Lloyd Russell-Moyle – the Double Barrelled Hypocrite who was imposed as Chair of Brighton & Hove Labour Party

Caught passing information to the Compliance Unit - Moyle deprecates social media abuse unless he is doing it

Lloyd Russell-Moyle specialises in conflict resolution but seems to cause more conflicts than he resolves

What can one say about someone who wrote to me on 22^nd August saying that

I am of a firm belief that one should say things publicly which are kind, and if you are unable to say that then one must be quite [sic] and say nothing on blogs and social media, esp about members. This is relevant when it comes to other members. I believe that attacking other members for taking (what you might believe is the wrong view) publicly brings the party into disrepute and it is an attempt to intimidate people from not saying anything. 

Admirable sentiments to be sure, but not quite at one with his actions!

Just over a week ago, in conversation with others including Sam Wheeler, a member of the Momentum Steering Committee and one of those who caved into the Jewish Labour Movement’s racist witch-hunt by removing Jackie Walker as Vice-Chair was not quite so restrained. Another participant was Joe Riches, a councillor and Yorkshire regional organiser of the Jeremy for Labour campaign who told Sheffield Momentum not to hold a stall at a Corbyn rally and was told where to go.  Indeed Moyle's comments fit squarely into the definition of abuse that has got thousands of Labour members suspended.  Moyle wrote:

‘I am the chair of his clp [District Labour Party in fact] and can tell you he is an abusive, unpleasant little man.  I have told him that to his face.  He alienates people who should be his natural supporters... he has gone about bullying the (Jewish, 17 year old) chair of our young labour group... abusing cllrs and being disruptive at meetings even when the “left” was winning.  There was not a right wing coup Brighton but an authoritarian move from the national office to suspend when the left was elected....’

A classic example of do what I say rather than what I do

i.                    Moyle obviously finds my height of some significance.  Perhaps I should also associate being a liar with having ginger hair!  It has about as much logic.

ii.                  Moyle said nothing to my face because he is one of those people who is polite to someone's face and then goes gossiping when their backs are turned.    

iii.                There is no truth in the allegation that I bullied anyone.  Yes I suggested to the Chair of Young Labour in Brighton when he announced to the world that he was joining the JLM that he was joining a group that defended ethnic cleansing.  Should age protect young people from the implications of their actions or should one patronise them and refuse to discuss 'adult' topics even over twitter?  Perhaps we should have been politer with 15 and 16 year old National Front supporters according to this same logic?

iv.                Likewise I pointed out to Progress councillors Caroline Penn and Emma Daniels, who also joined the JLM that they were joining an organisation which supports Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories and that its methods include minor things like the beating up and torture of 12 year old children and shackling and depriving them of liberty without access to their parents.  Unsurprisingly Daniels, Penn and 17 yr old Joe were all Owen Smith supporters.

v.                  It is a lie that I have disrupted any meetings, but what is one lie among many?

vi.                The idea that there wasn’t a right-wing coup in Brighton is fanciful.  It was the false allegations of Moyle’s councillor friends which enabled the national party to intervene and suspend the Party.  

Russell-Moyle is one of those fairweather Corbyn supporters whose only firm principle is the need to advance his own career.  Despite policy being passed by the local party opposing my suspension, Moyle has repeatedly written to the Compliance Unit urging them to take swifter action and to ensure that they have a water-tight case for expulsion.  Being a believer in openness, honesty and transparency, he didn't think of copying me into the correspondence.

A heavily redacted e-mail from Moyle to the Compliance Unit

Moyle served as Chair of the DLP for little over 6 months.  During that time he managed to alienate most members.  At one meeting Clare Wadey, herself a member of the Executive, challenged Moyle’s high-handed and undemocratic behaviour such that he ordered her from the meeting.  When his ruling was put to the vote it was overwhelmingly defeated.   On another occasion he tried to use procedural rules he had invented to prevent an emergency motion in support of the Doctors' strike.  Again he lost.

What provoked Moyle’s ire?  Primarily my response to a fatuous Executive statement on anti-Semitism issued at the height of the fake anti-Semitism hysteria.

The statement began ‘Following the recent reports of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party’.  It tookas its starting point the fake and contrived campaign against ‘anti-Semitism’ that Progress, John Mann and the right-wing media concocted. 

It then confused what it calls ‘revisionist history’ i.e. Holocaust denial with ‘(making) links between the Nazi regime and the demand for a safe homeland’ i.e. Zionism.  Zionism was not a demand for a safe homeland, it was a movement for a Jewish settler colonial state in a land where it was intended that the indigenous population, the Palestinians, would be ethnically cleansed.  Leading Zionists such as Arthur Ruppin were quite clear about this at the time.  Zionism was a movement to establish a state of Jewish racial supremacy not a state whose primary purpose was saving Jews from the Holocaust.  That was why David Ben-Gurion in reaction to the Kindertransport, which the Zionists opposed, after Kristalnacht told the Mapai (Israeli Labour Party) Central Committee on 7.12.38 that:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.

This quote can be found in the official biography of Ben Gurion, 'The Burning Ground: 1886-1948' by Shabtai Teveth on p.855.   The whole chapter, entitled 'Disaster Means Strength' on the Nazi Holocaust and Zionism is worth reading for the cynical Zionist attitude that saw the Holocaust as a golden opportunity for advancing Zionist claims to a Jewish state.  In fact their attitude differs little from their exploitation of the Holocaust for Zionist purposes today.

Moyle's statement on 'anti-Semitism'  repeats for a second time that there is a growth in anti-Semitic attacks in Europe, a dubious proposition in itself.  It then informed people that ‘Anti-Semitism is a distinct form of racism’.  Another meaningless statement since all forms of racism are distinctive in their own way.

As a classic example of the muddle headedness of the Labour Right on Palestine the statement then went on to declare that ‘Recent increases in people using "Zionist" as a substitute for "Jew" cannot be tolerated in our Party or our communities.’  Perhaps Lloyd and co. were unaware that it is the Zionists who assert that being Jewish and Zionist is one and the same.  For example in this week’s Jewish Chronicle there is an article Board criticises pro-Palestinian Soas students’ anti-Zionism event in which Marie van der Zyl, the Board of Deputies of British Jews vice-president, said:

 “For the vast majority of British Jews, political, cultural and religious affiliation with the state of Israel is a fundamental part of their Jewish identity.’

The occasion for this statement was the fact that students at the School of Oriental & African Studies had invited non-Zionist Jews to a meeting to discuss the differences between Zionism and Jews.  The Zionist Board didn't like this since it spends most of its time trying to confuse the two as well as closing down any meetings with which it doesn't agree!  In Israel dissidents are simply interned, subject to 6 months administrative detention without trial, which sometimes lasts for years.  In Britain they simply try to prevent free speech.  It is a constant theme of Zionists that being Jewish and Zionist is one and the same and hence anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is also the same.  Except of course for the thousands of Jewish anti-Zionists who are 'self-hater's, a term borrowed from the Nazi lexicon.  According to the Nazis, German anti-fascists also hated themselves since they denied the primacy of 'race' and 'nation' hence they hated themselves since, for fascists, a person only exists to serve the nation/race.

The article starts ‘The Board of Deputies has condemned a planned event by a pro-Palestinian student group which aims to separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism.’  Quite understandably, the BOD wishes to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, i.e, hatred of Jews with support for the Palestinians.  Lloyd was not however calling out Zionists who deliberately conflate  the terms ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew’.

Having muddled up just about everything it was possible to muddle, the statement went on to say that ‘The existence of Israel and its peoples right to self determination should not be questioned more than anyone's right to a nation.’  What Moyle omitted to say (or more likely was too ignorant to have inquired into) is that Israel is not just another state, but a Jewish state in which racism is enmeshed in the fabric of the state – the Israeli state is the most racist state in the world.  This is because it is the only active settler colonial state today in the world.  It is a state consisting of Jews and non-Jews.  There is according to Zionist ideology no Israeli nation – the Israeli courts ruled against this in George Tamarin v State of Israel in 1972 and again in Uzi Ornan v State of Israel in 2013.

In the latter case Ha’aretz noted that the Supreme Court’s ‘statement that there is no such entity as an Israeli nation strongly echoes the statement by Golda Meir when she was prime minister that “there is no Palestinian people.” 

One of Moyle's redacted emails

In Tamarin Justice Agranat ruled that ‘the desire to create an Israeli nation separate from the Jewish nation is not a legitimate aspiration. A division of the population into Israeli and Jewish nations would … negate the foundation on which the State of Israel was established.’  In plain English, as a Jewish state, Israel is a state not only of its own Jewish citizens but Jews living outside the state, like myself.  The problem with Israel, uniquely amongst states, is that it is not a state of its own citizens but a state of Jews, be they citizens or not.

So the concept of the right of Israeli people to self-determination is a nonsense.  There is no Israeli people.  Zionism refuses to accept such a notion.  Ipso facto there cannot be Israeli self-determination. See Discrimination is legal, there are no Israelis: Reading the Supreme Court’s decisions on Israeli nationality.  Of course I wouldn’t expect Moyle to understand any of this since he takes pride in his ignorance.

The final part of Moyle's statement was that ‘many tens of thousands of Israeli citizens criticise their government on a daily basis through democratic processes.’ is simply making a virtue out of stupidity.   The anti-Zionist and anti-racist Left in Israel probably doesn’t even comprise more than a thousand Israeli Jews.  That was the situation in South Africa where anti-apartheid whites were a tiny handful. Israel is a state where there is a permanent state of emergency, where torture is regularly used (mainly against Palestinians) where segregation in education, land, employent is the rule and where even Israeli Palestinians live there as guests, on suffererance.  In the Occupied West Bank the situation is an openly apartheid one since there are two different legal systems - one for Jewish settlers and one for Palestinians.

Moyle might be forgiven his ignorance except that he reacted to my letter criticising his statement by writing to the Compliance Unit asking them to speed up my expulsion.  Unfortunately for the hapless Moyle, I gained access to his letters via a Subject Access Request.  True LP HQ did blank out his name but it wasn’t difficult to discern that there was only one rat who would write as an informer to the Compliance Unit.  To Russell-Moyle the Compliance Unit is a neutral body implementing Labour Party rules, even if they occasionally get it wrong, rather than a body which interprets and uses the rule as part of the campaign against supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. 

The fact that the Compliance Unit and LP Headquarters have, in a vain attempt to stop Jeremy Corbyn being elected, expelled, suspended or otherwise deprived of their vote thousands of Labour Party members is of no account.  The fact that his own Party has been suspended means nothing.

One only need contrast the behaviour of Moyle with that of Kathy Runswick and Paul Davies, Chair and Vice Chair of Wallasey CLP who have fought the Compliance Unit on behalf of their parties rather than acting as a second-rate member of the Stasi.

I wrote to  Moyle when I first discovered that he was an informer.  Being in a forgiving mood I offered him an opportunity to apologise and I would not publicise the matter.  In response Moyle wrote that:

‘Tony, 

I wrote to the regional office on a number of occasions about differnt members. Generally I take and took the view that conflicts should be handled in a clam, friendly and local manor and not escalated to national office. 

After the investigation was started and after a number of phone calls with Mr Gregson on your behalf asking him to expedite the process, be open and transparent I wrote to him on the following matters:

1.       Abuse of other members

2.       Speed of investigation

3.       Revelation of accusation/making the case watertight

I believe point 2 is mutually agreeable by all, that any case must be quickly dealt with and I have repeated this call a number of times. 

I believe that point 3 is in hindsight poorly worded from myself, but is an attempt to get across that you must be told what you are being accused of and that any case must be clear cut and not smoke a mirrors. I believe that you often try and run rings around people on the political stance, when in essence the complaint it actually about your unpleasant behaviour. In this regard, whist i'm no expert, I think a case based only on anti-semitism would not stand up against you, but your behaviour is something to be desired. 

Point 1 is my concerns at your ongoing abuse on social media to our members from yourself. Your are not the only members who I have written to Harry Gregson about their use of social media, including members of the current executive who I have had to pass on their writings after complaints have been made. 

Once a formal complaint has been made to the Party, I pass on all infomation I have on that person to the national office for them to investigate because its effectually taken out of my hands. 

I am of a firm belief that one should say things publicly which are kind, and if you are unable to say that then one must be quite and say nothing on blogs and social media, esp about members. This is relevant when it comes to other members. I believe that attacking other members for taking (what you might believe is the wrong view) publicly brings the party into disrepute and it is an attempt to intimidate people from not saying anything. 

This works both ways and I can assure you I have made complaints and reported abuse on all sides. 

You will note that I not once challenged or asserted that you were an anti-semite, in fact the very opposite, I believe that the party shouldn't pursue any political case against you, because it could well fail. I do however believe that your behavior to other comrades (even if you don't consider them comrades) is intolerable and must stop. 

I hope that you can accept my limited apoligy for point 3 being poorly worded, and I hope that you will understand that whilst I don't regard you as an anti-semite, I do believe that to style, tone and manor which you comment to be very unpleasant and to have no place in the Labour Party. 

On this, I believe that people can change, they can reform and that support for you to understand how human being should talk to each other in professional communications could help you. 

Yours

Lloyd

As a result of this grudging half-apology I decided to let the matter rest until the Facebook comments above surfaced.  Again I offered Lloyd the opportunity to apologise and explain himself.  Clearly he felt incapable of either offering an explanation or an apology, hence this post.

By his own definition, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, if he has any integrity left, will shortly be referring himself, of his own volition to the Compliance Unit!

Politically the conclusion to be drawn from this is that there is a layer of soft-Corbyn supporters and low level officials and councillors who believe that the Labour Party machine is a neutral instrument that can be captured intact and then used against other socialists in the Labour Party.

Tony Greenstein