Tomorrow Bristol South Labour Party is holding its elections for the party’s NEC. If you are a member of that constituency Labour party, please go ahead and register to vote before the meeting begins on Zoom. Registration stops at 6.45 when you should start signing on. It’s a closed meeting, and so people won’t be admitted after it begins at 7.00 pm.
Yesterday evening I and the other constituency party members got an email from our local MP Karin Smyth outlining what she’d been doing in parliament. She’s due to give her report at the meeting. She also told us who she hopes will win our votes for the NEC. And it looks like a pack of Blairites.
‘There are many excellent candidates and I am hoping Paula Sheriff, Theresa Griffin, Liz McInnes, Johanna Baxter, Ann Black, Terry Paul, Luke Akehurst, Gurinder Singh Josan and Shama Tatler will be successful.’
Now I’ll admit my ignorance. I don’t know most of these people, but one name stands out: Luke Akehurst. If you’ve been following Tony Greenstein’s excellent blog, you’ll know that he’s one of the true-Blue Blairites, and a fanatical Zionist. He’s one who has smeared and tried to purge party members as anti-Semites if they supported Jeremy Corbyn or dared to offer the mildest criticisms of Israel. I’m guessing that the others she’s promoting have similar views.
My was one of those smeared and expelled from the party by the NEC, simply because he had the temerity to show that Ken Livingstone was historically correct when he said that Hitler supported Zionism. The Nazi leader signed a short-lived pact with the Zionist organisations in Germany to smuggle German Jewish settlers to Palestine. This was the Ha’avara Agreement, which is recognised history and documented as such in the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. 85 per cent of the initial founding capital for the Jewish state also came from Nazi Germany.
Mike was suspended from the party without being told on the evening before he was due to stand as a councillor in the local elections in his part of Wales. The NEC also went behind his back and told the press before they told him. This included Gabriel Pogrund, a hack with the Sunset Times, who then rang him up for an interview. The Sunset Times then showed its complete absence of any concern for truth by libeling him as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Which he is certainly not, and has never been. These lies were repeated by other newspapers, including the Jewish Chronicle.
Before his expulsion, Mike, like so many other decent, left-wing, genuinely anti-racist members of the Labour party, was subject to a kangaroo court hearing. This was supposed to let him challenge the NEC’s decision, but is really just window dressing designed to put a veneer of justice on what is a flagrantly unjust procedure. The Party then released a statement which again totally ignored and misrepresented what Mike said in his defence. To show how completely uninterested they were in any kind of real justice, one of the members of the hearing said, when asked by Mike if he’d read the parts of his defence in which he showed that he wasn’t an anti-Semite, admitted he hadn’t. He’d been told by someone unnamed not to. And the head of the tribunal wanted to finish early because she needed to catch the train home to Scotland.
Mike is currently suing the Labour Party for breach of contract over his shabby treatment. The hearing is next months, and he’s invited the press. I hope he wins.
Smyth’s support of these scumbags disappoints and infuriates me, but I’m not surprised. She has struck me as something of a Blairite. She was one of those who stayed away when Jeremy Corbyn visited Bristol on the campaign trail next year.
I fully intend to vote for their candidates from the Labour Left if there are any put forward, and I strongly advise others to do the same.
That is if you want a Labour Party that really stands for working people, rather than a nest of Blairite intriguers determined to enforce Tory policies and expel on fake, trumped up charges anyone who opposes them.
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