PROUD OF YOUR PARTY, MR CORBYN?
A Jewish MP’s police escort at Labour conference. A colleague who likens anti-Semitism crisis to the rise of Nazism. And a question for their leader ...
A JEWISH Labour MP was forced to rely on police protection at her party’s conference yesterday – as a colleague warned the anti-Semitism crisis could fuel the rise of Nazism in Britain.
Luciana Berger was accompanied by two police officers as she attended an anti-Semitism rally in Liverpool. Moderate Labour MPs lined up at the fringe event to demand that Jeremy Corbyn and senior union leaders take serious action to ‘drain the swamp’ in the party.
It came after the Labour leader refused to apologise for a series of controversial statements he has made about Jews and for his failure to clamp down on anti-Semitism. On another day of shame for Labour: One MP said the party should pay for
anti-Semites to visit Auschwitz to teach them about the evils of the Holocaust;
Another accused union leader Len McCluskey of ‘playing with fire’ for suggesting antiSemitism in Labour was just ‘mood music’;
A YouGov poll found Labour’s antiSemitism crisis could cost the party almost a million votes at the next election;
Another Labour conference fringe event heard claims that Israel is a ‘racist state’;
Mr McCluskey said Labour only adopted the international definition of anti-Semitism to ‘ease’ attacks on Mr Corbyn.
Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow in East London, warned that unless the issue of anti-Semitism in the Labour ranks was properly tackled by the leadership, racism will fester.
‘Nazism doesn’t turn up fully formed wearing black shiny boots and black shirts and goose-stepping,’ she told the rally. ‘It builds bit by bit, it gains little by little, it paints itself as the victim – it paints its victims as the enemies, as traitors, the “other”, with dual loyalty. It rejects those norms and conventions on anti-Semitism that we have worked so hard to defend. That is the threat that we face if we do not confront this.’
Ian Austin, a Labour MP facing the threat of disciplinary action for standing up to the party leadership, added: ‘The truth about Jeremy is that he’s much angrier about people complaining of anti-Semitism than he is with the people responsible for it.
‘Jeremy has got to stop thinking he’s the victim in this and he’s got to properly apologise for his role and responsibility in the development of this crisis.’ The protection afforded to Jewish Labour Movement chairman Miss Berger is particularly shocking as she is the MP for Liverpool Wavertree, meaning it was felt she needed a police escort in her home city.
She was seen arriving and leaving the conference building with two Merseyside Police officers. One officer was wearing a yellow Taser stun gun on his body armour.
Addressing the meeting, Miss Berger said the Jewish community was facing a ‘barrage of hate’, adding: ‘There are Jews in this country who do not feel safe.
‘If you troll Jewish people on Twitter and Facebook, if you share anti- Jewish images – and it’s not just on social media – if you also repeat lies and smears against Jewish people, if you talk about “weaponising” antiSemitism, if you support Holocaust denial, you are not Labour. You are not welcome.’
Miss Berger won loud and sustained applause as she said Labour was being held back by the ‘tsunami of anti-Semitic hate’.
‘If we have to spend another six months like we have spent the last six months, patiently explaining to new Labour Party members – and some old ones – that Hitler didn’t want to help the Jews, or that the Rothschilds don’t run the world banking system, or that the Jews didn’t finance the slave trade or that me and other Jewish MPs are not Mossad operatives, or that it’s not cool to desecrate the mass grave of the Warsaw ghetto with “woke” slogans, we will be no further forward,’ she said.
Miss Berger accused Mr Corbyn of trying
to sabotage the internationally recognised International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance ( IHRA) definition of anti- Semitism, adding: ‘Despite a last-minute and what I believe to be utterly shameful attempt to sabotage the IHRA definition and examples, Labour has at last adopted it, albeit with that unnecessary caveat.
‘What matters now is draining the swamp. We need to see the Labour Party step up the investigations into complaints of anti-Semitism and get a faster, fairer, more transparent system of internal party justice.’
Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield called on Labour to send people who denied the existence of the gas chambers to visit Auschwitz so they could see the truth.
Appearing on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show yesterday, Mr Corbyn was confronted by a series of allegations of antiSemitism made against him.
Pressed to apologise, he merely insisted that he was ‘anti-racist’.
At a fringe event, the chairman of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – whose patron is Mr Corbyn – said Israel was a racist state. Hugh Lanning said: ‘If you pass racist laws, if you operate in a racist way, there is nothing racist in calling you a racist state.’
It came as Mr McCluskey said: ‘The debate about the examples, the IHRA definition... we were getting sucked in almost like the Charge of the Light Brigade – cannons to the right and left and in front of us, sucked in to a debate on our enemy’s territory.
‘It was important to make certain that the attacks on Jeremy were eased so that we could continue the fight.’
Mr McCluskey said Mr Corbyn would be ‘proved right’ in his reluctance to adopt the IHRA definition of antiSemitism in full.
WELCOME to Labour conference 2018, where it took barely a day for the new nasty party to show its true colours.
Indeed, even before the formalities began, equalities spokesman Dawn Butler was chirruping the slogans of the Militant Tendency, who set an illegal budget at Liverpool Council in the 1980s.
Though Labour’s youthful army of zealots won’t remember, this appalling mismanagement led – in the excoriating words of Neil Kinnock – to the council hiring ‘taxis to scuttle around the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’.
Meanwhile, we learn that Andrew Murray, Jeremy Corbyn’s policy chief, called for Labour to admit Communist revolutionaries and advocated the creation of a ‘ Soviet Britain’. This isn’t just idle rhetoric: Labour plans an all-out tax assault on owners of holiday homes, and wants to stuff company boards with union die-hards.
But most alarming of all is this once great party’s continued descent into the sewer of anti-Semitism. All summer, Mr Corbyn has hidden from the torrent of allegations laid at his door, from his attack on British ‘Zionists’ for lacking a sense of irony (who
can he have meant?), to his attendance at a wreath- laying ceremony for Black September terrorists.
Finally facing robust questioning from the BBC’s Andrew Marr yesterday, Mr Corbyn squirmed, groaned, and shamefully refused to apologise. He even had the gall to describe Labour as ‘ open, welcoming and safe’ to people from all faiths.
Conclusive proof of how misguided that claim is came only hours later, with the horrifying spectacle of a moderate Jewish Labour MP, Luciana Berger, being escorted around the conference by two police officers, so serious is the threat to her safety from the Corbynite mob. What an utterly shameful state of affairs.
Under most circumstances comparisons with Nazism are best avoided, but who could deny the grain of truth in Labour MP Stella Creasy’s challenge to the hard Left over anti-Semitism: ‘What are you going to do before it gets to Cable Street? Nazism doesn’t turn up fully formed.’
But as much as the Mail sympathises with Miss Berger, Miss Creasy and the other moderates, we have a question for them all. Why on earth are they still supporting this wretched man to be this country’s next prime minister?