Lord Eric Pickles – Why is this Racist Bigot Britain’s Special Envoy on Holocaust Issues?

Pickles is an example of anti-Semitic Zionism – Chair of Conservative Friends of Israel, anti-Gypsy and a defender of Latvia’s Waffen SS

I always felt guilty that the eviction of Dale Farm in October 2011 and the hundreds of Travellers living there had passed me by.  Not for the Gypsies the faux anti-racism that is extended to British Jews in the wake of the Holocaust.

Gypsies suffered just as much as the Jews from Hitler’s Final Solution proportionally and they are still suffering from state racism throughout Europe. See Porajmos: The Forgotten Gypsy Holocaust The World Ignored

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, to which Pickles is a delegate doesn’t so much as mention the Gypsies and why should it?  There is no Gypsy state or imperial interests to defend.

The Pew Research Centre’s 2016 Global Attitudes Survey  showed shockingly higher anti-gypsy and anti-Muslim attitudes yet we haven’t heard a whisper about the bigotry towards Gypsies and Muslims in the Labour Party. Just one person to my knowledge has been suspended for anti-Roma racism.

If you look at the top 4 countries for racism then 82% of Italians have unfavourable attitudes to Gypsies. The other countries are all in the 60s.  Hostility to Muslims is similar. Hungary is the top with 72% and the other three are in the high 60s.  With Jews by contrast with the exception of Greece at 55% then the next highest is Hungary with 32% and then Italy and Poland with 24%.

You might think that the person who has responsibility for the Holocaust as Britain’s Special Envoy would be especially sensitive to the matter of the Gypsies.  Yet Lord Eric Pickles is a prime example of an anti-Roma bigot.

Pickles it was who was integrally involved in what was the worst post-war example of racism against the Roma and Gypsy minority in this country with the eviction of Dale Farm in 2011.

Members of this Traveller community had bought up the land on which they lived.  They had settled down and their children were going to local schools but many of the residents and the local Basildon Council resented their presence because they were Gypsies.

The excuse to evict them was that the land was within the green belt. They were deemed an eyesore or a ‘blight’ and evicted using hundreds of police thugs and bailiffs. Yet today developers are buying up this land in order that they can build on it.  What is good enough for developers was not good enough for Gypsies.

It was therefore with a view to assuaging my guilty conscience that I visited the Exhibition on Dale Farm at the Tate Modern with a friend. I am glad that I did because it filled in a lot of holes.  Not least about who was culpable for what happened.

The eviction cost Basildon Council £18m which was a lot of money for the Council at a time of austerity. Who should step in to help them but the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles. He provided £9m in order that the evictions could go ahead despite the Dale Farm residents appeal to Eric Pickles to stop eviction

Vanessa Redgrave, a Unicef goodwill ambassador who lent her support to the residents, said clearing the Dale Farm site in Essex breached United Nation's children's rights and said she was “appalled that such an eviction can be upheld by our government”. None of this however moved Pickles, whose concern over the Holocaust is strictly confined to Jews and Israel.

Pickles started off his political life as Leader of Bradford Council where he achieved a reputation as a savage cutter of services and a populist right-winger. When he became Community Secretary under Cameron he took the axe to local government. His Localism Act 2011 was alleged to give powers back to the people but almost immediately he approved a planning application that allowed a massive gas plant in Gloucestershire in the teeth of opposition of the Tewkesbury Planning Committee, 12 parish councils and 1,000 local residents.

Those at Dale Farm never forgot Pickles and what he had done and the following year they tried to evict Pickles from his office. However he had a large group of Metropolitan Police there to protect him and assault the demonstrators. (Dale Farm protesters target Pickles 19.10.12. Express) Protesters' chants rang out: "One, two, three, four, Eric Pickles out the door, five, six, seven, eight, let's evict the racist state." And who was their representative but the Holocaust toting Pickles who has dined off those who died in the Holocaust.

Pickles also demonstrated himself to be a Christian bigot when he tried to overturn a High Court decision that councillors could not be forced to attend Christian prayers. His excuse was that ‘Militant atheists should 'get over it' and accept UK is Christian. Pickles forgot that unlike Israel, religion should not intrude into civic and political life.

It is therefore natural that a bigot and racist like Eric Pickles should be Chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel.  Pickles is also a patron of the pro-Israeli ‘charity’, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Pickles was also the person who moved to depose the radical Black Mayor of Tower Hamlets Lotfhur Rahman in an early display of his racist bigotry.

As the United Kingdom Special Envoy for post-Holocaust issues you might think that Pickles would be ultra careful not to have anything to do with fascists and apologists for the Nazi era. After all isn’t that what the IHRA all about? It would seem not.

In 2009 a controversy blew up over the decision of Tory MEPs to leave the mainstream Christian Democrat European Peoples Party to join the far-right European Conservative Reform Group. The EcrG was chaired by a former fascist, Michal Kaminski of the far-Right anti-Semitic Polish Law & Justice Party, ‘whose anti-Semitic outbursts in the past have been well documented’ . Even Jonathan Freedland, a strong Zionist, wrote that  Once no self-respecting politician would have gone near people such as Kaminski. Self-respect is the least of Pickle’s worries.

The ECRG contained people like Roberts Zile of Latvia’s For Fatherland and Freedom/LNNK party. Every March Ziles goes on a demonstration/ march commemorating the veterans of Latvia’s Waffen SS. It is true that only a minority, between 20% and one-third were volunteers but the fact is that they fought on the side of the Nazis. These annual marches contain primarily fascist and nationalist elements that are virulently anti-Semitic.

Roberts Zile MEP 

In David Miliband’s speech at the 2009 Labour Party Conference he accused Pickles, who was Conservative chairman at the time, of being

“a defender of the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom party (with which the Tories are now allied in the EU) – despite the fact that its members attend commemorations for the Waffen-SS.’

In response Eric Pickles according to the Guardian suggested that ‘the Latvian Waffen-SS were only conscripts fighting for their country, and to say otherwise was a Soviet smear.’

Pickles deliberately ignored the fact that not only was a substantial minority of Latvia’s Waffen-SS eager volunteers, but they included veterans of pro-Nazi death squads who had already taken part in the first phase of the Holocaust. The mere fact that this march commemorated those who had fought with Hitler should have been enough for Pickles. 

Monica Lowenberg, whose paternal family, had been murdered in the Libau and Riga Ghettos by those who later joined Latvia’s Waffen SS, attended the March 2012 demonstration in Riga. She told in an open letter how

‘At the Monument of Freedom in the center of Riga where the SS lovers congregated last year... I was jostled, harassed and made to feel unwelcome. I was told by a number of young Waffen SS supporters that even though my grandfather was born in Libau (Libava), Latvia and all of my Latvian Jewish family had lived for generations in Libau, until they were brutally murdered in the Libau massacres of 1941 and Riga Ghetto of the same year, I had no rights to be in Latvia as I was Jewish.’

Even worse

‘another party comrade of Mr Zile told the Latvian parliament that LNNK has always been against the trial of Konrads Kalejs and other Latvians accused of Nazi crimes. Kalejs was a close assistant of Viktors Arajs, chief of the bloody Arajs Commando, responsible for guarding and finishing off those Jews who were still alive in the ditches into they fell after mass shootings. Some survived and tried to escape but the Latvians were on hand to kill them.’

The Arajs Commando worked alongside Einsatzgruppen A, the most murderous of the four death squads that operated in the wake of the Wehrmacht in Operation Barbarossa the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. They took part in mass executions in Riga Ghetto. The first transportation of 1,000 Berlin Jews to Riga along with 24,000 members of the Riga Ghetto were shot on 30^th November 1941 by the Nazis and the Arajs Commando, which joined the Latvian Legion which consisted of 2 Waffen SS divisions in January 1943.

Pickles justification for the actions of the Latvian Waffen SS were that ‘they were only following orders.’ Pickles role as an apologist for Latvia’s Waffen SS has not prevented him being a McCarthyist witch-hunter sniffing out any trace of ‘anti-Semitism’ whenever Zionism is on the agenda.

This is Part 1 of an extended essay on this Tory bigot.  Tomorrow is Part 2 and how Pickles tried to get a lecturer at Bristol University sacked for writing an article discussing how the Holocaust is used to deter people raising the question of Palestinian oppression.

Hear voices from Traveller communities in a creative response to the 2011 eviction from Dale Farm

On 19th October 2011, eighty Traveller families lost their 10 year legal battle for their homes. Dale Farm: The Eviction, explores this important event from the perspective of artists from different communities.

Artists from the Travelling community and elsewhere will present creative responses to the eviction, aiming to broaden the discussion about Dale Farm and acknowledge that not everyone backed or agreed with the eviction by the local authorities, which the UK government supported and in part financed. Against a backdrop of negative media coverage and social media attacks on Traveller communities, this event also aims to be therapeutic for the Traveller artists’ and the community members impacted by the loss of their homes.

As well as visual art, performance, music and video, audiences will have the opportunity to view unique Traveller archival material from Grattan Puxon’s archive together with artefacts from Dale Farm, removed at the time of the eviction.

This event is curated by Phien O’Reachtigan of Traveller-Art-Performance and Beverley Carpenter of Oblique Arts in association with Tate Exchange Associates 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning.

John McDonnell Has Become Tom Watson’s Useful Idiot as Watson Openly Defies Corbyn and Prepares a Coup

McDonnell’s Pathetic Acceptance of the Right's Fake ‘Anti-Semitism’ Campaign is akin to flying the White Flag of Surrender

Sunday Times 3 March 2019

I know it is difficult for Labour politicians to absorb, but for a decade the Tories have been in alliance with a host of genuinely anti-Semitic parties in the European parliament. Parties like Poland’s Law & Justice Party or Latvia’s LNNK, whose MEP Robert Zile goes on a walk each March with veterans of Latvia’s Waffen SS who did their duty helping out with the Holocaust. What is it that prevents them mentioning this every time someone accuses the Labour Party of ‘anti-Semitism’?  Stupidity? Cowardice? Take your pick. Labour's antisemitism fantasists don’t even refer to Boris Johnson and his racist comments.

Of course these anti-Semitic parties that the Tories are in alliance with are also devoted supporters of Israel, so perhaps this is not something worth mentioning?  I refer to e.g. Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, who is busy trying to rehabilitate Admiral Horthy, Hungary's war-time Nazi ruler who presided over the deportation of nearly half a million Jews to Auschwitz. The fact that he is of the opinion that Horthy was an 'exceptional statesman' doesn't prevent Netanyahu establishing a solid friendship with him or the Tories, alone amongst conservative parties in the European parliament, supporting him in a censure motion.

Horthy is a genuine anti-Semite unlike those accused in the Labour Party anti-semitism witch-hunt so what is it that prevents McDonnell engaging his brain with his mouth?

 It seems to be a little difficult for McDonnell and Labour’s so-called leftwingers, such as Angela Rayner or Rebecca Long-Bailey, to get their collective heads round the fact that genuine anti-Semites, like Richard Spencer, neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right, support Israel and even declare that they are ‘white Zionists’.  Most anti-Semites today are supporters of Israel and Zionism.  Israel is the ideal ethno-nationalist state, something to model themselves on. That is why allegations of Nazi-Zionist collaboration were no aberration. Zionism has always worked with genuine anti-Semites.

What is unforgivable is that McDonnell, Corbyn, Formby and the rest seem incapable of doing anything but retreating in the face of the Zionist and right-wing ideological onslaught.  Of course it’s not helped by the fact that Jon Lansman, Momentum’s dictator, is a paid up supporter of Israel and Zionism.

Perhaps the most abject moment in John McDonnell’s interview with Sky was when he said how much he regretted the resignation of Joan Ryan, Chair of Labour Friends of Israel.  Ryan was the person who deliberately invented false allegations of anti-Semitism against Jean Fitzpatrick, a delegate to the 2016 Labour Party Conference who had the effrontery to challenge her over LFI’s claim to support the Palestinians. Ryan was also filmed discussing a £1m contribution by Israeli agent Shai Masot to her slush fund.

Ryan has consistently been the front person for the Israeli state. Ryan it was who claimed that Jean had mentioned Jews and bankers in the same breath when criticising LFI. Fortunately the whole incident was secretly recorded by Al Jazeera’s The Lobby. Ryan, who is not even Jewish, has been assiduous in spreading the myth that the Labour Party is ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’. Far from regretting  Ryan’s departure it is one of the few good things to have happened lately. The pity is that more of the racist rats have not departed.

McDonnell is allowing this man to set the pace

Although McDonnell rebutted the suggestion that the Labour Party is ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’ he accepted that anti-Semitism was a major problem in the Labour Party.  It was only two weeks ago at the Labour Representation Committee, of which he is honorary President, that McDonnell gave his support to Jackie Walker, the Black Jewish activist who is currently suspended and facing expulsion on March 26^th. He also gave support to Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt whose candidature in Thanet South was rejected by the NEC Panel.

McDonnell has no problem in acknowledging the fact that the Witchhunt has predominantly netted anti-Zionist Jews and Black anti-racists but he seems unable to put two and two together and work out exactly why there never seems to be any evidence of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party. There are just assertions.

It was good that Jennie Formby wrote a stiff letter to Tom Watson calling him out over his vague parallel complaints monitoring system.  Unfortunately she also went and appointed an ‘independent’ overseer to the complaints system, Lord Falconer, Blair’s former flat mate and ex- Attorney General. It’s called shooting yourself in the foot.

It is difficult to know whether McDonnell is simply stupid or disingenuous.  My preference is for the latter but it is a close run thing.

It is should be clear with anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that the anti-Semitism campaign is a fake and that anti-Semitism has been weaponised by the Right. On LBC, in response to a caller who said that he was ‘killing Labour’ Tom Watson said that he won’t rest until he drives every last anti-Semite from the Labour Party. 

Leaving aside the absurdity of thinking that a mass party can simply purify itself 100% of any bigotry or prejudice (does the same apply to homophobes, Islamaphobes and any other form of prejudice?) it is a fact that Watson is extremely unconcerned when it comes to racism against Black people and Muslims. He went along with all New Labour’s anti-terrorism and Prevent measures. 

Tom Watson also abstained on Theresa May’s 2014 Immigration Act (ie. supported it) which introduced the ‘hostile environment policy’ which led to the deportation of hundreds of Black people.  If Watson is into expelling every last anti-Semite then presumably he is in favour of expelling himself as an incorrigible racist?  And given the way Ed Miliband pandered throughout his miserable leadership to racists, with those Labour Immigration Control mugs, presumably we can start by purging the Parliamentary Labour Party?

Of course this won’t happen. Anti-Semitism is the most marginal form of racism in Britain today.  The fact that the Labour Party is alleged to be overrun by it is testimony to how a ruling class, narrative, Orwellian in the way Black has become White has come to dominate the media.

What Watson really means by his declaration of running every anti-Semite out of the Labour Party, is that hostilities will continue until Corbyn is removed. It is a declaration of war and for McDonnell to simply mouth the same pieties is unforgiveable. He is in essence giving the green light to Watson and the Labour Right to continue a campaign whose sole purpose is to be rid of Corbyn as leader. 

It was therefore pretty sickening to hear McDonnell fawning over Momentum’s latest video attacking the Rothschild’s meme (basically that the Rothchilds finance Israel etc.) At a time when the Home Office is chartering planes to take Black people to the West Indies as part of their hostile environment policy Momentum under Lansman is obsessed by ‘anti-Semitism’, the most marginal of all forms of racism.

Rothschild’s conspiracy theories are believed by nutcases like David Icke. They have no popular purchase and are essentially harmless. For Momentum to concentrate on nonsense like this when there is real state racism, when Tommy Robinson’s thugs are active and when Apartheid Israel is continuing to use snipers to murder unarmed demonstrators is sick.

No one seriously thinks anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is a problem. It barely exists outside of the Daily Mail’s headlines.  Luciana Berger and Louise Ellman faced reselection problems not because they were Jews but because they are obnoxious right-wingers.

What is appalling is the way that so called left-wingers and socialists like McDonnell feel unable to stand up and call it out.

Jews in Britain are not being deported back to where their ancestors came from. They don’t die in police custody. They are not disproportionately gaoled. They do not fear (with the exception of the visually distinctive Ultra Orthodox) attacks on the street and the Ultra Orthodox have distanced themselves from the mainstream Zionist Board of Deputies attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, although the media deliberately didn’t report a letter from 29 rabbis last year distancing themselves from the Zionist attacks on Corbyn. Jews are not  economically deprived nor do they live in the inner cities.  Jews have long moved out of the East End into the suburbs of London.

It is an easily verifiable fact that the false anti-Semitism campaign was launched as soon as a Jeremy Corbyn leadership became apparent.

A month before Corbyn was elected the Daily Mail was accusing Corbyn of associating with a holocaust denier, Paul Eisen. The attention of the Zionists then turned to Jewish MP Gerald Kaufman before the incident of ‘anti-Semitism’ at Oxford University Labour Club.  All of these were fake and manufactured incidents as Asa Winstanley documented. The Chair of Oxford University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, just happened to have worked as an intern for the main Israeli propaganda group in Britain, BICOM.

The witchhunters then moved on.  I was suspended in March 2016 and Jackie Walker was suspended two months later. Around the same time Ken Livingstone was demonised for having said that the Nazis supported Zionism during the 1930’s, something clearly a matter of historical record.

If McDonnell ever got anywhere near power the Zionists would turn on him and dig up every 'skeleton' from the IRA to the PLO

Only last July the Jewish Chronicle and two other Zionist papers printed a joint editorial United We Stand which spoke of ‘the existential threat to Jewish life in this country that would be posed by a Jeremy Corbyn-led government.’ Corbyn was deemed a threat to the very existence of the Jewish community in Britain.  In other words he was anti-Semitic. Accusations that Chris Williamson was a ‘Jew Baiter’ have been the staple of Zionist propaganda. 

Yet instead of calling these false anti-Semitism attacks out, McDonnell beats his breast about ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party and how we must engage in a purge.  McDonnell is Tom Watson’s useful idiot. Anyone with the slightest guts would call out Watson and the Labour Right for their abysmal record on racism in Britain against Black and Asian people.

The real problem is that Corbyn and McDonnell believe that the road to power is via appeasing the majority of Labour MPs.  They are sadly wrong. It will not happen.  Last September Corbyn opposed Open Selection, the only device that would have allowed the composition of the PLP to change. He is now paying the price.

They said that adoption of the IHRA would put the anti-Semitism nonsense to bed.  A ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism which conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and which defines hostility to Israel as hostility to Jews.

When last year it was seen as possible that Corbyn wouldn’t survive and McDonnell was seen a possible successor the Jewish Chronicle and the Zionists immediately began digging into their files for evidence of McDonnell’s ‘anti-Semitism’.

McDonnell’s embrace of this false narrative, which is counter to the experience of all Labour Party members, is like drinking poison. It is utterly suicidal. It is clear that Watson is involved in preparations for a coup, whether it is a breakaway inside the PLP as the Sunday Times speculates or simply forcing Corbyn to resign. McDonnell’s behaviour is akin to treachery and it is no accident that he and Lansman are thick as thieves.

What McDonnell and the Labour Left, which today is difficult to discern in the PLP, should do is to call out the Labour supporters of Apartheid in Israel, i.e. Tom Watson and company.  When edicts are issued in Israel by Chief Rabbis against even Israeli Arabs renting rooms or flats in cities like Safed and members of the Labour Party like Luke Akehurst justify Israel’s use of snipers to mow down peaceful and unarmed demonstrators it is clear that McDonnell and other ‘lefts’ have lost the plot.

Yes there should be a purge but of the racist Right in the Labour Party not the anti-Zionist left.

Tony Greenstein

Brighton and Hove’s Green Councillors Betray the Cause of Anti-Racism as they get into bed with the Tories and New Labour

Brighton’s Labour Group Proposes IHRA Motion as part of its war on the Left and Corbyn and the Greens join in

In an interview with The Times of Israel it was reported that Israel’s Education Minister, Naftali Bennett, had stated that ‘he would instruct the IDF to shoot and kill any Palestinians who cross into the country from Gaza’. When questioned as to whether or not that would also apply to children Bennett responded ‘“They are not children — they are terrorists. We are fooling ourselves. I see the photos.” Bennett says IDF should shoot to kill Gazans who cross border [8.10.18]

The statement of Bennett, who is the leader of HaBayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home), a religious settlers’ party, is that of a Nazi. It is reminiscent of Himmler’s speech to Nazi leaders in the Polish city of Posnan on October 6^th 1943 when he explained why the killings had to include Jewish children: “I did not assume to have the right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers personified in the children to become adults for our children and grandchildren.”[Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p.259]

Palestinian children to Bennett are no different from Jewish children to Himmler. To both they represent the devil in child form. That was why Israeli polymath and orthodox religious scholar, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz described the settlers as Judeo-Nazis. Naftali Bennett is a prime example of a Judeo-Nazi. He subscribes to a racial philosophy of Jewish supremacism no different from Nazi ideology.

But under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ can be anti-Semitic even though Israelis regularly make such comparisons themselves. For example even Deputy Chief of Staff General Yair Golan at a Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration two years ago caused a storm when he stated that

‘If there's something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it's the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016. IDF Deputy Chief Likens 'Revolting Trends' in Israeli Society to pre-Holocaust Germany

Education Minister Naftali Benneftt, a Judeo-Nazi

Another member of Netanyahu’s Cabinet, Defence Minister Avigdor Liberman remarked that he would like nothing more than to see the drowning of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea. Again the label Judeo Nazi would be apt. His Deputy as Defence Minister, Rabbi Eli Dahan is also no slouch. In a radio interview he explained that to him Palestinians ‘“are like animals, they aren’t human.” and that “A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile [non-Jew] , even if he is a homosexual,”

Anti--Gypsy Signs in Barns Green, West Sussex

To understand the full import of the above it is important to recognize that for Orthodox Jews being gay is an abomination which merits the death penalty, but even a gay Jew has a ‘much higher soul’ than a non-Jew. These are just some of the people who inhabit the present Israeli cabinet. Yet to call them what they are, Judeo-Nazis is anti-Semitic under the shabby, incoherent and contradictory collection of words that goes under the title of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

Yet amazingly enough, the IHRA ‘definition of anti-Semitism’ is what Phelim McCafferty and the Green Group on Brighton & Hove Council has signed up to.  A defence of Israel which renders criticism of racists like Naftali Bennett antisemitic.         

The Latvian Waffen SS are lauded by the LNNK Party which the Tories are allied to in the European Parliament

Next Thursday Brighton and Hove Council is set to be the latest right-wing Council to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.  It is a definition whose main purpose is not to combat anti-Semitism but to demonise support for the Palestinians.

The arguments against the IHRA have been well rehearsed for example in my most recent Open Letter to Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion. Simply put there is a very simple definition of anti-Semitism.  It is the OED: ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’ The IHRA is 500+ words because that is how much it needs in order to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

Tony Janio - leader of the Tories  professes opposition to antisemitism but has never criticised the link-up of the Tories in the European Parliament with antisemitic parties

The actions of the Labour Group, which consists overwhelmingly of supporters of Progress and the Labour Right, in moving the IHRA have more to do with their opposition to Jeremy Corbyn than any concern about anti-Semitism.  Likewise the Tories are supporting the motion, not because they are worried about anti-Semitism but for similar reasons to Labour.  They too want to see an end to Jeremy Corbyn.  What is surprising is that the Green Party Councillors are playing #me2.

What kind of political degeneracy and stupidity leads anyone on the Left to sign a motion against racism with the Tory Party? Phelim McCafferty comes from Southern Ireland. He knows full well the bloody record of the Tories in Ireland. The Tory Party is the party of the British Empire and racism is its bread and butter. Racism was the justification for Empire through the belief that those we conquered were less civilised than ourselves. Racism isn’t an illness you catch or some moral deficiency, it is the oil that makes the wheels of imperialism turn - from the Atlantic slave trade to the Amritsar massacre and the starvation of Bengal. What kind of moral turpitude and political opportunism is it that leads the Greens of Brighton to get into bed with a party for whom racism is second nature? 

For sure the Tory party now has some Black and Asian MPs just as it now has some Jewish MPs. The British in India also relied on native collaborators to maintain the Raj but their rule was no less racist or bloody because of this. Today Sajid David presides over the Windrush scandal and the Tories ‘hostile environment policy’ towards migrants.

Most people think of the Green Party as some kind of anti-establishment party on the left of British politics but Brighton Greens when in power have shown a remarkable ability to adapt to the prevailing political ambience.

Up to 2015 the Green Party ran a minority administration in Brighton.  Because that administration was widely seen as a disaster, their representation fell from 21 to 11in 2015 and the Council is now run by Labour. The Greens during their time in power came into conflict with the refuse workers and together with the Tories imposed the hideous Eyesore (I-360) on Brighton.

We were led to believe that with the replacement of the previous leader, Jason Kitcat by Phelim McCafferty, that the Deep Greens had been put to bed.  By seconding the IHRA resolution to Council with the Tories the Greens have demonstrated their political shallowness.

Anyone serious about anti-racism would ask why it is that ‘anti-Semitism’ is being singled out.  Jews may be a minority but they are not racially oppressed. According to the Pew Research Centre 7% of British people have unfavourable attitudes to Jews, compared to 26% and 50% with respect to Muslims and Roma respectively.

Daniel Yates - right-wing leader of Brighton Labour Group

There are no Windrush-style deportations of Jews.  Jews are not stopped and searched on the street or likely to die in police custody nor do they suffer from racial attacks or economic discrimination.  Jews are not overrepresented in prisons and under-represented in Parliament. Jews are a privileged part of the White population.  The idea that passing the IHRA resolution has something to do with opposing racism against Jews is fanciful.  It is about a political narrative concerned with Israel, Zionism and Jeremy Corbyn. 

The mere fact that ‘anti-Semitism’ is being privileged above any other form of racism is itself racist.  It is a slap in the face of those groups who really do suffer from racism.  

The Tories are the traditional party of anti-Semitism. At the beginning of the 20^th century they opposed the immigration of Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia and in 1905 under the ardent Zionist Arthur Balfour they introduced the Aliens Act to keep Jews out.  In the 1930’s they opposed the immigration of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, supported by the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Express. The war-time government of Churchill adamantly refused to admit Jewish refugees who were able to escape Nazi occupied Europe because they were considered enemy aliens!

An email from Jewish Green Party member Les Levidow to Phelim McCafferty

Message to Phelim McCafferty from Debbie Fink, a Jewish member of the Green Party

Of course as the Jewish community has moved upward socially and politically to the Right the Tories have shed their overt anti-Semitism which resulted in someone like Michael Howard having to face over 40 selection contests before becoming an MP.

But although the Tories are ardently pro-Zionist and anti-Palestinian they have not shed all their attitudes.  They are allied with the European Conservative and Reform Group in the European Parliament.  This is a group consisting of a number of anti-Semitic parties such as the Swedish Democrats, Poland’s Law and Justice Party and Latvia’s LNNK/For Fatherland and Freedom. The LNNK for example has one MEP, Robert Zile, who on one Saturday every March demonstrates alongside veterans of Latvia’s Waffen SS.

Over 95% of Latvia’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, the second highest of any European country.  Part of the reason was the hostility of the native population many of whom joined the Waffen SS, the section of the SS responsible for running the concentration camps. Yet the Tories, including ex-Conservative Friends of Israel Chair Eric Pickles ardently defend their tie up with overtly anti-Semitic parties.

See Monica Lowenberg’s Riga, Capital of European Culture: Waffen SS, Stags and Silence? for a description of the Tories friends in Latvia. If Tony Janio, the Tory leader in Brighton Council were sincere in his opposition to anti-Semitism then he would challenge his party’s membership of the ECHR group in the European parliament.  Otherwise he is just being the normal Tory hypocrite.

For the Green Party to ally itself with right-wing Labour and the Tories use of ‘anti-Semitism’ as a stick to beat supporters of the Palestinians demonstrates how shallow their support for the Palestinians really is. Whenever the Greens gets their hands on the levers of power, they behave no different to their Labour/Tory counterparts.

It remains to be seen whether all 11 of the Green Party councillors follow the lead of Phelim McCafferty into the lobby with Warren Morgan and the Tories.

Let us be clear what this is about.  The IHRA states that

"Manifestations [of antisemitism] might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. "  

In other words if you criticise Israel because it is fundamentally different from a normal state, from an anti-Zionist perspective, because it is a state based on ethnic supremacy, then you are antisemitic.  This is what the Green group and the Labour group have signed up for. This is anti-Palestinian racism, pure and simple. Tony Greenstein

Open Letter to Phelim McCafferty – Leader of Green Group on Brighton and Hove City Council

Dear Phelim,

I wrote to you earlier today regarding the fact that you had jointly seconded, with Tony Janio of the Tories, the IHRA resolution that is going to the next meeting of Brighton and Hove Council. You have chosen not to respond.

I sent you and the Green Councillors over the weekend a letter explaining why the IHRA has nothing to with opposing anti-Semitism and everything to do with undermining support for the Palestinians. No one has yet explained why a ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism of 500+ words is required when the Oxford English Dictionary definition ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ consists of just 6. The fact that the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is based on ‘hatred’ rather than ‘hostility’ demonstrates it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

 Even the IHRA’s principal author Kenneth Stern has criticised its use to chill free speech on campuses. The IHRA has been the subject of withering criticism by a variety of legal and academic figures, such as former Court of Appeal Judge Sir Stephen Sedley, Hugh Tomlinson QC and Geoffrey Robertson QC who has described it as ‘not fit for purpose.’

The reason why the Labour Group is proposing this pernicious statement owes more to their hostility to Jeremy Corbyn than any concern with racism against Jews or others. Hostility to Corbyn is also the prime motive of the Tory group.  It is stretching credibility to believe that a Tory Party which has deported possibly hundreds of Black British Windrush Citizens under their ‘hostile environment policy’ is seriously concerned about racism against Jews.

A Tory Party which, when Jewish refugees were fleeing from the pogroms in Czarist Russia, introduced the 1905 Aliens Act and which also opposed the admission of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany is now apparently concerned about anti-Semitism. This is the same Tory Party which is in alliance with anti-Semitic parties in the European Parliament and whose MEP’s have just supported the racist Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary.

What makes this even more sordid is that you led people to believe that the Green group in the Council would not be supporting this wretched motion.

The only effect of adopting the IHRA will be to threaten the free speech of Council employees and others.  For the Green Group to support such an anti-democratic resolution is shameful. The IHRA has been used to close down Israel Apartheid week on university campuses. A staff member of Hammersmith & Fulham Council was dismissed for contravening the IHRA.  Clearly your support for civil liberties is skin deep.

This resolution is also racist. You have ignored the letter written to the Council by some 18 Black and migrant groups in this city opposing the IHRA. By what right do you privilege opposition to anti-Semitism, which is a marginal prejudice, compared to racism against Black people, Muslims and Gypsies?  There is no state anti-Semitism in Britain and where it does exist, in Poland and Eastern Europe, the Zionist movement has nothing to say because these regimes are also the most ardently pro-Israel.

Racist attitudes to Roma in this country are over 7 times higher than that against Jews and anti-Muslim racism is over 3 times as high.  It is clear that it wasn’t anti-racism which motivated this resolution.

Some people have fondly imagined that the Green Party and its councillors represent a break from the traditional two parties and their mode of operation. In supporting this racist resolution, not least in the way you led people to believe that you would be opposing the IHRA, it is clear that your real goal is for a greater share of the spoils rather than a desire for fundamental change in society.  Some of us had hoped that the Green councillors had broken from the Jason Kitcat era.  Clearly we were wrong.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein