Town hijacked by Corbyn cult
Merseyside was the Eighties citadel of the hard Left. Now the bully boys are back in Birkenhead and forcing out Labour moderates. Here GUY ADAMS reveals shameful evidence of abuse and anti-Semitism in the. . .
clapped- out councillors needs a shake-up.’
He denies this constitutes bullying, saying such claims are an invention of the ‘ hard Right’. Labour did not respond to a request for comment.
The charge sheet against Tony Norbury, meanwhile, begins with claims that in June last year he ‘made a series of aggressive and derogatory comments’ about the way colleagues ran the party and criticised members he regarded as ‘ Right- wing’ at a meeting of Birkenhead Labour Party.
A witness statement from one councillor, who filed a formal complaint, reads: ‘As a woman, I should be able to attend Labour Party meetings and be guaranteed a safe environment. I should not have to experience personal criticism, intimidation and verbal abuse.’
He was also accused of using social media to share material from a Facebook group called ‘Israel Is a War Criminal’, which the dossier contends is ‘widely regarded by the Jewish community to be AntiSemitic’ and to criticise publicly a number of local Labour policies, in breach of party rules.
Meanwhile, last September, the document states that Norbury ‘posted comments on Facebook critical of Frank Field MP inaccurately stating that he had supported the Conservative Party, and encouraging readers to use the local party’s upcoming AGM to lobby against him’.
At the Birkenhead Town Hall meeting, the six Labour councillors present — who had worked doggedly for the party for decades — politely informed Mr Smith that Momentum’s hostile brand of politics was unacceptable.
Senior party official Andy Smith was asked to mount a formal investigation. According to minutes of the meeting, he ‘asked that the file of evidence be submitted electronically and said he will escalate the matter’.
That was now almost a year ago. But nothing has been done.
‘We’ve had no acknowledgement of our complaint, and no word of whether any of the incidents mentioned has been investigated,’ says the councillor. ‘Bullying is a serious issue, and to have it ignored like this just beggars belief.’
Perhaps as a result of the Labour hierarchy’s apparent indifference, the atmosphere has since become more poisonous. In January, for example, Left-wingers in Birkenhead Labour Party took the extraordinary decision of voting to refuse an offer of free diversity training aimed at helping root out anti-Semitism among activists.
According to leaked minutes of a party meeting, it was agreed that the Jewish Labour Movement, which had offered to provide the training, had ‘possible links with ISIS and the Israeli government’.
Such links echo a sinister and utterly false anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that wealthy Jews bankrolled the creation of the terror group ISIS to ensure that Western governments remain on a war footing in the Middle East.
According to a new draft complaint, seen by the Mail, Councillor Tony Norbury was ‘asked to leave’ a Labour event because of ‘an aggressive outburst towards two group members’. He was also accused of stating that a long- serving moderate colleague was ‘not a loyal Labour Party member’ at her branch meeting.
More recently, a Labour canvassing session in Birkenhead was abandoned following an alleged street altercation between Norbury and Angela Davies, a fellow councillor leafletting local homes.
‘Norbury turned up and started shouting at Angela, saying the leaflets hadn’t been approved by the local Labour Party branch, and asking on whose authority she was campaigning,’ one witness recalled. ‘She pointed out that she was the local councillor, but he carried on having a go at her, so she decided to leave. He followed her down the road to her car. It left two of the women with her in tears.’
The incident is now the subject of a formal investigation. Norbury is understood to deny wrongdoing.
HoWEvERa complaint seen by the Mail suggests there will be several witnesses of recent canvassing sessions during which he ‘behaved in a way which was intimidating to people present and the sessions had to be aborted’.
However, one of the two women left in tears, a senior Labour figure called Sheila Murphy, said the experience had left her ‘ holding onto my membership by my fingertips’. In an interview with the blog Labour Uncut, Murphy said that many local councillors fear being replaced by hard-Left loyalists in advance of May’s elections.
‘Hard-working councillors are telling me that their mental health is suffering as a result. We have a new hard core whose behaviour is nasty, vicious and controlling,’ she says. ‘It’s a return to the factionalism of the Eighties. And we all know how that worked out.’
one person who might agree is Mike Sullivan, a Wirral councillor who left Labour last week, saying the party had been ‘over-run by a narrow ideological cult’ where ‘bullying of the many by the few is now the norm.’
Meanwhile, Phil Davies, the leader of Wirral Council’s Labour group, issued a statement last week criticising ‘the concerted efforts of a small group of hardline extremists who want to undermine the democratic mandate of Labour councillors in pursuit of a narrow ideological agenda’.
‘ our whips are investigating intimidation of female party members, reducing them to tears . . . This is a repeat of tactics used by hardLeft extremists in the Eighties and there is no place for this behaviour in today’s Labour Party.’
Davies has called on Labour’s most senior UK official, General Secretary Jennie Formby, to conduct an ‘urgent investigation’ into bullying in Wirral Labour.
But he shouldn’t hold his breath. Formby, a hard-line Corbynist, was recently identified as a former Militant activist — making her possibly the worst person to bring peace to a party that seems increasingly at war with itself.