Tag Archives: Jeremy Corbyn

Restore the Labour whip to Jeremy Corbyn!

17 Feb

This morning, David Rosenberg and I have sent a letter as Jewish Labour Party members to Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner calling for the immediate restoration of the Labour whip to Jeremy Corbyn. On 18th February 2021 it will be three months since it was withdrawn.

Dear Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner

We are Jewish members of Islington North Constituency Labour Party and we are calling for the whip to be restored to our MP, Jeremy Corbyn. Since we moved into the constituency in 1996, he has continuously represented us as a Labour Member of Parliament, winning overwhelming majorities in every election.

We agreed with the conclusion of the National Executive Committee panel, who decided unanimously and on the basis of legal advice to reinstate Jeremy Corbyn on 17th November 2020 after he had been unjustly suspended less than three weeks earlier. So, like many others, including a substantial number of NEC members, we were dismayed by the injustice of withdrawing the whip immediately after his reinstatement to the Labour Party.

We consider ourselves privileged to be represented by such an exemplary constituency MP. Until the whip was removed, Jeremy Corbyn attended every CLP General Meeting unless there was an absolutely unavoidable reason for his absence, and gave the CLP detailed regular reports on all his work, local, regional, national and international.

Unlike so many other Members of Parliament, he is rooted in and committed to serving the people of his constituency. He knows every corner of Islington North and has built constructive relationships with every community in it. This is an area where many individuals and communities are suffering from poverty, discrimination and fear. Jeremy Corbyn is always accessible to his constituents and is tireless in his support of those who are struggling to sustain themselves and their families, to live decent lives and to fulfil their potential in the face of inequality and injustice.

We are both involved in Mutual Aid – two of thousands in Islington who rushed to volunteer as the pandemic struck, to ensure that everyone in our community is cared for. We are proud to reflect this culture of solidarity and kindness which our MP has been so instrumental in establishing in Islington, and we have had his active and consistent support and appreciation throughout this tragic period.

As Jewish Party members, we sympathise strongly with his critique of the political and media commentary on the EHRC report on the Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party. Many other Jewish and non-Jewish Labour Party members have, like us, privately expressed similar responses to the report in the absurd situation where we are forbidden to discuss within Labour Party meetings a report on the Labour Party. As Jews who have been combatting and educating people about antisemitism over decades (including being educators on trips to Auschwitz for trade unionists, students and antiracist activists), it was clear to us that Jeremy Corbyn’s comments confirmed the facts, which were misused by people with factional political agendas and were misreported by the media.

Here is just one of a number of examples of such misuse and misreporting. In February 2019, Margaret Hodge tweeted about having submitted 200 complaints of antisemitism to the Labour Party. Inevitably, the media headlines unquestioningly reproduced her claims. In fact, as the then General Secretary Jennie Formby clarified, the Party had investigated and found that many of those reports were duplicates and actually referred to 111 individuals (not 200), and of those, only 20 were Labour Party members (The Guardian, 12th Feb 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/12/formby-denies-labour-leadership-is-ignoring-mps-on-antisemitism). The General Secretary published data on all the complaints of antisemitism the Party had received, the actions that were taken and the outcomes. In response, according to the BBC, “Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge tweeted a warning not to trust the figures.” (11th Feb 2019 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47203397)

While we believe strongly that allegations of antisemitism must be treated very seriously, unlike some of those making the complaints, we support the legal principle that accusations need to be supported by evidence in order to be proven.

Furthermore, we resent non-Jews queuing up to tell us how Jews feel,  dictating a single prescribed response to the EHRC report and treating the EHRC as infallible. This is especially concerning given two stark criticisms of the EHRC shortly after its publication. Firstly, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights declared: “We find that the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has been unable to adequately provide leadership and gain trust in tackling racial inequality in the protection and promotion of human rights.” (p.4 https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/3376/documents/32359/default/. Following this, the EHRC was condemned by women working at the BBC for its report on the Corporation’s gender pay gap (https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/bbc-equal-pay-findings-come-under-fire/). No one in the Labour party has been threatened with suspension for allowing discussion of these reports.

We know that antisemitism in British society is real and growing on the watch of Conservative governments since 2010. This ranges from prejudice, harassment, conspiracy theories and verbal hostility through to violence and desecration of synagogues, cemeteries and other institutions. But like hundreds of other Jews who we know personally or know of, we challenge the claim that Jews are not safe in the Labour Party. We have always felt safe, welcome and valued within our ward and Constituency Party. In this situation, what does make us feel unsafe is the strong sense that antisemitism is being used instrumentally, for political purposes, and not out of concern for the wellbeing of Jewish people. This instrumentalisation creates confusion about actual antisemitism and undermines attempts to challenge it.

The Jewish community, like all other communities and societies, is diverse, pluralist and embodies conflicting experiences, interests and perspectives. There are several bodies in the Jewish community which claim, falsely, to give a unified voice to this diversity, and they have declared their support for the Party’s summary punishment of Jeremy Corbyn. As many Jewish Labour Party members have said repeatedly since the claims of antisemitism against Jeremy Corbyn began (coincidentally, when he was elected as leader of the Party), these institutions do not represent us or our experiences. Indeed, we struggle to understand how they have more right to comment on the internal disciplinary procedures of a Party they neither belong to nor support than Party members like Jeremy Corbyn.

Three months after the the whip was unjustly removed from him, we call for it to be immediately and unconditionally restored. We look forward to continuing to work with our many-times-democratically-elected MP on the crucial issues of human rights and social justice, locally, nationally and globally, to which he has so consistently devoted himself.

Yours sincerely

Julia Bard and David Rosenberg

Members of Islington North CLP

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Leading from the front without leaving anyone behind

3 Sep

A  friendJulia+JeremyCorbyn_Highbury_150816_AZI_5607 I haven’t seen for a long time contacted me out of the blue to ask who I was voting for in the Labour Party leadership elections. She was torn, she said, because, although she basically agrees with Jeremy Corbyn, she thinks he’s “a lousy leader”. This is the line being put by his opponents, including the charismatic Owen Smith himself. To paraphrase what seems to be the entire campaign: “Jeremy’s a nice chap, principled and all that, but not a leader.”

I’m so fed up with this claim that, with apologies to my poor friend who wrote me a quick three-line note and got this long reply, I decided to revive my old blog and publish my response to her.

Photo: Aziz Rahman

Yes, I’m not only voting for Jeremy Corbyn, I’m campaigning for him. I left the Labour Party in the 1980s because I couldn’t stand the unprincipled machinations of the leadership then (nor of my branch at that time, which was full of racists, baying for the blood of the travellers who lived in our ward). In the intervening years, huge numbers of people have left the Party for similar reasons and particularly over the Iraq war.

I’ve known Jeremy for a long time. I have continued to vote Labour all these years, despite the careerism, corruption, and indifference to ordinary people’s lives of so many of the Parliamentary Labour Party, because he is my constituency MP. I’ve seen him turn up to campaigns large and small, local, national and international, not for the photo-opportunity but because he understands the issues, knows about ordinary people’s lives and, as an MP, is able to help. I rejoined the Party after he won the leadership contest last summer because he is a principled socialist, anti-racist and defender of human beings and human rights – not just here but across the world.

His opponents say on the one hand that he hasn’t got “leadership qualities”, whatever they are (I assume they mean something like David Cameron or Tony Blair  or Margaret Thatcher – “leaders” who are detached from the people who did all the work to get them where they are); and on the other hand, he is like a cult leader and his followers are just mindless fans who can’t think for themselves. Well my experience is that his supporters are thinking, enthusiastic, hopeful people, young and old, and from many different income brackets and backgrounds who, for the first time since we were conned into the Iraq War, feel there is a possibility of retrieving what the Labour Party is meant to be.

I don’t know how he has managed to keep going given the relentless attacks there have been against him – his opponents were briefing against him as he was giving his victory speech after last summer’s leadership contest. They have displayed complete inhumanity to him and his family on a personal level, and an utterly cynical attitude to the membership of the party who have worked to win them their seats in parliament. And despite all this, over the last year, Labour has won every Mayoral election and every single by-election it stood in, some with increased majorities. And, above all, the party has recruited hundreds of thousands of new members.

Under Jeremy’s leadership the Labour Party has also won some crucial victories in the House of Commons such as the Tory U-turns on tax credit cuts and on Personal Independence Payments. And he has changed the Labour Party from a party that supported austerity a year ago, to one where every single member of the PLP, whether they are friends or enemies of Jeremy, now says they oppose austerity.

In my opinion, the coup is not just against Jeremy Corbyn or even his leadership team, but against all of us who dared to elect a socialist to lead the Labour Party. He is just saying what many people think but haven’t dared say during all these years of cuts and rising inequality: that we need to take back our money from the people who are siphoning it out of our public services and into offshore tax havens, depleting our housing stock, selling off our health service, running down our transport system, dismantling the education system and undermining controls on environmental degradation.

As for Smith, someone said to me that “voting for him would be like voting for a cardboard box”.  He just seems to be the only person they could find who didn’t vote for the Iraq war. Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have much else to recommend him.

I meant this to be a short note but I was at a meeting last night with John McDonnell and a panel of others, some of them very young, in a packed hall in Walthamstow, an area I know quite well. It was standing room only, and many of those people were standing for two and a half hours listening to speeches which described ordinary people’s real experiences, struggling to house themselves, resorting to food banks, and all the rest of it. For the first time they can see a prospect of reversing the cuts that are undermining their lives, and they are being encouraged to participate and collaborate in making that happen.

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