Holocaust campaigner warns Labour Party is hostile to Jews
THE former chairman of a charity that oversees official Holocaust commemorations has filed a complaint against her local Labour Party over a claim it has become a “hostile environment” for Jews who challenge Holocaust denial.
As Labour gathered for its party conference in Liverpool today, Cathy Ashley, a former Labour councillor who chaired the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, claims she was jeered and then censured for confronting a member who spoke in support of Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor who was suspended from the party over allegations of anti-Semitism.
The disclosure is made in a book that also reveals a prominent supporter of Jeremy Corbyn resigned from a campaign group of which his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, is president, over an article it published claiming that Labour had become “a pawn of Zionist organisations”.
David Osland told The Sunday Telegraph: “I’m on the reality-based wing of the far Left. Paranoid drivel alleging ‘Zionist control of the Labour Party’ is dangerous tommyrot that won’t help secure either justice for Palestine or a Corbyn government.”
The disclosures come as a ComRes poll published by the Jewish News shows 31 per cent of voters now consider Labour the “nasty party” – a label Theresa May once warned the Conservatives had attracted; 34 per cent say the phrase still applies to the Tories.
Separate polling by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism found that 40 per cent of British Jews have considered leaving the UK due to anti-Semitism – up from 31 per cent in 2017 – while 82 per cent said politicians were doing too little to fight anti-Semitism.
The book, by Dave Rich, head of policy at the Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Semitism, discloses that Ms Ashley, who lost family in the concentration camps, filed a complaint against Dulwich and West Norwood constituency party in London in February. She has yet to hear whether Labour will take any action.
Her complaint stemmed from a debate on a motion condemning Mr Liv-
‘Paranoid drivel alleging ‘Zionist control of the Labour Party’ is dangerous tommyrot’
ingstone that “turned so hostile that she walked out to the sound of abuse from some of her fellow members,” according to an updated edition of The Left’s Jewish Problem, first published in 2016.
At the debate in July 2017, a member said in Mr Livingstone’s defence that it was an “inconvenient truth” that Hitler supported Zionism – the claim that had led to Mr Livingstone’s suspension.
The speaker “sat down near Ashley and, in the words of a witness, ‘leaned into her and was pointing aggressively’. Ashley later recalled, ‘I clearly found it distressing ... I responded that his argument was a form of Holocaust denial.”
The motion condemning Mr Livingstone was put to a vote and defeated, to cheers from some”, Mr Rich writes.
A complaint was lodged against Ms Ashley for harassment of the member who spoke in favour of Livingstone and she was ordered to apologise and agree to “handle emotive issues better in the future”. The book also says Mr Osland resigned from the Labour Representation Committee “in protest at the weak stance against anti-Semitism”, adding “few others appear to see a problem.”