Unrepentant, Labour activist who said Jews financed slavery

A LABOUR activist who was suspended after calling Jews ‘financiers of the slave trade’ yesterday remained defiant and said she would not apologise for her comments.

Jackie Walker, a prominent Jeremy Corbyn cheerleader, was suspended from the Labour Party earlier this month after posting the offensive comments on Facebook but has now been quietly reinstated.

She said she was ‘saddened’ if she had upset people by the remarks. But she said she did not have an apology to make, adding that the context for the comments was ‘extremely important’.

Miss Walker also said that if Boris Johnson was a member of the Labour Party he too would have been suspended over his remarks about black people.

The former London mayor faced criticism years ago after calling black children ‘piccaninnies’ and referring to black people as having ‘watermelon smiles’.

In an interview on the BBC’s Today programme, Miss Walker said: ‘I don’t have an apology to make. I’m saddened if I’ve upset people, but sometimes when we’re talking in political speech we upset people, and these issues are very upsetting.

‘All I’m saying is that every single death of every single person no matter what their race, no matter what their culture, is an awful thing.

‘No one genocide, no one holocaust, is in my opinion worse than any other. I’m an internationalist – that’s what it means to be an internationalist.’

Miss Walker, vice chairman of the hard-Left Momentum group, accused people opposed to Mr Corbyn’s leadership of having ‘provoked’ her suspension. The Kent activist had posted online: ‘What debt do we owe the Jews?’

Another user replied ‘the Holocaust’, but Miss Walker said: ‘Many more Africans were killed in the African holocaust. Many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade.’

Yesterday she said: ‘ The context of this is extremely important. This was in a private Face- book post. I was talking to two friends, one of whom is an Israeli Zionist, one of whom isn’t.’

She then added: ‘My experience of the Labour movement tells me that the Labour movement has much to be proud of in its anti-racist work.

‘Just compare it to what’s been happening in the Tory Party and let’s question why the racism of the Tory Party that is so easily pointed to is not coming under inspection. You could question why Boris Johnson, who described black people as piccaninnies with watermelon smiles, wasn’t suspended, because I know if he had been in the Labour Party he would have been.’

Labour announced on Saturday that following an inquiry, Miss Walker’s suspension had been lifted.

Critics said it paved the way for Ken Livingstone’s return following a similar storm. The former London mayor was suspended from Labour last month following an incendiary intervention in which he claimed Hitler had ‘supported Zionism’ in the early 1930s before he ‘went mad and ended up killing six million Jews’.