Corbynistas sang I’ll Be Watching You to menace me out of Labour job
HARD-LEFT activists taunted a Labour council leader by singing a song about stalking during their campaign to oust her.
Claire kober quit as head of Haringey in north London last week, saying she had faced sexism, bullying and personal attacks in a bitter dispute over a housing scheme.
She will step down at May’s elections after moderate colleagues were replaced by candidates backed by the pro-Corbyn Momentum campaign group.
‘I’ve been a leader for ten years, and as any other politician in a frontline role, you become pretty resilient,’ she told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show yesterday. ‘ In the last two years I have attracted more threats, more bullying, more intimidation than in the previous eight years put together.’
She told of a Labour meeting when opponents sang every Breath you Take, a Police song from 1983 which contains the line ‘I’ll be watching you’.
Miss kober said: ‘It is absolutely sexist – that runs from the way I was treated by my National executive Committee just last week – and I don’t think a man would be treated the same way. Through to examples in council meetings where Labour Party members at the end of a meeting have shouted at me and sung a Police song as a means of intimidating me.
‘That is a song about stalking. A man would not have been treated that way.’
Announcing her resignation last week, she said: ‘The sexism, bullying, undemocratic behaviour and outright personal attacks on me as the most senior woman in Labour local government have left me disappointed and disillusioned.’
She said she was ‘in no doubt that the behaviour and actions of certain individuals at certain times met the test of both sexism and bullying and politically intimidating behaviour’.
A row in her London borough over a housing development sparked a bitter reselection battle in which moderate councillors were kicked out.
Momentum is expected to take control of the council at May’s local elections, when Miss kober will step down.
She laid the blame for abuse of politicians on a ‘toxic culture’ that was sweeping through Britain.
She told the BBC: ‘We see it across the country, the way Jacob rees-Mogg was treated at the weekend, the way Diane Abbott was treated, we see it when the political editor of the BBC [Laura kuenssberg] has to take bodyguards to Labour Party conference.’
Miss kober said her attempts to try to help stamp out antiSemitism in the Labour Party had been met with ugly protests by Momentum activists.
She said: ‘Take one example, I proposed a motion on antiSemitism and Momentum called a demonstration at that meeting to protest against that motion. Demonstrations are part of the political discourse.
‘But we were screamed and shouted at in that meeting. That cannot be an acceptable part of the political debate.’
Labour’s ruling committee decided the housing scheme should be halted unless a compromise can be found – effectively scuppering the project.
‘Every means of intimidation’