Starmer’s campaign of exclusion and harassment.
Catherine Dunlop
This topic requires a report on the scale of the Forde report, which took two years to investigate complaints of all sorts regarding the behaviour of officers and members. What follows is a selection of headings of topics that need to be investigated to explain how the current leadership of the Labour Party is purging it of its left wing, with the result that the Party is no longer a ‘broad church’.
- Persecution against individual members, against MPs and other elected persons
- Banning organisations
- Interference with CLPs (Constituency Labour Party branches) activities.
- Censorship
1.a Individuals being expelled or suspended
Thousands of individuals, often left wing Jews, suspended, expelled or “auto-expelled”, meaning they have expressed support for a group later banned by LP; this supposed connection with a now banned organisation could be no more than ‘liking’ a tweet.
The website of the Jewish Voice for Labour has a long list of cases, not all Jewish. You can look up their name on the website to read their full story; they are invariably long standing stalwarts of the party, with a deep emotional attachment to it. JVL writes:
“Since mid-2021, Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) has repeatedly alerted the EHRC to the disproportionate targeting of Jewish members of the Labour Party for disciplinary action over allegations of antisemitism.
Ironically, this targeting of Jews seems to be reinforcing the claim for the success of the action plan in the name of combating antisemitism.
We received responses from the EHRC but no indication that our reports made any difference to Labour’s implementation or EHRC monitoring of the Action Plan.
Our most recent letter of 8 February 2023 referred the EHRC to the latest statistics on Jews targeted under Labour’s disciplinary procedures.
JVL is currently aware of fully 60 Jewish Labour Party members targeted.
The campaign against JVL has been relentless. Notably, in 2022, during the Jewish festival of Chanukah, three prominent Jewish members of JVL were expelled from the Party.
These were Naomi Wimborne Idrissi, a JVL Executive Officer, who was thereby prevented from taking up her elected post as the only Jewish member on Labour’s National Executive Committee. Stephen Marks, who had been a prominent voice on Labour’s National Constitution Committee. And Heather Mendick, who worked in Labour’s leadership office in 2019”.
The case of Diane Pearson
She wrote a letter to Keir Starmer in which she said:
I recall that on 19th November 2021 you [Keir Starmer] were on Radio 4 Today programme and you said, among other things, in reference to MPs’ lobbying and second jobs, “Don’t penalise people now for doing things in the past that were allowed at the time.” Which is exactly what you are doing with regards to purging left members.
You can look up the cases of many more members on the Jewish Voice for Labour website, for example Neal Lawson, Graham Bash, Pamela Fitzpatrick, Leah Levane, Stephen Marks, Stephen Kapos, Moshe Machover, Gary Ostrolenk, Anne Pissaridou, Glyn Secker, Martin Mayer, Andrea Egan,,
Damian McCarthy, Ken Loach, Jackie Walker, Chris Williamson, Tony Greenstein.
1.b
Active members banned from standing for parliamentary, council or mayoral elections
Mish Rashman, Dawn McGuinness; Jamie Driscoll.
1.c Labour MPs excluded from representing the Labour Party: Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, Claudia Webbe
2. Banning organisations of like minded people within the Labour Party, such as Momentum, which is itself not banned.
The National Executive Committee proscribed Resist and Labour Against the Witchhunt, which claims antisemitism allegations were politically motivated, and Labour in Exile Network, which expressly welcomes expelled or suspended members; also Socialist Appeal, a group that describes itself as a Marxist voice of Labour and youth, the Labour Left Alliance and the Socialist Labour Network and Alliance for Workers Liberty.
3. Moves against Constituency Labour Party branches (CLP)
CLP have been denied the right to choose their candidates for general elections, the best known being Islington North where the sitting MP, Corbyn, has been removed from the LP list of MPs and banned from standing. The list of CLPs this has affected is now long, and includes Broxtowe, Milton Keynes North, Kensington and Chelsea, Camberwell and Peckham, Stroud, Hastings, Sedgefield, Bolton North East and more.
The NEC has also interfered with CLP work by preventing certain speakers from being invited, removing officers and replacing them with others etc. This is less well documented, as members and elected reps are not always willing to talk, fearing reprisals.
The NEC is able to deny a CLP access to its main mailing system, as explained in the Morning Star 28 August 2023:
“Party bosses removed Hackney North and Stoke Newington CLP’s access to its Organise mailing system a day after banning discussions about Dame Meg Hillier’s former agent Thomas Dewey’s legal proceedings at a meeting in July.
Today local Labour members described it as “a very covert method of shutting down all local democracy without going as far as suspending a CLP” as well as a “convenient” way for the Labour leadership to avoid internal scrutiny over its ongoing suspension of their constituency MP Diane Abbott’s whip.
The Morning Star understands the tactic has mostly been used to silence left-wing CLPs after Sir Keir Starmer became party leader in April 2020”.
4. Pressuring venues against showing a film and discussing a book
The film about Jeremy Corbyn (The big lie)
First it was a film – Oh Jeremy Corbyn, The Big Lie. Relentlessly hounded by the so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, it has been unjustifiably labeled as antisemitic and conspiratorial, with venue after venue bludgeoned into refusing to screen it.
Discussion of a book cancelled by Unite the Union
Now it is a book – Asa Winstanley’s Weaponising Anti-Semitism – which is ironic as the very processes Winstanley chronicles in it are now at work trying to get the book banned.
Well, not actually banned, but it is Unite the Union – which really should know better – refusing to allow its premises in Bristol to be used to host a discussion of the book.
Presumably historians in the future will document this remarkable effort to change the membership of a political party through administrative persecution. They will no doubt meet the same difficulties that the Forde enquiry experienced:
“Some [staff members] promised further documents, which were never supplied; some were accompanied by lawyers. It was concerningly difficult to gather vital minutes of meetings and to understand the rationale for decisions. Key documents were unavailable, others were not supplied and details of meetings were not recorded”. “More surprisingly, and deeply worrying, there was no proper audit trail of emails. It became apparent that various WhatsApp groups were formed instead…”
(Foreword to the Report)
Labour Affairs 