolves in an attempt to ‘move on’.
The July 22 apology and payment of ‘damages’ by Keir Starmer to some of those who have been exposed in the Report as actively supporting the vicious campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the Left, gives us even less confidence that the result of the Enquiry will be anything other than a politically motivated whitewash.
Further, we do not believe the Enquiry panel can be described as politically neutral. It includes three Labour peers – the most conservative section of the Labour Party. One of them is Baroness Wilcox, who for example, ‘liked’ a tweet from the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, quoting Iain McNicol’s relief that Corbyn was gone.
The 851 pages of the Report contain damning evidence of the racism, sexism and prejudice of the most senior officers of the Labour Party. We understand that the Report is based on thousands of WhatsApp messages and e-mails. The real job of an Enquiry which was determined to conduct a serious investigation into the Report should be to:
• ascertain that the material in the Report is a fair selection of the primary evidence.
• enquire as to who was aware of the activity of staff who were actively hoping that the Lib Dems and Tories would defeat Labour.
• establish how it was possible that Officers of the Labour Party were able to carry out a war of attrition against the elected leader of the Party.
• investigate the many injustices perpetrated by an unelected Labour bureaucracy against its own membership, and in particular the disciplining of members, Labour branches and CLPs for their political beliefs, in a concerted attempt to prevent as many Corbyn supporters as possible from voting in the 2015 and 2016 election campaigns.
• investigate the circumstances surrounding the false ‘antisemitism’ campaign, which led to allegations of antisemitism being made against hundreds of members, many of whom were either Jewish and/or Black.
It is highly unusual for an Enquiry of this sort, into what are effectively whistleblowing allegations, to be primarily concerned with the source of those allegations. The question as to who blew the whistle on McNicol, Sam Matthews and the other racists and chauvinists who Labour employed, is irrelevant. The hunting down of whistleblowing sources is normally taken by Employment Tribunals as evidence of victimisation.
The third remit of the Enquiry to look into the ‘structure, culture and practices’ of the Labour Party makes the assumption that the wrongdoing uncovered is a cultural or technical matter, and that the correct structures or ‘culture’ (a meaningless term when applied to the headquarters of a political party) could correct what is clearly a political problem. Our contention is that members of the Inquiry share the same politics as the staff members in the Report, and therefore the Enquiry is likely to gloss over what has been unearthed, or to simply blame individuals whilst leaving the structures of discrimination, and unhealthy, undemocratic bureaucratic power relationships of full-time officials to members, intact.
We are therefore submitting this evidence on our own ‘terms of reference’ in order to highlight:
• Labour HQs inability to distinguish between antisemitism and anti-Zionism;
• The political and hypocritical campaign of suspensions and expulsions without any natural justice or due process, which has led to members being suspended for years, sometimes without ever being told what they have been suspended for;
• The efforts to restrict free speech on Palestine;
• The political nature of the witch-hunt;
• The actors behind the witch-hunt;
• The futility of trying to appease the right.

3. Evidence
There are a number of substantive articles that have already been written covering the wrongs uncovered by the Report. They include the following:
• Tony Greenstein’s two part analysis Part 1 and Part 2
• Craig Murray’s analysis That Leaked Labour Party Report
• Jon Trickett and Ian Lavery have written ‘The Leaked Labour Party Report Is Shameful. It’s Time for an Investigation’.
• Novara Media has produced the investigation, ‘It’s going to be a long night’
• Moshe Machover has written in the Weekly Worker: ‘Weaponising antisemitism’
• Other commentary includes useful articles and statements from:
o Welsh Labour Grassroots
o Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs
o The Struggle
o World Socialist Website
o Socialist Appeal
o Weekly Worker
o In Defence of Marxism
We also recommend the Open Letter to Jenny Formby by Kathy Coutanche, who is mentioned in the report and who eloquently and movingly complains about the impact that such false allegations and the lack of justice in the disciplinary process can make:
“The report says nothing of the lack of any real investigation on the part of the Labour Party into the allegations made against me. It says nothing of the failure to communicate, the altered report and the shoddy treatment I have suffered at the hands of Labour Party staff or of the years of delay that I have been subject to. It says nothing of the emails ignored, of the complaints ignored or of the promises of action broken.
It also says nothing of the support given me by my CLP and other members, including on the NEC, who know me and know that I am not an antisemite. To think that these members might also be targeted as antisemites for that support is abhorrent.
That my name is in this report has the potential to impact on every area of my life. That it is in the public domain means anyone, employers, political organisations, clubs and groups, anyone can see, without context, that the Labour Party considers me to be antisemitic. This is not something that can be put back in the box.”

4. Difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism
At the heart of the ‘antisemitism crisis’ in the Labour Party, which has spread into wider society, is the inability or unwillingness to distinguish between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
• The Oxford English Dictionary defines antisemitism as: “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews”.
• The Merriam Webster dictionary as: “Hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group”.
• Professor Brian Klug defines it as: “A form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are.”
Zionism is an ideology that originated as a response to discrimination against Jews in the declining phases of European feudalism and the rise of imperialist nationalism in the final quarter of the 19th century. Rejecting assimilation into non-Jewish societies, Zionists began to agitate for the creation of a separate Jewish state. Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) is generally regarded as the principal proponent of that idea. In June 1895 Herzl wrote in his diary as follows:
The private lands in the territories granted us we must gradually take out of the hands of the owners. The poorer among the population we try to transfer quietly outside our borders by providing them with work in the transit countries, but in our country we deny them all work. Those with property will join us. The transfer of land and the displacement of the poor must be done gently and carefully. Let the landowners believe they are exploiting us by getting overvalued prices. But no lands shall be sold back to their owners. (quoted in: Moshé Machover, ‘Israelis and Palestinians: conflict and resolution’, Haymarket Books, 2012, p87).
Israel was built on land stolen from the Palestinians. During the 1948 Palestinian exodus, also known as the Nakba, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their home. The colonisation of Palestinian land has been carried out by all Israeli governments since 1967 and it took place within the former borders – the so-called ‘green line’ – before 1967. It has been an ongoing policy of Zionist colonisation from the very beginning and is integral to it.
On July 19, 2018, the Israeli government enacted a quasi-constitutional nationality bill or “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People”, which has been widely condemned as institutionalising discrimination against Israel’s non-Jewish citizens. As many have observed, this law merely codifies and formalises a racist reality that long predates it. Within its pre-1967 borders, Israel is an illiberal semi-democracy. It defines itself as “Jewish and democratic”, but as its critics point out, it is “democratic for Jews, Jewish for others”. In the territories ruled by it since 1967, Israel is a military tyranny, applying one system of laws and regulations to Jewish settlers and an entirely separate one to the indigenous Palestinian Arabs.
Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, lists over 65 Israeli laws that discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens in Israel and/or Palestinian residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). In addition to these laws there are countless unofficial bureaucratic practices and regulations by which Israeli racist discrimination operates in everyday life.
Zionism is, as should have become clear, the name chosen by the founders of that ideology themselves. Not all Zionists are Jews and not all Jews are Zionists. Merely using the words Zionism or Zionist is not an insult or anti-semitic.
Anti-Zionism is the opposition to and criticism of the setting up and continued existence of the state of Israel as a purely Jewish entity that must be based on the systematic oppression and colonisation of the Arab population.
• “The Jews have fought to remove Jeremy Corbyn from day 1”. This is antisemitic.
• “The Zionist lobby has fought to remove Jeremy Corbyn from day 1”. This is an expression of anti-Zionism.

5. Problems with the IHRA mis-definition of antisemitism
The waters have been muddied hugely by this so-called definition published by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in May 2016, because in its eleven examples it conflates antisemitism with Anti-Zionism.
The short IHRA definition reads:
“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
Clearly this is not a definition. At over 500 words it is open ended and deliberately imprecise. American academic, Kenneth Stern, has repeatedly said that it was not devised in order to label individuals as antisemitic. In the Guardian (13.12.19) Stern wrote:
Fifteen years ago, as the American Jewish Committee’s antisemitism expert, I was the lead drafter of what was then called the “working definition of antisemitism”. It was created primarily so that European data collectors could know what to include and exclude. That way antisemitism could be monitored better over time and across borders.
It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week. This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.
Questions which are immediately raised by this definition include:
• What is a “certain perception” and in whose eyes؟
• Is antisemitism merely a perception؟ What about discrimination؟
• If antisemitism “may be expressed as hatred towards Jews”, what else might it be expressed as؟ Anti-Zionism؟
• Why are “non-Jewish individuals” included in a definition of antisemitism؟
• Why is special mention made of Jewish “community organisations”؟ Is this a pseudonym for Zionist organisations like the Board of Deputies of British Jews؟
• Why do seven of the eleven examples accompanying the definition refer to the state of Israel and not Jews؟
This ambiguity in the IHRA definition is not accidental: It is designed to allow any criticism of the actions of the state of Israel to be dismissed as ‘antisemitism’. The definition’s real purpose is to defend the Israeli state from its critics – not Jews from antisemitism. This becomes particularly clear in the eleven examples that have been published with the definition. The “examples” largely focus on Israel; they are used – and designed – to delegitimise serious questioning of the Zionist colonisation project and the regime of the Israeli settler state.
LAW is not alone in its critique. The ‘definition’, with its appended examples, has been thoroughly debunked by highly qualified critics, including Jewish ones. For example:
• Professor David Feldman (vice-chair of the Chakrabarti Inquiry and director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism) has described the definition as “bewilderingly imprecise”.
• Sir Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal judge, has written that the IHRA “fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite”.
• Hugh Tomlinson QC has warned that the IHRA definition had a “chilling effect on public bodies”.
• Geoffrey Robertson QC has explained that, “The definition does not cover the most insidious forms of hostility to Jewish people and the looseness of the definition is liable to chill legitimate criticisms of the state of Israel and coverage of human rights abuses against Palestinians.”
• Tony Lerman, a prominent Jewish academic, wrote that “it’s not fit for purpose, but it also has the effect of making Jews more vulnerable to antisemitism, not less, and exacerbating the bitter arguments Jews have been having over the nature of contemporary antisemitism for the last 20 to 25 years.”
The adoption of the IHRA definition and all eleven examples by the Labour Party’s NEC in 2018 has not brought an end to the ongoing claims that the Labour Party is riddled with antisemites. As LAW warned, the opposite has occurred.
The Labour Party’s decision to adopt the misdefinition was an outright victory for the Right inside and outside the party. While Jennie Formby halted the automatic and instant suspensions of Corbyn supporters, the adoption of the IHRA definition massively expanded the grounds being used for false allegations of antisemitism.
This pressure on the Labour Party to adopt the IHRA definition was part and parcel of the slow coup against Jeremy Corbyn. Some people ostensibly on the left of the party (such as Jon Lansman and John McDonnell) were therefore seriously misguided when they publicly supported the NEC’s adoption of the definition.
6. Examples: conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism
We post below screenshots taken from the letters of suspension/expulsion received by a number of Labour Party members. They have all been accused of antisemitism. There are many more such examples, where clearly members have voiced criticism of Zionism rather than expressed any hatred towards Jews.

7. The political nature of the witch-hunt
Rather than expose as a lie the absurd claim that the Labour Party is overrun by antisemites, we read in the leaked Report that the Corbyn leadership often actively participated in pursuing left wingers, even when the evidence against them was flawed. A few case examples will demonstrate the futility of trying to appease the right.
NEC by-election March 2020
We read in the Report that; “in many cases party members at all levels request the suspension of another party member as a way of escalating or indeed resolving a dispute. There is a wrongly-held view that political opponents can be ‘taken out’ of a contest or stopped from attending meetings by making a complaint with the intention of achieving a suspension of that member.” (p533)
But clearly, this is exactly what has been taking place. Even as recently as during the March 2020 NEC by-election, half a dozen left-wing candidates (including the three front runners Jo Bird, Mo Azam and Mehmood Mirza) were suspended in the middle of the contest – before any investigation was launched! Jo Bird for example had to be reinstated after a couple of weeks when it transpired that the evidence against her was not worth the paper it was written on.
Glyn Secker
In March 2018, following on from a report produced by the disgraced right-wing Corbyn critic David Collier into the Facebook group ‘Palestine Live’, (of which Corbyn was a member), Sam Matthews, then Head of Disputes, was able to single-handedly suspend Glyn Secker, Secretary of Jewish Voice for Labour – the case was so weak that he had to be reinstated almost immediately. Of all the examples of extreme antisemitism in the report, GLU had picked on Glyn Secker, even though Collier’s report did not contain allegations of antisemitic comments by Secker, and in fact stated that ‘Glyn Secker has had minimal interaction on the site’.” (p428). It is worth pointing out that it was only because James Schneider, Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesperson, urged Sam Matthews to take action, that the section in Collier’s report exonerating Secker was examined at all.
Moshé Machover
Similarly in October 2017, the ‘Disputes’ unit desperately looked for reasons to expel the prominent Israeli Jew Moshé Machover. His expulsion letter reads:
“Allegations that you may have been involved in a breach of Labour Party rules have been brought to the attention of national officers of the Labour Party. These allegations relate to an apparently antisemitic article published in your name, by the organisation known as Labour Party Marxists (LPM). The content of these articles [sic!] appears to meet the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which has been adopted by the Labour Party.”
The article can be read here – it clearly does not have a scintilla of antisemitism in it. The head of dispute’s nasty insinuation of ‘antisemitism’ against Moshé Machover was not only an absurd lie, but a gratuitous one, as the pretext used for his expulsion was quite different: It was decided to auto-expel him over his alleged membership of the “Communist Party of Great Britain Marxism-Leninism” (they got the wrong CPGB, incidentally) – but he was able to quickly disprove this claim. As party officials “found themselves inundated with emails about the case, including from Jewish socialist groups”, plus a robust legal defence from Machover, there was pressure to drop the case and rescind his expulsion. But the calumny of ‘antisemitism’ was never withdrawn, and Machovers’ repeated demands for apology were ignored.
In the event, the flimsy pretext did not work in Machover’s case and, faced with a large wave of protests, the party bureaucrats were compelled to rescind the expulsion. Many other, less prominent members have found it much more difficult to challenge their auto-expulsions.
Jackie Walker
Jackie’s case (she was first suspended by Labour in 2016) was deliberately delayed by McNicol and his staff. They were determined to get rid of Tony Greenstein and Marc Wadsworth first in order to build a campaign to justify Jackie’s eventual expulsion in 2019. However, the Report also states that, “LOTO [Leader of the Opposition’s Office] wanted Walker to be suspended and had briefed the media to that effect”. (p366) We read that in April 2018, Jeremy Corbyn and Jennie Formby met with the Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council and the Community and Security Trust (CST) and agreed to their demand that “the Party should expedite Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker’s cases”.
It is worth noting that the Report makes various positive references to Dave Rich and the CST, whose views are routinely sought as “expert opinion”. But the CST is not a neutral body – it is a pro-Israel charity, which the Tory government started funding in 2015 and has given at least 65 million pounds to since. And yet, the report quotes questionable evidence by Dave Rich of the CST, which implies that Jackie’s views are similar to those of Louis Farrakhan, but omits evidence given by black Jewish Professor Lewis Gordon, a world-leading academic on Jewish/black relations, which contradicts every claim by Dave Rich and supports Jackie’s case.
Anne Mitchell
Anne is a lifelong anti-racist and campaigner for Palestinian rights who was expelled from the Labour Party last October, without a hearing, solely on the “self-evident” basis of a small number of postings on social media. It was a bizarre process and an appalling judgment. Nothing in what Anne Mitchell posted justified a charge of antisemitism, let alone expulsion – the full article by Richard Kuper is here.
Brighton and Hove
On July 9 2016 Brighton and Hove District Labour Party held its AGM. Over 600 attended. The Left won the vote for the executive elections by 2-1. The Right, in the form of Council leader Warren Morgan immediately made a series of false allegations, concerning spitting and various irregularities. The Party was suspended, the old executive was reinstated and the CLP split three ways.
Cat Buckingham was appointed to ‘investigate’ the allegations. Ann Black, NEC Chair of the Disputes Committee, accepted as fact the false allegations of the Right. The Head of the Compliance Unit John Stolliday demonstrated the “fairness” and “neutrality” that the Compliance Unit has become famous for. Stolliday recommended: (p.113)
“Overturn AGM, deal with individuals. Shows what we’re up against – a bunch of SWP and Trots marching straight from a rally to invade a CLP meeting and stuff handfuls of ballot papers in boxes even when they’re not members of the party.”
Buckingham, who pretended to investigate what had happened, said: “I say act now and worry about [rules and legal issues] later, so long as we don’t do something that’ll end up ####### everything else up”.
As part of this campaign against the Left in Brighton, Greg Hadfield – who was elected secretary of Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party (but with the votes being subsequently annulled by NEC) – was suspended in October 2016 and re-instated in February 2019. Greg has written eloquently about his ordeal and the campaign against the Brighton Labour Party – here. Exactly the same process took place with respect to Wallasey Labour Party. (p. 114)
The Inquiry should be investigating the capricious and arbitrary judgements as well as political corruption evident in these cases. What is not needed is an investigation into ‘culture’ and other ####physical phenomena. What has clearly happened during the last five years is that the Labour Party bureaucracy, both nationally and locally, saw it as its job to defend the defeated right wing of the Party and to help in the process of ousting Jeremy Corbyn.
The examples also show just how futile it was of Corbyn and his allies to try and appease the Right by going along with some of these injustices, when they should have taken them on in a decisive manner.
There were some reforms under Jennie Formby, but there remain huge, ongoing problems with the way the party handles disciplinary cases. For example, the Governance and Legal unit uses a list of “investigatory search terms” to “vet” members, which includes words like ‘Atzmon’, and “a list of 57 (later 68) Labour MPs and their Twitter handles”. In other words, as is pointed out at page 17 of the Report, staff “initiate cases themselves by proactively investigating social media comments by Party members” to create a body of evidence where no basis for a case exists. Even more bizarrely, the name ‘Greenstein’ (after Tony Greenstein) was used as a search term.
8. Hypocrisy and ignoring real antisemitism
The Report shows that whilst false allegations of antisemitism were made against anti-Zionists such as Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, actual antisemites and holocaust deniers such as Christopher Crookes were ignored.
In August 2016 Crookes social media activity was reported by a fellow member of Labour International and this was followed up in September. The complaints were forwarded to Sam Matthews, who did precisely nothing.
In February 2018, after repeated inaction by Matthews, 280 members of LI signed a petition demanding action and it was not until 26 March that Matthews finally initiated a case. Between August 2016 and February 2018 the Crookes case was raised directly with Matthews 12 times, with Stolliday 4 times and with other GLU staff 4 times, as well as twice with McNicol (pp546-547). Crookes was eventually expelled in August 2019, 18 months after the first complaints were made.
The same inactivity took place with respect to Fleur Dunbar (p208) – more details here.
John McTernan
The case of John McTernan is also instructive. Tony Blair’s former director of Political Operations from 2005 to 2007, McTernan had taken to writing articles praising the Tories and attacking Labour and the trade unions. He was repeatedly reported to Labour HQ for abusive language on Twitter and elsewhere. He had described Labour MPs who nominated Corbyn as “morons”; tweeting twice that Corbyn was a “traitor”; described “Corbynistas” as racist; called Corbyn a “Putin-hugging, terrorist-loving, Trident-hater”; and wrote in the Daily Telegraph that all of Corbyn’s supporters were “online trolls”. (p368) No action was taken, and McTernan received the staff decision “No action – removed at referral”.
Ronnie Draper however, leader of the Bakers’ Union and a Corbyn supporter, was suspended in July 2016 for referring to Blairite “traitors”.
Similarly, Omar Baggili, a member of McTernan’s CLP, in response to an article by McTernan in the Daily Telegraph urging the Conservative government to “crush the rail unions once and for all” – tweeted: “Seriously John why haven’t you got yourself a Tory membership card. They’re anti unions and pro privatisation like you.” Baggili was suspended for “abuse”. (pp140-141)
These examples of rank hypocrisy and highly selective judgements by the Compliance unit are by no means isolated examples. Another identified in the Report is Andy Bigham, who suggested that Corbyn was a traitor and Diane Abbot should be “locked in a box” (pp 538-45). However, no action was taken against him even after he subsequently posted that he had voted Conservative, urged others to vote Conservative, and became the administrator of a Conservative Party Facebook Group.
Meanwhile left wingers were being thrown out of the party for having advocated a Green vote years before they joined Labour, or for calling MPs who supported the Iraq war “warmonger”.
9. Denialism, Chris Williamson and the Wavertree Four
Since fair-minded an politically articulate party members, including many Jewish ones, could plainly see that the allegations of ‘antisemitism’ against their party were hugely inflated in scale, and often relied on very questionable evidence, the instigators of the campaign against the Labour left were faced with the danger of being refuted by credible witnesses, so a new device for silencing the truth had to be invented – namely the heresy of ‘denialism’.
According to ‘denialism’, any party member who attests that Labour does not have a ‘big problem with antisemitism’, in the sense of being ‘institutionally antisemitic’, or questions whether a specific accusation is highly questionable, are themselves guilty of this heresy, which is as bad as being antisemitic. Such protestors are to be hounded from the party.
The authors of the Report (and their political friends) do not appear to have a problem with this: the inflated scale of the accusations, their often dodgy nature and the excommunication of ‘denialist’ heretics. They seem quite happy with the treatment of Chris Williamson and other less well-known victims, which took place under the post-April 2018 party regime, not under the previous one. In fact the main complaint of the Report against the loathsome baddies of the earlier regime is that they did not act expeditiously on allegations of ‘antisemitism’ (a large proportion of which were false!), because they wanted to create the impression that the party’s procedures of dealing with antisemitism were ineffective, for which Corbyn would bear the blame – as indeed happened.
Chris Williamson

An example was made of Chris Williamson, a left wing MP who dared to point out that Labour should not apologise for something for which it was not guilty. Moreover, a party member who defends, or shares a platform with, someone accused of ‘antisemitism’ or of the denialist heresy is likewise as bad as an antisemite.
It appears that Jennie Formby was the one driving Chris Williamson’s expulsion from the party. The Report approvingly quotes her long charge sheet against him – and clearly states that he has, in fact, not done anything wrong:
“Several of these [complaints], if taken as an isolated incident, may have resulted in no action. However, taken together they add up to a pattern of behaviour that is not only reckless, it has brought the party into disrepute. I would also add that I personally spoke with Chris only two weeks ago and asked him to stop aligning himself with Labour Against the Witchhunt and speaking about antisemitism in the way that he is, because as an MP he does not have the privilege of behaving in the same way as an ordinary lay member does.” (p826). The full evidence against Williamson – or rather, lack thereof – has been analysed by the Canary.
The Wavertree Four
The suspension of four officers from Liverpool Wavertree CLP, including the chair and secretary, on charges of conduct ‘prejudicial and/or grossly detrimental to the Party’ is an example of the way false accusations are used to stifle legitimate political debate in the Labour Party. The four party members – Nina Houghton, Kevin Bean, Helen Dickson and Hazuan Hashim – dared to raise political criticisms of their local MP Paula Barker, who had written an article in the Jewish Telegraph. Barker wrote, among other things that: “Luciana [Berger] leaving the Labour Party was a shock to many and I find it deeply regrettable that she felt she could no longer stay.”
Luciana Berger MP was one of the most vocal opponents of Jeremy Corbyn, and she used her position as MP to publicly undermine and sabotage him at every opportunity. Other opponents of the Corbyn leadership, such as the then deputy leader, Tom Watson joined in the smears declaring that she had been “forced out by racist thugs” in her CLP. In the end Berger jumped ship and joined the Liberal Democrats, which really could not come as a “shock” to anybody who had followed her political trajectory.
Paula Barker’s article seemed to support that false narrative. The four party officers felt so concerned that they wrote a private letter to Paula, but to no avail. Without any CLP meetings or decision-making taking place where they could have presented a motion, the four decided to publish their views in the weekly internal CLP bulletin of May 26, which had in fact been functioning as a medium of debate in the absence of CLP meetings during the Covid-19 lockdown, featuring all sorts of local and national events of interest to the CLP. The four wrote;
“Paula’s words will most certainly be taken to imply that we, as a CLP, were responsible [for Berger’s departure]. This accusation has been repeated by our political opponents, such as the anti-Corbyn Labour right and the Liberal Democrats on numerous occasions, culminating in Tom Watson’s calumny, under the protective cloak of parliamentary privilege. In the furore that followed, individual officers and members, such as our then chair, were subjected to further abuse and false allegations in the media, all of which were designed to obscure the political differences between Ms Berger and the CLP.”
Clearly, nothing in their letter is even vaguely antisemitic. The four committed the crime of questioning if the local CLP (and the party as a whole) is really overrun by antisemites – it seems that that was enough to substantiate a charge that they themselves were antisemitic. In other words questioning or denying the allegation automatically confers guilt, a characteristic of the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century. Of course, members don’t just have the right to criticize their MP – in a truly democratic party – it is their duty to do so!
10. Leaking of personal data
Numerous victims of the witch-hunt suffered additional hardship when their private details were leaked to the national press. For a long period under Iain McNicol’s rule, it was standard practice of the Compliance Unit to leak details of suspensions. We would expect the Panel to investigate this.
An illustrative example of the deliberate policy of leaking personal data is the case of Tony Greenstein who was suspended on March 18 2016. He was not informed as to the reasons for his suspension. All the letter notifying him of his suspension said was:
“Allegations that you may have been involved in a breach of Labour Party rules have been brought to the attention of national officers of the Party. These allegations relate to comments you are alleged to have made which will be investigated under 2.1.8. of the party’s rules.”
The first that Tony learnt of the substance of the allegations made against him was when they appeared in the print and Internet editions of the Daily Telegraph and Times of 2 April 2016. When Tony wrote to Iain McNicol concerning this leak, McNicol’s response of 5 April was to express disappointment that:
“you have taken the opportunity to make an unwarranted attack on a hardworking and diligent member of the Compliance Unit (John Stolliday who)… will respond to your outstanding correspondence upon his return. Like you I regret that information was given to the media. However, I entirely refute the allegation that the Compliance Unit leaked any details of your suspension to the Daily Telegraph or to anyone else.”
John Stolliday never responded to Tony Greenstein’s correspondence, and McNicol’s denial that the Compliance Unit had leaked news of Tony’s suspension was clearly untrue.
11. Spreading of the witch-hunt into wider society
The hysteria around the false premise that the Labour movement is overrun by antisemites has led to the witch-hunt spreading into wider society. One example will suffice.
Stan Keable is national secretary of Labour Against the Witchhunt. On April 21 2018, Stan was dismissed from his job with Hammersmith and Fulham Council after 17 years unblemished service as a housing officer, for having “brought the Council into disrepute”, by saying that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazi regime – a well documented if shameful historical fact.
He said this on March 26, in a conversation in Parliament Square – nothing to do with work – while participating in the Jewish Voice for Labour demonstration in support of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, called in opposition to the rightwing ‘Enough is Enough’ demonstration.
The BBC’s David Grossman tweeted a 105-second video clip of the conversation, retweeted by Tory MP Greg Hands to Hammersmith and Fulham Council Labour leader Stephen Cowan and then used by the Council to sack Stan.
Unison withdrew support because Stan rejected the bad advice of their regional organiser to plead guilty and thereby throwing away the right to demonstrate and to freedom of speech.
This dismissal is a good example of the McCarthyite witch-hunt against Corbyn supporters in the Labour Party extending into the area of employment, and there are numerous other examples of this happening to party members.
Stan Keable subsequently won the Employment Tribunal case he brought against Hammersmith and Fulham council: the tribunal judge ruled that it was “an unfair dismissal, both procedurally and substantively” and made a reinstatement order. However, HandF Council has appealed the decision, and the Employment Appeals Tribunal hearing is expected “some time next year”. Whatever the outcome, ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’.
12. Who organised the witch-hunt؟
Lastly, we want to look at who organised and ran the campaign to weaponise the very small number of real antisemitic incidents in the Labour Party and for what purpose. Moshé Machover has vividly described the three contingents who by a ‘happy coincidence’ found themselves pursuing the same goal (full article here):
Contingent A: A group of Israeli officials and operatives, as well as Israel advocacy groups in Britain. Members of this contingent are ideologically motivated: they care about Israel and the Zionist colonisation project. For the Israeli politicians and operatives, it is part of their job description. For the British advocates of Israel, support for the Zionist project and its state is a matter of mission. Some organisations – such as We Believe in Israel, Labour Friends of Israel and the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre – have advocacy for Israel as their raison d’être. Others – such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Labour Movement – have commitment to Israel as a formal or informal part of their constitution. In either case, part of their creed, held with various degrees of conviction, is that rejection of Zionism, antagonism to the Israeli regime, and support for Palestinian individual and national rights, are a ‘new form of antisemitism’. The vital contribution of this contingent to the campaign was to provide its very theme: ‘antisemitism’.
The Israeli part of Contingent A was in fact set up before Corbyn’s election as Labour leader (September 12 2015), and it was first focused on the US, not Britain. By the spring of 2015 Israel had suffered some well-deserved loss of support in world public opinion and erosion of its image. This included the US and, most painfully, American Jews, especially those under 30.
So on May 25 2015 Gilad Erdan was appointed minister of strategic affairs and Hasbarah (propaganda). At the time of writing, he still holds this post, as well as being minister of internal security. While the latter post is concerned with policing the Israeli public, especially Palestinian citizens, the ministry of strategic affairs and propaganda was designed to operate outside Israel’s borders – originally mainly in the US. But soon, following Corbyn’s election, the operations shifted heavily to Britain. A special target was the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign in support of Palestinian rights, which was gaining ground in Britain (and worldwide).
Peter Beaumont reported in The Guardian: Erdan’s ministry was asked in 2015 to “guide, coordinate and integrate the activities of all the ministers and the government and of civil entities in Israel and abroad on the subject of the struggle against attempts to delegitimise Israel and the boycott movement”.
Most controversially, Erdan has been put in charge of large-scale efforts to target foreign individuals and organisations, reportedly including staff recruited from the Mossad foreign intelligence agency, the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency, and the military intelligence directorate. (‘What did Israel hope to gain from Priti Patel’s secret meetings؟’ The Guardian November 8 2017)
A favoured tactic of Erdan’s operations is accusations of ‘antisemitism’. In this activity, Erdan’s operatives in foreign countries are aided by local advocacy groups. An exposé of how such an undercover operative, Shai Masot, worked in Britain, and his subversive attempts – aided by Israel advocacy groups – to meddle in the Labour Party, was provided in January 2017 by Al Jazeera in a fascinating four-part TV series, The lobby. (See aljazeera.com/investigations/thelobby.)
Contingent B: consists of sections of the British establishment concerned with foreign policy. Members of this contingency do not have an ideological commitment to Zionism or emotional attachment to Israel (unless they happen to belong to Contingent A as well), but they are genuinely worried that a left-leaning Labour Party may disrupt a basic precept of British foreign policy: toeing the US line. Accordingly, Israel must be supported – not because it is lovely, but because it is a favoured ally and junior partner of the imperialist hegemony. A Labour Party in which the majority of members are anti-imperialist and supporters of Palestinian rights is regarded as dangerous – so much more if it is led by someone with a similar record.
The indispensable contribution of this contingent to the campaign has been the mobilisation of the mainstream media and other facilities of the state to spread anti-Corbyn propaganda and suppress any opposition to it in the wider British public.
Contingent C: is made up by Labour’s rightwing MPs and party officers. Their vital contribution to the campaign has been to undermine Corbyn’s leadership from within the party and conduct a witch-hunt against its leftwing members.
The report is concerned solely with the party officers belonging to this contingent. It ignores all the rest. It is therefore not much more than a piece of scandalous gossip that simply confirms what has been widely suspected about those scoundrels, but contributes little to the understanding of the defeat, or self-defeat, of Corbynism.
13. Conclusions
The Enquiry into the report should in our view include the following conclusions:
• The Labour Party must publish the Report officially as well as the original data, Whatsapp messages and emails.
• The Labour Party should issue an official apology to Jeremy Corbyn and the left and condemn the campaign to undermine and sabotage them.
• All disciplinary cases processed during the last five years have to be overturned, pending unbiased re-examination.
• The party’s disciplinary system must be urgently and radically overhauled. Disciplinary procedures should be carried out in accordance with the principles of natural justice, and be time-limited: charges not resolved within three months should be automatically dropped. An accused member should be given all the evidence submitted against them, including the identity of the complainant(s), and be regarded as innocent until proven guilty. Those aspects of the Chakrabarti report must finally be implemented.
• The Labour Party must overturn its commitment to the mis-definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which is highly disputed and has been criticised by numerous academics as an attack on free speech, as it conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism in its list of eleven examples.
• All those mentioned in the document who took part in the campaign of sabotage and who are still in their post must be immediately investigated for gross misconduct.
• All those involved who have jumped ship and now enjoy well-paid positions in different companies must be named and shamed. They include:
o Iain McNicol, formerly General Secretary, now a member of the House of Lords
o Sam Matthews, formerly Head of Disputes
o John Stolliday, formerly Director of the Governance and Legal Unit






23.04.2020


Weaponising ‘anti-Semitism’
Labour’s leaked report does not tackle the central question, argues Moshé Machover
The internal Labour Party report The work of the Labour Party’s governance and legal unit in relation to anti-Semitism, 2014-2019 (‘the report’), leaked during the Easter holiday, is - as its title makes clear - about the way the Labour bureaucracy dealt with the accusations of anti-Semitism made against the party since Jeremy Corbyn was unexpectedly elected leader. More specifically, the report is an attack by one faction of party administrators and advisors, who were close to Corbyn and who gained partial control in April 2018 (when Jennie Formby was appointed general secretary), against their predecessors, who had been appointed in the pre-Corbyn era and were hostile to him.1
Unsurprisingly, the report documents the moral depravity of some of those former high-ranking officials, who are exposed as bullies, racists and misogynists, expressing themselves in the disgusting language of the cesspit. They conspired against the party that employed them, sabotaging its election campaign in 2017. They hoped and acted for an electoral defeat, that would lead to the resignation of Corbyn as party leader. In the event, they may have succeeded in preventing an outright Labour victory, but the party achieved impressive gains, so Corbyn remained leader for a while, until he was finally undermined.
But the report does not reflect too well on its authors and on the political friends they champion. In fact, they broadly share with the scoundrels whom they denounce the same view of the validity of the accusations that the Labour Party has a serious anti-Semitism problem. They also wilfully ignore two of the three sources of hostility to the Corbyn leadership, which fuelled and motivated the campaign of alleged ‘anti-Semitism’ against this leadership and the party as a whole. I will deal with these two interconnected failures of the report in turn.
Spotted hyenas
You have to be extremely prejudiced or pathetically credulous to take at face value the tsunami of ‘anti-Semitism’ accusations against Labour, which erupted soon after Jeremy Corbyn’s unlikely election as leader. Let me make it clear: the issue is not the existence in the party of the odd real anti-Semite: a person who hates Jews in general or is prejudiced against them. In this connection I have on several occasions used the parable of the spotted hyenas, which I am going to repeat here.
As you may know, spotted hyenas are some of the least attractive members of the animal kingdom. Now, here is a quiz question: “Are there spotted hyenas in Holland؟” This is the sort of question that neurologists use to diagnose people with frontal lobe lesions, who usually answer immediately, “No!” But in fact the right answer - which most normal people give, perhaps after some reflection - is “Yes, there probably are some” (eg, in zoos or safari parks), though Holland is not the natural habitat of spotted hyenas.2 Well, if you see an expedition organising at great cost and effort to go to Holland, and to your enquiry why they are going there they tell you ‘We are spotted-hyenas spotters, and we are off to spot spotted hyenas in Holland’, then you would suspect that they don’t really have a thing about hyenas, but about Holland …
There is an abundance of firm evidence that the anti-Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign has been a huge pall of smoke with precious little fire.3 As a typical example of how the mainstream press gleefully joined the brass-necked band playing the ‘Labour anti-Semitism’ march, consider the sensationalist Sunday Times article, headlined ‘Inside Labour’s hate factory - vitriol and threats of violence: the ugly face of Jeremy Corbyn’s cabal - anti-Semitic and holocaust-denying posts are rife on Facebook groups cheerleading for Labour’s leader’. Although the article appeared on April 1 2018, it was not meant as an April fool spoof. On careful analysis, posted by Jewish Voice for Labour the following day, it proved to be an inflated balloon full of malodorous hot air.4 Yet the authors of the report show no awareness of the manifest fact that the accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ were hugely exaggerated and formed part of a contrived, politically motivated campaign.
The report is disingenuous in yet another way: it does not challenge or express the slightest misgiving regarding the absurdly stretched definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ used by the anti-Corbyn campaign. The definition, promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, is pathetically deficient; and the 11 “examples” often appended to it go far beyond the normal understanding of anti-Semitism: hatred and/or prejudice and/or discrimination and/or persecution directed against Jews for being Jews. The “examples” largely focus on Israel; they are used - and designed - to delegitimise serious questioning of the Zionist colonisation project and the regime of the Israeli settler state.5 The ‘definition’, with its appended examples, has been thoroughly debunked by highly qualified critics, including Jewish ones.6
As an illustration of the abuse of that misdefinition, consider my own case. In an official letter expelling me from the party, dated October 3 2017, a Labour official who gloried in the title, ‘head of disputes’, informed me:
Allegations that you may have been involved in a breach of Labour Party rules have been brought to the attention of national officers of the Labour Party.
These allegations relate to an apparently anti-Semitic article published in your name, by the organisation known as Labour Party Marxists (LPM). The content of these articles [sic!] appears to meet the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which has been adopted by the Labour Party.
I strongly urge readers to consult that article, which is available online,7 and see for themselves that there is not a scintilla of real anti-Semitism in it. But perhaps, with sufficient ill-will, the views I express in it could be squeezed into a purpose-built misdefinition. My case can serve as an exemplar of the baseless, malicious smears made against numerous party members.
By the way, the head of dispute’s nasty insinuation of ‘anti-Semitism’ against me was not only an absurd lie, but a gratuitous one, as the pretext used for my expulsion was quite different. In the event, that flimsy pretext did not work and, faced with a large wave of protests (for which I am deeply grateful), the party bureaucrats were compelled to rescind the expulsion. But the calumny of ‘anti-Semitism’ was never withdrawn, and my repeated demands for apology were ignored.
Since fair-minded party members, including many Jewish ones, could see plainly that the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ against their party were hugely inflated in scale and often relied on very questionable evidence, the instigators of the campaign against the Labour left were faced with the danger of being refuted by credible witnesses. They were helped in silencing righteous protest by the mainstream media, including not only the BBC, but also the supposedly ‘progressive’ Guardian, which gave little or no space to refutation of the lies.
But this was not enough. A new device for silencing the truth had to be invented. This is the heresy of ‘denialism’. Any party member who attests that Labour does not have a ‘big problem with anti-Semitism’, in the sense of being ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’, or that a specific accusation is highly questionable, are themselves guilty of this heresy, which is as bad as being anti-Semitic. Such protestors are to be hounded from the party. An example was made of Chris Williamson, a leftwing MP who dared to point out that Labour should not apologise for something for which it was not guilty. Moreover, a party member who defends, or shares a platform with, someone accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ or of the denialist heresy is likewise as bad as an anti-Semite.
The authors of the report (and their political friends) do not have any problem with this: the inflated scale of the accusations, their often dodgy nature and the excommunication of ‘denialist’ heretics. They are quite happy with the treatment of Chris Williamson and other less well-known victims, which took place under the post-April 2018 party regime, not under the previous one. In fact the main complaint of the report against the loathsome baddies of that earlier regime is that they did not act expeditiously on allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ (a large proportion of which were false!), because they wanted to create the impression that the party’s procedures of dealing with anti-Semitism were ineffective, for which Corbyn would bear the blame - as indeed happened.
The report deserves limited credit: for exposing the swamp of the bureaucracy that Labour inherited from the pre-Corbyn era. But true leftwingers should be highly critical of the ideological concessions it makes to the vile swimmers in that swamp.
Three contingents
In order to appreciate the severe faults and limitations of the report, we must look at the wider context and analyse the structure of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against Corbyn and the Labour left. The campaign has in fact been waged by three contingents, which can be schematically represented by a Venn diagram.
As the diagram makes clear, these contingents are not mutually exclusive, but overlap: some individual campaigners belong to two of them or even to all three. The three contingents operate in synergy, and each plays a specific role, indispensable to the entire campaign.
Contingent A: consists of a group of Israeli officials and operatives, as well as Israel advocacy groups in Britain. Members of this contingent are ideologically motivated: they care about Israel and the Zionist colonisation project. For the Israeli politicians and operatives, it is part of their job description. For the British advocates of Israel, support for the Zionist project and its state is a matter of mission. Some organisations - such as We Believe in Israel, Labour Friends of Israel and the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre - have advocacy for Israel as their raison d’être. Others - such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Labour Movement - have commitment to Israel as a formal or informal part of their constitution. In either case, part of their creed, held with various degrees of conviction, is that rejection of Zionism, antagonism to the Israeli regime, and support for Palestinian individual and national rights, are a ‘new form of anti-Semitism’.
The vital contribution of this contingent to the campaign was to provide its very theme: ‘anti-Semitism’. Without this contribution, Contingents B and C would have had to invent other accusations.8
The Israeli part of Contingent A was in fact set up before Corbyn’s election as Labour leader (September 12 2015), and it was first focused on the US, not Britain. By the spring of 2015 Israel had suffered some well-deserved loss of support in world public opinion and erosion of its image. This included the US and, most painfully, American Jews, especially those under 30. Netanyahu’s obviously tense - not to say hostile - relations with Barack Obama did not go down too well among this public. Some acerbic commentator pointed out that more Jews had voted for Obama than for Netanyahu.
So on May 25 2015 Gilad Erdan was appointed minister of strategic affairs and Hasbarah (propaganda). At the time of writing, he still holds this post, as well as being minister of internal security. While the latter post is concerned with policing the Israeli public, especially Palestinian citizens, the ministry of strategic affairs and propaganda was designed to operate outside Israel’s borders - originally mainly in the US. But soon, following Corbyn’s election, the operations shifted heavily to Britain. A special target was the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign in support of Palestinian rights, which was gaining ground in Britain (and worldwide). This led to a turf rivalry with Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs. On September 4 2016, Yossi Melman reported in the Israeli paper Ma’ariv:
The problem may arise when the operations section, as hinted by Erdan at the YNET conference on BDS this year, will try to carry out, directly or indirectly, ‘special ops’, which may also be called ‘black ops’. These may have the form of defamation campaigns, harassment and threats to the lives of activists in ‘the boycott movement and delegitimisation’ groups, infringing on, and violating, their privacy, etc. Last March BDS accused Israeli intelligence of responsibility for cyber attacks against its website.9
And Peter Beaumont reported in The Guardian:
Erdan’s ministry was asked in 2015 to “guide, coordinate and integrate the activities of all the ministers and the government and of civil entities in Israel and abroad on the subject of the struggle against attempts to delegitimise Israel and the boycott movement”.
Most controversially, Erdan has been put in charge of large-scale efforts to target foreign individuals and organisation, reportedly including staff recruited from the Mossad foreign intelligence agency, the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency, and the military intelligence directorate.10
A favoured tactic of Erdan’s operations is accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’:
Israel has no convincing arguments with which to combat the arguments made against it, so it relies on skilled debaters and on personal attacks against those making these arguments, hoping to silence them - shaming and countershaming in the struggle against anti-Semitism.11
In this activity, Erdan’s operatives in foreign countries are aided by local advocacy groups. An exposé of how such an undercover operative, Shai Masot, worked in Britain, and his subversive attempts - aided by Israel advocacy groups - to meddle in the Labour Party, was provided in January 2017 by Al Jazeera in a fascinating four-part TV series, The lobby.12
These revelations, if they became widely known and discussed, risked undermining the credibility of the ‘Labour is anti-Semitic’ campaign. Therefore the leaders of the campaign insisted that the revelations be swept under the carpet. Anyone mentioning, let alone condemning, Israeli activity, such as disclosed by Al Jazeera, was now also suspected of being an ‘anti-Semite’. The Corbyn leadership complied; after a brief and feeble protest, the Shai Masot scandal was no longer mentioned. (In the general council of my local Constituency Labour Party, a motion, supported by a majority of the members, that the party launch a proper investigation into Israeli interference, was ruled out of order by the chair as “crossing the line of what is acceptable” and being possibly ‘anti-Semitic’.)
Contingent B: consists of sections of the British establishment concerned with foreign policy. Members of this contingency do not have an ideological commitment to Zionism or emotional attachment to Israel (unless they happen to belong to Contingent A as well), but they are genuinely worried that a left-leaning Labour Party may disrupt a basic precept of British foreign policy: toeing the US line. Accordingly, Israel must be supported - not because it is lovely, but because it is a favoured ally and junior partner of the imperialist hegemon. A Labour Party in which the majority of members are anti-imperialist and supporters of Palestinian rights is regarded as dangerous - so much more if it is led by someone with a similar record.
The indispensable contribution of this contingent to the campaign has been the mobilisation of the mainstream media and other facilities of the state to spread anti-Corbyn propaganda and suppress any opposition to it in the wider British public.
Members of this contingent have formed ties with the Gilad Erdan set-up in Israel. An interesting example is Priti Patel. Although a member of Conservative Friends of Israel, I would be surprised if she has a special ideological or emotional commitment to Zionism. But she is a noted rightwing friend of Narendra Modi and, of course, of Binyamin Netanyahu. In the summer of 2017, when she was secretary of state for international development in the Theresa May cabinet, she spent a ‘family holiday’ in Israel and had unauthorised secret meetings with Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu. She suggested diverting UK foreign aid funds away from Palestinian recipients to subsidise Israeli army “humanitarian” operations in the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights. For this unauthorised piece of diplomacy she was sacked by May.
But most puzzling was her secret meeting with Gilad Erdan, as it had apparently nothing to do with her official job. Indeed, Peter Beaumont’s Guardian article quoted above bears the heading, ‘What did Israel hope to gain from Priti Patel’s secret meetings؟’ What indeed! Ms Patel is, of course, now home secretary in Boris Johnson’s cabinet.
Contingent C: is made up by Labour’s rightwing MPs and party officers. Their vital contribution to the campaign has been to undermine Corbyn’s leadership from within the party and conduct a witch-hunt against its leftwing members.
The report is concerned solely with the party officers belonging to this contingent. It ignores all the rest. It is therefore not much more than a piece of scandalous gossip that simply confirms what has been widely suspected about those scoundrels, but contributes little to the understanding of the defeat, or self-defeat, of Corbynism.




Labour’s fabricated anti-Semitism crisis is a threat to free speech


UK MP Chris Williamson has begun legal action against Labour, the British political party which has suspended his membership.
The treatment of Williamson by Labour’s bureaucrats has been totally unjust and completely bizarre. His situation is only the latest in a long line of phoney examples of anti-Semitism, which have been barely out of the headlines since 2015.
Williamson was suspended earlier this year, shortly after he had booked a room in Parliament to host The WitchHunt, a film about the manufactured anti-Semitism “crisis” in the Labour Party and the long-running right-wing campaign against Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.
The film explored the case of Jackie Walker and other anti-racist grassroots Labour activists falsely accused of anti-Semitism by the mainstream media. It tells a story about Israel’s alliance with the global far-right, that Israel’s supporters would rather you not hear. Acclaimed British director Mike Leigh praised how it “exposes with chilling accuracy the terrifying threat that now confronts democracy”.
In conversation with many left-wing Jewish activists, the film challenges the conventional wisdom that anti-Semitism in Labour is endemic and has now reached “institutional” proportions.
READ: Formal ‘anti-Semitism’ complaint made against Corbyn’s Labour critic
Right-wing, anti-Palestinian groups like the Jewish Leadership Council, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Labour Movement have, for the last two years, considered Williamson to be public enemy number one – almost to the extent of Corbyn himself.
These pro-Israel lobby groups have rounded on Williamson, exactly because he has been the only MP to publicly challenge the Israel lobby’s narrative on anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Instead, he has talked of how the issue is used as a smear in order to oppose Jeremy Corbyn – a veteran Palestine solidarity activist – and his supporters.
The fake anti-Semitism “crisis” has now reached a genuinely dangerous level, one which massively threatens the very basis of free speech in the UK.
After Williamson was suspended in February (bizarrely for a “pattern of behaviour,” not for alleged anti-Semitism), he was readmitted to the party in June by a National Executive Committee panel. The disciplinary group let him off with a warning, which, considering he did or said nothing anti-Semitic, he should never have received.
However, this prompted an outcry by Israel lobby groups and Labour’s vestigial right-wing elements. The decision was overturned after two days of media headlines.
READ: ‘I called out Palestinian suffering – and was met by antisemitic abuse’
It is this disgusting treatment which Williamson is now challenging in court – something he says was unlawful. His crowdfunder has raised more than £35,000 ($43,000) in donations in only three days.
After a long line of good socialists have been driven out of the party – Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth – it seems that the Labour grassroots has really had enough and is saying “no more”.
Williamson has been one of Jeremy Corbyn’s most ardent supporters. He led a “Democracy Roadshow” speaking tour around the UK last year, in which he argued for the need for fully democratic elections for Labour’s candidates for MPs.
At the moment, it is very difficult for ordinary Labour members to hold their local MPs to account. This meant they had no fear in orchestrating a coup against Corbyn in 2016, despite the fact that he was elected by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Labour members and supporters.
Further, because they still have almost no democratic accountability, many Labour MPs are still openly agitating against their own party’s twice-elected leader. Williamson’s advocacy of open selections put him in the firing line of the unpopular, right-wing MPs who quite openly see democracy as a threat.
READ: London council cancels pro-Palestine event over anti-Semitism claims
As part of his campaign for re-admittance to Labour, Williamson spoke in Brighton last weekend about the need for a democratic and socialist economy. However, he was forced to address those assembled outside, after three meeting venues cancelled on the organisers.
Anti-Palestinian activists fiercely opposed Williamson’s speech in Brighton. Threats were made and Brighton’s Quaker centre, as well as hotel chain Holiday Inn, both pulled out to protect their staff. One of those alleged to be involved in this war of words against Williamson was Jonathan Hoffman, an anti-Palestinian activist convicted earlier this year of threatening behaviour. The initial venue, the Brighthelm Centre, also cancelled after a dishonest intervention by Peter Kyle, a right-wing, anti-Corbyn local Labour MP.
When an elected MP cannot safely hold a public meeting, you know that there is a severe chilling effect in place. Yet nothing is being said about it in the “mainstream” media.
The fabricated “Labour anti-Semitism crisis” is now the biggest threat to freedom of speech in the UK today.






Free Speech in Brighton!


September 22, 2019 Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker, Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour Party conference

Brighton Labour Left Alliance has pulled off an amazing feat by setting up a range of events on the theme of ‘Freedom of Speech’ during Labour Party conference. On Saturday, almost 100 activists packed into an upstairs room in the Rialto Theatre. Greg Hadfield, the key organiser of these events, spoke of the threats made against a number of venues booked by the left, leading to their cancellation. It says a great deal for his determination and courage, and that of his Brighton comrades, that we were able to listen to militant speeches from Ann Mitchell (chair of Brighton Palestine Solidarity Campaign), Tina Werkmann (Labour against the Witchhunt), Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson. The efforts of the witch-hunters had the opposite effect intended.
Chris Williamson spoke of his determination to continue to speak out honestly and to fight oppression, and of his determination that he would not be cowed, even if he was reinstated. Tina Werkmann warned of the rule change by the NEC which fast tracks expulsions. The right-wing are determined to destroy the left. But they have a fight on their hands.





Stan Keable has won his employment tribunal

May 24, 2019


We are very pleased to report that LAW secretary Stan Keable has today WON his employment tribunal against Hammersmith and Fulham council. The employment tribunal judge ruled that it was “an unfair dismissal, both procedurally and substantively.”
On April 21 2018, Stan was dismissed from his job with Hammersmith and Fulham Council after 17 years unblemished service as a housing officer, for having “brought the Council into disrepute”, by saying that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazi regime – a well documented if shameful historical fact.
He said this on March 26, in a conversation in Parliament Square – nothing to do with work – while participating in the Jewish Voice for Labour demonstration in support of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, called in opposition to the rightwing ‘Enough is Enough’ demonstration.
The BBC’s David Grossman tweeted a 105-second video clip of the conversation, retweeted by Tory MP Greg Hands to HandF Council Labour leader Stephen Cowan and then used by the Council to sack Stan.
Unison withdrew support because Stan rejected the bad advice of their regional organiser to plead guilty, throwing away the right to demonstrate and to freedom of speech.
This dismissal was clearly an extension of the McCarthyite witch-hunt against Corbyn supporters in the Labour Party into the area of employment. Hopefully, this judgment will go some way to stop any more of such politically motivated sackings.
The remedy hearing is set for October 2, to determine possible reinstatement and the level of compensation.
Thank you to everybody who has supported Stan in this period!