Solidarity is the Bread and Butter of Socialism – That’s Why I Called Out the Participation of Novara Media in a Celebration of Jewish Radicalism

An Injury to One is an Injury to All – Rivkah Brown’s Attack on Chris Williamson as a ‘Jew Baiter’ Causes Jewish Voice for Labour to Withdraw

It was two days ago that Becky Massey, an expelled comrade in Brighton & Hove Labour Left Alliance sent round a What’s App message about a meeting ‘A Celebration of Jewish Radicalism’ next Tuesday.

Such meetings are, of course, to be welcomed given that Starmer and his glove puppet Evans operate on the basis that the only Jews that matter are racists, Zionists and reactionaries like themselves. However the description of one of the speakers, Rivkah Brown of Novara Media as ‘radical’ is highly questionable.

Her attack on Chris Williamson as a ‘Jew baiter’ is outrageous. Despite being asked, numerous times, Rivkah has not provided a sliver of proof. If she knew anything about anti-Semitism or racism she would know that the term ‘Jew baiter’ is reserved for those few people who are not merely common and garden anti-Semites but pathological haters of Jews.

The JLM repaid Corbyn by voting no confidence in him!

Chris Williamson was someone that I and other Jewish people were happy to campaign for at the last election. There is nothing he has said that is at all anti-Semitic. This charge by the racist Zionist Board of Deputies is entirely without merit.

It is another example of how the Zionists, in order to defend the Apartheid State of Israel not only demonise their critics but drain all meaning out of the term anti-Semitism. That Rivkah Brown makes this charge, without even a sliver of proof, demonstrates that despite her alleged criticism of Israel as an apartheid state, she is borrowing her vocabulary from the Zionists she purports to oppose.

Given what Chris Williamson has been through and his demonisation at the hands of the right-wing of the Labour Party and the British press, the least he is entitled to is solidarity. The failure of Rivkah Brown and indeed the whole of the Novara Media group to extend any solidarity to Chris is shameful.

Peter Mandelson strangely enough has not been suspended for disagreeing with the EHRC Report Recommendation

It was solidarity or the lack of it from the British working class that led to the defeat of the Miners 35 years ago. It is the lack of solidarity among the Labour Left, epitomized by the role of Jon Lansman and Owen Jones in attacking Jewish socialists, which led to the crushing defeat at last December’s General Election.

There is no need to go into why the issue of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party was always a confected and false narrative that bore no relationship to reality. For those who are interested in the details see my Open Letter to Members of Labour’s National Executive Committee.

When it came to genuine racism from the Labour's Right had no problems, it was just 'antisemitism'

Suffice to say that if the Left had stood up to the suspensions and expulsions from the very start then Jeremy Corbyn could be Prime Minister today. If the false narrative of ‘anti-Semitism’ from a right-wing that has been riddled with racism (including anti-Semitism) for decades had been called out at the start, then the anti-Corbyn campaign could have been halted in its tracks. Labour’s Right even failed to oppose the Immigration Act 2014 which introduced the ‘hostile environment policy which in turn led to the Windrush Scandal.

Let us remember that the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign began with that well known anti-racist paper the Daily Mail, the paper which employed Katie Hopkins of ‘refugees are cockroaches’ fame.

'Antisemitism is a menace' is a cliche of Jones and his identity politics - Google how many times he uses it

However the poisonous legacy of identity politics, in which Jews are held to be oppressed just like Black and Muslims triumphed.  People like Lansman and Owen Jones counterposed White privileged Jews in British society to those who are really at the sharp end of racism.

Anti-Semitism must of course be fought, not with expulsions but by challenging it whenever it rears its ugly head. I have done so tonight with a racist on Twitter and have never failed to challenge holocaust denial but not because Jews are in any danger but because racism divides us and gives false solutions to the problems of capitalism.

There is no Jewish Windrush Scandal

But to pretend that Jews are oppressed or exploited in the same way as Black people in this society is a falsehood. There is no crime of driving whilst Jewish, Jews don’t face Stop and Search, economic discrimination, disproportionate imprisonment or the institutional racism of the Police force. Being Jewish in British society is not a disadvantage which is why even Boris Johnson professes a concern for ‘anti-Semitism’ (whilst being the author of a novel 72 Virgins which is anti-Semitic).

McDonnell never stopped appeasing the Zionists

If the Left of the Labour Party had shown resolve, if Corbyn hadn’t sulked and thrown his friends under the bus and instead addressed the false narrative, if John McDonnell hadn’t appeased the Right, if Jon Lansman hadn’t obsessed about ‘unconscious anti-Semitism’ and Owen Jones hadn’t been concerned to flatter his own ego then things might have been different. However we are where we are.

Floating in the shadows in the past few years has been an outfit called Novara Media. I was never very sure as to what they stood for or represented or indeed what they did. Aaron Bastani, their founder, addressed a Brighton Momentum meeting a couple of years ago and managed to say very little of relevance as far as I can recall but he didn’t attack Chris Williamson and Jackie Walker.

Ash Sarkar I had seen on television and I can remember she used to have a Twitter account which boast that she ‘fucked like a champion’ which struck me as somewhat odd as I wasn’t aware that fucking was now a regulated sport. I am told that this particular boast has now been taken down.

What I was unaware of, until Becky drew my attention to it, was the attack by Novara Media on Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson.  According to Rivkah Brown, of whom I had heard nothing until now, he was a ‘Jew baiter’. Ash Sarkar described Jackie Walker as a ‘crank’ and also supported removing the whip from Chris Williamson (alongside Ian Austin, Tom Watson et al). Aaron Bastani was all in favour of expelling Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker.

Clearly this was a Lansmanite style set up without a principle in sight. Ash Sarkar ventured that ‘characterising proceedings as a witch-hunt helps absolutely no one’ which rather begs the question, how would she characterise the expulsion and suspension of hundreds if not thousands of activists?  The mad hatter’s tea party?

I therefore wrote 2 days ago to leading members of Jewish Voices for Labour asking that they disown the meeting, which they were down as hosting, alongside Red Labour.

Well today I was told by JVL that they had indeed withdrawn their sponsorship of the meeting, although Naomi Wimborne-Iddrissi would be speaking in a personal capacity.

I also contacted some of the speakers, including Leon Rosselsson, Alexei Sayle, Andrew Feinstein and David Rosenberg to let them know who they were appearing besides.

The previously unknown Rivkah Brown attacks the one MP who stood up to those under attack

Only tonight I have learnt that Paddy O’Keefe, a long standing peace activist and who represents Equity on Brighton & Hove Trades Council has been suspended for the third time. Nearly all of the 24 pages of the allegations against Paddy relate to postings which predate his original suspension and reinstatement in Feb 2019. This is Starmer’s justice.  Someone should tell this ‘Racist without Qualification’ that there is a rule called double jeopardy. If someone has been reinstated after an investigation into a set of charges you can’t resuspend them on the basis of the same allegations!

Novara Media are the Establishment’s acceptable face of the Labour Left. We should make it clear that they are unacceptable to us as long as they feed the witchhunt of socialists.

Tony Greenstein

The Only Decent Journalist on the Guardian is their Cartoonist – Steve Bell

When you scratch a Liberal you find a Reactionary – The Guardian’s reaction to a Socialist leader of Labour was Predictable

Forget the Chakrbartys, the Gary Younge’s and George Monbiots, the only genuine anti-racist and anti-imperialist journalist with the Guardian these days is their brilliant cartoonist, Steve Bell.

Yesterday the Guardian, once again, censured a cartoon in which Israel's racist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu featured. One wonders just what the problem of Kath Viner, the Guardian's cowardly editor is.

Netanyahu has literally allied himself with a party, Otzma Yehudit, which is a neo-Nazi party in order to slide into government once again. He is a man who complained that too many Arabs were voting and who contradicts an actress, Rotem Sala, 'explaining' to her that no Arabs are not equal citizens in Israel.  Israel is a Jewish not a democratic state.

Yet the Guardian's cowardly editor and its equally cowardly journalists maintain their silence as the only socialist on the staff is censured by this bastion of free speech.

Email to Kath Viner and the Guardian's gutless staff by Steve Bell

The rest of them are washed up liberals. Not only did 60 of Labour’s finest racist peers launch an attack on Corbyn yesterday via the Guardian but the paper’s former Jewish Chronicle pundit and her colleagues, Jessica Elgot (who has blocked me on Twitter!) wrote a story based around the treachery of these unelected aristocrats.

He may be a racist but that doesn't stop John Reid protesting about 'antisemitism'

I couldn’t help but notice the name of John Reid.  Ex-Stalinist he has a good claim to have been the most racist Home Secretary in living memory.  It would certainly be a hard fought contest with David Blunkett who tried to stop the children of asylum seekers going to school because then they would become integrated in the local community and harder to remove.

As the Guardian wrote in its more liberal days, i.e. when the capitalist system wasn’t threatened with having a socialist as Prime Minister, ‘Controversial proposals to deny asylum seekers rights to educate their children in British schools are facing a legal challenge because they breach human rights legislation.’ Blunkett wanted separate schools for asylum seekers in detention centres because that would make deportation easier.

Nick Blake QC wrote that:

‘'Blunkett's obnoxious language of "swamping" is unnecessary, inappropriate and offensive. How can a separate educational regime for asylum seeking children be other than discrimination?'

 Another New Labour racist who signed the letter from the peers was Beverley Hughes, a former Immigration Minister.  An article ‘Tough new asylum laws 'too draconian' in the Telegraph of all places described how ‘New rules to strip asylum seekers of benefits were condemned as "draconian and appalling" by refugee campaigners.’ New Labour’s Beverley Hughes was quoted as saying that

‘It is a reasonable expectation that desperate people fleeing for their lives will claim asylum as soon as they can. It is not acceptable for people to claim asylum after being in Britain for weeks or months working illegally, simply as a way of staying on at the taxpayers' expense."

Labour peers advert in the Guardian

Here you see their racist logic in action.  Asylum seekers are condemned for working illegally, having had their benefits removed and yet they are also condemned for staying on at the tax payer’s expense. In all the furore over the fake anti-Semitism people forget just how deeply racist these people were. ‘Anti-Semitism’ has brought people like Norman Tebbit even out of the woodwork and that is the best proof there is that if Tebbit and Trump condemn it, then it’s not anti-Semitism.

When people like Reid, Blunkett or Hughes condemn anti-Semitism, we should treat it in the same way as when Donald Trump tells 4 Black Congresswomen to go back to the home they never came from and then adds, for good measure, a condemnation of their ‘anti-Semitism’.

Anti-Semitism today is being weaponised by the Right and it is only fools and knaves like Momentum’s racist fuhrer Jon Lansman who refuses to see it.

That is why I support moves to break away from Momentum since the urgent need today as the vultures of the Right hover is for a fightback against those who weaponise anti-Semitism.  Following the AGM of Brighton and Hove Momentum last night members of the Labour Party have decided to form the Left Alliance in Brighton and Hove since Momentum is incapable of fighting the witchhunt.

Tom Watson lost sleep over 'poor Phil Woolas' Labour's racist MP

Our enemies include, according to the Guardian, Labour Party staff who voted by 124-4 in favour of a motion condemning the Labour press office’s response to the BBC programme.

These are the same people who quite happily expelled and suspended thousands of people suspected of voting for Jeremy Corbyn. When the left gained a majority on the National Executive Committee there should have been a wholesale clearout of existing New Labour staff, both locally and in the HQ.  It is still not too late.

It is not for the Labour Party’s civil service to dictate the politics of the Labour Party and the GMB should be told in no uncertain terms that any staff attempting to dictate the party’s response to the BBC’s Panorama programme, which contained the false and distorted ‘whistleblowing’ of Sam Matthews and company will be dismissed.

Below is an excellent article on the hypocrisy of Labour’s racist peers and their record of racism, by Aaron Bastani

The Labour Right WouldPrefer a Johnson Government to a Corbyn One. It’s Time to Replace Them

by Aaron Bastani

This was the week when the British establishment, from right to centre, effectively conceded they would prefer a Boris Johnson premiership to a Jeremy Corbyn one. This includes the Labour establishment, of course, the highlight being an advert in the Guardian taken out by 64 Labour Lords criticising the party’s leadership. 

It must be a new low for the Guardian when, in a manner resembling that of the Evening Standard, its commercial arm is indistinguishable from its editorial line. Rather than irritation or anger, the advert left me with a sense of befuddlement: why did Labour Lords pay £18K for negative coverage in a paper so willing to perform the service for free? Unelected legislators paying for newspaper inches in a ‘progressive’ outlet to attack a socialist leader of the opposition – just when you thought you’d seen it all, something else comes along.

The political hue of the signatories was predictable. One was Margaret McDonagh, the party’s general secretary from 1998 to 2001. It was during her tenure that Labour accepted a donation of £100K from Richard Desmond, then proprietor of the Daily Express and Daily Star. Not long after that contribution, which was known of only by McDonagh and the person who banked the cheque, the former general secretary joined Desmond’s operation as general manager of Express newspapers. Such largesse by the media lothario – whose Daily Star would champion the English Defence League in 2011 – would be significantly outdone, however, when he later donated more than £1m to Ukip.
Another signatory was John Reid, home secretary during the New Labour years and arguably the most authoritarian figure to hold an office tailor-made for such a disposition. While the advert claims the Corbyn leadership has failed “to defend our party’s anti-racist values”, it was Reid who once announced he would target “foreigners [who] come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits”. He also once boasted he was “throwing out more asylum seekers – failed asylum seekers – than ever before.” As ‘anti-racist’ rhetoric goes, it’s certainly original.

Indeed Reid’s ‘woke’ credentials go so far that he even once took a holiday with Radovan Karadzic – the man responsible for Europe’s most recent mass genocide at Srebrenica. Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who wanted special prisons for refugees run by G4S, he proceeded to join the company after leaving government. Like McDonagh, Reid’s trajectory is that of the classic Blairite: unscrupulous bureaucrat to unsavoury lobbyist. 

Then there is Baroness Morgan of Huyton – Sally Morgan to you and I. Morgan was once a trusted advisor to Tony Blair himself. So much so that – along with her then boss – she allegedly blocked the attorney-general from explaining to cabinet the small matter of the legality of the Iraq war. After leaving Downing Street in 2005, she became a non-executive director at Southern Cross Healthcare, leaving a year before the company went bust in 2012. She proceeded to become a senior non-executive director at Carillion, the outsourcing company, which also went into liquidation in early 2018 and is subject to an ongoing investigation by the Financial Reporting Council.

In short, many of the Lords associated with the Guardian advert represent the very worst elements of the Blair era. They are cronies who enabled a racist agenda on immigration; bag-carriers who misled a nation into an illegal war. Their reward is plum peerages with no scrutiny and plenty of perks.
Only days before the advert was published, five members of Labour’s national executive committee, including deputy leader Tom Watson, submitted a motion calling for rule changes to be enacted within the party. This included the demand that racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are dealt with by “automatic exclusion” from Labour where there is “irrefutable evidence”. In an opportunistic ploy, typically bereft of considering actual implementation, it’s unclear what “irrefutable evidence” is on Planet Watson. Would Watson himself, for instance, have faced such a measure after running a racist campaign in the 2004 Hodge Hill by-election? After all, one of the leaflets in that very campaign claimed the Lib Dems “want to keep giving welfare benefits to failed asylum seekers. They voted for this in parliament on 1 March 2004. They want your money, and mine, to go to failed asylum seekers.”

What wasn’t mentioned in this campaign was that the policy in question was Labour’s plan to take asylum seekers’ children away from them and forcibly place them in care. For defending such a brutal, racist policy – and deploying the most audible of dog whistles while doing so – what does Mr Watson think should be his comeuppance?

And what would Watson suggest for his various colleagues, both past and present? Take David Blunkett, who was home secretary from 2001 to 2004. He once claimed asylum seekers’ children were “swamping” British schools. And then there’s Jack Straw – should he have been automatically expelled for overseeing the introduction of discriminatory visa policies for Roma people of Slovakian and Czech heritage in 2001? Or perhaps he could offer input regarding Phil Woolas? Ahead of the 2010 general election, the former MP’s team spoke internally of needing to get “the white vote angry”. Such an impulse was the basis for a campaign so ridden with racially inflammatory lies that shortly after winning, two high court judges determined Woolas had acted unlawfully and called for a fresh election. His punishment in the intervening period? A promotion. Watson’s response, rather than to decry his colleague’s lack of a moral compass, was to declare that the judges’ decision was one “we will all regret” and that he had “lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas”.

Remarkably Woolas’s son, Josh Woolas, was one of the 200 “current and former Labour staff and supporters” who condemned Labour’s handling of last week’s Panorama documentary in a recent letter. Did he pen anything when his own father’s campaign explicitly aimed at getting the ‘white vote’ angry? I suspect you know the answer to that. Interestingly, he participated in his own smear campaign in 2016. Like father, like son.

But even more absurd than the Guardian advert and Watson’s motion is the fact we now know it was former general secretary Iain McNicol who made the former party staffers on Panorama sign their non-disclosure agreements. This means the ‘whistle-blowers’ appeared on the same programme, saying the same thing, as the man who had allegedly curtailed their ability to speak the truth. Of course John Ware, who produced the programme, didn’t deem that detail important enough to mention.

Confronted with an increasingly deranged Labour right and their allies in parts of the media, it’s important to grasp what all of this represents: a last ditch effort to stifle any chance of a Corbyn-led Labour government. This now has an added urgency given that a general election looks increasingly imminent. The default approach of the Labour leadership so far, not unwisely, has been to ride such provocations while getting on with the slow business of transforming the party. But the reality is without mandatory re-selection it’s difficult to see how the leadership can maintain a semblance of party cohesion, especially in government.

Every single Labour MP now needs to face a trigger ballot as soon as the opportunity arises. Why? Because there is absolutely no chance of a successful political programme aiming to deal with Britain’s biggest problems – from rising racism to falling wages – with many of these people as Labour MPs. The last ten days have proven that beyond all reasonable doubt.

Published 18th July 2019.