CORBYN FACES NEW REBELLION OVER ‘WIFE BEATER’ MP
Women MPs’ fury at ‘assaults’ Anti-Semitism crisis deepens Key Corbyn ally forced to quit
JEREMY CORBYN faced a revolt from women Labour MPs last night over claims his party has failed to take action against a male MP accused of wife-beating.
A meeting of Labour women MPs – attended by ex-Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman –
From Page One backed calls to suspend the politician from the party after he allegedly used violence against his wife on repeated occasions. Ms Harman advised colleagues at the meeting of the women’s Parliamentary Labour Party that the complaint against the MP could be taken up with the Labour leader, his Chief Whip Nick Brown and party officials. But sources say there were also threats to ‘shame’ the party leadership into taking action by making their call public if the Labour whip was not removed from the MP concerned. Women MPs were told the alleged wife-beater had been reported to Labour HQ but officials had failed to act. One source said: ‘The allegations against the man are horrific. There is no way he should be an MP and the party cannot just sit on its hands and do nothing.’ It is understood that Jess Phillips, who chairs the women’s group, has written to Mr Corbyn asking for the MP to be suspended pending an investigation. The row came as Mr Corbyn faced a deepening crisis over claims that he has failed to crack down on anti-Semitism in his party. On a day of dramatic new developments: Leading ‘Corbynista’ Christine Shawcroft resigned from Labour’s ruling national body after claims that she failed to act against anti-Semitic Labour activists – and was replaced by comedian Eddie Izzard; Labour MP John Mann, writing in this newspaper, said Mr Corbyn was ‘unfit’ to be Prime Minis- ter unless he expelled Ken Livingstone who has said Hitler supported Zionism – and claimed Labour faced up to 5,000 anti-Semitism complaints;
Blairite ex-MP Tristram Hunt called for London Mayor Sadiq Khan or exForeign Secretary David Miliband to launch a party to challenge Labour;
A Jewish Labour donor revealed he had quit the party because he no longer felt any ‘affinity or connection’ with it in the wake of the anti-Semitism row.
Ms Shawcroft, who supports the hardLeft Momentum group that supports Mr Corbyn’s leadership, was forced to step down as head of the National Executive Committee’s disciplinary committee last week after she appeared
to defend a council candidate accused of Holocaust denial. However, she quit the NEC last night after calls for her to go from party deputy leader Tom Watson.
Amid the row, a leaked letter that Ms Shawcroft wrote three weeks ago defended her chairmanship of the NEC disputes panel but complained that she was ‘stitched up’ by trade unionist rivals. In her letter – which lets rip at the unions – Ms Shawcroft said: ‘Dear Comrade, from the moment I was elected to the NEC, I was made unwelcome.
‘People thought I would be a useful idiot to chair the NEC disputes committee. I’m not angry because you stitched me up. I’m so used to that I barely notice. What’s more important is you stitched up my members and they deserve better.’
Last night she said she had quit because ‘my continued membership of the NEC has become a distraction for the party’.
Mr Izzard will replace her because he had been runner-up in the last elections. The pro-EU comedian and activist had run on a platform of increasing diversity in the party.
At the time he vowed: ‘Despite not being elected, I’ll continue to do all I can to campaign for an open and welcoming Labour Party and to campaign with fellow Labour activists to help Labour win the next Election and put Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street.’
Last night, Sir David Garrard, who has donated £1.5million to Labour since 2003, said he had left the party because he no longer felt ‘any affinity or connection’ with Labour following the row.
The property tycoon accused the leadership of failing to adequately deal with ‘the most blatant acts of anti-Semitism’ and said the party he used to support ‘no longer exists’.
In a further blow to Mr Corbyn, former Shadow Minister Mr Hunt became the latest Labour figure to call for a breakaway, Left-ofCentre political force. Mr Hunt, who quit politics last year to become director of the V&A Museum in London, said he was no longer certain to vote for Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party, even though he was still a Labour member.
Mr Hunt said that Britain was crying out for its own Emmanuel Macron, who quit France’s Socialist Party and stormed to power last year as leader of his own CentreLeft movement, En Marche!
He added: ‘To cut through social media politics, you need a strong, substantive leader – somebody like Sadiq Khan or David Miliband.’
Mr Hunt said both would make ideal leaders of a ‘pro-European, internationalist party that believes in social mobility, a market economy and social justice’.
Mr Corbyn has denied being anti-Semitic. But Jewish peer Robert Winston has claimed that the Labour leader has ‘encouraged and endorsed’ anti-Semites.
The MoS has chosen not to disclose the identity of the MP in the wife-beating claims. Labour sources denied the party had failed to act, saying the party leader’s office had taken ‘every opportunity’ to try to deal with the allegations.