Another Fine Mess
Iain McNicol
–v- Tony Greenstein
another fine mess
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| Having done his best to lose Labour the General Electon 'gormless' McNicol pursues a Witchhunt in his own shambolic way |
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| Bogus letter that McNicol's legal team relied on |
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| Actual letter sent to Tony Greenstein with bundle of documents |
On the 30th May I had
an investigation meeting conducted by the Southern Regional Organiser Harry
Gregson. The Transcript of our Exchange
can be viewed here.[See also Labour’s
Inquisition – from the banal to the mundane] Suffice to say Gregson did not
have a clue as to what it was that he was supposed to be investigating.
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| The JLM's whining plea that my criticism of them would 'further exasperate (sic!) the problem of anti-Semitism in the party.' |
I therefore decided on 13th
May to apply, under the Data Protection Act, for copies of all documents relating
to me to be disclosed by the Labour Party.
Suffice to say the 40 days allowed for by the DPA was exceeded and it
was only on 15th July, 60 days later, that I was supplied with about
300 pages of documents. Many of these
documents were either duplicates of each other or correspondence that I already
had.
A number of the documents were
redacted, i.e. blacked out.
Correspondents’ names were deleted and often large chunks of text were
deleted and in the case of 4 documents everything was blacked out. What, I wondered, did they have to hide? In some cases it was possible to guess the
identity of the informant. In other
cases they blacked out a name in the header and then kindly left it at the end
of the document.
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| McNicol's idea of disclosure |
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| McNicol's idea of a full and frank disclosure - the question is what is he hiding? |
At other times, it was obvious from the context and content who the correspondent was. E.g. it is difficult not to recognise the whining voice of the Jewish Labour Movement’s Chair, Jeremy Newmark, complaining about my criticism of the little racists and urging McNicol to speed up the expulsion!
Nonetheless in a significant number
of cases, it was impossible to discern what was being hidden. It was also clear from some of the comments
left in that many of the remarks were prejudicial asides from the very Labour
Party staff who were supposed to be impartially administering the process.
I therefore wrote to the Labour
Party demanding that there be full disclosure.
Suffice to say I received no response (Labour Party bureaucrats rarely
engage in correspondence. From some of
the correspondence it is clear that they debate among themselves whether they
should response. This is quite understandable as they don’t see themselves as
accountable to anyone.
I therefore decided, having taken
legal advice via the Bar Pro Bono Unit that I would initiate legal proceedings on
8th May against McNicol for full disclosure of the redacted
documents. On 22nd June the case
was listed for a hearing on August 8th.
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| Leaks to the national press about my suspension - at the same time as telling me nothing |
Until the 28th July,
just over a week before the hearing, I had heard nothing. ‘Crooked’ McNicol was, I assumed, still
recovering from the shock of the election result that he’d done so much to prevent.
On 4th August McNicol’s solicitors
whacked in a 9 page witness
statement, a bill of costs for £7,000 (McNicol’s legal beavers don’t come
cheap) and two files containing some 350+ pages of exhibits. All were sent via 2
massive email files.
I noticed on the tail of the
email a message ‘William Sturges LLP does not accept service of any court proceedings or
other documents by email’. I
therefore sent them an email informing them that Tony Greenstein also doesn’t
accept service of court documents by email, especially when there are 350 pages
of them to print off. Suffice to say
they sent them by snail mail, arriving on 6th August, i.e. less than
2 days before the hearing!
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| Satirical take on the logical implications of Labour's false anti-Semitism witch hunt is entirely lost on McNicol's humourless minions |
Going through the witness statement
I noticed a curious thing.. In Para. 8 it
stated that ‘The Party replied to the SAR
on 10 November 2016.’ This was
rather curious since they had responded on 15th July, some 4 months
earlier. Consulting their Bundle, there
was a letter, not much different from the one I had received, dated
10.11.16. Even more curious, it was addressed
to me at an address I haven’t lived at for 14 years!
When I first moved to this address
in 1993 I had also been suspended from the Labour Party along with about 30 others. After my one year suspension was up I briefly
rejoined the party and received an agenda to a meeting of Woodingdean LP which
announced that the Ward was supporting some local racist campaign to get rid of
Gypsies from the local park. Zionism in
the Labour Party party is bad enough without a dose of anti-gypsy racism
too.
I know that the Progress Right
and people like Cllrs. Poison Penn and Emma Daniels, who parade their
opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ (i.e. support for anti-Palestinian racism) are
only too happy to go along with anti-Gypsy/Roma racism but I wasn’t prepared to
remain a member of a party that tolerated this racism. Although it is convenient to forget it today,
since the Holocaust is treated as a Jewish only affair, but proportionately as
many Gypsies/Roma were exterminated by the Nazis as Jews. Clearly my old address had remained on file
and equally clearly McNicol’s incompetent buffoons in the Compliance Unit had
somehow managed to swap my old for my
current address, whilst forgetting that they had already mailed out a Bundle of
Documents.
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| Letter to The Times |
Either that or the Labour Party had
simply forged the letter of 10 November as I initially suspected. Either way Jay Sharda’s tortured explanation
for why the documents were disclosed 4 months after they had actually been
disclosed was pure waffle. However it
wasn’t until I emailed the letter to William Sturges and the Court that McNicol’s
solicitors woke up to the fact that their whole case was based on the wrong set
of documents!
Suffice to say that it was a
rather shamefaced solicitor and barrister who approached me to agree on an
adjournment which I had already indicated I would be applying for as even I
find it difficult to assimilate 350 pages of documents and a torturous witness
statement at less than 2 days notice. In
fact I did pen a response
to a witness statement was dishonest and dissembling.
To give a flavour of Sharda’s witness
statement take the following example from para. 21(b):
The Claimant also openly regards
Muslims as "the route [sic] cause of our [the Party's] problems"
[315] and talks with his followers about how it is "tempting" to
shoot a Jewish Labour Movement staff member for being a Zionist [332 - 333].
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| A humorous exchange on Twitter becomes a plot to murder the fragrant Ella Rose |
Not only am I an anti-Semite but I am also Islamaphobic and
to cap it all I want to shoot a member of the JLM staff (its Director, the
fragrant Ella Rose). Clearly if these
accusations are true then I deserve to be expelled. Indeed ‘Crooked’ McNicol deserves to be censored
for not having ensured that I was expelled months ago. But what is the truth of these allegations?
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| Letter to the Telegraph after article insinuating antiSemitism |
Sharda referred to two documents, the first on pages 315-6. This is an email of 3 May 2016 to Iain
McNicol from me. It was entitled ‘Rule Change re Anti-Semitism – Proposal Which
Should Satisfy All Parties’. I realise
that McNicol’s minions are a few sandwiches short of a picnic, as well as being
humourless, but a proposal from me which suggests that all applicants to the Labour
Party should have their membership vetted by the Israeli Embassy might just alert
them to the fact that this was satire.
Clearly not.
In the email I take McNicol and
co. to task for the fact that their concern with ‘anti-Semitism’ revolves
around the use of language. They reduce
the Holocaust to a set of acceptable phrases and use of terms like ‘Final
Solution’ is verboten. Their concern is
not with the lessons of the Holocaust but treating it as some form of sacred
icon. In that way they never draw any
parallels between Nazi Germany and European fascism and what is happening in Israel
today.
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| Labour supporting Telegraph prints the Compliance Unit's leaks |
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| The Telegraph has second thoughts |
For example Naz Shah MP used the
words ‘transport’ – apparently this is anti-Semitic as it might refer to the
transport the Nazis used to deport Holocaust victims. Whilst the Labour Right
turns a blind eye to actual living examples of racism in Israel, which they
portray as a democratic state, they examine under the microscope any deviation
from language norms for signs that they might be ‘anti-Semitic’. So a state
where chants of ‘Death to the Arabs’ is a norm or where Palestinians have their
houses and villages demolished for Jewish settlers is held out to be a paragon
of western democracy. But if you put a
syllable wrong when it comes to the Holocaust, if you don’t pay due deference
to language whilst ignoring the real lessons of what happened in Europe then
you are classified as ‘anti-Semitic’ by these racist hypocrites. One might have thought though that a well paid
solicitor might have been put on notice that satire is used as a way of
highlighing the idiocy of his client’s views.
Obviously not.
The second example is even more ludicrous
(if that is possible). Readers may
remember the Al Jazeera programme, The Lobby, about
dirty tricks by the Israeli Embassy, the JLM and Labour Friends of Israel in
the Labour Party last January. In one of the clips the juvenile Director of the
JLM Ella Rose is captured as saying ‘I’m
a Zionist shoot me’. On Twitter a
few of us therefore agreed how tempting this invitation was! Only a complete fool or idiot would take such
a comment seriously.
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| The Times withdrew its insinuation of anti-Semitism |
The
Hearing
At the hearing yesterday, having
received my response to their witness statement at 4 am, McNicol’s minions were
suitably subdued having got everything including the documentation wrong. At the hearing itself Directions were agreed
for the filing of documents. The Labour Party legal representatives made
themselves look pretty stupid because the Labour Party has no record of sending
me a bundle of documents in May 2016! So
it is up to me to supply them with a list of what they sent to me. Utterly absurd but McNicol’s witch hunters
are not merely reactionary apologists for racism but extremely incompetent ones
too. I therefore made an application that regardless of the eventual outcome of
the case, the costs of the attendance of the Labour Party’s legal representatives
should be borne by the Labour Party not me.
Although their barrister resisted my application the Judge agree with
the application and she ruled that no order for costs would be made. McNicol and co. will therefore pay at least
£1,000 out of members’ subs because John Stolliday and the Compliance Unit are
incompetent fools.
Despite the attempt of the Labour
Party legal team prior to today’s hearing to have the whole application
rejected, in the end they were forced to agree to a timetable over the next 3
months for the service and preparation of documents.
Thus the stage will be set by
October 16th or thereafter for battle to be joined on whether or not
the Labour Party is allowed to drive a coach and horses through the Data
Protection Act by supplying blacked out documents to protect the identity of
its staff and informants. Watch this
space!
And thanks to Becky and Anne
from Brighton and Hove Momentum who accompanied me and provided me with moral
support!
Tony Greenstein
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