Tag Archives: commission

On This Date 2020: Is EHRC too busy scrabbling for anti-Semitism in Labour to bother with obvious Tory Islamophobia?

Islamophobia: the creator of this image thought it was bad enough in the Tories under Theresa May. Now, with racist Boris Johnson in charge, who knows how far the rot has gone?

How long has the Equalities and Human Rights Commission been looking for anti-Semitism in the Labour Party now? A year?

Either it is very well hidden – which would be odd, considering the number of (admittedly mostly false) claims made against the party – or the EHRC is determined not to stop until it has managed to concoct a convincing case.

It doesn’t fill one with confidence in that organisation.

And now we see that the EHRC is trying to squirm out of handling 300 documented cases of Islamophobia – in the Conservative Party.

Does anybody else smell a rat?

According to the Mirror, the dossier handed to the EHRC – by the Muslim Council of Britain – contains information about 16 Conservative MPs, one MEP, nine election candidates and 183 party members.

That’s 209 people, so presumably some are multiple offenders. I wonder if Boris Johnson is listed among them?

The allegations include:

  • A former councillor calling for “unconditional surrender” by Muslims, who they label “brutes who beat, kill and maim young women”;

  • A local party association chair who called for Muslims to be banned;

  • A member who called for Muslims to be thrown from bridges;

  • Another member who called for the forcible sterilisation of Muslims.

The MCB also condemns the Conservative Party’s failure to suspend MP Daniel Kawczynski after he spoke at an event alongside far-right leaders, and for failing to take action on MP Karl McCartney, who shared Islamophobic and anti-Semitic social media content by Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins.

Secretary General Harun Khan said the EHRC had failed to give any response to the MCB’s first formal complaint in May 2019, and says it was ‘extraordinary’ that the watchdog had taken no action in the 10 months since.

“There is no doubt that the Conservative party has an Islamophobia crisis: it is institutional, systemic and widespread” he said,

“The party’s response has been one of denial, dismissal and deceit – this results in clear discrimination against Muslims because of their religion”

The EHRC says it is waiting for information about a promised internal inquiry by the Conservative Party, which it is claiming will be “independent” even though it is to be carried out within the party structure.

This Writer can only wish them good luck with that. We’re all also awaiting publication of the report on Russian influence on the Conservative government, and on Boris Johnson’s relationship with Jennifer Arcuri.

Wise heads think it won’t just be a cold day in Hell, but their subjects may actually have taken up residence there before these reports are published.

Former Tory-supporting columnist Peter Oborne thinks – well, see for yourself:

In his article, he wrote:

The problem stretches from the lowest ranks of the Tory party to the very top. There is a massive problem with Islamophobic bigotry among Tory grassroots, where the MCB has provided a list of more than 100 cases.

Party members, councillors and officials have repeatedly made disgusting statements about Muslims, calling for them to leave the country, making provocative insults about the Prophet Muhammad and peddling malicious lies.

This should not come as any surprise to anyone, since poll results published by the anti-racist organisation Hope Not Hate last year showed that more than half of Conservative members thought Islam was “generally a threat to the British way of life”.

I’ve written before about Bob Blackman, the Conservative MP for Harrow East, who shared an anti-Muslim post by Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League; hosted the anti-Muslim Tapan Ghosh, the right-wing Hindu nationalist; and shared far-right and Islamophobic content on Facebook.

Anti-Muslim bigotry is not a barrier to promotion. Nadine Dorries, who also shared a tweet by Robinson, is now a health minister. This is no surprise, given that Johnson himself has a long record of making anti-Muslim remarks.

Tellingly, Johnson is surrounded by Islamophobes. Dominic Cummings, his most senior advisor, reportedly had overall responsibility for The Spectator website in 2006, according to Stuart Reid, the magazine’s acting editor at the time, when a controversial cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban was posted on the site.

One of Johnson’s up-and-coming advisors is Chloe Westley. She praised Anne Marie Waters, leader of the anti-Islam party For Britain, as a “hero”, even though Waters has called Islam “evil” and also has links to Robinson.

But he made a very important point: the UK’s mass media are ignoring this story:

I could find nothing at all about the MCB report in the Financial Times or Daily Telegraph. There were seven paragraphs on page 16 of the Times and 11 paragraphs on page 7 of the Guardian. Nothing in the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, or the Sun.

Most British newspapers are as Islamophobic as the Conservative Party itself, and in some cases, more so. This means they are effectively giving Johnson and his senior advisers and ministers a free pass to reshape the Tory party as a far-right, populist organisation of the type we already know too well on continental Europe.

It shows how the media have been manipulating your opinions and – by proxy – the actions of organisations like the EHRC.

The papers kicked up a huge fuss about the imaginary crisis of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party (where I doubt if even 200 genuine cases have been found among a membership of more than half a million in the past four years).

But their silence over 300 evidenced cases of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party, which is much smaller than Labour, means few people know about it and any outcry is therefore minimised.

So the EHRC can say there’s no real demand for it to investigate, despite the fact that, in real terms, it is a bigger issue.

Source: EHRC Condemned For ‘Failure’ To Act On Tory Islamophobia

Observer/Jeremy Corbyn/EHRC/antisemitism footnote: article author’s ill grace

Facepalm: And quit right -what will Jeremy Corbyn (and his supporters) have to put up with next?

The author of the Observer article I criticised so roundly earlier this week has commented after (apparently) a few corrections were made to the online version.

I can only agree with Aaron Bastani:

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

And I found plenty more errors. Are they going to stay uncorrected?

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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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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 (and Ruth Smeeth’s) message to Labour: ‘Some Jews DON’T count’

The content of this video is self-explanatory. I think it should be shown to anybody deluded enough to think that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is now a safe space for Jews.

It’s only safe for very right-wing Jews whose allegiances belong to the fringe groups that have received the Labour leadership’s stamp of approval.

Anybody else can go hang, apparently. Isn’t that the very definition of anti-Semitism?

Have a look at the video; it’s packed with facts – I’ve already commented on the Smeeth/Anderson/whatever-she’s-calling-herself clip myself:

Shocking stuff.

More shocking because it comes with the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s seal of approval, despite having received complaints about anti-Semitism in Starmer’s Labour for years.

Which of course suggests that the EHRC is a racist organisation too.

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Is this the truth of Labour’s disciplinary process under Starmer?

The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s decision to whitewash the Labour Party’s disciplinary proceedings seems doubly contradictory when one considers the words of one of that process’s victims, below.

I’m aware that what’s described below isn’t directly related to the party’s policy on anti-Semitism, but it does provide revealing information on the treatment that anybody undergoing this Kafkaesque process is facing.

It seems clear that the current disciplinary process is being used as an excuse for the persecution of people who have done nothing wrong at all – the example below is of a woman who gave an interview to an organisation within the Labour Party. A year later, Keir Starmer’s bully boys and girls summarily proscribed that organisation and expelled anybody who had anything to do with it – even though they could not possibly have known that it would be proscribed at the time of their own contact.

It also seems clear that the appeal process against expulsion simply doesn’t work at all – most probably because it is run by factional party members who are bent on removing left-wingers from the formerly left-wing party.

The effect on the former party members targeted by this victimisation – this persecution – is predictable: their political careers have been harmed, possibly fatally; they have been prevented from carrying out any of the good work they had been doing previously; their reputations have suffered and they have been shunned by people who were previously colleagues; and their personal life and well-being has suffered hugely.

This is a calculated, desired result. Keir Starmer wants people like Pamela Fitzpatrick to suffer.

Few rank-and-file party members will be in a position to take the Labour Party to the High Court and seek satisfaction via litigation.

Personally, I think Ms Fitzpatrick should invite other wronged party members to join her, and make it a class action, but that’s a matter for her.

Whatever happens in court, her story serves as an example of StarmerLabour’s authoritarian – if not totalitarian – policy: it is no longer a broad church. Members must service Starmer’s increasingly right-wing demands – or he will harm them.

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Why is the EHRC letting Labour get away with overtly anti-Semitic expulsions of Jews?

Please share the image, or even tweet it to @Keir_Starmer if you like it.

Those of us who have taken to watching the anti-Semitism of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party from outside can only gape appalled at the latest announcement from the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

According to that body, it is satisfied that Labour has made enough changes to the way it handles complaints of anti-Semitism to counter the criticisms it made of how the party handles anti-Semitism complaints and will be winding up a two-year monitoring process.

You can read more about that here.

But you’ll also need to be aware that since Keir Starmer took over as party leader, Labour has embarked on a programme (or should that be pogrom) of removing Jews from the party – specifically targeting Jewish people with left-wing views.

Here‘s a report from December last year, on the removal of three high-profile left-wing Jews. All anti-racists, they were accused of anti-Semitism.

Notice that, in this report, Heather Mendick commented that “her branch used to have ‘lots of active Jewish members’. All were ‘lefties’ but just one of them is still a member.”

How about the resignation from Keir Starmer’s own Constituency Labour Party of Stephen Kapos, a Holocaust survivor who the party told must choose between his duty to teach people about its horrors and Labour policy demanding he may not support a group that has been proscribed by the party (albeit for questionable reasons)?

Others who have been forced out include:

Jo Bird

Leah Levane

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi

And the Jews named in this article (which I’m aware includes some of those mentioned above).

It has been claimed that Jewish Labour members are almost five times more likely to face anti-Semitism charges than non-Jewish members.

But against this background of shockingly anti-Semitic behaviour, Starmer has issued an ultimatum to all remaining left-wing Labour members: support him or leave.

The BBC reports him saying:

“We are never going back. If you don’t like it, nobody is forcing you to stay.”

What a horrifying message for Jewish members of the Labour Party.

Starmer is saying that he will continue to purge them from their political home; to deny them a voice; to remove their identity (shades of Germany in the 1930s).

And their only alternative is to leave before they are forced out.

And that is what the euphemistically-named Equality and Human Rights Commission is praising.

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Why has EHRC broken promise to investigate DWP’s role in deaths of benefit claimants?

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has u-turned on a promise to investigate the role played by the Department for Work and Pensions in the deaths of vulnerable benefit claimants, it’s being reported.

Instead the EHRC are now asking the DWP to create new policies in relation to claimants with mental health issues and learning difficulties. Apparently the commission is using the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse.

This Site forced the DWP to publish figures showing that thousands of people had died of unexplained causes after being thrown off benefits by that government department and I am deeply concerned by this failure to scrutinise whether the government caused these deaths.

And how many more people have died since I exposed those deaths seven years ago?

I shall be writing to the EHRC today, seeking a meaningful explanation for this u-turn.

UPDATE: Here’s what I have written to the EHRC:

“I was the writer who forced the DWP to admit that thousands of people have died after being thrown off benefits – for no established reason. I am deeply concerned that the EHRC has decided not to investigate the DWP’s role in the deaths of claimants and is choosing only to seek an agreement to better protect claimants – similar to other undertakings that the DWP has ignored in the past, causing more deaths. The DWP will never respect the human rights, or indeed the lives, of claimants unless it is forced to do so. I am writing to you to seek an explanation for your decision that I can publish to my readers. How will you defend this indefensible decision?”

Let’s see what response – if any – I receive.

Source: EHRC Breaks Promise To Investigate DWP Role In Deaths – The poor side of life

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Nadine Dorries appoints new charity regulator – the wrong way

Nadine Dorries: wrong again.

If you heard a job had become available because a candidate had failed, went for it, and then found you weren’t considered because the bosses couldn’t be bothered to do it all again, wouldn’t you be upset?

If so, you can understand why the House of Commons Culture committee refused to endorse Nadine Dorries’s decision to make Orlando Fraser the new chair of the Charity Commission.

Mr Fraser was only appointed because Dorries’s original choice – Martin Thomas, who was reported to be a long-time friend of Boris Johnson – resigned after just a week in the job over allegations of inappropriate behaviour in a previous post.

She simply went back to her shortlist and appointed the candidate who was next on the list – to the disgust of the Culture committee:

Withholding its approval for Mr Fraser’s appointment, the cross-party Culture Committee said in its report that Ms Dorries should have initiated an entirely new selection process at that point, rather than picking another candidate from the existing shortlist.

The “slapdash” failure to rerun the process raised “serious concerns” about the selection process and the lack of diversity in the shortlist, the committee said.

The controversy has cast a shadow over Mr Fraser’s tenure, before he even started in the job.

No matter what he does now, he will always be considered a second-best choice who only get the role because a government minister couldn’t be bothered to do her job properly.

Source: Nadine Dorries appoints new charity regulator in face of objections from parliamentary committee

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#DowningStreetFlat controversy resurfaces as information shows #BorisJohnson lied to investigation

Has this Downing Street story resurfaced now so manipulative people can confuse it with the story about the Downing Street party last year?

Even if not, it seems to be doing just that, as commenters on Twitter have been mixing the two merrily.

So, for clarity, here’s Labour’s Zarah Sultana with the story:

Boris Johnson – a liar?

Okay, it’s not much of a revelation. But the evidence that he lied to an investigation by Lord Geidt, the independent advisor on ministers’ interests, about how he paid for the flat can only harm Johnson at a time when he desperately needs validation.

Johnson was accused last April of having misled Parliament by failing to provide details of funding for the renovations to his official Downing Street flat.

The allegation was that private donations to the Conservative Party totalling £60,000 had been used as part of £200,000 worth of refurbishments to the flat.

If so, it should have been reported to the Electoral Commission, because the Ministerial Code demands that “a statement covering relevant Ministers’ interests will be published twice yearly”. The last such statement (at the time of the investigation last April) had appeared in July 2020, eight months previously.

If Johnson had received the money from other people, this created a potential conflict of interest but Geidt concluded very swiftly that Johnson did not breach the Ministerial Code and that no conflict, or reasonably perceived conflict, of interest arose.

He said that £52,000 had been contributed by Lord Brownlow, but via a blind trust, meaning Johnson seemed unaware that Brownlow had contributed his own money to it.

But the Electoral Commission had launched its own investigation – and this has just concluded that Johnson did approach Brownlow for cash, via WhatsApp – the government’s favoured method of avoiding scrutiny, back in November 2020:

So what actually happened, it seems, was this:

Johnson wanted to redecorate the flat but his tastes ran to much more expense than the £30,000 per year annual allowance he receives for this purpose.

The Conservative Party then received a donation for £67,801.72 from Brownlow’s firm Huntswood Associates Ltd – but declared only £15,000 of it as a donation. The rest went towards the flat redecoration via a payment from the Tory Party to the Cabinet Office.

This, plus the £30k allowance, was still not enough so Johnson WhatsApp’ed Brownlow for more on November 29, 2020, leading to a further payment direct to contractors of £59,747.40.

The Tories said the £53k they didn’t declare was not a donation, but was in fact “a donation to the Prime Minister via the party”, or “a ‘gift to the nation’”, or “a ministerial matter”, or “the repayment of a loan”.

But the Electoral Commission disagreed, saying the full amount “was a donation and should have been reported to the Commission”; the party’s records of the £53k sum were “not accurate”; and there were “serious failings in the party’s compliance systems”.

As a result, the Conservative Party has been fined £17,800 for failing to comply with electoral law. See information here and here for more details.

That covers the money that went through the Conservative Party but not the extra cash that Brownlow put up himself.

It seems clear that, having requested it from Brownlow, Johnson could not have been unaware of its origin when the bills were suddenly paid.

Certainly his former advisor (and now bitter enemy who calls Johnson the “Shopping Trolley”, using an image of one, on Twitter) Dominic Cummings seems to think so:

Lord Geidt is said to be furious about it – and has reopened his investigation. Whether he did so at the request of Labour’s Angela Rayner (below) is not known to This Writer:

The prime minister’s office at Downing Street has said it will answer any questions Geidt has.

If he finds information that shows Johnson did know the source of the money – or had reason to – then he is likely to have broken not just the Ministerial Code but also the wider Members’ Code, applicable to all MPs.

Any such breach would require his resignation from his job – although as final arbiter on breaches of the Ministerial Code, he could always corruptly dismiss the findings. He’s done that before.

Coming after the allegations about Christmas parties in Downing Street while London was in Tier 3 lockdown, before a by-election triggered by the resignation of a Tory MP amid corruption claims, and while Tory backbenchers debate whether they’ll support new Covid-19 social distancing rules that many believe Johnson is imposing as a distraction, this is another hammer blow to Johnson’s credibility.

If he is found to have known about any of the parties, or the Tory loses the by-election, or Parliament fails to ratify the ‘Plan B’ measures, or he’s found to have broken either of the codes relevant to the flat refurb – or any combination of them – Johnson’s career should be over.

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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