Tag Archives: antisemitism

No honour in Labour: Ed Miliband backstabs the man who defended his late father

He’s got your back: Ed Miliband is pictured behind Jeremy Corbyn – presumably working out where to put his knife.

Ed Miliband, whose father was defended by Jeremy Corbyn when the Daily Mail said he “hated Britain”, has shown his true colours by stabbing Mr Corbyn in the back.

In October 2013, after the Mail ran an attack piece against the then-Labour leader (Ed Miliband) by accusing his father, Mr Corbyn appeared on BBC News to defend him – as you can see:

Note also that Mr Corbyn was the only Labour MP to defend Miliband’s father publicly.

Today (March 28, 2023), as Labour’s NEC considers a motion by current Labour leader Keir Starmer to ban Mr Corbyn from ever again standing for election as a candidate for that party, Miliband also made an appearance on the BBC – to trot out yet again his leader’s tired and ridiculous whinge about anti-Semitism.

He said:

It’s about one thing, which is about Jeremy Corbyn’s reaction to the EHRC report on antisemitism and his refusal to apologise for that reaction. That is the background of this. I don’t think there’s any mystery about that.

There’s one problem with that: Keir Starmer’s motion does not mention anti-Semitism at all.

It is, therefore, entirely inappropriate for Miliband to trot it out as a reason for denying the members of Islington North’s Constituency Labour Party their democratic right to choose their candidate for Parliament.

Remember: Keir Starmer is on the record as saying he wanted to end NEC interference in local selections of Parliamentary candidates:

The move to bar Mr Corbyn is a clear betrayal of that promise.

So we see an honourable man – Mr Corbyn – backstabbed by not just one but two betrayers who are members of the Labour Party leadership. Doesn’t that tell us that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is not worth your time? That it should be shunned, avoided, and vilified wherever possible?

Ironically, Miliband’s ill-intended comment about Mr Corbyn came the morning after his victim was outside Parliament, speaking at a rally against racism:

Finally: the reason that is actually given by Keir Starmer’s motion, for wanting Mr Corbyn’s candidacy to be blocked, is the fact that Labour lost an election under his leadership.

By that standard, Ed Miliband should also be barred. He was the leader in 2015 when Labour won a much smaller share of the national vote than in 2017 or 2019, when Mr Corbyn was in charge.

But he is a member of the Shadow Cabinet.

The double-standard could not be clearer.

Miliband’s treachery has certainly provoked a strong reaction from the public. I provide a selection below, for those of you who would appreciate further depth:

The facts are clear – and they mitigate against Keir Starmer, Ed Miliband, and all the other fetid liars infesting the corpse of a once-great political organisation.

I don’t think the NEC’s decision will even matter now. The damage has been done.

Starmer, Miliband and the others have shown that Labour will betray anybody.

If that party – in its current form – gets into government, that is exactly what it will do to you.


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Corbyn joins Forde’s call for action on Labour racism and Islamophobia. Silence from Starmer

Keir Starmer: after the Equality and Human Rights Commission lifted its special measures against Labour over the way it investigates anti-Semitism, he claimed Labour would “never again be brought to its knees by racism or bigotry”. Those words ring hollow now.

Let’s say it straight: Labour leader Keir Starmer has been accused of lying about processes within the Labour Party to tackle racism, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Both Martin Forde KC, whose report on the subject was commissioned and then ignored by Starmer, and Jeremy Corbyn, who has been widely – and falsely – accused of allowing anti-Semitism to run wild in the party while he was leader, have demanded action to implement the Forde Report’s recommendations.

Mr Forde rounded on Starmer’s claim that Labour had “zero tolerance of anti-Semitism, of racism, of discrimination of any kind”.

Speaking to a virtual event organised by Compass on Monday (March 20), he said:

We’ve heard it from various politicians, but you can’t implement zero tolerance unless you’re policing things fairly rigorously and you’ve got transparent systems in place.

It’s not enough to say, ‘I’ve been on a course’, and that means I’m untouchable.

And he criticised Labour’s decision not to introduce an independent directorate that would oversee the party’s disciplinary process.

This is interesting from This Writer’s point of view, because a Labour NEC member is on the record as having said the Forde Report’s recommendations were being followed:

I think part of the reason that factionalism has arisen around this is because there is a perception that different groups are treated differently,” Forde said.

Jeremy Corbyn’s comments were, if anything, more harshly critical of his successor:

I’ll reproduce his statement below – not just for people who can’t read image files, but also to provide commentary:

The Forde Report called out the horrific sexism and racism expressed toward Diane Abbott and others among senior members of Labour Party staff who were factionally opposed to me leadership. Eight months on from the Report’s publication, it is appalling that anti-Black racism and Islamophobia are not treated seriously enough by the Party.

There should never be a hierarchy of racism.

This is a criticism of Starmer, who has been attacked for making it seem that it is more important to tackle anti-Semitism against Jews who are Zionists and supporters of the current Israeli government than any other form of racism.

We must stand up to all forms of discrimination, which is why I called for the swift implementation of the EHRC recommendations to improve the Party’s disciplinary processes for handling antisemitism complaints. Concerns about anti-Black racism and Islamophobia, detailed by Forde, must be treated with equal significance.

The Forde Report also details instances of factionalism that hindered our objectives and undermined the democratic mandate of Party members. Since April 2020, this culture of factionalism has escalated.

April 2020 was when Keir Starmer became Labour Party leader. Mr Corbyn is saying that Starmer has either ignored or supported such factionalism (my personal opinion is that he has encouraged it; some may claim he is even responsible for it).

Across the country, socialist members with grassroots and trade union support have been blocked from standing as Labour candidates, denying Party members the right to fair and democratic selection processes.

The recommendations of the Forde Report must be implemented. That is the bare minimum. But we must go further in fighting for a politics of anti-racism, democracy and solidarity in wider society. That means opposing the government’s assault on refugees, rather than pandering to divisive rhetoric. It means offering bold solutions to the compounding crises facing us all. And it means building a vision of hope, which inspires people to fight for a more equal, sustainable and peaceful world.

The factionalist attacks against left-wing Labour members should certainly be brought to the attention of the wider public – because their impact has the potential to harm the wider public significantly, if a Labour government is elected into office in 2024 or 2025.

The reason for such concern may be summed up with the words of “a senior left-wing Labour MP” who spoke after the Compass event. That person said:

“If you want to know how [a] party will treat you in government, look at how it treats its members.”


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Why is Keir Starmer ignoring racism and Islamophobia exposed by the Forde Report

Starmer takes the knee for Black Lives Matter: to him it meant nothing more than a photo opportunity. Black lives don’t matter to him – as we discovered when he attacked the organisation shortly after. Now we find he’s turning a blind eye to racism identified in the report by Martin Forde KC.

Anti-black racism and Islamophobia in the Labour Party, raised by Martin Forde KC in his report to that organisation last summer, has been ignored by party leaders including Keir Starmer.

Starmer has not contacted Forde since he published his report confirming that anti-Semitism and other racism had been a battleground between left- and right-wing factionalists within Labour. It seems this was not what the party leader wanted to hear.

Fortunately for him, very few mainstream media journalists had been interestest either:

Yes – odd, that. Mainstream hacks had been able to doorstep Jeremy Corbyn at the drop of a hat, but Starmer seems uncontactable.

Worse, Starmer seems to have ignored concerns raised by black and minority ethnic figures within his own Parliamentary party:

Here’s some evidence to back up the assertion:

Strange how anti-Semitism against pro-Israel Zionists can be such a vital issue for Starmer, but racism against non-Zionist left-wing Jews, black people and Muslims gets a free pass.


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Why is Luciana Berger back in the Labour Party?

Berger: she and others claimed criticism by the Liverpool Wavertree CLP of her attempts to undermine Jeremy Corbyn were anti-Semitic abuse – but there is no apparent evidence of any anti-Semitism against her by any party member.

Remember Luciana Berger? The former Liverpool Wavertree MP whose opposition to Jeremy Corbyn caused such friction with her local party that she quit, claiming anti-Semitism? The one who went on to form the ill-fated Change UK to challenge Labour?

Now she’s back, after party leader Keir Starmer apologised for the way the party handled her claims of anti-Semitism. He said there had been a “litany of failures”.

Had there?

Well, no. But I’m happy to be corrected, if anybody can produce hard evidence refuting what follows…

Berger was parachuted into the Liverpool Wavertree Parliamentary seat in 2010, against the wishes of local people like actor Ricky Tomlinson and others, who publicly voiced their disquiet that the Labour leadership had chosen a member of the London elite instead of a person with local connections. At the time, the matter was framed purely as an issue of local democracy.

Then Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015 – and Berger joined an organised resignation of shadow front benchers in order to undermine the democratically-elected leader who was widely supported by members in her constituency.

The tension this created – along with concerns about a TV interview in which Berger repeatedly failed to say whether she would be leaving Labour to form a new, centrist party – led to Berger’s CLP inviting her to attend a meeting in 2018 when a motion would be discussed stating, “Instead of fighting for a Labour government, our MP is continually using the media to criticise the man we all want to be prime minister.”

The motion was attacked as an example of anti-Semitism by Labour right-wingers, but it clearly wasn’t. And when Berger quit Labour in February 2019, to join the centrist Change UK, the members of Wavertree CLP were proved to be right in their concern.

But they were attacked as anti-Semites nonetheless.

Berger was a victim of anti-Semitic abuse – but it came from outside the Labour Party; four neo-Nazis were jailed for crimes including anti-Semitic abuse and harassment, between 2014 and 2018.

And she has not – to my knowledge; how about yours? – produced a single scrap of evidence to show anti-Semitic abuse against her from within the Labour Party.

Here’s some background information:

Fake accusations against Momentum over Luciana Berger are undermining the fight against anti-Semitism (from July 2017).

Bullies in the Labour Party… are those who lied about Wavertree CLP’s ‘no confidence’ votes on Berger (from February 2019).

With such a poor history, Berger should never be allowed to become a Labour candidate again.

But you can bet that she will.


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Top barrister attacks media falsehoods about Jeremy Corbyn and the EHRC report

Laughter: I doubt this has been Jeremy Corbyn’s reaction to the latest vain attempts to destroy his reputation, but let’s hope he gets a warm feeling from the fact that the rest of us are laughing at his detractors.

This is what I get for missing Not the Andrew Marr Show.

On Sunday, it featured award-winning human rights lawyer and former legal advisor to the Race Relations Board, Geoffrey Bindman KC, who exposed the failures of both The Guardian and The Observer to report the facts of the EHRC investigation into whether there was “institutional antisemitism” in the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.

Here’s a video clip of him doing it:

So now there’s a highly-distinguished legal analysis opposing these journalists’ unevidenced opinions.

I hear the Guardian has run more anti-Corbyn drivel on its letters page. Where’s the factual accuracy? Or did that leave mainstream newspaper reporting around the same time I did?


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Rafael Behr and Jenny Chapman take a slapping over Jeremy Corbyn antisemitism claims

Jeremy Corbyn: the facts are on his side – along with some strong defenders.

After The Observer published an incendiary – and almost fact-free – propaganda piece supporting Keir Starmer’s undemocratic decision to deny voters in Islington North a chance to continue having Jeremy Corbyn as their Labour MP, journalist Rafael Behr of that paper’s stablemate The Guardian appeared on the BBC’s Politics Live and tried to justify it.

He was joined by Labour’s Jenny Chapman, who also pushed the Labour leadership’s claims.

But they were opposed by Jess Barnard, who many may remember as the firebrand leader of Young Labour. She’s now a member of the party’s ruling National Executive Committee and of Corbyn-supporting group Momentum – and she wasn’t taking any prisoners.

I was live-tweeting at the time, and I have taken the liberty of superimposing my own comments at the appropriate moments in the discussion, so you can tell exactly what I was thinking as the debate was taking place.

For an in-depth analysis of everything that was wrong with the Observer article and the position taken by Behr and Chapman see this Vox Political article.

Sadly, considering the atmosphere in the Labour Party at the moment, This Writer fears for Ms Barnard’s future within it, having made such a clear stand against her autocratic party leader.


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Observer hack attacks Jeremy Corbyn – and triggers a war of words

Jeremy Corbyn: falsely accused YET AGAIN.

What was Sonia Sodha thinking?

“Keir Starmer was right to exile Corbyn,” she wrote. “Labour has a duty to voters, not to rebellious members.”

And: “The party leader correctly sent a signal that democracy is about winning votes, not indulging nostalgia among a minority.”

What?

Did Ms Sodha hear the same speech I did?

Starmer used the opportunity provided by the Equality and Human Rights Commission whitewashing his anti-Semitic attacks on left-wing Jews to again tar Mr Corbyn with the anti-Semitism brush, along with any Labour members who supported Corbyn’s “Scandinavian” style of socialism.

And then Starmer told socialists across the party that if they didn’t like his leadership, he wanted them to get out.

So anybody who takes his advice won’t be voting for him, then. So much for Starmer’s duty to voters and to winning votes!

I don’t see where nostalgia figures in what happened at all.

And that’s just looking at the first two paragraphs of Ms Sodha’s Observer article!

She makes basic errors of fact:

  • The EHRC’s report of 2020 did not find Labour responsible for “institutional antisemitism” as she claimed – indeed, it ruled that Labour was not guilty of such an offence.
  • Ken Livingstone – and Pam Bromley – may have been found to have unlawfully harassed Jewish party members, but both are currently (as far as I can tell) embroiled in court action against the EHRC over this claim; it is wrong for her to publicise the former without also confirming the latter.
  • Claims of “appalling” abuse against Luciana Berger from within the Labour Party have been debunked (although she did receive abuse from right-wing activists who had nothing to do with the party)(there are far too many examples for me to provide links here); Margaret Hodge submitted hundreds of complaints – the vast majority of which had nothing to do with Labour Party members.
  • Jeremy Corbyn did not accuse the EHRC of the EHRC of “dramatically overstating” the extent of antisemitism in the party “for political reasons”; he said that, in general, the scale of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party had been overstated by its political opponents.

  • Mr Corbyn has no reason to show contrition because he had not “presided over” anti-Semitism in his party. In fact, he worked hard to eradicate it and succeeded in reducing it until anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was far below not only that in other political parties but also well below the national average as well. Under Mr Corbyn, Labour really was the safest place for Jews. That is not true under Keir Starmer.

And let’s have a few facts that she missed:

  • The report said that Labour discriminated against people who had been accused of anti-Semitism in 42 of the 70 cases the EHRC examined, meaning complaints were exaggerated.
  • The report wrongly blamed Mr Corbyn’s Labour leadership for failing to do enough – or act quickly enough – to implement recommendations for improvements, but it also showed that this situation was quickly put right when Jennie Formby took over from right-wing factionalist Iain (now Lord) McNicol as general secretary; it was party officials working under him who had been dragging their feet.
  • The leader’s office was found to have interfered in several investigations – but often the prejudice was against the people who had been accused of anti-Semitism, and not against anybody Jewish.

So Ms Sodha’s claim that Starmer’s decision was “principled” and “morally correct” because Mr Corbyn hasn’t shown any contrition for the anti-Semitism he “presided over” is baloney because he didn’t preside over it – he worked hard to stop it.

Starmer’s decision therefore comes across as narrow-minded factional hysteria. Ms Sodha’s description of him as a “leader of integrity” is risible; he has opportunistically hung an unwarranted attack against an innocent man on the EHRC’s announcement.

Ms Sodha says Mr Corbyn’s “deep unpopularity in 2019 was a significant factor in Boris Johnson’s resounding victory” but fails to accurately record the reason for that unpopularity: false media reporting of issues like anti-Semitism that has clearly gone uncorrected in the mainstream media to this day.

Still, she gets one aspect of Starmer’s leadership right: he’ll sacrifice any and all principles in order to grasp power.

Ms Sodha wrote: “For Labour’s left flank… votes are not to be achieved at the expense of sacrificing their principles,” clearly implying that the so-called “moderates” (in reality, right-wingers who have very few political differences from the Tories) with happily go anywhere the wind blows if they think it will win them a few votes: “Democracy is first and foremost about winning votes.”

It’s Tony Benn’s argument about politicians being either “signposts” or “weathercocks”; a “signpost” always points in its direction of travel and you know exactly what they are, while a “weathercock” changes with the wind, meaning you can never trust them to do what they say they’ll do from one day to the next. Keir Starmer, as I’ve said before, is clearly a “cock”.

It follows clearly from this that Ms Sodha’s claim that Starmer’s “duty is to voters” is not how the current Labour leader sees his position; he reckons his first duty is to elevate himself, no matter what means he uses to do it. If he’ll sacrifice any policy position to achieve his aim (and remember, he has ditched all 10 of the pledges he made when he was seeking election as party leader), then voters cannot know what he will do and he clearly feels no duty to them at all.

She goes on to attack democracy; if members of the Labour Party can’t have equal say in the election of a Parliamentary candidate, then democracy has been betrayed. If party leaders can override constituency members in choosing who will represent them, then democracy has been betrayed. Ms Sodha denies this.

“It is fundamentally undemocratic to give the small, unrepresentative sliver of voters that constitutes the Labour party membership too much power to impose a leader that neither the party’s MPs, nor the country at large, think is decent and competent, or to impose an idiosyncratic choice of individual as a likely local MP on tens of thousands of voters,” she trumpets, unable to see the fundamental flaw in her argument.

What is that flaw? Simply that the membership of a political party describes its policies, beliefs and direction of travel – or should do so. The membership’s choice tells the voters at large what the party is about.

And – crucially – handing these important decisions over to the leadership simply gives power to an even smaller, less representative sliver of voters and must, therefore, be even more undemocratic according to Ms Sodha’s own argument.

So much for her.

The article has attracted a large amount of flak. Here’s just some of what I’ve found:

You can probably find more on the social medium of your choice.

Personally, I hope press regulator IPSO receives a barrage of complaints about this article.

Ms Sodha – and all at the Observer and sister paper The Guardian – should be ashamed.

Keir Starmer’s ultimatum to Labour left-wingers is a double-edged sword

He probably thought he was being clever.

But Keir Starmer’s assertion that anyone who doesn’t like what he has done to the Labour Party can leave is dangerous for him, as well as for them.

Here’s what he said:

Firstly, it’s clear that he was lying. Labour hasn’t stopped being a party of “narrow interests” – it has become one.

As Damian Willey tweeted: “Political pygmy tells anyone not subscribing to his narrow political viewpoint to do one, thereby making it a party for narrow mindedness.”

Others feel the same:

The problem is that Starmer issued his ultimatum after making a speech about the Equality and Human Rights Commission supporting changes he has made to the party’s process of handling complaints of anti-Semitism.

If anybody leaves his party in disgust at policies that have made Labour virtually indistinguishable from the Conservatives, he’ll be able to claim that they are anti-Semites. Yes, I really do think he is that low.

And the irony is that Labour under Keir Starmer is more anti-Semitic than ever it was under Jeremy Corbyn – or any other leader, I would dare to suggest.

Just because some party representatives say it is better, that doesn’t mean it is, Consider:

For the sake of accuracy, let’s have the official line from the House of Commons Library:

In fact, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, anti-Semitism plummeted to a lower point, in the Labour Party, than in any other UK political organisation or the population generally.

Under Keir Starmer, however, Jewish people are five times more likely to face disciplinary proceedings and possible expulsion than non-Jews – especially if they are left-wingers.

And what is the official Labour line on this? It runs as follows: “If you don’t like it, tough.”

Watch:

Notice that Smeeth provides not one scrap of evidence to support her claims against Jewish Voice for Labour.

And this leads me on to the reason Starmer’s ultimatum is a double-edged sword for him, as well as for left-wingers and socialists who might leave the party.

He made it while trumpeting the EHRC’s support for what he has done – but anybody taking the opportunity to leave the party has only to turn his words back on him.

All they have to do is point out that anti-Semitism within the Labour Party is higher now than at any time under Jeremy Corbyn, pointing at the persecution of Jewish members and the words of Ruth Smeeth (or Lady Anderson, or whatever she wants to call herself). They can denounce the EHRC’s comments as a sham while they’re at it.

Starmer’s gamble is the usual one: he thinks that left-wingers don’t have anywhere to go other than Labour. That’s not true either.

They could go to the Green Party, as many already have. Or they could (finally!) form a party of their own. It would admittedly take a while to gain traction with voters, but if it led to yet another defeat for Labour in 2025, then socialists would be able to blame Starmer and his followers for perverting that party into something it should never have been.

My personal opinion is that Labour probably won’t lose the next general election, even under the leadership of such an inept would-be dictator as Starmer undoubtedly is. It just won’t win by the massive margin that so many pundits are expecting.

And even then his troubles will be only just beginning, because we’ll be able to criticise every right-wing, harmful-to-the-people, decision he makes.


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Now we’re being told Jeremy Corbyn has ‘unconscious bias’ against Jews. Or does he?

Jeremy Corbyn is clearly not an enemy of the Jewish people.

Look at the state of this:

Baddiel is saying that, although on the surface Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely not anti-Semitic, he has an unconscious bias against Jewish people.

He has cited the case of the Mear One mural featuring bankers playing Monopoly while sitting on the backs of the poor, saying they all bore caricature “Jewish” facial features. Mr Corbyn defended the artist.

People forget that only (if I recall correctly) two of the bankers featured in the mural (they were all based on real people) were Jewish, so they could not all be representations of the anti-Semitic trope of a Jewish capitalist banking conspiracy. They were simply caricature representations of bankers in general and what the artist considered them to do to the poor.

Mr Corbyn saw that. Baddiel seems to have a blind spot there.

I know it’s just one example, but might it not be more accurate to suggest that it is Baddiel who has the unconscious bias, if he can’t understand that Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition to racism in all its forms is genuine?

Others do:

Mr Corbyn had his faults as a Labour leader, certainly. He didn’t clear the right-wing factionalists out of the party machine to stop them clogging it up, for one thing.

But on anti-Semitism, he acted decisively. He brought in measures that reduced the amount of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party to a lower level than anywhere else in the United Kingdom – even while being hindered by those right-wing factionalists. But this is ignored.

And now his successor, Keir Starmer, is behaving in openly anti-Semitic ways but gets a free pass because (it’s thought) the mainstream media do not see him as the threat to the Establishment that Mr Corbyn was.

So Starmer can kick any number of left-wing Jews out of Labour without being questioned at all:

One has to question, also, why Mr Corbyn and anti-Semitism keep being dragged back into the spotlight. Is this a distraction from the issues facing us now?

So it seems that, rather than there being a hierarchy of racism in Mr Corbyn’s mind, there is a hierarchy of bias instead.

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t biased at all; David Baddiel has an unconscious bias against Corbyn; and the media have a very conscious bias against him. Am I right?

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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Why does Jeremy Corbyn STILL face constant attacks – with LIES – in the media?

One has to admire the resilience of the man.

More than two years after he retired from the leadership of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn is still bombarded with unsupported attacks on his character and behaviour.

We all know, now, that claims of rampant anti-Semitism within Labour during his leadership were lies. Accusations were confected for political reasons and were false.

Similarly, claims that he was a supporter of terrorist organisations like the IRA and Hamas were also lies; he is a pacifist and would never approve of the use of violence to achieve political ends.

But still the accusations fly – today, from client journalists like Olivia Utley of the Torygraph and a comedian called Matt Forde, on the BBC’s Politics Live.

Sadly, little attempt was made to balance their nonsense with factual evidence.

Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was reduced during Mr Corbyn’s time as leader – and that was from a level lower than the national average or any other UK political party.

The investigation of the party by the Equality and Human Rights Commission was requested for political reasons and eventually reported that the party was not institutionally anti-Semitic.

Forde’s attacks on Bell Ribeiro-Addy, referring to the investigation, were misleading. I think he must have known this and question why he behaved in that manner. It surprises me that nobody at the BBC thought to question it in any way.

Perhaps This Writer can redress the balance here, with something the BBC broadcast a while ago:

It seems there’s at least one broadcaster there who still knows what a fact is.

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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