● HOW LABOUR REACTED
SHADOW INTERNATIONAL trade minister Barry Gardiner revealed on Wednesday that he had written to Labour general secretary Jennie Formby to lodge a formal complaint about the decision to readmit left-wing firebrand Derek Hatton into the Labour Party.
Within minutes of his speech in the Commons debate on antisemitism, it was confirmed that Mr Hatton had been suspended by the Labour Party.
Mr Gardiner said he had seen social media messages posted by the former Liverpool City Council leader which said Jewish people with “any humanity” should criticise Israel.
On Monday, only hours after Luciana Berger had announced her resignation from Labour, Mr Hatton’s application to rejoin Labour was confirmed as having been aproved by party bosses.
Labour MP Ian Austin said the decision to readmit Mr Hatton showed how far the party had moved outside the mainstream of British politics.
In his speech, Mr Gardiner attempted to apologise for Labour’s failings over antisemitism, saying: “How can it be that we are struggling so badly to eradicate antisemitism from our own membership?”
The Labour Party, he said, has not had “adequate procedures in place” to act swiftly against “that small minority of members” who have sometimes expressed antisemitic views.
“I want on behalf of my party to publicly apologise to the Jewish community, that we have let you down.”
Mr Gardiner also said that Ms Berger, one of the eight Labour MPs who quit the party this week, has suffered “disgraceful treatment”.
“I regret deeply that she has left our party. I regret most of all the antisemitic abuse which made her feel it was necessary to do so,” he added.
He described her as a “kind and loving person” who has been “bullied by antisemites to a point that most of us would not have had the strength to bear”.
“I wish she’d stayed and helped us defeat the evil in our party,” he said, but added that whichever party she represented she should have the “unqualified solidarity” of MPs.
His words came after another Labour MP had been forced into an apology for suggesting that the Independent Group might have been secretly funded by Israel.
In behaviour that seemed to go to the heart of Labour’s failure to tackle antisemitic discourse, Ruth George, the MP for High Peak, “unreservedly and wholeheartedly apologised” on Tuesday after a Facebook post in which she said that “support (for the breakaway group) from the State of Israel, which supports both Conservative and Labour Friends of Israel of which Luciana (Berger) was chair is possible and I would not condemn those who suggest it.”
Both Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell