Monthly Archives: July 2019

Here’s a weird one: Is Boris Johnson conducting a social media charm campaign?

I’ve received a curious message. See what you make of it:

My wife has a YouTube page that she hosts a chat group on every so often. now this is not a big page and she has less than a 1000 subscribers.

last night whilst doing her live chat a person came into her chat and asked, “what did people think of Boris Johnson”. I thought this was a very unusual question to ask, because her chat groups are not about politics. To cut a long story short, three different people joined her chat session and all three asked the same question. I did suggest this must be the Tories latest media surge to get people to like Boris.

I have enclosed a link to last nights video and you will see for yourself these people in the chat asking about Boris: –

https://youtu.be/SVM_o1EpF4U

The clip is very long (nearly 90 minutes) – but has anyone else experienced anything similar on social media?

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Streeting becomes third Labour anti-Semitism witch-hunter to be accused of anti-Semitism

Accused: Wes Streeting.

Labour MP Wes Streeting, who has been vocal in his attacks on fellow party members accused of anti-Semitism, has become the third high-profile witch-hunter to receive the same treatment.

He joins Tom Watson and Margaret Hodge in having an anti-Semitism complaint aimed at him.

Here’s Skwawkbox to explain:

The Orthodox Jewish member, who asked not to be named, has made the complaint with regard to tweets and retweets by Streeting labelling Charedi Jewish member Shraga Stern as ‘homophobic’ and ‘anti-LGBT’ for his campaign to maintain sex education as a matter for the parents of Orthodox children, as well as his assertion that Orthodox Jewish values are not Labour values. The complaint includes copies of a number of social media posts.

The complaint states:

Below and attached are five antisemitic attacks,  smearing me for the one and only reason for being an Orthdox Jew and wanting to uphold Jewish tradition…

Attacks… are clearly for the reason that I intend to hold on to my Jewish traditions.

The above is original antisemitism via inciting hate against religious Jews and has caused to the killing of millions of Jews throughout the years.

I am anxious about this hostile environment and racist attacks by some individuals within the Labour party… This is extremely dangerous and needs to be dealt with as a matter of urgency.

I am hurt by all this and wonder if Labour is the neutral home for visible Jewish People.

Being attacked by an official elected Labour MP for being Jewish needs to be taken as a wake-up call and rooted out of the Labour party. Every Jew has the rights to be a Jew and all need to be treated the same at the Labour Party.

I urge the Labour Party to suspend him until the investigation is over.

Labour Party rule 2.1.8 makes it clear that: “The NEC … shall regard any incident which in their view might reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on … religion or belief … as conduct prejudicial to the Party.

As with the Watson and Hodge cases, it will be interesting to see how the party’s leaders rule on this.

Source: Jewish Labour member’s formal complaint of ‘original antisemitism’ vs Streeting | The SKWAWKBOX

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Tory/Lib Dem protest voters: Think again – Brecon and Radnorshire is NOT a ‘Brexit by-election’

Tom Davies in Brecon: He lives in the constituency, unlike Lib Dem interloper Jane Dodds.

Labour’s candidate in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election has appealed for voters to remember that there is much more to the August 1 by-election than Brexit.

“There are far greater issues than just Brexit,” said Tom Davies, whose campaign has been said to be lagging behind those of vapid Liberal Democrat leaflet-spammer Jane Dodds (Remain) and convicted criminal Chris Davies (Leave) – both of whom have little to recommend them other than the chance to record a pointless protest vote about the decision to leave the European Union. “We’re looking at the national effects of austerity, which are really taking hold in this constituency.

“What we’re hearing on the doorstep is more about people struggling to make ends meet and money not going into services than about Brexit.”

People in the constituency have been raising Brexit on the doorstep, he conceded, but “it’s not the only issue.”

He said: “We’re giving the option that if the public still want to leave the EU, then those people can vote for a deal. Parliament is deadlocked. The Tories rejected our deal, which I’d say was closest to what was promised during the referendum. Because the Tories have rejected that, it’s only right for that to be put back to the people.

“We as a party, and I certainly, will not accept any deal that will make us worse off than being in the EU. Any deal that has been put forward at the moment, save perhaps our own, is exactly that. In our stance – confirmatory vote and remain – I think we’ve got the sensible solution.”

And he pointed out that it would be a betrayal to stand aside for another party as part of a so-called “Remain alliance”: “We have a number of other factors at play, not just Brexit. I won’t forgive Lib Dems for their part in austerity. I won’t forgive them for their voting record during the coalition government. The last Lib Dem MP for this constituency lost his seat. He voted for welfare cuts, and I won’t be seen to be accepting that.

“Adam Price, the leader of Plaid Cymru, has been public in saying he’s thrown his support behind the Lib Dems. That’s him playing politics. He is well aware that Plaid Cymru hasn’t had a good showing in this constituency recently, and I don’t think he wants to lose their deposit.”

Austerity

He admitted: “You can introduce yourself and people will say ‘no, thank you’ because of your stance on Brexit or ‘yes, I’ll talk to you because you’re for a confirmatory vote’. [Tom is a Remainer, and would campaign for that as an MP if Labour has its way and voters go back to the polls to confirm the way forward on the vexed Brexit issue.]

“What we’re focusing on is austerity, but also losing between £850m and £1bn… In Brecon and Radnorshire, as part of Powys, we’re seeing a 9.5% council tax increase to pay for Tory cuts. [Powys County Council is Tory-Independent run.]

“The reason we’re not getting the funding from the Welsh government is because their budget has been cut from Westminster.”

NHS

“In spite of the Tory and Lib Dem coalition austerity measures, the Welsh government is still pumping record amounts of money into the NHS.”

Schools

“We’re still pumping £1.4bn over the last five years into the new schools programme, and the Welsh government has built 41 new schools across Wales. We’re also putting an extra £100m into education, and we’re offering families some of the best childcare offers across the UK.

The message is that despite the Tories in Westminster, it’s the Welsh Labour government that is delivering for the people of Brecon and Radnorshire.

Popular policies

“People are very interested in John McDonnell’s plans for a Post Bank. I certainly think it’s well worth exploring and developing. We’ve lost a lot of high street banks in this area and people need somewhere to be able to do their banking.

“We’re obviously looking at more funding for the devolved nations of the UK as a national party, and that is absolutely welcome. Also going down well are the pledges for a £10-per-hour real living wage, lifting the public sector pay cap and the green industrial revolution, which was a big hit in the hustings.”

Tactical voting

He doesn’t agree with the false Liberal Democrat demand for Labour supporters to vote tactically for the other party, to keep the Tories out – for a very good reason: “That hasn’t worked over the last few elections. It certainly didn’t work in 2015 and 2017. It didn’t work in 2010 either because, even though the Lib Dems were elected, they turned around and went into coalition with the Conservatives. That is not what Labour voters would have voted Lib Dem for.”

And of course there’s the fact that Liberal Democrat canvassers have been lying directly to voters: “We’ve heard rumours of one activist saying to voters in one area that Labour aren’t standing in this election so the voters who are naturally Labour should be voting Lib Dem. Well, here I am. I’m standing. It’s really misleading tactics from the Lib Dems.”

So there it is.

This election is about more than just Brexit – and voters simply cannot trust the Liberal Democrats and the Tory convict. Labour has the local policies that people want… It would be irrational to support anybody else.

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BoJob booed again as the new PM fails in Wales

Farmers at last weeks Royal Welsh Show demanded answers from new prime minister Boris Johnson about the effect of a “no deal” Brexit which they fear will harm exports and bring a fall in animal welfare and environmental standards – along with a massive cut in funding. If they expected answers when he visited Wales yesterday, they were disappointed.

Mr Johnson was booed as he arrived at the Welsh Assembly for talks with First Minister Mark Drakeford. He had previously visited a chicken farm near Newport and an online retailer in Brecon.

Boris Johnson: A clown, even when he isn’t wearing the make-up.

After behind-closed-doors discussions, Mr Drakeford was disparaging about BoJob. Here’s the BBC’s report of his words:

He held talks with Wales’ First Minister Mark Drakeford, who said there was a “deeply concerning lack of detail” from the new prime minister.

The Welsh Labour leader said he pressed Mr Johnson to explain the path to a deal with the EU but did not get a “clear sense” from him of what the plan would be.

Mr Drakeford said he emphasised the “catastrophic effect” a no-deal Brexit would have on the Welsh economy, and said the PM provided assurances of support for manufacturing and agriculture in such a scenario.

“But asked to describe the nature of that support, I’m afraid that there is a deeply concerning lack of detail that is available to people whose livelihood is on the line”, Mr Drakeford said.

The first minister said the PM told him there would be many new opportunities for Welsh agriculture and businesses, but he had “no sense again” there was detailed thinking behind what “otherwise becomes vacuous optimism”.

Mr Johnson said: “We’re not aiming for a no-deal Brexit, we don’t think that’s where we’ll end up.”

“This is very much up to our friends and partners across the channel,” he added.

A Welsh farmer called on Mr Johnson to stop “playing Russian roulette” with the lamb industry over the threat of a no-deal Brexit.

Members of the press are starting to call Mr Johnson “Maybot Mk II” after he refused to respond to a single on-camera question.

Adrian Masters of ITV Cymru/Wales explained on Twitter:

Of course, control of the mass media is a warning sign of fascism – see this article for the rest and consider how many other conditions the Conservatives have already met, and how many more they are likely to meet as BoJob’s leadership continues.

The fledgeling PM was much-criticised for leaving his meeting with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon by the back door.

Having failed in Wales, I wonder whether he left Mr Drakeford by the same route.

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By-election candidate supports tax avoidance for the rich – but hammered the vulnerable with the bedroom tax

Chris Davies: He supports tax avoidance and evasion, according to his voting record.

If you were reading This Site yesterday (July 30), you’ll be aware that a friend on Facebook has been looking at the Parliamentary voting record of Chris Davies, the former MP and current Conservative candidate in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election – and it makes grim reading.

The same friend has now finished researching Mr Davies’s record on taxation and the results speak for themselves. Amongst other decisions…

• Davies voted against a series of proposals intended to reduce tax avoidance and evasion.
• Davies voted against an investigation into the banking industry’s failure to prevent tax evasion.
• Davies voted against requiring multinational enterprises to publish a country by country tax strategy including information on their attitude to tax planning (this could have established evidence to show how companies avoid paying tax).
• Davies voted against giving the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority duties to combat abusive tax avoidance arrangements.
• Davies voted not to support the publishing full details of the Government’s tax settlement with Google and for an international agreement to implement country-by-country reporting of company accounts.

So you can see that Mr Davies is a big fan of tax avoidance and evasion by corporations and the very rich. Conversely:

• Davies voted to ensure that victims of domestic abuse would have to pay extra charges – the bedroom tax – if they were provided with a secure tenancy that incorporates a spare room.

So he’s against tax fairness; he would let corporations and the rich get away without paying a huge amount of tax that would hugely contribute to public services, but he’s happy to hammer the vulnerable with an unfair and random tax that affects people according to the accommodation that is allocated to them (which in turn is based on what is available).

I hope the people of Brecon and Radnorshire pay attention to this abysmal record – while also remembering that Mr Davies is himself a convict, having been found guilty of faking expenses claims earlier this year.

Mr Davies should never have been voted into Westminster. It is time to kick him back into the political wilderness.

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Nearly a quarter of the UK population has been pushed into poverty – but Tories don’t care about the poor

Tory fail: Pensioner poverty has risen under Conservative government policies.

Around 14.3 million people in the UK are now living in poverty, with seven million suffering “persistent” poverty and 4.5 million at least 50 per cent below the poverty line.

The revelation, in a report by the Social Metrics Commission, comes after it was revealed that Boris Johnson’s senior advisor believes Conservatives don’t care about the poor.

Dominic Cummings, who was also a chief architect of Brexit, said at the Conservative Party Conference in 2017: “People think, and by the way I think most people are right: ‘The Tory party is run by people who basically don’t care about people like me.’

“I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct. Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people.”

It means Mr Johnson is unlikely to do anything about the fact that illness and disability disproportionately influences whether people live in poverty: 6.8 million people – 48 per cent of those in poverty – are in a family where someone has a disability.

Overall, 22 per cent of the population now live in poverty – and Tory policies appear to be responsible.

Poverty among pensioners rose from nine per cent in 2014-15 to 11 per cent in 2019.

Among children, it stood at 31 per cent in 2014-15 – and is now at 34 per cent.

And with Boris Johnson determined to push through a “no-deal” Brexit that is already damaging the economy and has sent the value of the pound plummeting, we can expect worse to follow.

Because he’s a Tory, and he doesn’t care about the poor. We’ve got that from his senior advisor so we can believe it.

Source: 7 million people in the UK are ‘living in persistent poverty’, report says

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Johnson stumbles again as child poverty cash handed back to Europe unspent

Nobody’s going to be helping this child out of poverty; in fact, the Tory government under Boris Johnson is giving back EU cash intended for this purpose, unspent.

It’s not a good beginning for Boris Johnson, is it?

His Home Secretary is a security risk, dedicated to bringing back the death penalty – and may have breached the ministerial code for a second time, despite having been forced out of the cabinet for her first transgression.

His police recruitment drive won’t restore the 20,000 officers lost since 2010 but will only keep numbers at a standstill.

He made a hypocrite of himself by saying he won’t call a snap election. Despite this claim, the other political parties have put themselves on election alert.

He quietly dropped a Cabinet Office investigation into an MP who grabbed a female climate change protester by the throat, slammed her into a pillar and marched her out of the Mansion House at an event last month, confirming many people’s belief that he is happy with abuse of women.

He pledged to spend £39 billion on a high-speed rail vanity project between Leeds and Manchester, then no doubt wondered why Scottish people booed him when he turned up there offering a share of £300 million to boost growth.

Now this – all in his first week as PM.

More than £3.5m intended to alleviate child poverty and homelessness is at risk of being wasted because the government has failed to spend it, says a House of Lords committee.

The government said there had been “barriers” over spending the money.

But peers have written to complain that after almost six years, the government has failed to deliver spending aimed at addressing “the worst forms of poverty”.

About £580,000 of unspent cash has so far been taken back – and a further similar amount is at risk of being deducted at the end of the year.

While this money is being handed back, food banks are struggling to feed a million children who live below the poverty line, during the school holidays.

As far as I can tell, the only way he could make things worse is by running over Larry the Downing Street Cat in his prime ministerial gas-guzzling limo.

Source: Child poverty cash handed back to Europe unspent – BBC News

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Fake-personalised ‘letter’ is Jane Dodds latest electioneering trick

Mrs Mike would like to put Jane Dodds on notice that if another piece of electioneering drivel comes through our letterbox, she’ll happily shove it as far down the Liberal Democrat’s throat as she can reach.

“I’m just sick and tired of it,” she’s telling me right now. “It’s constant. Why waste so much money on this when it doesn’t say anything [I’m paraphrasing here; the actual language was much less diplomatic] about helping people who need it – the sick, the disabled, people who’ve had everything taken from them by the dratted [more paraphrasing] Tories.”

The correspondence that caused so much ire was another leaflet – this time disguised as a personal and handwritten letter, delivered direct to the recipient. In fact it is another Fib Dem leaflet, printed by a company in Bristol (another snub against this constituency, which has perfectly decent printers of its own).

“Dear Neighbour,” the leaflet says – another giveaway that it isn’t personal at all, and another lie; Ms Dodds lives in Welshpool, which isn’t even in the constituency.

There’s a bit of flannel about the “wonderfully warm reception” she’s had across “our” community. “Our” community? You have to live in it first!

Then she tells us “Westminster politics has failed people across Powys” – showing she doesn’t recognise the difference between Brecon and Radnorshire constituency and the county that contains it. And if Westminster politics has failed us, aren’t the Liberal Democrats partly to blame – they let the Tories into power and propped them up for five years, enthusiastically supporting every bit of legislation that stole from ordinary people and gave to the super-rich.

The Liberal Democrats’ supreme achievement during those five years, it seems, was to apply a 5p tax to plastic bags – bought at the cost of inflicting deep cuts in benefits for the sick and disabled. You see, Mrs Mike was right to be angry.

“We shouldn’t suffer in silence while essential local services like buses, shops and cashpoints disappear from our communities,” she writes, even though – if she becomes MP – she won’t be suffering at all; she’ll have £70,000 a year of our money to cushion the impact.

“We shouldn’t settle for patients having to endure long waiting times and journeys to get essential health treatment.” As I grow tired of continually pointing out, health is a devolved matter – on which I am told the incumbent Liberal Democrat AM has not fared well (see today’s article about Chris Davies). In any case, the Labour-led Welsh Assembly Government is already pouring nearly £2 million extra cash into Powys teaching Health Board, so there will be little for an elected Jane Dodds to do about it but sit back and count the zeroes on the paycheque that she hasn’t earned.

“We shouldn’t stay quiet while our farming industry is under threat or when working parents have to rely on foodbanks to feed their children. The hypocrisy here really is unbearable. The only reason anybody here has to rely on foodbanks is that the Liberal Democrats joined forces with the Tories to force them.

That’s the point you need to remember. Never mind the rest – it’s a waste of time reading it.

Mrs Mike is still talking: “These Lib Dems were in coalition with the Conservatives – that’s when they caused all the problems.

“They screwed everybody over.

“People are starving, losing their homes because they can’t pay their rent.

“School kids are going hungry – and that’s not on. All down to what the Liberal Democats did with the Conservatives.”

And she said: “They’re on our doorsteps now but they never come round after they’ve been elected. They don’t want to know you then.

“If Jane bloody Dodds gets elected we won’t hear from her again until the next election. That’s not representation.”

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If you need reasons NOT to vote Conservative, look at convict Chris Davies’s voting record

Chris Davies: Some of us think he should be behind prison bars rather than campaigning to win back his comfortable Parliamentary seat.

A fellow Brecon and Radnorshire constituent contacted me on Twitter to say that he would be voting for Chris Davies in the by-election on Thursday.

Mr Davies is the Conservative candidate who was recently convicted of faking expenses claims. There was a petition of recall which was signed by twice the number of people needed, and a by-election was called. Mr Davies caused this election by his own criminality.

But my correspondent said he will vote for the criminal anyway, because Mr Davies persuaded Powys Health Board to carry out a life-saving operation on his son, when the Liberal Democrat AM – Kirsty Williams, whose responsibility this should have been (healthcare being a responsibility devolved to the Welsh Assembly), did nothing.

It’s a fair reason. And I note that the health board did act on the demands of a Westminster MP in this extreme case – but that does not mean that Jane Dodds would have any influence on wider issues if she were elected, as she insists on claiming.

But before we all decide that Tories aren’t so bad after all, let’s have a look at Mr Davies’s voting record, shall we?

A friend on Facebook has been looking into this and has managed to produce this information about his votes on military action, defence, policing, legal matters, fire and rescue

• Davies voted to cut the police budget by 1.7 per cent for 2018-19 (from the previous year) – he has cut the effectiveness of the police.
• Davies voted against a motion to accurately record assaults on police officers and to ensure police officer numbers and funding are not further reduced. He’d previously also voted against supporting real-terms protection for the police budget and against a funding settlement for the police that would maintain frontline services and not compromise public safety.
• Davies voted against making the possession of Corrosive Substance or Dangerous Knifes while on Mopeds or Motorbikes an aggravated offence (aggravated offences attract harsher sentences) – he does not consider acid attacks to be a serious offence.
• Davies didn’t bother to vote on a bill that would ratify a European convention aimed at preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence – he supports violence against women.
• Davies voted to reduce regulations surrounding the possession, making or trading of certain types of high velocity rifles.
• Davies voted to support military action, specifically airstrikes, in Syria – he is a warmonger.
• Davies voted against a motion proposing a full independent UN-led investigation into alleged violations of international humanitarian law in the conflict in Yemen; and against calling on the Government to suspend its support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces in Yemen until it has been determined whether they have been responsible for any such violations – he supports profiteering at the cost of human lives.
• Davies voted against requiring the Government to adopt the continued participation of the UK in the European Arrest Warrant in relation to people suspected of terrorist offences as a negotiating objective in the withdrawal negotiations with the EU – so terrorists are welcome in the UK, as far as he’s concerned.
• Davies voted against requiring the Secretary of State to establish an inquiry into allegations of data protection breaches committed by or on behalf of national news publishers and other media organisations, as recommended by Lord Justice Leveson for Part two of his Inquiry – your information isn’t safe, thanks to Mr Davies.
• Davies voted against requiring Companies House and Other bodies to Identify Beneficial Owners of Companies on Formation (Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill)
• Davies voted against creating a public register of beneficial ownership information for companies and other legal entities outside of the UK that own or buy UK property, or bid for UK government contracts (Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill)
• Davies voted to require that the strike ballot threshold for key Fire & Rescue Service Workers be raised to 40% for strike action to be legal.
• Davies voted to require that the strike ballot threshold for Border Security Workers be raised to 40% for strike action to be legal.
• Davies voted against calling on the Government to reduce overcrowding and improve safety in Prisons – our prisons are powderkegs because of him.

The support for crime and opposition to the police speaks for itself. Put it together with the warmongering and profiteering from the harm caused by war and we see a very nasty character indeed.

While the help he provided to one constituent is worthy of acknowledgement, it does not wipe out the huge harm to many others that he has supported.

Would you vote for the man who has done these awful things?

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Panorama hatchet-job part five: It’s not WHAT you know – it’s WHO

[Note: This article is much-delayed – events between the last instalment of my feature on the BBC’s Panorama: Is Labour Antisemitic? meant that I could not finish it until now. I wanted to run my analysis right through to the end as the next step is to compose a complaint – or a series of them – to the BBC. Current events have now made that timely, as you’ll see at the end of the piece.]

The next part of Panorama: Is Labour Antisemitic? started by saying the Chakrabarti Report had said people should not be judged on the company they keep. Mr Ware’s voiceover said this was “Just as well – for Mr Corbyn.”

She had drawn specific red lines over past history, according to Mike Creighton – platform-sharing being one of them.

“For someone who insists he’s such a principled anti-racist and he always opposes anti-Semitism, it is extraordinary the number of times he finds himself alongside people who have a record of expressing views or doing things that are completely the opposite of the anti-racism he claims,” says

One would expect, following this, a series of allegations that Jeremy Corbyn shared space with anti-Semites, in an attempt to show that he is also anti-Semitic.

But all we saw was a claim about inviting an alleged anti-Semite named Raed Salah to Parliament. Was this the only platform-sharing accusation the Panorama team could find that hasn’t been disproved?

If so, the platform was on very dodgy ground indeed. Raed Salah spent time in a British jail after coming to the UK to attend a Palestine Solidarity Campaign meeting in the House of Commons. Panorama showed footage of Mr Corbyn inviting him to it. The arrest appears to have been on the basis that he had written an anti-Semitic poem, but was overturned when it was revealed that somebody had produced a falsified version of the poem with the words “You Jews” inserted to create a false impression of anti-Semitism. It seems this person suffers a lot of interference of this sort. What kind of person devises and carries out a plan like that – and for what purpose? Mr Ware did not say.

It is a flawed argument anyway. Mr Corbyn spent more than 15 years talking with people associated with terrorist groups in Northern Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement. He wasn’t a terrorist sympathiser himself – he was working for peace – and eventually won an award for it from the Gandhi Foundation.

The official Labour response doesn’t really address this, and one has to wonder whether it was just inserted here but refers to another query: “Jeremy Corbyn’s record on opposing anti-Semitism goes back decades. He has proactively addressed anti-Semitism within the party in direct communications to the party membership, in articles, speeches, videos and interviews.”

Moving on, we are told modern anti-Semitism has its roots in ancient conspiracy theories that the difference between them and others is that “they are malign, powerful and tricksy – always tricksy, behind the scenes, pulling the strings, their power is always shrouded and hidden. The New Left had their own form of anti-Semitism which was that the Jews were the arch-Imperialist power, and this is what has filtered through into the present-day Labour Party,” we are told without a shred of proof.

Ah, but Mr Ware wanted to tell us that Mr Corbyn has himself engaged in a conspiracy theory about Israel (not Jews, then? Wrong subject!) – in 2012, 16 Egyptian border guards were murdered. “As the BBC reported at the time, the Egyptian government were clear – jihadists were to blame… Despite all this, a week later, on Iranian state TV, Mr Corbyn turned up with his own highly-conspiratorial interpretation of the facts.”

What did he say? “You have to look at the big picture. In whose interests is it to destabilise the new government in Egypt? In whose interests is it to kill Egyptians other than Israel? I suspect the hand of Israel in this whole process of destabilisation.”

Nothing in his comment suggests any anti-Semitic intent. He was referring to the state of Israel, acting for political purposes of its own, and not to the Jewish people, many (if not most) of whom live elsewhere and do not share the political views of that state’s government.

And this is reflected in the official Labour response: “Jeremy Corbyn’s speculation about the perpetrators of attacks on Egyptian border guards was based on previous well-documented incidents of killings of Egyptian forces by the Israeli military.”

Mr Ware, interviewing former disputes team member Dan Hogan, asked an obvious question: If Mr Corbyn were still associating with the same people he did before he became Labour leader, would he survive the disciplinary process?

The answer is telling – but perhaps not for the reason Mr Ware wanted us to think: “If he were an ordinary member of the Labour Party, no… I think he would be expelled.”

This tells us that higher-ranking members of the party are protected from complaints about their behaviour – which explains more about the survival in the party of people like Margaret Hodge and Tom Watson than it does about Jeremy Corbyn.

The official response: “This is offensive nonsense… Jeremy Corbyn was subject to the same rules as everyone else. He has not done or said anything that constitutes a breach of the party’s rule book.”

This Writer’s problem with that is: Neither did I! But I have been expelled. And high-ranking party members do seem to get away with saying the most offensive things and having complaints against them dismissed – possibly by Mr Hogan and/or members of the disputes team at the time he was there. This would have been a legitimate point to investigate, but Mr Ware skated over it because he wanted to attack Jeremy Corbyn, not to find out what is really wrong in the Labour system.

Next came more testimony: “We feel like we don’t belong here, and we have to do far more than anybody else to be accepted.” This person – unnamed – stated: “A year ago, a member of the Labour Party decided to do a video, just about me, a 45-minutes video, where he started… by saying I was “a fucking Jew… Someone told me I was a pig – a Jewish pig… Do you feel that they single you out just because of being Jewish?”

I would like to see evidence to support this. If the video exists, why wasn’t it shown as proof? This is only hearsay without it.

Moving on: In August 2018, Mr Corbyn acknowledged that Labour could have handled its anti-Semitism crisis better, we were told. The accompanying video clip showed him saying the party had been “too slow”.

We were told “many members are no longer convinced”. But Mr Ware and his team have spoken to only 20 Labour Party members out of a membership of more than half a million. Is that “many members”? Or is it in fact a pitiful few?

The disputes team members interviewed on the programme had left the party, we were told. Kat Buckingham said she was stuck between an “angry” leader’s office and an “arcane” disciplinary system when she left in 2016. It is interesting that the fact of her early departure was left until so late in the programme. Claims of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party were relatively few at that point. And what does she mean by an “arcane” disciplinary procedure?

She said she had a breakdown: “People felt it was okay to make people feel unwelcome in their community. It’s not okay.” But what about all the attempts to make Labour members – who haven’t committed any anti-Semitic acts – feel unwelcome in that party? What about all the moves to push them out? Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Next up: Sam Matthews. “There were elements… certainly in the leader’s office… who regarded us and our team as Blairites who were working to undermine the leader of the Labour Party. And now suddenly our boss is someone who has openly accused members of my team of being politically-motivated, of not investigating complaints against Blairites but of investigating complaints against supporters of Jeremy. And this all created an environment and a culture that meant that the mental health of me and my team went through the floor.”

But it is known that high-profile Blairites – especially those who freely accused other party members of anti-Semitism – got a free pass when complaints were made about them. This Site has reported on that phenomenon. Mr Matthews currently stands accused of leaking to the press huge amounts of material about Corbyn-supporting party members who have been accused of anti-Semitism. And what about these claims the disputes team members shredded a large volume of complaints against their friends/Blairites/people who made false accusations?

Moving on again: In return for not having to work out their notice periods, disputes team members like Louise Withers-Green were told they’d have to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, we were told. She complained that it was highly-restrictive about what she would be allowed to say – but isn’t that justified, considering her job was to root around the private personal information of party members?

Some of the controversy around the programme prior to its transmission was about Labour using these legal devices when the party’s official line is to oppose them. It is true that the Data Protection Act orders data holders to keep people’s information confidential – but in the Labour Party, the official data holder is the general secretary. Disputes team members, who handle personal data every day, must also be held to confidentiality by some means and it seems likely that NDAs were the only such means available.

And they have broken those agreements – most clearly with the leaks to the press that led, in my own case, to me being libelled as a Holocaust denier by The Sunday Times and four other news outlets including the Jewish Chronicle. Whoever committed that offence did so in breach of an NDA long before Panorama got anywhere near them.

Summing up in voice-over, Mr Ware concluded: “Notions about Jews, their supposed power, their hidden influence, and malign intent have surfaced within Labour as never before.” Really? On the basis of this film, such accusations hang on the claims of a very small number of people whose motivation is highly suspect, accusing a very high number of their fellow party members.

As I write this, I note that the BBC received 1,593 complaints about this Panorama hatchet-job during the period in which it was broadcast – that’s one-quarter of all the complaints it received in that time.

And now I’m off to write another one.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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