Okay, as you’ve no doubt seen on the news, the Labour party won the Wellingborough and Kingswood bye-elections. In Kingswood, a suburb of Bristol, I think they increased their majority over the Tories to 8,000. The local Bristol Labour party has been campaigning hard up there for the past few weeks. I suppose that, as a member of the party, I should feel delighted, optimistically looking forward to Labour enjoying a sweeping landslide when Sunak chooses to call an election.
But I’m not. Because I don’t think that the election is necessarily secure, and that even if Labour win, it’ll just mean a change of faces, not a change of policies. As the saying goes, ‘Same sh*t, different assholes’. And the week has definitely been mixed for Starmer, no matter what spin he chooses to put on it.
To begin with, Starmer has managed to destroy Muslim support for the Labour party. He could have called for a ceasefire, citing the massively disproportionate casualties suffered by Palestinian civilians, most notoriously women and children. He could have made it plain that he condemned the terror attack by Hamas that killed the kids at the music festival, and said something about Israel having the right to defend itself while stating that the death toll on civilians had gone too far. In short, he could have acted as a statesman in waiting. He didn’t. He rejected a ceasefire, then when this started to lose him votes he did what he usually does when faced with electoral or political embarrassment: he started lying and claimed that he had always supported a ceasefire. Nobody bought this latest set of untruths. The result is that the party’s support among Muslims has collapsed, and various Muslims are now standing against Labour in their constituency as independents. In Rochdale he disavowed the Labour candidate, Afzal Ali, because he said something that one of the ultra-Zionist watchdogs decided was anti-Semitic. In fact, Ali simply repeated the Egyptian story about the attack and made a few observations and questions of his own. The Egyptians have claimed that they told the Israeli authorities that the attack was coming days before, and the Israelis did nothing. There are other questions as well. Israel is circled by surveillance equipment, including alarms that go off whenever anyone breached their defensive wall. But somehow all this highly sophisticated equipment failed to detect the terrorists when they flew into Israel. The music festival itself was only miles from a number of IDF bases, so why did it take the army eight hours to get there? And the festival was originally a bit further away, and actually moved closer to the Gazan border. Various people, and not just Ali, have smelt something very fishy. Sonia Paulton on her YouTube channel said that it looked very much like a false flag attack, of which the Israelis have been responsible for a number. The most famous was the attack on the USS Liberty during one of the wars in the 1960s. The Liberty was in the Mediterranean off Israel collecting intelligence. The Israelis were afraid they’d pass this on to Egypt and the Arabs, and so attacked the vessel.
But Ali was accused of anti-Semitism and spreading conspiracy theories about Jews. Er, no. He raised reasonable questions about the Israeli state, which is not synonymous with the Jewish people or religion whatever Netanyahu and his supporters over here may say. Starmer apparently threw Ali out. But this has led to further embarrassment. I think Ali is set to win, despite no longer being a member of the Labour party. And a number of Starmer’s own right-wingers have been accused of anti-Semitism, because they’ve said much the same as Ali. Or uttered other comments that could be viewed as anti-Semitic. The ever-excellent Damo Kernow has made a brilliant video about this. One of those who could be accused of anti-Semitism is Ruth Smeeth, the malign women who made a completely bogus accusation of anti-Semitism against anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth after he commented on her passing on pamphlets to a hack from the Torygraph. The bug-eyed Zionist right is now appearing on GB News and other right-wing propaganda outlets declaring that Labour still has a problem with anti-Semitism.
And along with this embarrassment, Starmer ditched his £28 billion pledge for Green energy and technology. The right hates the Green movement with a passion and so I doubt that they’re terribly upset at this. But that hasn’t stopped the Torygraph noticing that Labour’s lead was falling in the polls. There is preciously little now, if anything, that separates Labour from the Tories. Starmer has just about dumped the last left-wing policy he had. His stance now is basically, ‘Vote Labour – we’re not the Tories’. And many people are now wondering who they should vote for. I’ve had friends tell me that they don’t know, because Labour is now the same as the Tories. They’ve even said that they’d rather vote Communist, not because they are Commies, but because that party would offer a genuine alternative.
I’m very happy that the Tories didn’t win Kingswood, but I don’t really have any enthusiasm for Labour’s victory. I would have been happier if it was smaller, and there was a break out vote for the Trades Union and Socialist Coalition, the Socialist Party or the Greens, and that one of these parties had come second. Such a result might convince some people in the party that they should start returning to socialism sharpish if they don’t want Labour to start to come second to them. But that’s far too much to hope for.
At the moment it looks like a Labour victory is still on the cards, but with a reduced majority. I believe that, if they do get in, we should still prepare to carry on the fight to preserve the NHS and the welfare state just as the left is doing now under the Tories.
Because Starmer hates the nationalised NHS and the welfare state as much as they do.
The conspiracy/parapolitics online magazine, Lobster, has published a review of a new book on the smear campaign against Chris Williamson, Labour, the anti-semitism crisis & the destroying of an MP, by Lee Garratt, Thinkwell Books (thinkwellbooks.org), 2021, £10.00, by John Booth. Booth states that he knows Williamson personally, having sought to work as a volunteer activist in a Tory marginal. He was sent instead to work with members of his local constituency party, who were campaigning in Joan Ryan’s constituency of Enfield North. This was because, he found out later, that Ryan’s supporters put a higher priority on making sure the chair of Labour Friends of Israel retained her seat than the party actually winning an election. Which just confirms what we knew already about the Blairites and the Israel lobby: they don’t mind destroying the party, so long as they retain their grip on it. But Booth decided instead to go to Derby North to help campaign for Williamson.
The book briefly describes Williamson’s career and the attacks on him as part of the manufactured anti-Semitism crisis, the party’s inability to fight back and the process by which unsubstantiated allegations were uncritically accepted by the party as ‘patterns of behaviour’ that required condemnation and punishment. The book also includes Williamson’s correspondence with the party about these smears and attacks. It notes that Williamson had two allies in the shape of Fabian Hamilton, the Jewish MP for Leeds North East, and Laura Smith, who was at the time MP for Nantwich. It also discusses Williamson’s critics, including Ruth Smeeth, Margaret Hodge and Luciana Berger, who actually stood as a Lib Dem candidate in the north London constituency in which Booth had hope to campaign for Labour. Booth is extremely impressed by a passage in Garratt’s book which makes it clear how absolutely vacuous all this screaming about anti-Semitism is. For all that the Blairites, Tories and Board of Deputies screamed that the party was a hotbed of Jew-hatred, hardly anyone has actually been arrested and charged by the rozzers despite the fact that it is a crime in this country. The passage runs
‘It should be acknowledged that, in modern Britain, anti-semitism is a criminal offence. One can, and should, report it to the police. Consequently, one would expect that any “anti-semitic crisis” in the Labour Party – at the level and over the timescale that has been alleged – would have resulted in a significant number of criminal convictions. At this point in time then, one may ask, how many Labour MPs have been found guilty of committing an anti-semitic crime? The answer is zero. For those frothing at the mouth regarding Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson or Jeremy Corbyn, this must come as a surprise. What about at the CLP [Constituency Labour Party] level? Surely constituencies such as Berger’s Liverpool Wavertree, seen by The Guardian and Berger as festering hotbeds of “anger, denial and prejudice”, would have harboured CLP individuals ripe for committing such crimes? The answer is, up to this point, not one Labour constituency member has been found guilty of committing an antisemitic crime. Indeed, to find evidence of any anti-semitic acts that have resulted in police action, anywhere in the country amongst Labour’s half a million members, is difficult. There seems to have been only a handful of members scattered around who have faced criminal charges. And to my knowledge, at this moment in time, not one of them has been found guilty. This surely is an improbable state of affairs, particularly for an issue that can easily be dealt with in court. Moreover, for such a “crisis” to lack any evidence in relation to its existence, is quite an embarrassment. One looks in vain for the simple acknowledgement of this reality in either party or the media.’
Garratt goes on to describe the anti-Semitism smear campaign as a manufactured witch-hunt comparable to that of Senator McCarthy. Booth concludes his review
There is a wider and deeper context to this “non-story” which I and 2 others, as well as targeted Jewish members of the Labour party, have tried to describe. But by narrowing the focus upon the abusive treatment of Chris Williamson and by adhering to standards higher than those of his dishonest opponents and their mainstream media allies, Garratt has performed a very valuable democratic service. Are there many people left in the Labour party to act on his warning?
I honestly don’t know, as Starmer is continuing his campaign of throwing members out on the flimsiest of excuses. That’s when he can be bothered to find one. With the Blairites and Israel lobby working hard to make sure that people only see their propaganda, I felt it important to put this review up as a reply to it. Especially to book’s like Dave Rich’s, which was part of the anti-Semitism smear campaign against Labour and promoted the lies that Corby and the party were anti-Semitic. As Rich is either head, or something big in the Zionist Federation, this is what you’d expect unfortunately.
Remember Luciana Berger? She is, or was, the Blairite MP for Liverpool who joined the chorus of Jewish MPs screaming that Jeremy Corbyn was an evil anti-Semite and a threat to British Jewry because he criticised Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Oh yes, and he wanted to ditch Thatcherism. She was one of the lynch mob of angry White women who turned up at the kangaroo trial of Marc Wadsworth demanding that he should be expelled for the dreadful crime of embarrassing Ruth Smeeth. For which Wadsworth, a long-term anti-racist activist who had worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in passing legislation to deal with real anti-Semitic attacks by the BNP, was labelled an anti-Semite. Berger seems to have turned up amongst the intake of new MPs in the 2010 parliament, and so Private Eye ran a feature on her in their ‘The New Boys and Girls’ column in their issue for the 18-31 March 2011. She comes across as fiercely ambitious, opportunistic and with scant interest or understanding of the ordinary Liverpudlians she supposedly represented. The article runs
“She may recently have been voted the most fanciable member of parliament, and since being elected as Labour MP for Liverpool Watertree last year she has developed a drooling fan club of sad, middle-aged men in the Commons – but looks deceive.
Twenty-eight year old Luciana Berger is what the comrades used to describe as a “right operator”. Within a few months of her arrival, Ed Miliband had already promoted her to the frontbench as a shadow minister for energy and climate change.
Her swift climb up the greasy pole began soon after she left the Haberdasher Aske’s School for Girls and went to Birmingham University, where she became an executive member of the National Union of Students, convening national anti-racism campaigns. She resigned in 2005, accusing the NUS of taking a lax attitude to anti-Semitism on campus.
She later took up a “public affairs” post at Accenture and went on to advise the NHS Confederation, but not before the rumour mill had come alive with talk of a relationship with Euan Blair after the pair were pictured at a party. Denials came thick and fast, not only from Blair but also from the Labour party, which took it upon itself to issue an official statement saing that young Luciana “was not, and had never been” romantically linked with Euan Blair.
One of her predecessors in the Liverpool Wavertree seat, the late Terry Fields, might have doffed his fireman’s helmet to her for the way she managed to get selected in the first place, for it came straight out of the old Militant Tendency’s instruction manual. While Labour was choosing its candidate, Berger lived for a month at the home of Jane Kennedy, then the sitting MP, whose partner was the Labour official who ran the selection process, Peter Dowling. The completed ballot papers were then returned to Kennedy’s home address for counting.
A furious Frank Hont, secretary of the regional branch of the Unison trade union, lodged protests with party bosses, to no avail. Although veteran Liverpool Walton MP Peter Kilfoyle branded her a “student politician” who lacked the experience to do the job, Berger went on to beat Liverpool councillors Wendy Simon and Joyce Still by a margin of around 2-1 to win the candidacy on an “all-wimmin” shortlist. By this time, Berger was in a relationship with the MP and journalist Sion Simon, who was shortly to stand down from parliament to devote his energies to becoming mayor of Birmingham. The pair were talked of as a new “power couple”.
Berger didn’t improve her stock with incandescent Scousers by committing a series of gaffes that would have sunk a less shameless candidate. In January 2010, the Liverpool Echo tested Berger with a four-question quiz on Liverpool life and history. She scored two out of four, not knowing who performed “Ferry Cross the Mersey”, and not recognising the name of former Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly.
In her defence, Berger said that “you can’t ask a girl a football question” and added: “I’m not new to the city. I’ve been coming here for the past decade through all different jobs.” It is difficult to know what caused more offence, Berger’s failure to have heard of Shankly or her reference to coming to the city “through all different jobs” – jobs, after all, being a commodity in short supply on Merseyside.
For a while it looked as though she would be given a run for her money at the election by Scouse actor and former union activist Ricky Tomlinson, who announced that he would stand for the Socialist Labour Party under the election slogan “Berger – my arse!” – but then wimped out because of “personal and contractual commitments”.,
Once in parliament, Berger’s ability to upset local sensitivities continued. Last October she infuriated Liverpudlians by appearing on a Radio Five Live show with Kelvin McKenzie, who was the editor of the Sun at the time of the Hillsborough disaster and whose coverage of the story led to a boycott of the paper on Merseyside that last to this day. Berger’s lame defence was that she “didn’t know who the other guests were”.
With yet another little local difficulty somehow shrugged off, Luciana has also shrugged off Sion Simon and is now romantically involved with an equally ambitious Labour MP, Chuka Umunna, who has been dubbed “the British Obama”. With the pair already being talked of as a new “power couple”, let’s hope the Labour party doesn’t go and spoil things against by issuing a denial.”
From this, it seems that she won her selection as Labour MP through knowing the right people, and is less interested in representing Liverpool than using it as a base to get her rear end in parliament. Which describes any number of Blairite MPs, male and female. As for saying that it was unfair to expect a girl to know about football, this sounds less persuasive ten years later when there’s a campaign to get more women and girls playing sport and women’s footie has been a regular fixture on the box with the men’s. As for Berger’s commitment to anti-racism, while I’m sure it was genuine enough at the time it was clearly outweighed in the Wadsworth’s case by her determination to defend Israel and purge the party of Corbyn and his supporters anyway she could. I also wonder about her complaint that Birmingham University wasn’t doing enough to tackle anti-Semitism. It’s possible it was all as she said it was, and there was real anti-Semitism on campus. But the Blairites deliberately conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Was the anti-Semitism she was so upset about simply other student activists, equally determined in their opposition to racism, condemning Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians?
And it is, in my view, too bad that Tomlinson didn’t stand against her and win. If he had done so, it was have done much to demonstrate to the Blairites, and particularly Starmer, that the Old Labour they despise has the power to defeat them by being able to create its own, independent party outside their control.
This is what Smeeth’s and Hodge’s gaslighting at the Labour conference was intended to protect: Stalin and the Blairites’ continued sectarian anti-Semitic persecution of decent, self-respecting Jews. The Jews they’re smearing as self-hating and anti-Semitic because they’re socialists and/or support the Palestinians. Zelo Street has put up a piece today reporting that Heather Mendick, an active member of Hackney and Shoreditch Labour party is now being investigated for actions that “may reasonably be seen to involve antisemitic actions, stereotypes and sentiments”. Mendick is herself Jewish, and the real reason for her investigation may not be un-adjacent to her position as co-secretary of Hackney Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
She was insensitively sent the email accusing her of anti-Semitism on Erev Rosh Hashanah, the ten days of repentance observed by Jews before the festival of Yom Kippur. Last week’s Private Eye contained a number of replies from readers to my letter in the previous issue attacking Labour for their accusation that I’m an anti-Semite. One of the letters was from a Jewish woman, who found their printing of my letter insensitive during one of her faith’s festivals. This is not something I have any control over. I was just responding to a false accusation by a malicious party bureaucracy. A party bureaucracy, who, it seems, themselves have absolutely no sensitivity about causing distress to Jews during a solemn holiday. Mendick states that “This was done in the name of … making the party welcoming for Jewish people. In making this claim, the Labour Party is excluding me from the category of ‘Jewish People’”. Absolutely. One of the most vile aspects of the particular smearing of decent Jews, is that the accusation causes strain and suspicion with other members of the community. Jackie Walker states that the false smear against her caused problems with her partner’s family. Her partner was Jewish, as is Walker.
Mendick has been accused because her twitter account appeared in a report compiled by the Community Security Trust. She says “In August 2019, my Twitter account was listed in the Community and Security Trust’s report Engine Of Hate. The report’s authors do not discuss my account except generically but they do state that looking in detail at my Twitter feed they found no anti-Semitic material”. In fact, only 12 of the 36 twitter accounts the CST examined contained anti-Semitic material. Mendick states “The group has needlessly defamed 24 individuals. It hasn’t retracted or apologised. And it appears unwilling to do so …The thought occurs that the CST may have selected some of its targets, knowing they did not have the means to go to law in order to defend themselves”. She further remarks that some of those smeared “are left to try and defend themselves as best they can, fearful of being attacked online, or worse, tracked down and attacked physically, while those who hang on the CST’s every word as if it were unvarnished fact compound the smear”. Absolutely. Jackie Walker has said that her daughters have stopped her looking at her email, because so much of it contains abuse and death threats.
As for the CST, they are, from what I’ve gathered, little more than a bunch of thugs in uniform. They were set up to defend Jews and Jewish buildings and monuments, like synagogues and cemeteries, from assault and vandalism. If they’d kept to that, then I wouldn’t have any problem with them. Jews have been assaulted by anti-Semites, and homes, synagogues and cemeteries vandalised. But they don’t confine themselves to that. They’ve been employed as stewards for Zionist rallies, and have abused and assaulted pro-Palestinian counterprotesters. According to the estimable Tony Greenstein, they’ve separated Muslim and Jewish protesters, ’cause heaven forbid that Jews and Muslims should march in peace and friendship against the persecution meted out by Israel. They’ve also assaulted women and punched an elderly rabbi in the mouth at one rally. But they’ve got the backing of officialdom and are supposedly trained by Mossad in self-defence, so behaving like a mob of White, gentile Fascists is perfectly OK.
I’ve written in a previous article that the CST ought to be wound up. They behave like a gang of out-of-control thugs, and act as a precedent for other groups and ethnicities demanding their own private police forces. Some of us remember the noxious ‘Muslim Patrol’ set up by Anjem Chaudhury, who marched up and down threatening non-Muslims in the streets outside his mosque. These included people drinking alcohol and a man wearing makeup. Chaudhury’s an Islamist, who ran an outfit in Belgium, ‘Shariah 4 Belgium’, that wanted a Muslim-only enclave in that country governed by Islamic rule and with Arabic as its official language. Chaudhury was jailed for supporting terrorists and his wretched Muslim Patrol closed down by the rozzers. The trouble is, you can’t reasonably stop Muslims having their own volunteer police forces while permitting Zionist Jews to have theirs. Muslims are at far greater risk of abuse and violence than Jews, except for Orthodox Jews because of their distinctive clothing.
As for Ms Mendick being investigated simply because she was mentioned in the CST’s wretched report, this is very much like the historic witch hunts, where the mere accusation was taken as proof. Except that you probably had a greater chance of acquittal in the Middle Ages. It’s more like Pemberton Billing in the years just after the First World War and his wretched ‘little black book’. Billing was a bigot, who claimed to have a book containing the names of 50,000 ‘devotees of Sodom and Lesbia’. These gays were a security threat, because they were open to being blackmailed into spying by Germany. But it looks like he was also simply just a massive homophobe. He was constantly accusing people of homosexuality, which was then illegal, and being sued for libel as a consequence. Once such trial collapsed when he loudly claimed that the judge, too, was in his wretched little black book.
This strikes me as much the same phenomenon. Decent people are being deliberately smeared by individuals with no real evidence for an ultra-nationalist end. And the mere accusation is being taken as proof, even when there isn’t any.
The majority of people being falsely accused are Jewish. This seems to me to be sectarian anti-Semitism. And its being rightly called as such by the Labour left. People in the video I put up the other day on The World Transformed talk on Starmer’s attack on democracy in the Labour party mentioned not just the purges generally, but the purges of Jewish members specifically. Despite the fact that Starmer’s wife is Jewish, and his children are being brought up in that faith, the Labour leadership and bureaucracy are so anti-Semitic in this sense that I wonder if a new nickname for Keef isn’t called for.
Instead or as well as ‘Stalin’, it struck me that ‘Stormfront’ would also be fitting after the American neo-Nazi website.
Further evidence to condemn Starmer, Smeeth and Hodge as fanatically intolerant Blairites with absolutely no qualms about lying to the wider party to support their witch hunt against decent people, especially Jews, because their socialists and/or they criticise Israel. Mike has on his piece about this shameful incident a tweet from Labour Grassroots, in which a tearful delegate to conference describes how they were gaslighted by the odious Ruth Smeeth into support the grotty rule changes that have concentrated powers in the hands of the leadership and General Secretary. Smeefy got up on her hind legs to tell conference that they couldn’t consider themselves anti-racists or opponents of anti-Semitism without backing the changes. She was then followed by the equally repulsive Margaret Hodge, who said the same thing. The delegates states that this was all about concentrating power in the hands of an undemocratically elected official and continuing the witch hunt, but she was too frightened to speak up. She and her colleagues were hoping that someone else would, but nobody did. She describes it as the lowest point in her experience of the Labour party.
Mike states that, with these changes having been passed, her experience is going to get a lot lower.
Smeeth is the noxious MP, who got genuine anti-racist and opponent of real Nazism thrown out of the party as an anti-Semite. Why? Wadsworth caught her passing on a Labour brochure to a hack from the Torygraph at a party rally. Smeefy then accused him of using the old trope of the disloyal Jews. Except that Wadsworth didn’t know she was Jewish, and didn’t mention Jews at all. Wadsworth has a long and proud career as a real campaigner against racism, arranging for the parents of Stephen Lawrence to meet Nelson Mandela, and working with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 80s to pass legislation against NF attacks on Jews in the Isle of Dogs. This didn’t prevent an angry squad of right-wing, White female Labour MPs descending on his trial to demand his expulsion. Commenters have said this squad was like a racist mob about to lynch a Black. As for Hodge, who looks to me like a cross between a Dr. Who monster and a ferocious female character, Mrs Slocombe, from Are You Being Served, she infamously screamed at Corbyn in parliament, calling him a ‘f***ing anti-Semite!’ This was against the rules, and she was suspended. She then whined that this was anti-Semitic, and made her feel like the Jews in Nazis Germany waiting for a knock on the door from the SS. This, not unreasonably, angered Jews and gentiles, whose relatives had been carted off to the concentration camps by the Nazis. And as an MP, she was so complacent about the threat from the BNP that seven of them got elected to Tower Hamlet’s local council and their leader sent her a bouquet as thanks. It’s partly thanks to these two lying clowns that Stalin has now managed to tighten his grip on the party.
I don’t blame the speaker for being too scared to stand up. I think that anyone who did, would have been smeared as an anti-Semite. But this shows that you can stand back and expect someone else to speak out against lies and authoritarianism, ever. Because if you stand by and allow it, it will be passed unopposed. Andsooner or later, they will come for you.
Readers of this blog will be very aware of my position on the trans ideology. I believe the ideology is immensely harmful, causing psychologically vulnerable people to believe falsely that they are of the wrong sex. The process of medical transition is long, expensive and very often difficult and there may be serious complications that permanently impair the life of the person undergoing it. At the same time the idea that anyone can validly claim to be a member of the opposite sex simply by saying they identify as that gender has made biological women vulnerable to sexually predatory biological men, who have gained access to female-only spaces. There have been a spate of rapes and sexual assaults in Californian women’s prisons, thanks to legislation backed by Biden granting trans-identified men the right to be housed in them. At the same time transwomen may still retain biological advantages over born women in sport which makes them competing with them unfair. And Trans Rights Activists can be violent and abusive. They do post abuse and threatening imagery against their opponents online, and gender critical feminists – termed TERFS by their opponents – have been assaulted. At a recent demonstration in Spain by feminists protesting against their government’s self-ID bill there were three squads of riot police sent in to protect them against assault by militant pro-trans activists. Eventually so many of trans activists appeared in such a aggressive mood that the police advised the women to leave for their own safety.
Now Rosie Duffield has appeared in the Sunset Times to claim that she’s not appearing at the Labour party conference due to threats from trans activists and LGBTQ+ Labour.
Despite my opposition to the trans Ideology, I have to be fair. It seems that no such threats have been sent to Duffield. She has not produced a single threatening tweet to support her claim.
As Mike points out, it seems she’s copying the tactics of Luciana Berger of smearing her opponents in the party with false claims of abuse. Berger a few years ago claimed that she had received anti-Semitic abuse from Labour party members. It was a flat-out lie. She had received abuse, but it all came from the usual source – the far right. Duffield is a right-winger, and so Starmer has taken the trouble to check her welfare, something I doubt he would do for anyone on the left who had suffered abuse.
Duffield, of course, has form when it comes to trying to get left-wingers and Corbynites thrown out of the party. She marched with Ruth Smeeth in the ‘lynch mob’ of right-wing female Labour MPs in support of the fake anti-Semitism allegations against Mark Wadsworth.
She also demanded that Chris Williamson should be found guilty and thrown out of the party when he was hauled before the NCC’s kangaroo court.
And Mike points out that she smeared victims of her own abuse.
She is deeply untrustworthy and this looks like another lie made up by a right-winger to smear the left.
But unfortunately it’s a lie that the right-wing press and media are all too keen to hear. Alex Belfield has been pushing it this morning.
Duffield’s behaviour not only shows the sheer mendacity of the Blairites, it also shows their complete absence of any positive policies. They say nothing to oppose the Tories, because they support Tory policies and want to steal their voters. They want to turn Labour into a second Tory party, and to do so wish to suppress and expel the left.
But having nothing positive to offer themselves, all they can do is smear and expel them with lies and falsehoods.
First the good news. Black anti-racism campaigner Marc Wadsworth has won his libel battle against the Jewish Chronicle, one of the Jewish newspapers involved in the press and media smear campaign of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as raging anti-Semites and Nazis. Wadsworth was unjustly accused of anti-Semitism and expelled from the Labour following accusations from the noxious Ruth Smeeth. Wadsworth had seen her pass on a Labour party brochure to a Torygraph hack sitting next to her at a Labour party, and so commented about her helping the Tory press. Smeeth and her supporters in the party and beyond chose to interpret the comment as more anti-Semitic tropes. He was accused of saying she was part of a conspiracy, just as Jews are accused of conspiring against gentiles, subjected to a kangaroo court like like the others the Labour right and right-wing British media and political establishment smeared as anti-Semites, and thrown out of the party. This was despite the fact that Wadsworth isn’t any kind of anti-Semite or Fascist. Far from it. In the 1980s he worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to bring in legislation to protect Jews in Thanet from real anti-Semitic assault by members of the NF/BNP. He was also responsible for arranging the parents of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence to meet Nelson Mandela. During his farcical trial by the Labour party, a squad of angry White female Labour MPs turned up to demand his expulsion. Some observers found this extremely chilling as it was very reminiscent of the lynch mobs attacking Blacks.
Wadsworth sued the Chronicle for libel because it also claimed that he was part of the Labour In Exile Network, which was targeting Jewish Labour party activists at their homes in order to ‘take care of them’. Wadsworth wasn’t a member of the group and didn’t have anything to do with what the Chronicle claimed they were doing. As a result, he has won his libel case, the Chronicle was forced to apologise to him and pay him substantial damages. Mike over at Vox Political is particularly glad Wadsworth won as he too was on the receiving end of the Chronicle’s mendacity when it smeared him years ago as an anti-Semite and Holocaust-denier. Zelo Street has also suggested that he might also care to launch a libel suit against Tom Bower for the smears and lies in his biography of Jeremy Corbyn. This repeats the Tory establishment lie that Corbyn is some kind of Trotskyite traitor and anti-Zionist Nazi. It repeats the smear that Wadsworth anti-Semitically abused Smeeth, despite the fact that not only is he definitely not a Jew-hater, he didn’t even know she was Jewish. But this hasn’t stopped Bower repeating the libel with a few additions of his own. He has invented a statement that was never made by Wadsworth, writing that after he made the conspiracy theory comments, Wadsworth said ‘And she’s Jewish’.
It’s great that Wadsworth has won his libel battle against the Chronicle, but the injustice remains. There are many others, like Mike, who were thrown out of the party and similarly falsely smeared, who have spent years trying to clear their names.
And theLabour party’s witch-hunt and smear campaign is continuing under its useless and partisan leader, Keir Starmer.
Robin Ramsay has updated his ‘View from the Bridge’ column for the current issue of the online parapolitics/ conspiracies magazine, Lobster. And one of the interesting pieces is about Ruth Smeeth, the nasty piece of Blairite trash who accused Marc Wadsworth, the Black anti-racist activist, of being an anti-Semite. As you will recall, it was because Wadsworth embarrassed her in a meeting by pointing out she was passing information onto a Torygraph journalist. Smeeth then accused him of an anti-Semitic trope, that of the disloyal Jew. Wadsworth didn’t know she was Jewish, and what he said about her was in any case correct. She was passing material on to a Tory journalist, and that had absolutely zilch to do with her ethnicity or religion. One suspects that the real reason she smeared Wadsworth was because he was yet another supporter of that horrible leftie, Jeremy Corbyn. This led to the spectacle of Wadsworth being hauled before a Labour Party kangaroo court, while a posse of White Blairite women descended on the proceedings to demand something be done about him. To some people, this looked very, very much like White anti-Black racism, and explicit comparisons were made to racist lynchings in the American deep south.
The former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, writing in his Times column, revealed that Smeeth is now the head of Index on Censorship, ‘the global freedom of expression campaign’. Phillips also claimed that, because of her accusation against Wadsworth, she received 25,000 abusive message in two months. According to her, 20,000 of those came in the first 12 hours. Ramsay’s sceptical about that claim, as even if she could open and read them at a rate of ten a minute, it would still take 33 hours. Put that way, it does indeed look like a very dodgy claim. It shows the Blairites are still keeping up the smears that its only the Labour left that’s making threats and hurling abuse. While it’s wrong to send abusive texts, I don’t really have much sympathy for Smeeth. The victims of the anti-Semitism smears, and especially the Jewish victims, have also received horrendous abuse. Jackie Walker has had people send her messages telling her that she should be lynched – a horrendous thing to say to a woman, whose mother was a Black civil rights worker – and that she should be cut up and put in bin bags. Phillips himself also has form when it comes to dubious statements. Tony Greenstein has called him an ‘Uncle Tom’ on his blog for his weak attacks on racism, and Zelo Street has several times discussed how Phillips has made Islamophobic remarks and retailed bogus stories smearing Muslims.
But what is really interesting is the revelation that Smeeth was an American agent. This comes from a leaked cable from the American embassy in 2009 that ran
‘Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Burton Ruth Smeeth (strictly protect) told us April 20 that Brown had intended to announce the elections on May 12, and hold them after a very short (matter of weeks) campaign season.’ (emphasis added).
Which has caused Ramsay to ask what it was that she had done or offered to do to become a confidential source for the American embassy.
This also shows just how powerful were the forces working to undermine Corbyn. But because that cable came from Wikileaks, it will be discounted as a mere conspiracy theory, if not totally ignored altogether, by the British political and media establishment.
The media’s been full of stories about how politicians are being sent abuse and death threats, with many of these stories focusing on the internet. It’s been going on for some time, and the Labour right tried to weaponise the issue against Corbyn. Following Hillary Clinton’s lie that Bernie Sanders’ supporters were all misogynist ‘Bernie Bros’, various right-wing female MPs tried the same smear against Corbyn’s supporters. They claimed that they were receiving sexist and misogynist abuse from them. Many of these stories fell apart on inspection, and by and large I don’t think the Blairite women were getting more abuse than anyone else. Half of the abuse directed at female MPs in the Labour party goes to Diane Abbott. Some of the tales of abuse couldn’t be supported, as it seems that the messages sent could not be found or shown. And other messages weren’t sent by members of the Labour party, and so Corbyn couldn’t be responsible.
The same smears of abuse were also used by the Israel lobby – Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement. And the same criticisms apply here. The existence of some of these abusive texts couldn’t be corroborated, some weren’t sent by members of the party and the actual numbers of real anti-Semites in the party is actually minuscule. But nevertheless the press was full of smear stories by Blairites like Ruth Smeeth and others that the Labour Party was not a safe space for Jews, not since Jeremy Corbyn became leader.
But what the press and media do not report is the extensive smearing and bullying by the Israel lobby and ultra-Zionist activists. This is immense and horrific. Anyone – anyone at all – who dares to make the mildest criticism of Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians is immediately accused of anti-Semitism. And this is particularly true of Jews. I’ve blogged about the way Jackie Walker receives horrific abuse after her smearing as an anti-Semite and expulsion from the Labour party. Jackie, despite being Jewish by faith and blood, is told she isn’t a Jew because she’s a woman of colour. They also call for her to be lynched – an especially serious threat, as her mother was a Black civil rights activist from the American Deep South – and her body to be set on fire and stuffed into bin bags. Tony Greenstein has received emails telling him that he and his family should have been murdered in the Holocaust. He has also been assaulted by an angry Israeli.
And it goes on. Peter Oborne in his programme on the Israel lobby for Channel 4’s Despatches ten years or so ago showed how respective journalists at the Guardian and BBC were subjected to the same smears by the Board of Deputies of British Jews when they reported massacres and atrocities committed by the Israelis or their allies, the Christian Phalange, in Lebanon. These accusations were leveled at Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin. When David Attenborough stepped in to deny them, he too was accused of being an anti-Semite. And this abuse has been hurled at people like Mike and other Corbyn supporters in the Labour party. Lobster also cites formerGuardianreporter Nick Davies in their review of a book dismantling the anti-Semitism smears,Bad News for Labour. Davies described inFlat Earth Newshow reporters and journalists were subjected to horrific abuse and allegations from Israel’s supporters. John Booth, the author of Lobster’s review, writes
‘Journalists who write stories which offend the politics of the Israel lobby are subjected to a campaign of formal complaints and pressure on their editors; most of all, they are inundated with letters and emails which can be extravagant in their hostility,’ he writes. ‘Robert Fisk of The Independent has been told that his mother was Adolf Eichmann’s daughter, that he belongs in hell with Osama bin Laden, that he is a “hate peddler”, “a leading anti-semite and protofascist Islamophile propagandist” and a paedophile.’
This abuse has reached the point that according to the Lobster article, Jewish journalists are afraid to publish articles critical of Israel. Evening Standard journo Mira Bar-Hillel, who was born in Jerusalem, says that they fear retribution if they do.
And left-wing supporters of Jeremy Corbyn have also received this horrific abuse in the Labour party. Sally Eason, the founder of Labour Left Voice, was forced to leave the Labour party because of her criticisms of Israel. Eason’s Sephardic Jewish on her mother’s side. And so she was targeted for concerted abuse and trolling by a network of right-wing scumbags, including David Collier and the Gnasherjew troll farm, which was cheerfully reblogged by ‘jobbing actor’ Tracy Ann Oberman. Mike also suffers vicious abuse from people, who continue to believe the smears that he’s an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier despite his success in getting these utterly false allegations retracted from the papers that printed them. And last week I was insulted by someone angry at my support for Corbyn against the anti-Semitism smears. They sent the comment ‘Fuck you. From a Jew’. It was only one such insult, and it’s mild compared to that sent to people like Mike, Tony and Jackie. But it does show the abusive nature of Israel’s most ardent supporters.
But if you believe the media, the abuse is all one way. It’s all those evil anti-Semites in the Labour sending hatred and death threats to women and Jews. The reality is that Corbynites have also been on the receiving end of horrific abuse, much of the abuse the Blairites claim was sent to them seems to be nonexistent. And some of the most vicious, and viciously anti-Semitic abuse is that sent by the Israel lobby and supporters of Britain’s Jewish establishment. And thanks to the abuse sent by people like David Collier and his friends in Gnasherjew, Israel-critical Jews do not feel safe.
That is real, viciously dangerous anti-Semitic abuse. And it is not reported in the Media. Disgusting!
A couple of days ago the Supreme Court ruled that Johnson’s prorogation of parliament was wrong and illegal. Yesterday the honourable ladies and gentlemen filed back into the House to take their seats according to the democratic mandate they have received under the British constitution and from their constituents. Boris was stymied in his attempt to set himself up as temporary generalissimo, and he and his supporters in the Tory press showed it through colossal displays of bad grace and ill temper. Like Boris refusing to acknowledge John Bercow, the Speaker, when he left the chamber yesterday. But worse than that, BoJo has resorted to highly inflammatory language about his political opponents, which have left women MPs in particular frightened for their lives. Boris attacked the MPs – who come from across the political spectrum – who passed the legislation preventing him from getting a No Deal Brexit as ‘traitors’. He denounced the Act itself as a ‘surrender’ act, a ‘capitulation’ act, and a ‘humiliation’ act. His words alarmed six lady MPs, notably the Labour MPs Jess Philips and Paula Sherrif. Sherrif said that the language he was using was that of the people, who send death threats to MPs.
“We should not resort to using offensive, dangerous or inflammatory language for legislation that we do not like, and we stand here under the shield of our departed friend with many of us in this place subject to death threats and abuse every single day.
“They often quote his words ‘Surrender Act’, ‘betrayal’, ‘traitor’ and I for one am sick of it.
“We must moderate our language, and it has to come from the prime minister first.”
Philips stated that BoJob’s language was deliberately phrased to be as offensive and divisive as possible.
So how did Boris defend himself from these accusations? He denounced Sherrif’s statement as ‘humbug’, and in reply to concerns that his rhetoric would lead to another assassination like the murder of Jo Cox by a member of the Fascist outfit Britain First, he blamed it all on his opponents. It’s their fault for stopping Brexit that people are angry with them, and the best way they can honour her memory was by finally leaving the EU. Cox herself was a Remainer, and her husband Brendan commented that the debate had descended into a “bear pit of polarisation” and MPs had fallen into a “vicious cycle where language gets more extreme, the response gets more extreme and it all gets hyped up.
“It has real-world consequences… It creates an atmosphere where I think violence and attacks are more likely than they would have been.”
Earlier, the Times had temporarilyh released infamous right-wing hack Quentin Letts from his cage there, and sent him to join the baying hordes at the Scum. Where he penned what amounts to little more than an incitement for extremely intrusive scrutiny of the Supreme Court judges themselves. In fact, it was tantamount to a call for people to doxx them, revealing intimidate personal details of the judges themselves, their partners and their children. The odious Letts ranted that the judgment “could make life immeasurably hotter for judges and senior lawyers in Britain. From now on, their political leanings, their family and professional backgrounds, their social media records and all those juicy perks they enjoy at their Inns of Court are going to be fair game for public scrutiny”, and continued “Where do these top lawyers live, which clubs do they belong to and what are the political views of their spouses? All these – and more – will in future be legitimate fare” He then went on to say “But let’s consider other questions. Who did you sit next to at your last posh dinner? What charities do you support? Who gave your children their work experience internships? Do you have any overseas investments? Did you pay tax on them?”.
As Zelo Street pointed out, this was an incitement to doxx, and the very language used is that which led to the radicalisation of Thomas Mair, Jo Cox’s assassin.
As for BoJob’s own inflammatory rhetoric, the Sage of Crewe commented
‘if this language carries on, and is not only tolerated, but cheered on, by the Tory front bench, we won’t get Brexit done. We’ll get another Jo Cox. And that’s why all those baying Tories, and their pals in the press still prepared to back Bozo, need to stop and think, although they are not big enough, or sensible enough, to do so.
Tolerating a Prime Minister who is shamelessly and blatantly trying to echo Donald Trump in his ability to cause offence and dispense inflammatory language will lead, with the grim certainty of night following day, to a body count. Someone is going to get killed.
And that is not a price anyone should be prepared to pay to keep Bozo in a job.’
These aren’t idle fears either. Philips in her speech attack BoJob’s language demonstrated how his rhetoric and those of the idiots and fanatics sending death threats to her were one and the same by reading out one of the threats she’d received. Now it seems her fears were justified. Last night a man was arrested outside her offices. He had apparently tried to terrorise them by banging on the windows, attempting to smash them, and shouting ‘Fascist’ at them.
Philips is very far from either Mike’s or my favourite MP. Along with Luciana Berger, she formed a lynch mob of privileged White Blairites to support the fake and malicious accusations of anti-Semitism against Marc Wadsworth by Ruth Smeeth. Much of the abuse she receives I believe she calls down on herself through her obnoxious views and behaviour. But this time she is a genuine victim.
Let’s be clear about this. These are Fascist tactics and Nazi rhetoric. Hitler’s thugs used the same language to describe the Treaty of Versailles and the democratic parties that became the cornerstone of the Weimar Republic – the SDP, Catholic Centre Party and the two Liberal parties. They also vilified and smeared the judicial and police authorities, that also tried to maintain the new, fledgling German democracy. One of the left-wing bloggers – I’ve forgotten which one – has gone further and described the kind of language now being used by BoJob as a deliberate incitement to violence and assassination. They said the people using it – he was referring to Trump and his demonisation of immigrants – were well aware of the effect their rhetoric was having stirring up hatred and encouraging the far right in their attacks. Like the violence by the Proud Boys and other American Fascists at Charlottesville. However, they were careful not to make their incitement to assault and murder explicit, so they could always deny it.
And this is what BoJob and the Tory front bench are doing now. And if they’re not careful, someone will get killed.
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