Labour disputes chief resigns after opposing suspension of ‘Holocaust denial’ row man
Christine Shawcroft.
You thought this was about me, didn’t you?
Sorry to disappoint, but this is about someone who, it appears, may have genuinely suggested that the Holocaust was a hoax.
That being said, Alan Bull’s claim that the accusations took his Facebook postings out of context chimes right – that’s the way with many false, malicious and opportunistic claims of anti-Semitism.
It doesn’t mean he’s innocent; it means Labour Party investigators need to look at the original posts.
If Ms Shawcroft had done so, she might not have made the comments that led to her resignation (or did Jeremy Corbyn really tell her to quit, as some are suggesting?) – or she might have had the evidence she needed to prove herself right.
In these matters, context is everything. That’s why so many false accusations are stripped of context, or doctored to create a completely false impression. Without seeing the original posts, it’s impossible to know the facts of the matter.
Now, it seems timing is equally important.
Would Ms Shawcroft have been forced out if the latest anti-Semitism row had not happened last weekend?
Probably not.
It did happen, her email was publicised by some unscrupulous Labour source, and she was out of time.
What now?
Well, Labour is likely to (finally) enact the recommendations of the Chakrabarti report, bringing a level of transparency and even, possibly, legality to its dispute resolution process. So we may hope the removal of Ms Shawcroft will have achieved nothing for those who engineered it.
Mr Ball will likely see his case handled under the new process – let’s face it, the current one is cripplingly slow – and we’ll find out what was going on with Mr Ball, one way or the other.
And of course we now have further proof that Labour is leaking like a sieve because it has at least one traitor working at the highest level. The party needs to identify this person.
Fortunately, the more they leak, the easier it will be to find them.
Labour’s disputes chief resigned tonight after asking for a council candidate embroiled in a “Holocaust denial” row to be let back into the party.
Christine Shawcroft said she was “deeply sorry” for her comments as she quit as head of the party’s powerful disputes panel.
It emerged Ms Shawcroft sent an e-mail, which was leaked to The Times, asking party officials to reinstate Peterborough council candidate Alan Bull.
Mr Bull was suspended after a screenshot apparently showed he had shared an article on Facebook called: “International Red Cross Report Confirms the Holocaust of Six Million Jews is a Hoax.”
But in the leaked e-mail Ms Shawcroft wrote she was “concerned” about Mr Bull’s suspension, adding the original Facebook post was “taken completely out of context and alleged to show anti-Semitism”.
In her e-mail Ms Shawcroft also suggested “partisan” disputes were “wasting a great deal of staff time.”
She said it was received by the party almost a year earlier yet Mr Bull was suspended “just in time” to stop him standing in the local elections.
She added: “As it is hardly Mr Bull’s fault if the party has sat on the complaint for months without investigation, I think we should reinstate his membership and allow him to contest [the election].”
A Labour source confirmed the e-mail was genuine.
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He did share the article, but made clear that he was doing so under “sharing-does-not-necessarily-mean-endorsement” terms i.e. letting people read it and discuss it. Personally, I think that was a very foolish thing to do as it was almost guaranteed to be ‘Irving-ite’ codswallop, but it certainly doesn’t mean Bull himself is a holocaust-denier.
http://azvsas.blogspot.fr/2018/03/more-fake-antisemitism-alan-bull-labour.html
The Dirty Tricks Playbook is really getting a run in this pre-election period. This anti-Jewish (Arabs are also Semitic) ants’ nest has really been poked with a lot of sticks. Last week Corbyn was a Commie fifth columnist, this week he’s a fascist. Possibly by tomorrow he’ll have been held responsible for the death of Jesus?
Anti-Semitism refers to Jews only. Arabs are part of the Semitic family of peoples, but that does not change the meaning of that word.
When I saw the headline last night, my first thought was that it might be to do with you or Jackie Walker and I had the tiniest hope that Shawcroft had resigned her position on a matter of principle, that she was in fact refusing to ‘convict’ on these politically motivated and entirely spurious charges (I would describe what has happened to the pair of you, as well as KL, ‘semantic entrapment’ – yes, I am anti-semantic). I’ve got so much to say about all of this I could easily write from now until dawn, fully referenced and without a break on this toxic subject; I’m like an angry John Mann except my feelings are genuine! Over this last week (yes, we are 7 days into this confected nonsense) I’ve read so much and done so much research. During all this I did two things related to your case. The first of these was to read the entirity of the thread which got you into so much trouble (any idea who ‘Nic’ is?) which was illuminating but not surprising. The second is that I googled your name when I was looking for you twitter account to have a look and was so shocked when the results page came up. If anybody else were to do that I’m sure they’d come up with only one conclusion. Thankfully I, and, I’m sure many others that read your blog, know better.
I’m not sure this comment is necessarily ‘for publication’, that’s not the point right now, but I did want to point you to a Tony Greenstein article about the Alan Bull case. I expect you’ve already seen it, but it does give another side and I imagine you’ll empathise with the situation in which he now finds himself.
https://medium.com/@TonyGreenstein/more-fake-antisemitism-alan-bull-labour-candidate-in-peterborough-suspended-as-a-result-of-6ce65b5c2695
All the best, Mike!
Should ask my friend who’s family was nearly annialiated in the camps ober 200 of his uncles, cousins, aunts, his grandfathers and grandmothers on both sides and they are recorded in the Jewish Memorial Centre and of course the Germans were very good and precis are recording everything accurately.
and of course if you say the Jewish Holocaust was a lie or a hoax you then have to say the Holocaust victims such as disabled, gays, gypsies, communists were also lying and creating this “hoax”
I think there should be a Yad Vashem for the Disabled Victims of our Holocaust Genocide and every one should be accounted for.