Yet more
False Anti-Semitism Smears - Elected by the members and removed by the corrupt GMB
and Labour's Right inc. Claudia Webbe
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| Labour's Gutless 'Left' Voted to Endorse Guido Fawkes base accusations |
The NEC’s
shameful decision to deselect South Thanet’s socialist Parliamentary
Prospective Candidate should be seen in perspective. The decision was taken at
the behest of Douglas Murray’s far-Right Islamaphobic Henry
Jackson Society and the Tory Guido Fawkes. It is a prime example of the cowardice in the
face of adversity. Such gutlessness can and will only rebound on the
left.
One of the
defining moments in consolidating the grip of Tony Blair in the Labour Party was
the deselection in 1995 of
Liz Davies as Leeds North-East PPC. The right-wing press had whipped up the
normal storm of lies against Liz. She had broken the whip twice on Islington
Council to vote against the closure of a nursery. As Tony Benn noted in his
Diary:
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| Karen Constantine |
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| Karen Constantine |
“Liz Davies is due to have her endorsement as a
parliamentary candidate for Leeds North East refused by the NEC tomorrow
morning… Frank Field, MP, has encouraged Labour voters in the past to ‘Vote
Liberal’ and that’s alright. Roger Liddle, who was an SDP councillor until May
and voted against Labour, is taken into Blair’s private office. But Liz Davies,
who voted against her Labour Council – to save a nursery school – is not
allowed to be a candidate.”
When Liz
Davies was deselected as Labour PPC Jeremy Corbyn spoke up strongly in her
support. Today he has remained silent after a campaign by the same political forces
that were responsible for the defenestration of Liz Davies. Today the so-called
Left on Labour’s NEC has gone along with these Tory hyenas.
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| Karen Constantin's baiting of the elected PPC for South Thanet |
South Thanet
Labour Party is a model party. It was their vigorous campaign which helped see
off Nigel Farage when he stood in the 2015 General Election. The area has been
a focus of activity by fascists and the NF for many years. South Thanet’s Vice
Chair, Jackie Walker, the Black Jewish activist who was scandalously suspended
by Iain McNicol’s witch hunters, led the fight against the fascists.
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| Andrew Cunningham - GMWU NE Regional Official Gaoled for 5 (cut to 4) years in prison |
South Thanet
recently selected as its PPC a well-known and locally respected socialist
activist, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt. Her main opponent was Karen Constantine, a Labour
Councillor who is known locally as ambitious and self serving. Constantine was
at one point employed by the GMB, a notoriously
corrupt union.
Those with
long memories will remember their North-East Regional Secretary Andrew
Cunningham who was also Chairman of Durham County Council. In 1974 Cunningham
was gaoled for 5 years for graft and corruption, alongside John Poulson and T
Dan Smith, former leader of Newcastle Council. It was a scandal that brought down the Tory
Home Secretary of the time, Reginald Maudling. Regional Secretaries in the GMB
are unelected and unaccountable. One of their main activities is feathering
their own nests.
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| Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt - deselected by cowards on the NEC |
Constantine
was supported by the GMB in particular in her bid to become PPC. She had
however become extremely unpopular since her involvement in ‘Soapgate’
(Feb 2017) Soapgate could and should have led to her suspension from the
Labour Party. It was in essence theft from the poor and was seen as such. However under Iain McNicol a blind eye was
turned to the misdemeanours of the Right.
For example the
late Riad
al-Taher, an Iraqi member of the Labour Party who had been gaoled for 10 months
for breaching UN sanctions on Iraq which were killing thousands of Iraqis, was
expelled summarily from the Labour Party. On the other hand Jeremy Newmark, who
was Chair of the racist Jewish Labour Movement, was not suspended because his corruption, documented
at length by the Jewish
Chronicle, was considered ‘private’ by McNicol.
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| As part of the campaign around fake antisemitism allegations merely alleging that antisemitism is being weaponised is in itself 'antisemitic' |
Lush Cosmetics
is an ethical company much like Body Shop used to be. Kent Online reported that in
early 2017 it donated hundreds of pounds of goods to various charities to
support the homeless, vulnerable and disadvantaged.
Karen
Constantine got her paws on the goods and instead flogged them to raise funds
for Labour’s election campaign, in which she was involved, raising over £400 in
a table top sale. Lush gave 100 tonnes of products to 38 charities, including
Food For All. FFA handed some of them to Constantine and her agent Kaz Peet.
The pair then held a Lush for Labour sale. See Thanet Labour councillor apologises after
selling charity Lush products to raise money for election campaign
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| Lush's stolen goods |
Constantine
posted “Absolute bargains to be had -
there has never been a better time to buy a bath bomb!!!” and Kaz Peet
posted: “Many serious bargains to be had
at the sale of Lush products - this afternoon at Churchills - all funds to the
Labour party KCC campaign.” Undoubtedly this was true!! When they were
exposed they were forced to hand over the £415 collected to local
charities.
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| Douglas Murray of the Henry Jackson Society |
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| This is the intellectual racist who is motivated the NEC to deselect Rebecca |
Constantine later exclaimed that
she had not known that she could be in breach of electoral law. Selling
goods donated to a charity for private purposes is not only a breach of electoral
but charitable law and possibly a breach of the Theft Act. David Goodfellow of
The Kindness Offensive said:
“We make it very clear that anything we
donate is used for people in desperate, desperate need. I am a bit surprised as
it is made abundantly clear that these should go to the end user.”
This should have been an expulsion
offence. Selling goods intended for the
homeless for the sake of her election campaign.
Constantine
unsurprisingly lost out in her first attempt to become PPC at the 2017 General
election. In her second attempt in 2018 she lost out again to Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt.
On both occasions her behaviour at LP meetings alienated people. She had a
sense of entitlement and expectation that she should become the candidate.
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| GMB member Stuart McCann resigned because the views of his and other branches were overruled by the GMB region |
Although
nominated by the corrupt GMB union as their candidate in 2017, no local
branches of the GMB were asked for their opinions resulting in the resignation of local
GMB representative Stuart McCann. The Isle
of Thanet News reported in March
2018 McCann, a former President of the Thanet Trades Council, as saying that:
“I am sad to
say that as of today I have resigned from all my GMB posts and will also be
resigning my membership of said union (Thanet TUC) over what I believe to
be corruption at regional level in
the nominations from GMB branches for PPC candidate Karen Constantine.’
“My branch
is listed as a nominating branch, however I can confirm that W09 Asda Dartford
branch has not met to nominate Karen, in fact my branch secretary informs me he
hasn’t even heard of her never mind nominating her.”
Frank
Macklin, the GMB Regional Organiser complained that Stuart had failed to
contact him personally. At no time did he dispute the accuracy or
truthfulness of the allegations which had been made.
Constantine
was selected by Momentum to be their candidate though she has never attended a
Momentum meeting and kept her distance from the local group. Her support for
Corbyn was initially non-existent and only appeared to develop after she saw
which way the wind was blowing. Unfortunately this is symptomatic of Momentum
these days.
Since Rebecca
was elected, Karen and her supporters have consistently undermined her on a
local and national level. Most party members have no doubt that Constantine was
behind the smearing
reports of the Weekend Furlough, a nasty
far-Right blog and that Constantine was their ‘senior Labour source’.
The Weekend Furlough is published by Sam
Armstrong, a shady character who was accused of rape recently
while working in Westminster as an aide to Craig Mackinlay MP, ex UKIP and now
Tory MP for South Thanet who’s on trial at the moment over his election
expenses!!! Like many men accused of rape, Armstrong was acquitted.
These are
the people the LP are listening to.
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| Rebecca's Open Latter Explaining the Background to what happened |
However it
didn’t matter how nasty, racist and right-wing this blog is. Certain people in
the upper echelons of the Labour Party, left-overs from crooked McNicol, were
determined to do their best to undermine an elected socialist candidate. According to the Furlough:
Our first
call was to a senior Labour source – one who as a consequence of the result –
we thought might be talkative. We made the call on the 10th of April... We were
not disappointed. Over the course of a 30 minute phone
call, the individual told us that there was a “big story here” and we should be “grateful” because she was giving us a lot of news. The
individual pointed us in the direction of a lot of different allegations.
We made a note of all of them. Some did not check out – many did.
It was clear
that our source had an axe to grind and would tell us what we wanted to hear in
order that we may criticise Dr Gordon-Nesbitt. She obviously felt hurt by
the way that she thought Gordon-Nesbitt had betrayed her. Clearly at that
stage she was disappointed at recent events and wanted to lash out. Her
view was that the PPC election should be re-run. However, while much was
unfocused and unpublishable she gave us a lot that was actionable... We ended
the phone call, feeling excited. If just some of what our source had claimed
was true, this could be big. We were amazed that we had gained all of
this from an elected official.
It is clear
that this ‘elected official’ was
Constantine. Who else ‘had an axe to
grind’? The ‘Weekend Furlough’ is a local version of the Tory Guido Fawkes blog.
Here’s what Fawkes had to say
Labour’s newly-selected parliamentary
candidate in South Thanet runs a pro-Corbyn ‘think tank’ which repeatedly
defended Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker during their anti-Semitism scandals
and questioned the “Zionist sympathies” of John Bercow. Rebecca
Gordon-Nesbitt, a socialist historian who wrote a book praising Castro, was selected in Thanet earlier this month after joining
the Labour Party when Corbyn became leader. She also runs a think tank called
The Centre for Cultural Change. Whois records show Gordon-Nesbitt registered
its website and there are no other staff listed at the organisation. Its
Twitter account has repeatedly promoted Gordon-Nesbitt.
As you can see these are really
serious charges. The kind of McCarthyism you expect from the rabid Right. It is
a sad indictment of the ‘left’ on Labour’s NEC that they took this kind of
rubbish seriously. Not only was Rebecca guilty of defending Jackie Walker, who
is suspended (& in the eyes of Labour’s witchhunters you are guilty until
proven innocent) but she defended Ken Livingstone and worse still wrote a book praising
Fidel Castro. For these crimes, Labour’s witchhunters removed Rebecca as the
democratically elected PPC.
Armstrong is now communications manager with the
cold-war warriors of the Henry Jackson Society, founded by Douglas Murray, author of ‘The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam’.
The Guardian Review describes
the book thus:
Think Daily Mail columnist Katie Hopkins, but with longer
words, and for people who wouldn’t be seen dead on an English Defence League
march – although one of the more ridiculous contentions in this book by the
journalist Douglas Murray is that the EDL are actually terribly misunderstood
chaps, who have a point, and aren’t really to blame for the way their rallies
regularly end in violence.
This is the kind of scum that Labour’s NEC,
Claudia Webbe and Lansman listened to when deciding to deselect Rebecca. The
whole fake ‘antisemitism’ smears and witchhunt are driven by Zionists like
Douglas Murray. For a racist union like the GMB this is no problem.
The HJC recently held a public meeting
called “The Left’s Jewish Problem — Jeremy Corbyn, Israel
and Antisemitism” which held that ‘antisemitism is a
‘sickness’ at the heart of left-wing British politics that has become
increasingly insidious in recent years.’ Speaking at this meeting was Dave Rich of the Zionist
Community Security Trust which is responsible for the manipulation of
‘anti-Semitism’ incidents, year by year, in order to create the appearance of
ever increasing anti-Semitism in British society. Tony Lerman, the former
Director of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research, showed in ‘Anti-Semitism Redefined: Israel’s Imagined National Narrative of Endless
External Threat’ how Israel’s Mossad, took over responsibility for the
collation of statistics of anti-Semitism internationally as part of a narrative
that the only refuge from anti-Semitism is the emigration of Jews to Israel (‘Aliyah).
Alan
Mendoza, the Executive Director of the HJS was ‘aghast’ at Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis. He explained:
"It is shocking that a party such
as Labour, which used to be a big bastion of support for Israel, has now fallen
by the wayside. Of course, there are still a good
number of Labour MPs who are supportive of Israel. "I think the big change
in British politics has come on the right. There is now large support for
Israel.’
It
is clear that for the Right, Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism
crisis’ is not about hatred of Jews but criticism of Israel.
Rebecca, who was the real
left candidate, was supported by the grassroots and most local Momentum members.
She won PPC democratically and against huge odds. Have a look at the letter she
has written about the NEC decision for more details. A
number of local LP members have already resigned. The local party is united
against the decision of the NEC.
Thanet Labour councillor
apologises after selling charity Lush products to raise money for election
campaign
By Paul Francis Published: 16:30, 27
February 2017
A Labour
councillor sold cosmetics meant to benefit the homeless and disadvantaged to
charity to raise money for her election campaign instead.
Karen
Constantine, who is already a Thanet councillor and is standing in May's county
council election, raised more than £400 in a table top sale of Lush cosmetics
and other beauty products that were supposed to have been handed directly to
charities serving the homeless, vulnerable and disadvantaged.
Instead,
the cosmetics were sold to fund Labour’s county council election campaign for
candidates in South Thanet.
Karen
Constantine
Under
election law, charities are not usually considered as permissible donors.
There is
no suggestion that Lush was aware of what happened and its website makes clear
that anything it donates should not be resold or raffled as prizes.
The chain
of events began when a charity called The Kindness Offensive was offered a
100-tonne consignment of Lush products.
It gave
the products to 38 charities, including Food For All. A charity shop run by
Food for All offered some to Karen Constantine and her agent Kaz Peet, who then
collected them from London.
Lush
products were for sale on the stall
Postings
on Facebook by Karen Constantine and Kaz Peet then advertised the table sale
taking place at a Ramsgate pub on February 18 - making it clear the money made
would go towards the Labour party’s campaign costs.
In one,
Cllr Constantine said: “Don't forget the Lush for Labour sale at Churchills!
2pm today. Absolute bargains to be had - there has never been a better time to
buy a bath bomb!!!”
In
another, Kaz Peet posted: “Many serious bargains to be had at the sale of Lush
products - this afternoon at Churchills - all funds to the Labour party KCC
campaign.”
Cllr
Constantine told the KM Group she acted to rectify the situation as soon as she
was aware of it but had not known that she could be in breach of electoral law.
"I
am sorry that this happened and unreservedly apologise" - Karen
Constantine
“We made
a mistake. I was absolutely unaware of any issue that could cause problems. As
soon as I found out, we arranged for the proceeds to go to charity," she
said.
In a
statement, she added: “I fully apologise for not knowing the election funding
laws regarding charities.
"Once
the law was made clear to me and I realised there was a mistake I took
immediate steps to ensure monies raised - £415 - were donated to local
charities. I am sorry that this happened and unreservedly apologise. This will
not happen again."
David
Goodfellow of The Kindness Offensive said: “There has clearly been a mistake
here. We make it very clear that anything we donate is used for people in
desperate, desperate need. I am a bit surprised as it is made abundantly clear
that these should go to the end user.”
It is
understood that party officials in Ramsgate are due to meet tonight to discuss
the issue.
Food For
All has been approached for a comment.
A row has broken out in the Thanet Labour Party
ranks about the group’s parliamentary candidate nominations for the South of
the constituency.
This morning (March 12) former Thanet Trade Union
Council President and GMB (General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trade
Union) member Stuart McCann resigned all his roles in protest at a regional
level nomination for South Thanet candidate Karen Constantine.
In a statement Mr McCann, who remains a member of
the Labour Party, said: “I am sad to say that as of today I have resigned from
all my GMB posts and will also be resigning my membership of said union (Thanet
TUC) over what I believe to be corruption at regional level in the
nominations from GMB branches for PPC candidate Karen Constantine.
“My branch is listed as a nominating branch,
however I can confirm that W09 Asda Dartford branch has not met to nominate
Karen, in fact my branch secretary informs me he hasn’t even heard of her never
mind nominating her.”
Candidates
The resignations centre on the contest for South
Thanet’s parliamentary candidate for Labour. The candidate voted in will fight
to take the constituency seat from Tory Craig Mackinlay in the scheduled May,
2022, General Election.
Hustings are currently underway and there are six
candidates, including Cllr Constantine. The others are Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt,
Raushan Ara, Helen Elizabeth Whitehead, Simon Warley and Mohammed Rodwan
Abouharb.
The argument is that Cllr Constantine has already
been ‘given’ the role as PPC due to regional GMB backing.
Cllr Constantine announced the backing on social
media saying UNISON South East Labour Link Committee had voted to nominate her
as well as five GMB branches.
GMB response
Frank Macklin, GMB Regional Organiser, responded to
the accusation by Mr McCann, in a social media post. He said: “As the officer
responsible for Stuart and his workplace, I was made aware of Stuart’s issues
via social media. At no time has Stuart contacted me personally about his
issues surrounding the endorsement of Branches for parliamentary candidates
“If Stuart had contacted me I would have given him
the same advice that I have now had to do on social media.
I have advised Stuart to raise this matter with the region and if he is unhappy with the response he receives he can then invoke the complaints procedure under the GMB rulebook
I have advised Stuart to raise this matter with the region and if he is unhappy with the response he receives he can then invoke the complaints procedure under the GMB rulebook
“Unfortunately Stuart has chosen not to do this but
instead he has chosen to air his grievance on this forum, which is a shame. I
have known Stuart for a number of years and I am truly sorry that as a
longstanding trade unionist he does not trust his union enough to at least give
them the chance to investigate his grievance properly.”
Mr Macklin added that: “Trade union democracy and
procedures should be explored to find an amicable resolution.”
A GMB Southern Region spokesman added: “The GMB
Southern region can confirm that Karen Constantine has been nominated by the
GMB in the Labour Party selection process for Parliamentary candidate in South
Thanet.
“Following our internal procedures this nomination
has been endorsed by our regional committee. This nomination was submitted to
the Labour Party in accordance with the Labour Party selection timetable.
“GMB has very recently become aware of comments
made by an ex GMB member regarding this process. The regional political officer
has asked for the substance of the complaints (if any) to be clarified to
us in writing.”
TUC
The national Trades Union Congress (TUC) declined
to comment.
Thanet TUC is hosting the hustings for
candidates at the Red Arrows Club, Newington Road, on March 21 at 7pm.
TTUC President Jon Flaig said: “This is not a
matter for Thanet Trades Union Council. We are friends with both Stuart McCann
and the GMB and hope they can resolve this matter.”
Cllr Constantine has been asked for comment.
Labour
Candidate’s Think Tank Defended Ken and Jackie Walker – Guido Fawkes
Latest
in Guido’s Candidate Watch
series: Labour’s newly-selected parliamentary candidate in South Thanet runs a
pro-Corbyn ‘think tank’ which repeatedly defended Ken Livingstone and Jackie
Walker during their anti-Semitism scandals and questioned the “Zionist
sympathies” of John Bercow. Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, a socialist
historian who wrote a book praising Castro, was selected
in Thanet earlier this month after joining the Labour Party when Corbyn became
leader. She also runs a think tank called The Centre for Cultural Change. Whois
records show Gordon-Nesbitt registered its website and there are no other staff
listed at the organisation. Its Twitter account has repeatedly promoted
Gordon-Nesbitt.
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