Labour candidate suspended one day after selection over anti-Semitism row
Leading art critic who was to fight Trade Secretary’s parliamentary seat says allegations are ‘nonsense’
A LEADING art critic has been quietly dropped as a Labour prospective parliamentary candidate as it emerged that he dismissed allegations of antiSemitism in the party as a “witch hunt” and described a former chief rabbi as a “notorious hate-filled racist”.
Matthew Collings, who won a Bafta for a Channel 4 series on modern art, has been suspended while the party investigates his social media accounts.
Mr Collings, 64, the art critic for the London Evening Standard, has stood aside as a Labour candidate contesting the Commons seat held by Liz Truss, the International Trade Secretary.
His party membership was suspended one day after his adoption as the candidate for South West Norfolk, over allegations relating to “behaviour on social media”. A series of posts on Mr Collings’s social media accounts about anti-Semitism and Israel have since been uncovered by the GnasherJew Twitter account, which highlights examples of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Mr Collings described claims of anti-Semitism as “nonsense” and has pledged to reverse his suspension and stand again in the future. Yesterday, he told The Sunday Telegraph: “I don’t know of any posts that I have made that could possibly be anti-Semitic. I would never make any anti-Semitic posts.”
Posts highlighted by GnasherJew included an image Mr Collings published on Facebook in May 2018 which called for the deselection of Labour MPs who joined a parliamentary delegation to Israel. “Labour MPs enjoy a free holiday to Israel whilst the Israeli Government massacres children,” the post stated.
Another post, in August 2018, followed an article in the New Statesman in which Lord Sacks, the former chief rabbi, said comments by Jeremy Corbyn about Zionists at a 2013 conference were the most offensive statement by a senior UK politician since Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech.
Mr Collings said: “Sachs [sic] is a notorious hate-filled racist.” He cited the fact that Lord Sacks had recommended a book by Douglas Murray which included a segment stating that Mr Powell had “underestimated” the effect high rates of immigration would have on Britain. A similar claim was made by a number of prominent supporters of Mr Corbyn at the time of Lord Sacks’s comments, prompting Adam Wagner, a human rights lawyer, to say it made “no sense at all” to consider Lord Sacks’s political views “in isolation”. Later, in April 2019, after Richard Burgon, the shadow justice secretary, initially denied saying that Zionism is the “enemy of peace”, Mr Collings tweeted: “Burgon should just say, Look there’s a witch hunt McCarthy thing going on where you have to lie & not tell the truth. That’s why I lied. Of course Zionism is the enemy of peace. A Neil [Andrew Neil, the BBC interviewer] isn’t interested in whether it’s a lie or not, just in winning a move in the witch hunt game.”
On April 9 Mr Collings posted a diagram purporting to show “how ‘The Lobby’ influences our politics”, with Israel and Jewish businessmen “influencing” political groups. He said the image demonstrated why “you are hearing so much at such a high trumpeting level, about a phenomenon – anti-Semitism – that is very small in Labour, confined to a few fringe nutcases, and as such is pitiable and silly, rather than menacing or horrifying.”
On Thursday Mr Collings tweeted: “Suspended from Party day after selected as candidate. Disappointed. But content to answer allegations.”
On Facebook he said: “Suspect it is antisemitism nonsense, and allegations predate candidacy though may relate to period in which it was publicly known I intended to stand.”