Tag Archives: alliance

This cynical move shows Keir Starmer is turning Labour into a members-only club

For the many? It seems “the many” are being pushed out of the Labour Party – unless they are friends of Keir Starmer.

Pretty soon, the only people allowed to be members of the Labour Party will be those in Keir Starmer’s inner circle.

That’s why the party leadership is tailoring its conditions for proscribing members – automatically excluding them in retrospect for activities with outside or formerly-affiliated organisations – to ensure the current leader’s friends don’t suffer the effects meant for others.

The latest groups to be proscribed are Labour Left Alliance (LLA), Socialist Labour Network and the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) – but there is a singular exception:

Regarding AWL, members are excluded for participating in events including the annual conference except for debating with members of the organisation.

This is because Luke Akehurst, secretary of the far-right Labour First, has taken part in such an event and Starmer doesn’t want to lose him.

Luke’s a member of the club, you see. He gets a free pass. You don’t.

Steve Walker of the Skwawkbox blog is right: “The shameless hypocrisy of the Labour right knows no bounds. Just as Starmer’s ‘zero tolerance of antisemitism’ turned out to mean ‘a lot of tolerance for antisemitism as long as it’s a right-winger’, it was always clear that expulsion rules were only being applied to left-wingers.

“But now those rules are being specifically written to ensure that favoured henchmen are explicitly exempt – and only those favoured henchmen.”

And Labour MP Clive Lewis admitted that the move shows his own party sliding into authoritarianism and a “crisis of democracy”:

Simply put, the Labour Party is turning into a members-only club for friends of Keir Starmer.

They get all the perks.

If you’re a socialist and you’re still a member of that party, then get used to dreaming about democracy – because you’re never going to have it again.

 

Source: Labour tailors new expulsion rules to protect right-winger Akehurst – SKWAWKBOX

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#Labour is dead; who’s joining #PAL instead?

Rachel Reeves: it has been suggested that she would be more at home in the actual Conservative Party than Labour – but now Keir Starmer has turned the Red party into Tepid Tories it seems she has become comfortable again.

Rachel Reeves really put her foot in it on the morning media round today (Thursday, January 20, 2022).

Challenged over the fact that her political party – Keir Starmer’s Tepid Tories (formerly Labour) – has room for a right-wing Conservative, but not for a socialist like Jeremy Corbyn, she not only admitted that she was glad that Starmer had changed Labour into a pale reflection of the Conservatives, but also spluttered that Mr Corbyn should apologise for the fabricated anti-Semitism “crisis” that was foisted on him for political reasons by right-wing organisations outside the party and was then seized by right-wingers within Labour itself.

She lied, saying Mr Corbyn needed to apologise for his response to the “EHCR” [sic – she meant EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission)] report because it had said Labour was “institutionally anti-Semitic”; the EHRC report said no such thing. Here are the facts:

And she lied again, saying that Mr Corbyn damaged relations between the Labour Party and “the Jewish community”. Firstly, there is no single group that identifies as “the Jewish community” or represents all Jews in the UK (although there are some who falsely claim they do); and secondly, Mr Corbyn did nothing to upset any Jews at all – some people on the political right saw an opportunity to bring down a socialist by lying about him and opportunists like Ms Reeves joined them.

Hear it for yourself because here’s the clip:

If that wasn’t bad enough, Reeves seems to have gone on a destructive rampage against Labour’s left-wingers and through her own party’s current policies to ensure that a Labour Party with either her or Starmer as its MPs would never be acceptable to left-wing voters:

She said that the loss of 200,000 members was a “good thing” because it removed anti-Semites from the party, and “people who never shared our values”. She did not say what those values were but let’s take a moment to remind ourselves that this is a person who gave a glowing endorsement to Nancy Astor, who was an infamous anti-Semite, Nazi idealogue and supporter of Adolf Hitler.

She admitted that Keir Starmer’s Tepid Tories were in financial difficulty but lied yet again, saying this was Jeremy Corbyn’s fault. In fact, when Mr Corbyn handed over the party leadership to Starmer, Labour had £13.5 million in the bank. Starmer, and his general secretary David Evans, squandered the lot.

Some of these claims were made on the Today show; some in the Financial Times. None of them were corrected by either Today presenter Mishal Husain or any of the newspaper’s editorial staff. On the BBC’s side, this is surprising, because only last week the corporation apologised for not challenging claims of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn in another interview:

We may await an apology and correction – although I expect we shall be waiting a long time.

Fortunately, those of us who want a better life for more people than just the fabled “one per cent” don’t have to put up with Reeves’s nonsense any longer: there is an alternative:

It seems likely that at least six other groups are likely to announce their own involvement in PAL.

Of course, there will be no publicity from the BBC, Financial Times, or any of the other mainstream media. They’ve spent decades neutering Labour; they won’t want to let some other working-class Lefty upstarts rock the boat, now they think they’ve put us all back in our place.

If it’s a genuine alternative, it will grow in spite of them – and This Writer is looking forward to helping that happen.

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Starmer’s dilemma: where does Labour go after Chesham and Amersham?

The problem, not the solution: Keir Starmer – and all his supporters – are a betrayal of the Labour Party and of Labour voters. We all know it. Labour is unelectable until they have all left the party – and they won’t go. They are the worst of all Boris Johnson’s Tory enablers.

No points to anybody who responds to the headline with “Batley and Spen”.

It would be fair to say that Keir Starmer did not expect to win the Chesham and Amersham by-election.

But the scale of his loss there – and I think it should be understood that it was a failure that Starmer owns – should make it clear to him that he has taken Labour in the wrong direction.

His party’s 622 votes – just 1.6 per cent of turnout and one-sixteenth of the number Jeremy Corbyn managed to raise in 2017 – is fewer than the number of people in that constituency’s Labour Party.

Either party members abstained or they voted for someone else, which is an offence for which they could be expelled.

(Or there could be far fewer members remaining in that constituency than Starmer is willing to admit, after the – alleged – mass exodus of members following his election as leader. If so, even if remaining members did vote for somebody else, he’ll be in a quandary over whether to carry out disciplinary procedures.)

Encouragingly, it seems almost nobody aged less than 70 voted for the Conservatives:

I’m not sure Richard Murphy is right about that, as the number of pensioners in the UK will remain very high, some way into the future (even after the ravages of Covid-19), and the Tories have a knack of duping the gullible into supporting them (or perhaps that should be bribing the gullible). Still, it suggests that the Tories’ time is running out.

That said, the simple fact is that people aged under 70 simply didn’t go for Labour, despite Starmer’s attempts to woo them by changing Labour’s direction sharply to the political right. They voted Liberal Democrat.

I draw two conclusions from that:

Firstly, Starmer’s claim that Boris Johnson’s party has enjoyed a “vaccine bounce” – resurgent popularity because of the perceived success of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout – is bunkum. Or at least, any such bounce has now petered out.

Secondly, that people prefer to put their trust in political organisations that have some consistency about them, rather than wandering around all over the political spectrum searching for votes – or very obviously trying to fool people into voting for them – like Labour under Starmer (and Miliband, Brown and Blair before him).

Some commentators are now suggesting that Labour should at least discuss the idea of a “progressive alliance” with other opposition parties like the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, to field just one candidate against the Tories in Tory strongholds, thereby making it easier to force them out. But there are problems with that…

Yes indeed; the Liberal Democrats won because they are the most similar to the Conservatives in Chesham and Amersham, not because they are a radical alternative.

So a “progressive alliance” isn’t going to happen. And dreams of getting the Tories out by using proportional representation will continue to be dreams for the foreseeable future because the Tories are in power and they aren’t going to bring it in because they know it would harm them.

What’s left? Tactical voting?

But that will just result in another hung Parliament that the Tories will probably dominate – with Liberal Democrats joining them for the sake of power if they get enough seats. We’ve already had that from 2010 to 2015.

And all of this theorising neglects one simple fact:

In order to beat the Tories, whichever party you support will need to deserve to win.

And Labour, under Keir Starmer, doesn’t.

How can left-wing voters support a party that deserts them in the way Starmer has? How can they support a party whose Parliamentary representatives no longer come from the working class but represent exactly the kind of middle-class privilege that Labour was originally created to oppose?

How can right-wing voters support a party they know only courts them in order to gain power for its own purposes? They know the Tories are untrustworthy – but only in their promises to people earning less than £100,000 a year; as long as Tory priorities are aligned with their own, they’ll carry on with Johnson’s bandits, even if it means imposing fascist-style dictatorship on the rest of us.

Starmer has been criticised because he hasn’t brought forward a single policy to replace the 10 pledges he scrapped as soon as they had won him the Labour leadership under false pretences. There is a reason for this failure: Starmer is trying to find a magic promise that will fool a majority of voters, just long enough to get himself into Downing Street.

His problem is that we all know that this is what he’s doing. He is probably the most classic example of Tony Benn’s “weathercock” ever to come forward – a career politician who doesn’t have any principles of his own but goes any way the wind blows, chasing votes according to what his focus groups tell him is popular.

And Starmer’s focus groups are disastrously out-of-touch. This means Starmer is continuously trying to tell us what we want, and getting it wrong.

So he drapes himself in the Union Flag because he has seen the Tories do it and he thinks it appeals to our patriotism – but under Boris Johnson’s fascism, we have no reason to feel patriotic at all.

So he blames Jeremy Corbyn for his failures and tries to remind us that Corbyn was accused of letting anti-Semitism into the Labour Party – when we all know that the accusations were (mostly) false (there are always a few racists in any large organisation but the leader cannot be blamed for them). Labour has just been in court defending itself against a group of former members who have brought a hugely damaging case against the party.

In all this squirming, he presents himself as entirely untrustworthy.

So we don’t trust him, and that means we don’t trust Labour:

It won’t change until Starmer is gone. I don’t mean that he should step down as leader of the Labour Party; I mean he should leave the party altogether, along with all the other cuckoos who got in under Kinnock, Blair, Brown and Miliband. You know who they are. Including party staff members who support them rather than traditional (pre-Kinnock) Labour values.

One more note: I could happily tap out a list of policies that Labour should adopt in order to win public support – it isn’t hard to do.

But there is no point while Starmer and his cronies are in charge. They would see such policies as a marketing strategy to win votes – and if it worked, they would then ditch those policies in favour of the right-wing agenda they’ve had all along.

They have to go.

The problem is, they won’t. They know they are unacceptable; unelectable. But they absolutely won’t allow anybody to lead Labour who could possibly break the deadlock.

And in the meantime, Boris Johnson gets worse and worse. Enabled by Starmer.

Take part in the online day of action against Universal Credit sanctions

Today – July 1 – conditionality and sanctions return to the UK’s benefit system.

This means the two million people who signed up for Universal Credit because of the Covid-19 crisis will now be expected to show they are looking for work, and will be sanctioned if they fail to do so.

For the first time, they will experience what – for example – people with disabilities have suffered under the Conservatives for the last 10 years.

Some people are about to be rudely awakened from their previous complacency, I reckon!

Perhaps they would like to take part in this national day of action, organised by one of the larger representative organisations for people with disabilities, DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) under its banner of the Scrap Universal Credit Alliance (SUCA).

Here’s what they’re about and what you can do:

There is now overwhelming evidence of both the serious harm that the sanctions regime inflicts on the most disadvantaged members of society and the fact that sanctions are punitive and counter-productive to the aim of getting people off benefits and into work.

Join the Scrap Universal Credit Alliance in our demands to:

#EndConditionality

#ScrapSanctions

#NoMoreBenefitDeaths

Ways you can get involved:

  • Get active on social media at 12 lunchtime on 1 July using the above hashtags and directed @DWP @justintomlinson @theresecoffey . You can find a list of findings, facts, stats and links for reference here: https://dpac.uk.net/2020/06/sanctions-findings-facts-stats-and-links/
  •  Write to your MP asking them to put pressure on the government not to restart conditionality and sanctions.
  • We encourage people to write to their MPs.
  • Write to your local paper
  • If you think you may be affected by conditionality restarting and putting your safety at risk because you still need to shield, it may be worth gathering what medical evidence you have (for example if you received a letter or correspondence from the NHS telling you to continue shielding until the end of July) and pro-actively sending it in to your job centre/adding it in to your Universal Credit journal. It is difficult to know what to do given the complete absence of information from the government.

Source: National [online] day of action against sanctions – 1st July – DPAC

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‘Leave alliance’ in 317 constituencies as Brexit Party announces it won’t challenge Tories

Nigel Farage: You know the saying – everything before the ‘but’ is meaningless.

Nigel Farage has announced that the Brexit Party is allying itself with the Conservatives in a bid to ensure the Labour Party cannot form a government.

His party will not challenge the Conservatives in the 317 constituencies where the Tories won seats in the 2017 election.

Mr Farage said this was to prevent a second referendum taking place – signalling that he fears the British public has changed its collective mind and would vote to remain in the EU after all, given the chance.

This is obviously an attempt to attack democracy. Why should voters not have a chance to change their minds – or confirm the 2016 decision?

And many will suggest that this puts more pressure on Labour – but this is ridiculous.

Labour’s challenge remains the same – to persuade the public that its policies are better for the UK than those of the Conservatives.

And there can be no argument against this.

On Brexit alone, the Tories have had more than three and a half years to “get Brexit done”, as their slogan states – and they have completely messed it up.

Their leader, Boris Johnson, is implicated in a series of scandals – over racism, Russian interference in UK democracy, support for Jennifer Arcuri, and probably other things that This Writer can’t remember off the top of my head. He is a national embarrassment.

Their economic policies will plunge the UK back into economic crisis because they haven’t done their sums properly.

Their health policies have put huge amounts of care into the hands of private companies, meaning people have to pay for many treatments now – and their availability has become a postcode lottery. In the future, we can all look forward to the possibility of bankruptcy if we need serious procedures under the American-style system the Conservatives are trying to bring in by stealth.

And their benefit system has plunged millions into poverty and despair, with thousands upon thousands of deaths related to their cuts.

And the Brexit Party has indicated its support for these wreckers.

This is not a boost for the Conservatives. It is an argument to vote against them.

And it is a huge encouragement for people to vote Labour instead.

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Labour’s first post-‘IHRA’ anti-Semitism accusations have been made – and they abuse the new rules

Remember when right-wing Labour MPs were screaming for the party to adopt the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism with all its examples, including those that make it almost impossible to criticise the Israeli government?

Remember how those people swore blind that adopting these examples would not lay party members open to false accusations by those abusing the new rules?

Well, they lied.

(Or at least, they have been proved wrong.)

The first accusations under the new system are starting to come to light, and they are damning.

Consider the case of Eleanor Penny, a correspondent for Novara Media, who happens to be Jewish.

It seems – and please correct me if I’m mistaken – that parts of this video in which Ms Penny states that it isn’t anti-Semitic to criticise Israel, holding it to the same standard as other countries, are being used as the evidence against her.

Fortunately there are those among the rest of us who are not willing to lie down and put up with this nonsense:

For what my word is worth (not much at the moment, owing to my own suspension by Labour after allegations of anti-Semitism – a suspension that is now in its 16th disgraceful month), Labour should not just dismiss the complaint.

The party needs to make a sincere apology for allowing such an abuse of its complaints system to take place – as it should with other false complaints such as that against me.

And does the complaint itself count as anti-Semitism, as it is intended to create discrimination against a Jew?

Visit our JustGiving page to help Vox Political’s Mike Sivier fight anti-Semitism libels in court

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Israel’s Arab MPs back Corbyn – and oppose IHRA definition – in antisemitism row

In a Knesset session, Arab MPs protest against recent legislation that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

If your knee-jerk reaction to the headline is, “They would, wouldn’t they?” then you need to read what follows.

You see, the letter from the Joint List MPs in the Israeli Knesset – who include one Jewish representative – could really put the cat among the pigeons.

It highlights the double-standard of a UK organisation setting Jews above all other minorities – giving them protections available to nobody else – when the self-defined “nation-state of the Jewish people” has just stolen rights from all minorities in Israel.

It highlights the fact that the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism – which the Labour Party in the UK is under extreme pressure to adopt in full – prohibits opposition to Zionism, which is not a characteristic of Judaism but a political philosophy that, as characterised by the government of Israel, is racist.

Where does this put those in the UK who are demanding that Labour adopt the IHRA definition?

Where does it put Gordon Brown, who has put pressure on Labour’s NEC to adopt IHRA in full, “unanimously, unequivocally and immediately”, saying Labour is all about equality and solidarity?

IHRA would grant Jewish people more privileges than any other minority in the UK. That’s not equality. The demand that Labour supports Zionism is not solidarity.

It would be collusion in racism, as the Joint List letter makes clear.

Where does it put Margaret Hodge, who has admitted that the anti-Semitism row in the Labour Party is about right-wingers like herself and Mr Brown trying to remove Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the party?

She said: “The problem is that he is the problem.”

It puts them on particularly weak territory.

And where does it put Labour’s National Executive Committee, which is due to vote in a meeting on Tuesday, on whether to adopt the full IHRA definition, with all its examples including support for Zionism with all the implications of support for racism that it entails?

If it supports the change, the NEC will be deliberately provoking constituency party units that have supported the current code of conduct, which supports the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism but omits some examples in favour of explanations that improve on those put forward by the IHRA – removing ambiguities that prohibit criticism of Zionism and/or policies of the Israeli government?

It leaves them up to their necks in the… soup.

If they support a move to describe criticism of racist Israeli policies as anti-Semitic; if they support demands to prohibit criticism of the racist, land-grabbing and genocidal political philosophy that supports such policies; if they support self-determination for Jewish people but not for Palestinians…

They will be worse than those who are demanding it of them – because they will be silencing international condemnation that may be the only way to prevent the name of Palestine becoming just another entry in a history book – and the Palestinian people being the victims of another avoidable genocide.

A political alliance of four Arab-dominated parties in Israel’s parliament have broken ranks with fellow legislators to announce their support for Jeremy Corbyn.

In a letter to the Guardian, the Knesset members said they commended the Labour leader for “his long-standing solidarity with all oppressed peoples around the world, including his unflinching support for the Palestinian people”.

They added: “We stand in solidarity with Jeremy Corbyn and we recognise him as a principled leftist leader who aspires for peace and justice and is opposed to all forms of racism, whether directed at Jews, Palestinians, or any other group.”

“As long as efforts to curb anti-Jewish sentiment in the UK are focused on combating the disparagement of Jews merely for their membership in a minority group, they have our full support,” said the group, which includes the deputy speaker, Ahmad Tibi. But they added that the definition of antisemitism “goes far beyond anti-Jewish animus to include anti-Zionism”.

Arab and other minorities in Israel have felt under threat after the Knesset passed a law in July declaring that only Jews have the right of self-determination, encouraging Jewish settlement, and downgrading the status of the Arabic language.

The Joint List letter said Palestinian citizens of Israel have “yet to experience a single day of equality”, adding that millions more in the West Bank live under occupation and “under siege in the Gaza Strip”.

“Incredibly, instead of taking that government to task for its unadulterated racism, the British political class ignores the Palestinian historical plight,” it said. “With the Netanyahu government ramping up the racism, our struggle for survival is more precarious than ever.”

Source: Israel’s Arab MPs back Corbyn in antisemitism row | World news | The Guardian

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QC criticises IHRA definition of anti-Semitism as ‘not fit for purpose’

“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 NGO’s 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 organise such events.”

The definition of antisemitism adopted by the government is not fit for the purpose of decision making, declares Geoffrey Robertson QC in an opinion published today.

The opinion, which was produced to advise the Palestinian Return Centre, states 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.

Mr Robertson, an expert on freedom of speech and human rights, who has lectured on genocide at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has criticised Theresa May for adopting a definition which was not intended to be binding and which was not drafted as a comprehensible definition. By pivoting on expression that arouses hatred (a “very strong word”) it does not cover speech that arouses hostility, or which “politely spreads the poison of prejudice” against Jews as a race. He evinces surprise that Jewish organisations are advocating acceptance of the full definition by the Labour Party and other organisations have not realised that it fails to protect Jews from many prevalent kinds of antisemitism.

Source: Eminent QC Criticises IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism as “Not fit for purpose” in Opinion Published Today

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Even full acceptance of the IHRA examples of anti-Semitism won’t stop Labour’s backstabbers from attacking Jeremy Corbyn

Joan Ryan MP: This shot is taken from the Al-Jazeera documentary series The Lobby, in which Ms Ryan, chair of Labour Friends of Israel, is told by Shai Masot, the Israeli embassy’s then-political officer, that his government was providing a one million pound slush fund for her organisation to undermine people considered to be enemies of that country’s administration. Mr Masot was shipped back to Israel after the documentary series revealed that he was conspiring with Britons to undermine the UK government.

Why are Labour’s leaders agonising over this? We have an admission that the row over the party’s definition of anti-Semitism is artificial, courtesy of The Jewish Chronicle.

For weeks, supporters of the Israeli government have been pressuring the Labour leadership to accept the full IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism, with all the examples including those that forbid any criticism of Israel and Zionism (I’m paraphrasing for brevity; you can look them up for yourself).

But now we see Labour MP and Israeli government poodle Joan Ryan (she is the chair of Labour Friends of Israel, so I believe the implied criticism is justified) saying attacks on Mr Corbyn will not stop, even if Labour adopts the full IHRA definition with examples.

So Labour has nothing to gain from doing so.

The definition and examples of anti-Semitism in Labour’s code of conduct are better than those put forward by the IHRA. The only people suggesting otherwise are those who have a vested interest in silencing criticism of the Israeli government and its genocidal ongoing eradication of the Palestinian people (and those who have been duped by their claims).

And let’s face it: The attacks on Mr Corbyn have been pathetically ridiculous. He was at a wreath-laying ceremony in a cemetery where none of the terrorists involved in the Munich attack on Israelis were buried; he was at the wedding of a man who said something anti-Semitic four years later, and had no way of knowing.

Other party members have been attacked with equally specious, unevidenced claims.

I’m one of them! To help me take legal action against those who have made false claims against me, please visit my JustGiving page.

See for yourself what Ms Ryan has said:

Even after all that has happened over the past four weeks, the leadership appears to be desperately trying to wriggle out of accepting IHRA. Instead it seems determined to protect the rights of those who wish to call the Jewish people’s right to self-determination a “racist endeavour”.

That some have decided to put this right over the express wishes of Britain’s Jews is beyond arrogant and insensitive. IHRA needs no additions, deletions or qualifications.

Nor should we pretend that even full acceptance of IHRA ends the battle against antisemitism in the Labour Party.

Ms Ryan’s article could have been written by an Israeli government propagandist.

Particularly offensive is her statement that Mr Corbyn claims to be willing to talk with anyone who wishes to bring about peace, and her outraged assertion that he will not talk with Israelis.

Of course, we have only her word for that. But if true, doesn’t that indicate that the representatives of the Israeli government have no interest in peace – at least until they have wiped all traces of Palestine off the world map?

Source: Jeremy Corbyn appals me – and his behaviour will get no better – The Jewish Chronicle

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‘Universally-accepted’ definition of anti-Semitism isn’t even accepted by its author

Kenneth Stern: The author of the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism opposes its use as demanded by the groups that have been attacking the Labour Party.

I have mentioned in previous articles on the Labour anti-Semitism row that the author of the IHRA working definition of it is on the record as having rejected the use to which organisations like the Board of Deputies of British Jews are putting it.

His name is Kenneth Stern and he know better than the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, Labour Friends of Israel, the Jewish Labour Movement, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, any right-wing Labour MP and the Israeli government. If you don’t accept that, your opinion is not worth our time.

Here are his reasons:

According to the latest hysterical criteria of the Israel lobby* and their camp followers, the original drafter of the so-called IHRA definition of antisemitism, an avowed Zionist, should himself be categorised as an antisemite, or perhaps a “kapo”. For that is the conclusion one must reach if one accepts the assertion that anyone who challenges any aspect of the holy writ that the IHRA definition has become is an antisemite.

The drafter of what later became popularly known as the EUMC or IHRA definition of antisemitism,including its associated examples, was the U.S. attorney Kenneth S. Stern. However, in written evidence submitted to the US congress last year, Stern charged that his original definition had been used for an entirely different purpose to that for which it had been designed. According to Stern it had originally been designed as a ”working definition” for the purpose of trying to standardise data collection about the incidence of antisemitic hate crime in different countries. It had never been intended that it be used as legal or regulatory device to curb academic or political free speech. Yet that is how it has now come to be used. In the same document Stern specifically condemns as inappropriate the use of the definition for such purposes, mentioning in particular the curbing of free speech in UK universities, and referencing Manchester and Bristol universities as examples. Here is what he writes:

“The EUMC “working definition” was recently adopted in the United Kingdom, and applied to campus. An “Israel Apartheid Week” event was cancelled as violating the definition. A Holocaust survivor was required to change the title of a campus talk, and the university [Manchester] mandated it be recorded, after an Israeli diplomat [ambassador Regev] complained that the title violated the definition.[See here]. Perhaps most egregious, an off-campus group citing the definition called on a university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for antisemitism, based on an article she had written years before. The university [Bristol] then conducted the inquiry. And while it ultimately found no basis to discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like. [square brackets added]”

Of course the groups which were behind this “McCarthy-like” repression of free speech condemned by Stern are the very same ones which are now engaged in the current vendetta against Corbyn. For example in the case of the Bristol University lecturer who was subjected to an inquiry into false accusations of antisemitism, it was the misnamed Campaign Against Antisemitism, in reality an aggressively pro-Israel lobby group, which had called for her to be sacked unless she recanted.

* I use the term “Israel Lobby” as a shorthand for those who use false or wildly exaggerated charges of antisemitism against the Labour party as a cover for their real goals which are (a) to make pro-Palestinian activism impossible within the Labour Party, and (b) to ensure that Corbyn is removed as leader of the Labour party. In reality, as Moshe Machover has repeatedly pointed out, this is a loose coalition of rather different political groups from the centre-right to the far right, some of which are connected to pro-Israel and rightwing Jewish organisations, but some of which have no particular connection or interest in either Judaism or the Israel-Palestine conflict, but are simply using the antisemitism hysteria as a means to attack the Corbyn political project. Some have suggested that the term “anti-Palestinian Lobby” might be a more appropriate terminology.

Oh, it had to be the CAA behind an aggressive attempt at censorship of free speech!

Mr Stern continues:

Imagine a definition designed for Palestinians. If “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist” is antisemitism, then shouldn’t “Denying the Palestinian people their right to self-determination, and denying Palestine the right to exist” be anti-Palestinianism? Would they then ask administrators to police and possibly punish campus events by pro-Israel groups who oppose the two state solution, or claim the Palestinian people are a myth?

The full article is well worth reading and may be found here: Why the man who drafted the IHRA definition condemns its use :: Jewish Voice for Labour

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