The Terrorism Acts Are Not About Terrorism But About Criminalising Support for Anti-Colonial Resistance

 Freedom of Speech is a Luxury That Burnham, like Starmer, is Willing to Sacrifice in the Drive to War - Juries Are Our Last Line of the Defence of Freedom

Charged With Terrorism for a Tweet — How Tony Greenstein Beat the UK

On Tuesday evening at 7 pm Brighton and Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign will hold a meeting at the Friends Meeting House in Ship Street, Brighton.

The theme is the silencing of Palestinian advocacy and I will be one of four speakers – the others include Sukaina Rajwani, whose daughter Fatima was sentenced to almost 6 years in prison by Injustice Jeremy Johnson because he added on a ‘terrorism’ connection to a minor criminal damage conviction. This is an injustice that has to be rectified. If a judge is going to sentence anyone for terrorism then a jury must first convict them of terrorism.

Lubna Speitan, who is spearheading the Zionism is Racism motion at the Green Party conference is also speaking as is  Stephen Kapos, a child survivor of the Hungarian holocaust.

It is remarkable. No Zionist supporter of genocide in Gaza has been prosecuted for supporting Genocide in Gaza. Only the opponents of genocide have been arrested and imprisoned. Genocide is the supreme crime. It is a crime under the International Criminal Court Act 2001 yet the Police initially refused even to investigate British citizens who went to fight in the IDF. Let alone those who fund the genocide.

Instead the Police have directed all their energies at supporters of the Palestinians. They have deployed the ‘anti-Semitism’ weapon in the same way as the Zionists. A nearby synagogue was the pretext for the Met banning a demonstration starting near the BBC. On October 4, 2024 I was arrested for making a speech comparing the Israeli state to Nazi Germany. Later they dropped the charges and I’m presently suing them.

All of this should be no surprise because Britain has a military alliance with the Israeli state and has provided arms and intelligence to them. Despite Ed Miliband’s speech in Parliament condemning Jewish terrorists on the West Bank nothing has changed. All the actions proposed are, his officials reassured the Americans, ‘symbolic’.

The reasons are simple. Britain has, since 1956, been aligned with US Imperialism. Israel is the operative arm and attack dog of the United States in the Middle East. The European Union and Germany have also given full throated support to the Genocide and the war against Iran.

The behaviour of the German state is particularly vile given their record. Having participated in or initiated four genocides – the Maji Maji, Herero/Nama, Armenian and Nazi holocaust, Germany is eager to support Israel’s holocaust in Gaza in order to come to terms with its own record.

What is even more remarkable is that whereas public opinion, in Britain, Europe and the United States has turned decisively against Israel, including in Germany, the elites have been consistent in their support for Zionism and Israel.

\The plaque on the walls of the Old Bailey which commemorates the 1670 Bushell's case in which a Jury successfully defied a Judges  Attempt to Make Them Convict Two Preachers

All of this is no accident. Blair and Straw planned it that way in the Terrorism Act 2000. That was why s.1 of the Act defines terrorism in terms of ‘serious damage’ to property, health and safety and attacking electronic systems.

What Chamberlain J called the ‘colloquial’ definition of Terrorism bears no relationship to s.1 of the Terrorism Act.

“An action done for the purposes set out in s. 1(1)(b) and (c) constitutes terrorism if it involves serious damage to property even if it does not involve violence against any person or endanger life or create a risk to health or safety… [T]his definition of ‘terrorism’ makes the statutory concept wider than the colloquial meaning of the word.”

I chose 5 dictionary definitions of terrorism – none of them mentioned property, health and safety or electronic systems. All of them mentioned violence and terror against people.

The Cambridge Dictionary definition of terrorism is ‘violent action or threats designed to cause fear among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims.’

The Miriam Webster definition of terrorism is ‘the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion’

The Brittanica Dictionary definition of terrorism is ‘the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal’.The dictionary.com definition of terrorism is ‘the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives.'

The Oxford Reference Definition is ‘The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to inculcate fear.

In his 2014 Report David Anderson, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism legislation  wrote about

the extraordinarily broad definition of terrorism under UK law, and the heavy reliance that is placed on the wise exercise of discretions by Ministers, prosecutors and police.

It was Conservative MP Douglas Hogg who warned in the parliamentary debate in 2000 on the Terrorism Act that

By extending the definition of terrorism, we put at risk our long tradition of giving sanctuary to people who are fighting oppressive regimes abroad. I do not want protesters to be classified as terrorists.

The qualms of Douglas Hogg, who was no liberal, were disregarded by Blair and Straw just as half a century later they would be disregarded by Starmer and Yvette Cooper when proscribing Palestine Action.

Jack Straw simply lied when reassuring Alan Simpson MP:

people supporting one or another of the international causes he cites will not even remotely come under the Bill.... However, to think that the Bill will restrict the right of peaceful protest, demonstration and campaigning is wholly erroneous.

Simon Hughes of the Lib Dems made a similar point.

...the Bill's definition sweeps in not only people who attack property for an environmental objective or for objectives connected with other general issues such as animal rights, but people who support organisations outside Governments in countries that are not democratic. All those people would now be included in the definition. 

Jeremy Corbyn pointed out that

Calling your opponents ‘terrorists’ is a familiar tactic of repressive states and it was something that New |Labour was about to introduce in this country.

Jack Straw said that ‘an organisation becomes a candidate for proscription only if it is concerned in terrorism’ and what was ‘terrorism’? Well that was the whole point. By redefining terrorism the British State could include within its remit just about any protest group that annoyed them.

New Labour politicians knew that they could rely on lying and servile British judges to aid and abet them. And no group of judges is more dishonest or servile than the present Court of Appeal under Liar Lady Justice Sue Carr, a blue stocking who decided to romanticise the Suffragettes:

Palestine Action characterises itself as a non-violent “direct action protest group” which follows in the footsteps of the suffragettes, and the campaigns against apartheid and the Iraq war.

It was not accurate for Ms Ammori to paint Palestine Action as an “ordinary protest group engaged in activities that fall within the well-established tradition of peaceful protest”.  

Palestine Action’s activities are planned and undertaken secretly with the objective of avoiding detection ... 

Secondly, the members of Palestine Action do not vouch their sincerity by accepting the penalties imposed by the law. Thirdly, on a fair analysis, Palestine Action has little or nothing in common with the suffragettes or the anti-apartheid or Iran War protest groups.   

The whole premise of Palestine Action is to cause damage to property belonging to Elbit and other companies trading lawfully in the United Kingdom. (my emphasis)

It is, nonetheless, a fundamental mistake to overlook the fact that Palestine Action overtly promotes unlawful violence amounting to terrorism. It is not, as it claims, a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes operating transparently in the open. It is a covert organisation that operates using secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy the property of third parties. Palestine Action’s activities have caused injury as well as property damage.

Palestine Action was classed as a violent terrorist organisation, operating covertly unlike the genteel folk of the Suffragettes. Yet the opposite was the case.

The National Scot was the only national paper to cover my acquittal - if I had been convicted no doubt all of them would have highlighted it

The suffragettes were anything but peaceful. From 1912-14, they openly embarked on a terror campaign, bombing and burning their way across the country. The Suffragettes certainly didn’t plan their arson or bombing campaigns in open meetings!

Below are just a few examples of the peaceful, ‘transparent’ Suffragettes that Liar Lady Carr referred to:

Bombings and High-Profile Arson

The campaign saw the widespread deployment of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and petrol-fueled fires.

·         David Lloyd George’s House (1913): A bomb exploded at a house under construction for the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Walton-on-the-Hill.

·         Theatre Royal, Dublin (1912): Suffragettes deployed several bombs and used petrol to set fire to the theatre during a live performance attended by Prime Minister H.H. Asquith.

·         Westminster Abbey (1914): A bomb was detonated inside the historic abbey, damaging the Coronation Chair.

·         Kew Gardens Tea Pavilion (1913): The famous tea pavilion was entirely destroyed by arson. Weeks prior, suffragettes smashed orchid houses and destroyed rare plants.

·         The Home Office (1912): A powerful bomb was discovered and safely defused in Home Secretary Reginald McKenna's office.

·         Holloway Prison: A bomb was detonated outside the walls of the facility holding imprisoned suffragettes.

·         Bombs exploded at Edinburgh's Royal Observatory, Rosslyn Chapel, St. Paul's Cathedral, train stations (like Oxted and Westbourne Park), and various public infrastructure sites

Assaults, Vandalism, and Infrastructure Sabotage

·         Assassination Attempt on the Prime Minister: In July 1912, a suffragette threw a hatchet at Prime Minister Asquith's carriage. It missed him but struck and injured Irish nationalist MP John Redmond.

·         Nationwide Postal Sabotage (1912–1914): Suffragettes launched a systemic campaign targeting public pillar boxes. They poured ink, corrosive acids, and liquid phosphorus into postboxes to destroy mail, occasionally leaving postal workers and police officers with chemical burns.

·         Art Destruction (1914): Activist Mary Richardson entered the National Gallery and used a meat cleaver to slash Diego Velázquez’s famous painting, the "Rokeby Venus," protesting the re-arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst.

In their attempts to destroy the direction action movement, judges lie. When Burnham and Starmer say there is no Genocide in Gaza they lie. Lying is an integral part of the system we live in. When the Court of Appeal says that making quadcopters to murder civilians is a ‘lawful business’ they lie.

The British state has been desperate to criminalise activists in Palestine Action and those who are prominent in the Palestine solidarity movement. That is why the Police raided my home on December 20 on a trumped up charge of ‘inviting support’ for Hamas, after 9 complaints from individual Zionists including the obsessive Heidi Bachram.

The Terrorism Act 2000 and in particular s.12 has been wheeled out in order to attack freedom of speech on Palestine. To my knowledge at least 7 people, probably more, have been prosecuted under the Act.

The only problem for the State is that juries have been remarkably unwilling to convict people for exercising their right to freedom of speech.

Between October 7 2023 and October 7, 2024 the Crown Prosecution Service initiated 11 prosecutions under s.12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000. 

Of those we know about Kwabena Devonish, Sarah Cotte, Tony Greenstein and Natalie Strecker were acquitted and two  Hanin Barghouthi and Majid Freeman had hung juries.

There were also the "Paraglider Imagery" Appeals (Metropolitan Police / London Magistrates). Three women (Heba Alhayek, Pauline Ankunda, and Noimutu Olayinka Saka) were convicted at Westminster Magistrates in early 2024 of a terrorism offense for displaying images of paragliders at a protest shortly after October 7. They all received conditional discharges.

Following structural challenges regarding intent and the definition of symbolic support, multiple similar cases involving protest imagery have been quietly dropped by the CPS or successfully appealed due to the high legal threshold required by the Supreme Court's R v ABJ precedent.

It is interesting to look at the reaction of the Zionists to my acquittal. The non-Jewish Zionist obsessive, Heidi Bachram, reacted ‘furiously’ saying it was ‘a huge failure of the legal system to protect the population from extremism and support for terrorism.’ Translated means protecting Heidi from free speech.

Both Heidi and another Zionist, Crepidarian argued that I should have been prosecuted under s.12(1A) which criminalises ‘expressing an opinion or belief supportive of a proscribed organisation’ and believe the CPS chose the wrong charge. This may comfort them because you have to be reckless in what you are doing. However the Prosecution still have to prove intent and in any case my closing speech to the jury was based on the right of the Palestinians to resist the occupiers, so this is simply an exercise in wishful thinking.

The point I made in my first blog on my acquittal is still valid. It is a mistake simply to deal with such charges legally without ensuring that the jury understands the context. It is because lawyers find it difficult to provide the political context when judges remove such defences that where possible defendants should consider taking the final speech and certainly ensure that via their cross-examination that jury know the whole case and not simply that which the judiciary want the jury to know.

The role of the judge is to try and pull the wool over the jury’s eyes which was why I emphasised that whereas the judge deals with the law, the jury is there to ensure justice.

The Only Thing of Interest in My Trial was Gary Lineker Retweeting My After the Verdict Speech

The Terrorism Act 2000 is also a racist act. Many migrants in this country support liberation or resistance organisations in their countries of origin. Yet Britain proscribes many such groups because our state is friends with the dictators who run such a state.

This is particularly true in the case of the Kurds of Turkey. The PKK Kurdish Workers Party is proscribed as a ‘terrorist’ organisation because we are friends with Turkey’s semi-fascist dictator, Recip Erdogan. It is a national liberation movement which most Kurds in this country support.

As David Anderson, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism wrote in his 2012 Report on Terrorism Legislation:

the current law allows members of any nationalist or separatist group to be turned into terrorists by virtue of their participation in a lawful armed conflict, however great the provocation and however odious the regime which they have attacked.

As Anderson also wrote in his 2012 Report there was

‘a case for shrinking the definition of terrorism... the definition is so broad as to criminalise certain acts carried out overseas that constitute lawful hostilities under international humanitarian law. Examples include UN-sanctioned use of force and acts of violent rebellion against oppressive governments, even where such acts target only military objectives and minimise civilian casualties.

Anderson also wrote in his Report that:

As presently drafted, the definition is so broad as to criminalise certain acts carried out overseas that constitute lawful hostilities under international humanitarian law.... the current law allows members of any nationalist or separatist group to be turned into terrorists by virtue of their participation in a lawful armed conflict, however great the provocation and however odious the regime which they have attacked.

Tony Greenstein

See: Greg Hadfield The most important half-hour of my life

The British state has lost the argument, even as it rigs the trials of genocide opponents Jonathan Cook

How Britain Tried To Rig the Trial of a Genocide Opponent – and Lost -  antiwar.com

The jury said not guilty.The papers reported Gary Lineker.

Ten Year’s Hard Labour is the most important account yet of the defeat of the Corbyn Project

Chris Williamson describes how the Labour Right, with the complicity of Momentum, allowed the fake ‘Anti-Semitism’ narrative to destroy the Left 

Ten Year’s Hard Labour – Chris Williamson,

Lola Books, 2022, pp. 394

There is a tendency amongst many on the left to engage in an uncritical adulation of Jeremy Corbyn now that we see how awful is his successor, the serial liar and empty suit, Sir Stürmer. That would be a mistake.

Stürmer did not emerge from nowhere. Despite being part of the Chicken Coup, Corbyn embraced this latter day Brutus without once questioning his role as Director of Public Prosecutions in the cases of Julian Assange, IanTomlinson and other similar cases.

Without an analysis and understanding of where Corbyn and his entourage went wrong and why their policy of appeasement could only lead to disaster, the Left is destined to repeat the same errors.

Corbyn ended up throwing his friends to the Zionist wolves in a vain attempt to appease them

For those who wish to understand how the Corbyn Project went from the dizzy heights of near election victory in 2017 to catastrophic defeat two years later, Chris Williamson’s account is compulsory reading. Unlike books such as those by Owen Jones and Gabriel Pogrund/Patrick Wintour, it isn’t concerned with the gossip and tittle tattle of who did what in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office. [LOTO]

This is a book about the sustained attack that was mounted by Britain’s political establishment, in conjunction with the Zionist lobby and the secret state, on Corbyn and his allies. All with the connivance of Labour’s senior staff and the Labour Right. An attack which was fought in the name of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Today we can see where this fight has ended up. Starmer became leader of the Labour Party pledging to ‘root out anti-Semitism from the Labour Party’. Yet today Jews are five times more likely to be expelled for anti-Semitism than non-Jews. People like Jewish Voices for Labour members like Mike Howard, 72, for 40-years a Labour member and former Hastings councillor and Riva Joffe, a South African-born anti-apartheid activist in her 80s. Both died with the slur of ‘anti-Semitism’ hanging over them.

Not surprisingly Williamson’s book has been ignored by the mainstream press and those who were responsible for the fake anti-Semitism attacks on socialists and anti-racists in the Labour Party. Stürmer and General Secretary David Evans have ridden roughshod over all notions of natural justice and due process as they have launched a witchhunt, the likes of which has never been seen before in the Labour Party.

Those in the media who would have cried to the heavens if Corbyn had expelled Margaret Hodge or Ruth Smeeth, keep silent as thousands have been excluded by Stürmer.

I was the first Jewish person to be expelled in February 2018. When allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ were first raised in the Labour Party we were told that we were paranoid to suggest that it was all about Israel and Zionism. Yet today Stürmer, who defines himself as a Zionist ‘without qualification’ makes no pretence about the fact that he considers anti-Zionism to be anti-Semitism.

What Williamson calls the ‘optics left’, such as Novara Media, Richard Seymour, Dave Renton and Owen Jones, played a major part in the defeat of the Corbyn project. This book raises the question as to whether the Left can ever win control of the Labour Party since the Right will stop at nothing, including open collaboration with the Tories and the prostitute press, to destroy anyone who isn’t committed to neo-liberalism and NATO.

This book isn’t an autobiography and, as it name suggests, covers the years when Williamson was MP for Derby North, from 2010-15 and 2017-19, ending in his defeat in 2019.

Bereft of ideas, Starmer's only concern is to turn Labour into a safe party of capitalism

Williamson ignores the period in the early to mid-2000s when he was Labour’s pragmatic leader of Derby Council making arrangements with the Tories in order that Labour could retain control of the Council and even using the Private Finance Initiative in order to buy up housing.

Chris Williamson followed in the footsteps of his hero, Tony Benn, in moving from right to left. Perhaps this was part of the reason why he was so hated by the right. Although Williamson came from a working class background unlike the aristocratic Benn, he defied the tradition in the Labour Party of Labour MPs moving in the opposite direction.

Williamson held on to Derby North, a red wall seat, in 2010 with a majority of just 613. In 2015 he lost the seat by the smallest majority in England, 41. In 2017, the first election under Corbyn, Williamson regained it with a majority of 2,015.

In 2015 right-wing Labour MPs, believing their own rhetoric that Corbyn would lose disastrously, asked voters to support them despite Corbyn’s leadership. Their campaigns, as we now know, were covertly funded by the rogue Ergon House operation run by Labour’s senior staff.

Nick Cohen summed up their mentality just one month before Theresa May announced the 2017 election. Cohen described the election disaster that was around the corner:

On current polling, Labour will get around a quarter of the vote... Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it.’

When the results were announced Labour had achieved a 40% share of the vote and an increase of 30 in the number of seats. It was the largest swing since 1945 and 9.6% more than Ed Miliband’s miserable performance in 2015.

Williamson took a principled stance and far from distancing himself from Corbyn issued a press release announcing himself as ‘the most Corbyn-friendly candidate standing anywhere in Britain.’  [93]

The Miliband Years

Williamson devotes relatively little time to his period in parliament from  2010-2015 when he was a Shadow Fire Minister under Ed Miliband before being sacked after standing on an FBU picket line. Williamson was not a firebrand or anti-imperialist when he was first elected. In March 2011 he supported a resolution approving the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya, the precursor to NATO’s bombing of Libya. A decision he was to later regret.

Williamson describes how Miliband, having been elected as the left-wing candidate, proved a bitter disappointment. Williamson savages the decision to abstain as the Tories took the axe to social security benefits. Under Miliband the approach to austerity was that the Coalition, in the words of Shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson, was ‘cutting too far and too fast.’ [5]

Chuka Ummuna, who was later to defect to the Lib Dems, was put in charge of opposing the privatisation of the Post Office. When Williamson urged Ummuna to commit Labour to renationalising the Post Office, the answer was revealing as to who really wields power in Britain: ‘We can’t do that.  The City wouldn’t wear it.’[26]

Williamson recalls Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, remarking that ‘One of the first acts of the Coalition government was to turbo-charge Lord Adonis’s academy programme.’ [28] The privatisation of local authority schools had been inherited from New Labour.

As Williamson observed ‘The Shadow of New Labourism continued to linger on in the Miliband years.’ The book however is most revealing for its description of the Corbyn years and how Corbyn and the Labour Left snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2017.

The Corbyn Years

From the very beginning of his leadership Corbyn faced the unremitting opposition of Labour’s senior staff who, it was revealed in Labour’s Leaked Report, had openly wanted a Tory victory. When the polls began to turn in Corbyn’s favour they openly expressed their disappointment.

Corbyn’s election had been a fluke. The Labour Right had convinced itself that one-person one-vote would ensure that the Left would be forever marginalised. Right-wing MPs like Sadiq Khan had persuaded themselves that Corbyn could never win and therefore nominated him in order to make the process seem democratic. As Margaret Beckett ruefully remarked later, she was a ‘moron’ for having done so.

After having attacked Corbyn on a variety of grounds without success, the Right settled on ‘anti-Semitism’ as their chosen weapon. There were many reasons for this, not least that it gave them the moral high ground to be seen to be attacking Corbyn as a racist.

Lansman ended up working with arch-Zionist and witchhunter, Luke Akehurst

This should have been called out for what it was from the beginning. This was the most catastrophic mistake of Corbyn and the Labour Left, especially Momentum under Jon Lansman’s baleful influence.

It wasn’t as if it was difficult to point out the hypocrisy of the Labour Right adopting the mantle of anti-racism. The British National Party  even sent Margaret Hodge a bunch of flowers in appreciation of her proposal for a Whites only housing policy.

Tom Watson, who declared that he wouldn’t rest easy until every last anti-Semite had been expelled from Labour, had a long record of playing the race card stretching back to the Birmingham Hodshrove by-election in 2004 when he told the electorate that Labour was ‘on your side’ unlike the Lib Dems who ‘were on the side of asylum seekers’. 

When Phil Woolas, who had run a racist campaign in 2010 designed to ‘make the white folks angry’, was removed by an Election Court from Parliament for lying about his Lib Dem opponent, Watson wrote about how he had lost sleep thinking about ‘poor Phil’

Others who led the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign included John Mann, who had previously issued the Bassetlaw Anti-Social Behaviour Handbook which labelled a whole ethnic group, Gypsies, as anti-social. Mann ended up being interviewed by the Police under caution.

The worst New Labour racists had suddenly become concerned about anti-Semitism. Of course the Labour Party, with nearly 600,000 members harboured a handful of anti-Semites. It would be surprising if they didn’t. Statistically the Labour Party no doubt harboured a few paedophiles but no one suggested that Labour was overrun by them.

The Labour Right was full to the brim with Islamaphobes but nobody mentioned that. Yet Corbyn, McDonnell and Lansman, alongside the openly Zionist AWL adopted the anti-Semitism narrative wholesale.

The ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations were clearly about Israel. Today every human rights organisation accepts that Israel is an apartheid state. The only defence Zionist supporters have is to cry ‘anti-Semitism’. Unfortunately Williamson was the only Labour MP to get it.

When Black anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth was suspended and then expelled for having criticised Ruth Smeeth MP at the Chakrabarti Inquiry press conference, only Williamson stood up for him. When Jackie Walker, a Black-Jewish member was suspended it was Williamson who stood by her. Williamson supported Labour Against the Witchhunt and spoke on its platforms alongside expelled and suspended members.

At Wadsworth’s hearing a ‘lynch mob’ of all-White MPs accompanied Smeeth to the hearing. Yet instead of Corbyn coming out in support of his old friend, Marc was told by LOTO that ‘it won’t help Jeremy if there is a demonstration.’[86] When Marc told the press that Corbyn had phoned him personally to give support LOTO went out of their way to deny it.

When Williamson appeared on a platform with Jackie Walker, Ben Folley of LOTO told Williamson to heed the Zionists’ ‘advice’ not to do so. [111] As Williamson recounted:

The febrile atmosphere bludgeoned every MP but me into accepting the false narrative. I was, literally, the only MP prepared to challenge it publicly.

To this day I wonder why it never occurred to Corbyn’s advisors such as Seamus Milne that retreating only encourages your enemies. In Milne’s case he knew from personal experience how Israel’s supporters deploy accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’. The question must arise as to who Milne was working for.

If Jeremy had stood up to the weaponisation of anti-Semitism he could have turned the tables on his detractors. He could have pointed to New Labour’s racist record and mobilised the 70% of Labour Party members who consistently refused to accept that Labour was an anti-Semitic party.

The Zionist lobby in the Labour Party led by the Jewish Labour Movement [JLM] had its knives out for Williamson who they outrageously called a ‘Jew-baiter’. Williamson who had fought National Front influence on building sites, often with his fists, was now called a racist by those who had never fought either racism or anti-Semitism.

In March 2018 the Board of Deputies called a demonstration to protest at Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. Among the ‘anti-racists’ who attended were Norman Tebbit MP of the ‘cricket test’ and Ian Paisley Jnr, of the anti-Catholic DUP. Tebbit had previously said that those who supported the Indian or Pakistani cricket teams were not really British was now an anti-racist!

This was the first ‘anti-racist’ demonstration that the Board had ever called. When Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists tried to march through the East End in October 1936 they were repulsed at the Battle of Cable Street despite the Board advising Jews to stay indoors and keep their heads down. The Jewish Chronicle wrote:

Jews are urgently warned to keep away from the route of the Blackshirt march and from their meetings. Jews who, however innocently, become involved in any possible disorders will be actively helping antisemitism and Jew-baiting. Unless you want to help the Jew-baiters, keep away.”

When the National Front was mobilising on the streets in the 1970s the Board repeated the same message.

The Zionist movement has never fought anti-Semitism. The Zionist  movement, when it first arose at the end of the 19^th century, was greeted by most Jews as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. Zionism believed that anti-Semitism was a virus that all non-Jews carried around with them and therefore it was futile to fight against it.

Williamson is suspended by Jennie Formby

Corbyn and his advisors, rather than standing up to their detractors, appeased and apologised, throwing first Ken Livingstone and then Williamson to the wolves.

Williamson was suspended in 2019. It was a classic example of what George Orwell called Doublethink. In the eyes of Jennie Formby and the witchhunters Black was White. At a meeting of Sheffield Momentum in February 2019 Williamson gave a speech in which he stated ‘We’ve been too apologetic. What have we to apologise for? For being an anti-racist party?’ [150]

This was twisted by the Yorkshire Post into ‘Chris Williamson tells a Sheffield Momentum meeting that Labour has been “too apologetic” about  anti-Semitism”

A good example of how the McCarthyist ‘guilt-by-association’ technique had been adopted and accepted by Corbyn and Formby was the comment in the right-wing Labour magazine Prospect on hearing of Williamson’s suspension.

This week matters came to a head. In the space of 48 hours we have seen Williamson attempt to host an event in Parliament with a woman who has been suspended from the Labour Party under investigation for antisemitism before telling an event in Sheffield that the Party has been “too apologetic” about the same topic.

These two things in one week alone should have been enough to warrant disciplinary action even if they had come from nowhere. But Williamson has a well-established history of upsetting the Jewish community

Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian was prominent amongst who prostituted themselves for the Israeli state

The weasel words of these press whores, because journalists they are not, are a wonder to behold. They build their case resting one lie on top of another. Who in the ‘Jewish Community’ (is there one?) was upset?  We are not told. Apparently it is unacceptable to host an ‘event’ (a film called, appropriately enough The Witchhunt) because it is with a woman accused of, anti-Semitism. In other words you are guilty until proven innocent (although Jackie Walker was at no time accused of antisemitism).

Yet what was the response of LOTO?  To defend Williamson? To call out the harlots of the press and the Labour Right? No their advice was to apologise. Not only did the Socialist Campaign Group not defend Williamson but Laura Pidcock told him not to attend any more meetings! [159] 

Solidarity was never the SCG’s strong point. McDonnell’s advice was to ‘apologise again and again’. [198] The only members to offer any support were Richard Burgon and the MP for Crewe, Laura Smith.

Like Dave Renton, another SWP exile, Richard Seymour ended up justifying the witchhunt

All the soft-Corbynites from Guardian journalist Owen Jones to Jon Lansman and Novara Media joined the calls for Williamson’s expulsion. Even Richard Seymour, the ex-SWP writer repeated the lie that Williamson had said Labour was too apologetic about anti-Semitism. [173] Yet what Williamson said was easily available.

In June 2019 a National Executive panel voted 2-1 to reinstate Williamson. Almost immediately a hue and cry was raised and Tom Watson launched a petition amongst right-wing peers and MPs. What Corbyn should have done was to issue a statement welcoming the decision and reaffirming his earlier statement of 31 January 2019 to the Derby Telegraph that ‘He is not an anti-Semitic in anyway.’ [192]

Yet Corbyn not only didn’t defend Williamson he issued a statement implying that he was anti-Semitic. Once again Corbyn had done the work of the Right. Williamson was duly resuspended 48 hours later.

Williamson went to court and applied for a Declaration that the suspension was unlawful. In September 2019 Justice Popperwell ruled that it was indeed unlawful. In anticipation Labour General Secretary Jennie Formby had issued a third suspension on a flimsy pretext but this was enough to carry the day and Williamson remained suspended.

Formby was appointed General Secretary in the wake of Iain McNicoll’s resignation. She was a supporter of Corbyn yet she had engineered a situation where the demands of the Right for Williamson’s head were met. Not for nothing does Williamson label her ‘Judas Jennie’  though perhaps this is unfair. Judas was paid 30 pieces of silver whereas Jennie betrayed Williamson for nothing!

After the high hopes of September 2015 and his success in defeating the challenge of Owen Smith MP in 2016 Corbyn, instead of fighting Labour’s pro-capitalist MPs had succumbed to them. As Williamson said of LOTO ‘they were one-trick ponies, whose only strategy was to appease and capitulate to hostile forces.’

Did this appeasement of the JLM achieve anything? Did Formby not understand that when she boasted of the expulsion of hundreds of Labour Party members for ‘anti-Semitism’ that all she was doing was confirming the Right’s false anti-Semitism narrative? 

Labour’s Leaked Report (p.306) sums up the policy that Corbyn and his advisors had adopted of appeasing the Zionist lobby:

Jeremy Corbyn himself and members of his staff team requested to GLU that particular antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO staff chased for action on high-profile antisemitism cases Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth, stressing that these cases were of great concern to Jewish stakeholders and that resolving them was essential to “rebuilding trust between the Labour Party and the Jewish community”.

Well we were all expelled or forced out of the party. Was trust rebuilt? Of course not. It simply whetted the appetite of Corbyn’s accusers who went on to demand more and more heads until there was no one left to expel but Corbyn himself.

Not content with preventing Williamson stand at the 2019 election, Corbyn and Formby introduced ‘fast track’ expulsions for the most ‘egregious’ of cases, which were subsequently used against hundreds of people including Corbyn himself.

Corbyn, who in a different era had been Secretary of Labour Against the Witchhunt, opposed the very things he had always fought for such as Open Selection of MPs at the 2018 conference. In doing so he sealed his own fate.

Possibly the main fault of Williamson’s book is his tendency to seek revenge against detractors like Edward Isaacs of Bristol University when they are simply unimportant. Williamson also does not really deal with whether what happened is inevitable in a reformist social democratic party which seeks to manage capitalism rather than change it.

However this book will be ignored by the Left at its peril.  It is not about personalities or the weakness of Corbyn and Formby but about socialist strategy and whether Labour is doomed to remain a pro-capitalist party.

Tony Greenstein