Lloyd Russell-Moyle is a Synonym for Lies, Deception, Treachery and Back Stabbing

The MP for Brighton Kemptown, Who Supported Palestine When It Suited Him, Abstained on the Anti-Boycott Bill - As Did Dianne Abbot and Richard Burgon

I have amended this article to take out my criticism of Zara Sultana, who had a legitimate reason for being absent

Corbyn, McDonnell and Crispin Blunt Speeches Opposing the Tory’s Anti-Boycott Bill

Whenever I think of Lloyd Russell-Moyle I think of his exact opposite, Divina Levrini. One is an opportunist for whom everything is a tactical game designed to advance his career. The other is or rather was a 30 year old Swedish mother who, despite a serious illness, went on the 2018 Gaza Freedom Flotilla in order to fight for justice and freedom for others regardless of the cost to herself. Divina was beaten up and denied her medication by the savages who run Israeli detention facilities. Divina died 9 months after returning from detention in Israel.

Divina Levrini holding the Gaza Freedom Flotilla banner at Brighton's Old Steine

Moyle and Divina could not be more different. One sacrificed her life for the freedom of the Palestinians, the other used the Palestinians to help his career, making fine speeches full of sound and fury but literally signifying nothing.

When in 2018 the Gaza Freedom Flotilla came to Brighton and Hove Russell-Moyle was happy to come to the party in their honour at the Verdict, a Brighton jazz club and be pictured alongside these heroes who put their lives on the line, literally. But when it came to standing up for the Palestinians in parliament this week, despite making a short intervention in the debate, Moyle was conspicuous by his absence.

The national conference of Woodcraft Folk, which Moyle chaired, which voted overwhelmingly for Boycott - at that time he had no problems with BDS

This is especially the case since Moyle chaired the national conference of the Woodcraft Folk which voted in July 2010 to support a full boycott of Israel. Moyle knows the arguments, he knows that Israel is an Apartheid State yet when push comes to shove he bottled out and abstained.

No greater cowardice can there be than someone who is happy to stand in the limelight  but afraid to stand up and be counted when it matters.

The late Divina Levrini

See Divina Levrini – A Star that will forever burn brightly in our memories

People may think that I’m being hard on Russell-Moyle. After all he is little or no different from all the other cowards and traitors who sneer and bray from Labour’s backbenches. Moyle was a member of the ‘Socialist’ Campaign Group who make fiery speeches once a year at Labour Party Conference, posturing and preening themselves and spend the rest of the time cowering in the shadows. In a way I am being harsh on Moyle because he is no different from the rest of the parliamentary traitors.

LRM grabs the mace

For all I know Moyle may still consider himself a socialist but thinks that it is best to bide his time. The problem with this is that by continually making concessions to the right one becomes part of them. The will to do good will have atrophied through lack of use.

Moyle is fond of making firebrand speeches, even if he finds it hard to live up to them. There was his speech at the election count, where he accused Tories of killing people. That didn’t last long.

fiery speech at count

Then there was the speech at the 2021 Labour Party conference where he said that Starmer is “not a politician for the Labour Party”. Well that lasted all of 5 minutes.

Lloyd Russell-Moyle - Starmer was "not a politician for the Labour Party".

Then there was his promise to put his arms around all those who had been unfairly purged, which is about 99.99%. That too didn’t last longer than the first hostile headline. Moyle said:

“I want to apologise from all of us but me in particular. Because if we have made you feel like you are alone, if we have not reached our arm around you enough in these tough times when you are being purged or set up with false allegations, I not only apologise, I will endeavour to do better because we have to support each other.”

The spiritual mentor of Israel's Police & Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir is on record as saying that one Jewish fingernail is worth a thousand non-Jewish lives

I have to confess that I never asked Moyle to put his arms round me but I would have appreciated it if he hadn’t written to Iain McNicol urging that my expulsion be sped up! Especially since at that time he was Chair of Brighton and Hove Labour Party which had just passed policy deploring my suspension.

A few more photos from the time when Moyle found it useful to be seen to support the Palestinians

According to the local Argus, Sussex Friends of Israel’s Fiona Sharpe, a racist who doubles as Labour Against Anti-Semitism said:

“Keir Starmer has taken some positive steps to remove anti-Semitism from the party, and we urge him to take immediate action and remove the whip.”

No sooner had he spoken than Moyle was backtracking. On Twitter he began the retreat:

 “there are anti-Semites that have rightly been expelled from party” but there was also people “who have been threatened with expulsion or investigation for no reason."

"No arm should be put around people legitimately removed from Labour", he added in another tweet, "but those wrongly threatened for supporting trans rights or supporting Labour MPs has created a chilling effect which has made activist feel vulnerable and not respected. It’s to those we should show solidarity."

Guido Fawkes, the Tory libel site, ran with the headline “Moyle for the chop”.  Guido suggested that

“if Starmer is serious about detaching Labour from the hard-left, his outriders think Russell-Moyle’s now ripe for the picking”.

LAAS posted on Twitter to say that a letter had been sent to Starmer to “urge him to remove the whip” from Moyle.

Lloyd promises to ‘put his arms round’ all the victims of false anti-Semitism accusations.

Moyle's promise to hug and put his arms round the hundreds of victims of false antisemitism accusations lasted as long as his speech. As soon as the Zionist backlash began LRM retreated and he has been doing so ever since. In 2017 he was attacked for supporting Melanie Melvin, Brighton Labour Party’s Women’s Officer after she came under attack. Again he retreated. Moyle’s record ever since the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign began is one of retreating under pressure.

This is the Israel that Moyle says is not an Apartheid State

Lloyd Russell-Moyle Supported the Tory Anti-Boycott  Bill

But none of this can justify the fact that last Monday 3 July, when the second reading of the Tory Anti-Boycott Bill was held, Moyle abstained. This is truly unforgiveable. If this Bill had been in force in 1933 it would have made the Jewish anti-Nazi Boycott illegal. It would have made the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against South African Apartheid illegal. It would also have made the Boycott of Slave Grown Sugar in the Caribbean illegal.

Now just imagine if the White Slave Owners had protested that Boycotting their sugar was discrimination against them on the grounds of colour! This lity is what the Zionists are saying. That we are discriminating against them, not because they murder Palestinian children, not because they demolish their homes and confiscate their land. Perish the thought. It’s because they are Jewish!

This is what the anti-BDS campaign is about and Moyle has joined hands with the most reactionary racists, Zionists and imperialists. Because when an Opposition abstains on a government measure it is tantamount to supporting it. Keir Starmer we know is a Zionist ‘without qualification’. Starmer is a proud and unashamed racist and this is who Moyle has joined hands with.

Israel's new government is stuffed with people proud to be fascists and homophobes

The best that can be said of the vote last Monday is that at least 10 Labour MPs defied Starmer to vote against this racist measure. They were Apsama Begum, Dawn Butler, Barry Gardiner (surprisingly since he is down as a Labour Friends of Israel sponsor), Ian Lavery, Andy McDonald, John McDonnell, Ian Mearns, Grahame Morris, Mick Whitley and Beth Winter. This is in addition to Jeremy Corbyn and Claudia Webbe who have had the Whip removed.

Moyle also provided a testimonial to anti-Roma, harasser of women and anti-Palestinian hate activist Luke Stanger

But where were Dianne Abbot, Clive Lewis, Nadia Whithome (the AWL MP), Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Dan Carden, Kim Johnson who only recently called Israel a fascist and apartheid state, Rebecca Long Bailey, Kate Osamor, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Sam Tarry and Jon Trickett?

Despite having been a Corbyn supporter when it benefited his career, Moyle refused to sign a petition calling for the whip to be restored to Jeremy Corbyn

On paper the SCG has 35 members, but in practice it is in a state of political collapse. To put things into perspective 10 members of the Liberal Democrats, Zionists to a man and woman, also voted against this Bill on civil liberties grounds. Even 2 Tories did. The refusal of Moyle, Burgon and co. to join them is nothing less than shameful.

Tony Greenstein

By Standing as an Independent Jeremy Corbyn Can Help Destroy the Warmongers and Neo-Liberals behind Liar Starmer

Labour is Dead as a Party Representing The Working Class and Oppressed

Ken Loach on Slippery Starmer

I had a personal and political reason for knowing that Starmer was lying when he stood as a Corbyn continuity candidate for the Labour leadership. That he should have jettisoned his 10 Pledges so quickly was no surprise whatsoever. That he should have called himself a Zionist ‘without qualification’ was also no surprise. Racism and Starmer go together like Laurel and Hardy.

On February 18^th, hours after I had been expelled, Starmer welcomed my expulsion with one word – ‘good’. A man of few words and even fewer ideas.

Keeping Starmer in his Shadow Cabinet, despite his personal responsibility for what has happened to Julian Assange, his proposal to gaol those guilty of over claiming benefits for 10 years (not tax dodgers of course) and his refusal to prosecute police murderers such as the killer of Ian Tomlinson, should have given him ample warning of Starmer’s Brutus like treachery.

Below is an article which I largely agree with, from Adam Johannes, a Welsh socialist. It is clear that despite the Tories self-imploding over the summer with Liz Truss’s 44 day leadership, the shortest in history, Starmer has failed to capitalise on it.

Thornberry attacks the Crown Prosecution Service under Starmer for its failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile

Sunak has now stabilised the Tory government and Starmer has nothing to say, hence his childish ad accusing him of not wanting to gaol child abusers when it was he who refused to prosecute Jimmy Savile. Starmer himself has never denied his part in the decision not to prosecute Savile.

Starmer represents the British state in all its ugliness and hypocrisy. He is, as I wrote, two months before he was elected leader, ‘the candidate that the Deep State & the British Establishment want you to vote for.’

For me the key was Starmer’s pivotal role in the persecution of Julian Assange, whose only crime was the revelation of American war crimes in the illegal Iraq War. Starmer also ensured that thousands of CPS files were destroyed.

Corbyn made many mistakes during his leadership but the key one was appeasing those who were out to destroy him. Instead of calling out Israel’s supporters in the Jewish Labour Movement he tried to work with them.

Corbyn failed to understand the nature of the attack on him and took these attacks as if they had been made in good faith. In particular he accepted the ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative.

As Asa Winstanley made clear, The Jewish Labour Movement had been refounded precisely in order to destroy Corbyn. Yet, as the Labour Leaked Report revealed (p. 306)

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 Labour Party yet was trust rebuilt? Yet instead of realising his mistake Corbyn went on trying to appease the Zionists. Chris Williamson, his most faithful supporter in Parliament was thrown to the wolves. Jennie Formby boasted about how many socialists she had expelled compared to Iain McNicol.

The crowning mistake was at the Labour Party Conference in 2018 when Corbyn opposed reselection. I spoke with Chris Williamson at the Labour Against the Witchhunt fringe meeting and I said to him after the meeting that by taking this decision, and persuading Len McLuskey of UNITE to oppose it, Corbyn had driven the final nail into the coffin of the Corbyn Project.

Tony Benn and Jon Lansman

In one sense Corbyn and Tony Benn before him represented the fatal weakness of the Labour Left. In Benn’s famous phrase an airplane needs two wings to fly. This is of course true but when it has two pilots determined to fly in different directions that is a disaster.

The Labour left had little or no imagination and could never imagine life without the pro-war, pro-capitalist Labour Right. In practice what this meant was that the Labour Left abandoned all hope of socialism and put its faith in minor reforms to capitalism. The history of the Labour Left is a history of retreat, ideological confusion and betrayal.

This has now reached its logical end point with a Socialist Campaign Group that has, to all intent and purposes, abandoned any criticism of Starmer or his policy of faithfully following every twist and turn of US foreign policy.

John McDonnell and the SCG support the United States’s proxy war in Ukraine. Just as McDonnell, perhaps the most pathetic of the leaders of the Labour left there has ever been, praising Starmer’s do nothing, see nothing, say nothing refusal to criticise Boris Johnson over the COVID pandemic.

However Corbyn can make amends. To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing would become Corbyn so much as his leaving of the Labour Party to stand as a socialist independent. The question is whether he will take that step and lead the fight against Starmer and for a new socialist formation.

I agree with Adam Johannes.  Because Starmer has refused to oppose the Tories on economic affairs, civil liberties, racism or indeed anything substantive, the Labour Party today is by no means guaranteed to win the next election.

Dido Harding - only qualification was marriage to a Tory MP

The refusal of Starmer and Streeting to support striking workers, including the nurses and junior doctors is particularly shameful. ‘There is no money’ they repeat in Tory fashion. But there was £37 billion for a failed COVID test and trace system run by Dido Harding. of which there  is no trace other than to say it went to Tory cronies.

There were billions of pounds for a VIP channel for COVID contracts that even the High Court declared unlawful. It is capitalism that prefers to reward ruling class crooks rather than pay ordinary workers that is the problem and the problem with the Labour Left is that they have never opposed a market economy or capitalism.

Tony Greenstein

The Weakness of Starmer Labour and the tasks ahead

Adam Johannes

The latest opinion polls suggest that the days of a 20 point lead by Labour over the Tories are over and we could be heading for a hung parliament in the next election, which could even mean the prospect of another five years of Tory rule.

On the central faultline in British politics the cost-of-living crisis and the economy the Labour Party are not offering a sharp, clear alternative way of resolving the crisis by ending it, or any easily understood solutions to the ills that plague everyday life today: wages, benefits and pensions that don't match rising living costs, the housing crisis, crumbling public services etc.

Labour's plunge in the polls comes as we reach the end of round 1 of the national strike wave which offered the possibility of a national alternative narrative to the establishment on the economic crisis, but has dipped with the drive of the trade union bureaucracy for sectionalism and to settle for pay rises well below inflation, effectively a pay cut, and refusal to link individual disputes into a national programme to end the cost of living crisis.

A stronger, more political, movement of workers in the rank and file will be needed that can push for a winning strategy in the workplaces and articulate an alternative set of national policies to end the crisis, tied in with supporting campaigns against racism, climate breakdown and imperialist war etc.

The permanent dithering of Jeremy Corbyn over whether he will stand as an independent (let alone help build a left wing alternative to Labour) is also problematic, as such such an election campaign even though in one constituency would offer a possibility to give a national profile for an alternative set of national policies and exert pressure on Starmer's Labour from the left.

One of the weaknesses of the Corbyn Project was the beginnings of a sweeping economic programme separated from fighting social movements and militant trade unionism at the base of society, it was as though it could all be done from above. One of the side-effects of the collapse of Corbynism is the beginnings of a revival of social movements and militant trade unionism that often don't link the day-to-day battles with 'high politics' and a sweeping economic programme that challenges the system.

Meanwhile yesterday's canvassers for nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy now say that all we can do is burrow away at a very local level in our renters unions and workplaces in the hope that in some far flung future we will reach the cumulative strength to articulate a national alternative, politics doesn't progress by gradualness though, but by 'Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!'

The Enough is Enough campaign has also been a setback for the left. The unions involved CWU, RMT, UCU, as well as Tribune and Acorn, and Zarah Sultana should be held to account, you don't play sectarian games during a major economic crisis. Last summer as the cost-of-living crisis began to fight hundreds of thousands signed up to this sham organisation wanting to join a national mass organisation to fight back. It's main achievement has been to derail building a national movement around the cost-of-living crisis and a national community organisation to support the national strike wave, by pretending to fill the space and thereby stopping anything actually being built to occupy the space.

The coming election will probably be the ugliest on record fought out on so-called 'culture war' issues in a bidding war between Tories and Labour over who can be most in the gutter in cynically using the lives of minorities, migrants and marginalised groups, and the poor, for political gain, and Labour deploying right wing tropes around being tough on crime, rather than its causes.

This is a potentially combustible mix. With no strong national left wing voice, as bitterness rips though society over rising living costs coming on top of years of austerity and neoliberalism, all kinds of dark forces may be waiting in the wings.

The left must stand with the oppressed and the scapegoated, but simply remaining in that defensive space means essentially getting bogged down on a terrain decided by the right and where the right is strongest.

What is desperately needed is HOPE a sense of a national movement in political life on the offensive with a progressive economic programme that can unify our people and cut across various cultural divides in society.

Not only repairing years of damage to the fabric of society done by forty years of Thatcherism and individualism, but offering something collective for the common good that goes beyond the welfare state consensus of 1945-1975.

Kim Johnson MP called Israel an Apartheid Fascist State – When Threatened With Losing the Whip She Immediately Recanted

 Johnson’s Cowardice When Confronted With Starmer’s McCarthyism Speaks Volumes About the Socialist Campaign Group and the Labour Left

It was nothing if not predicable. A member of the Socialist Campaign Group collapsed like a pack of cards when threatened by Starmer’s bullies. Instead of standing her ground and defying Starmer to do his worst, instead of defending what she had said, she chose to preserve her parliamentary career above principle.

What a contrast with holocaust survivor Stefan Kapos, who when he was told last week by a Labour apparatchik not to speak at a Holocaust Memorial Day meeting organised by the Socialist Labour Network, or he could be expelled, immediately resigned. The SCG prefer instead to capitulate.

If John McDonnell, Zara Sultana and the rest of the opportunists in the SCG had any principles, still less strategy, they would have immediately backed up Kim Johnson and gone on the offensive, defending that she had said, calling out Starmer’s racism and challenging him to do racist worst. Instead they remained silent.

When, during Israel attacked Gaza in 2009 Gerald Kaufman, a Jewish MP who was not even on the left, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, no one even thought that he should be disciplined. Even Tony Blair, a renowned Zionist, didn’t entertain the idea of removing the Whip. That shows just how far down the road we have come with Starmer.

Gerald Kaufman's famous speech comparing the Israeli Army to the Nazis

When Kaufman died in 2017 the Jewish Chronicle told its readers that he was ‘reviled’. Marcus Dysch wrote:

He compared Israeli soldiers serving during the Gaza conflict of 2009 to the Nazis who forced his ancestors to flee Poland.

His “here we are, the Jews again” comment when Labour MP Louise Ellman rose to speak in the chamber in 2011 was not just crass, but specifically targeted, knowingly full well the hurt that would – and did – follow.

It is not as if there isn’t proof a plenty that Israel is an apartheid state. It is also clear to all except wilful racists like Starmer, that Israel’s government is stuffed with extreme racists and fascists.

All the major human rights organisations, from B’Tselem’s Report to  Human Rights Watch’s A Threshold Crossed to Amnesty International’s Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians, that Israel is guilty of the crime of Apartheid.

Starmer embracing Louise Ellman, the MP for Liverpool Riverside and Tel Aviv South, who defended the Israeli army's abuse of Palestinian children

If we could turn the clock back 90 years then Starmer would have had no difficulty explaining why Hitler had come to power. He is a man without principle dedicated to defending imperialism come what may.

When a delegate at Labour’s conference last September pointed out that the Zelensky regime had banned trade unions and incorporated neo-Nazis into his regime Starmer had him immediately suspended.

Kim Johnson prostrating herself at the feet of Starmer & the Israel lobby

The truth of what Kim Johnson said, before she recanted like a victim of Stalin’s purges, is self evident. Israel has de facto annexed the West Bank but denies any rights to its Palestinian inhabitants unlike the Jewish settlers who have the full protection of Israeli civil law.

Israeli maps treat the West Bank as part of Greater Israel. The Green Line has long disappeared. In the West Bank two different sets of laws apply to two different peoples – Jews and Palestinian. That is the quintessential definition of apartheid.

But within Israel Apartheid also exists. There are over 60 laws which explicitly discriminate against Israeli Palestinians.

The 2003 Citizenship Law prevents Israeli Palestinians from marrying Arab spouses living outside Israel. The Admissions Committee Law 2013 enables hundreds of Jewish communities to bar Israeli Arabs from living amongst them.

The Jewish Nation State Law reserves national self-determination only for ‘the Jewish people.’ 93% of Israeli land is reserved solely for the use of Jews via the Jewish National Fund.

Arabs are confined within their towns and villages which are unable to expand, unlike Jewish towns because they are deliberately surrounded by Jewish communities.

In the Galilee, East Jerusalem and the Negev/Naqab there is a deliberate policy of Judaisation. If you want an equivalent then you only need to recall Nazi Germany’s policies of ‘deJewification’.

Israel isn’t a fascist but a settler colonial state but that doesn’t make it better. Arguably it makes it worse. America wasn’t a fascist state but its settlers exterminated millions of the indigenous native Indians.

The Israeli government is, however, stuffed with people who proudly declare that they are fascists. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s new Finance Minister who is in charge of the Civil i.e. Military Administration in the West Bank said that ‘My voters don’t care if I’m a homophobe or fascist’. Miri Regev, Israel’s new Minister of Transport said ‘I’m happy to be a fascist’.

Smotrich is on record as opposing having Arab women share maternity wards with Jewish women but to Starmer this too is ok.

Even the European Union of Jewish Students has warned against ‘Fascist’ Ben Gvir, the new Police Minister. Calling Israeli Ministers and the Israeli state ‘fascist’ is commonplace but for Keir Starmer, any criticism of the United States’s racist Rottweiler is forbidden.  

The Independent reported that:

Sir Keir’s spokesman denounced the use of both the terms “apartheid” and “fascist”, saying many will have taken offence at the latter in particular. He told reporters: “As a first step we would obviously want her to withdraw the remarks that she used for sure.”

Johnson’s crime was giving ‘offence’.  No doubt many Germans would have taken offence at criticism of Hitler’s regime and racist Whites like Starmer would have taken offence at criticism of South Africa but so what? If telling the truth gives offence then so be it.

If anything the description of people like Bezalel Smotrich and Ben Gvir as fascists is too kind. The proper description of them is Jewish or Judeo-Nazis. The Times of Israel reported, on election night Gvir

interrupted his own victory speech… to pay tribute to the radical settler Rabbi Dov Lior and to his former political partner Bentzi Gopstein, the head of the racist and homophobic Lehava organization.

Rabbi Dov Lior is Chairman of the Jewish Rabbinical Council of the West Bank and Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba and Hebron. He is also an unreconstructed racist, even by Israeli standards.

In 1994, he supported the murder by an American settler, Baruch Goldstein, of 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque. Lior then issued a religious edict, saying,

There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them....A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail.

Lior praised Goldstein, calling him a “great saint and rabbi … may his memory be blessed”. Ben Gvir, until recently, had a poster on his wall of Baruch Goldstein.

Not to be outdone, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, officiating at Goldstein’s funeral, told mourners that even 1 million Arabs “are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” Angry voices in the congregation shouted, “We are all Goldsteins!” and “Arabs out of Israel!”

Several months after the massacre, Lior told disciples in Kiryat Araba near the occupied West Bank city of Hebron

Jewish blood was redder than non-Jewish blood … and that a Jewish life is preferred by the Lord than a non-Jewish life.

In 2009 Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur wrote Torat HaMelech, a religious guide to killing non-Jews legally. Among their insights was the ruling that the ‘Prohibition 'Thou Shalt Not Murder' applies only 'to a Jew who kills a Jew.' Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and attacks on them "curb their evil inclination," while babies and children of Israel's enemies may be killed since "it is clear that they will grow to harm us." It was immediately endorsed by Dov Lior.

Another hero of Gvir is Benzi Gopstein of the fascist Lehava whose slogan is ‘assimilation is a holocaust’. Like its Nazi forebears it openly campaigns against miscegenation, sexual or personal relations between Jew and Arab.

Lehava thugs openly attack Arabs who they suspect of liaisons with Jewish women and in one attack 105 Palestinians were wounded and 22 hospitalised in a pogrom in Jerusalem.

Lehava activists were also responsible for arson at one of the few mixed Jewish-Arab schools, the Hand in Hand in Jerusalem. One of those who set fire to the school received 3 years in prison. If he had been a Palestinian the sentence would have been 3 or 4 times that.

As someone equally hostile to Christians Gopstein has advocated burning churches too. These are the friends of Israel’s new Police Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir who is now in charge of directing Israel’s police. Yet Labour’s racist leader, Keir Starmer, objects to calling the Israeli government ‘fascist’ or apartheid. But then Starmer or was quoted as saying ‘I support Zionism without qualification.’

There is nothing that Israel could do that would disturb Starmer and Biden. All that matters is its strategic role in the Middle East. Labour has a racist as leader yet the SCG, instead of following in the footsteps of previous generations of socialists like Mervyn Stockwood and Lord Soper keeps quiet in the hope of keeping their parliamentary seats.

There really is nothing more contemptible than the likes of Kim Johnson or Richard Burgon apologising for even the slightest criticism of Zionism or Israel.

Tony Greenstein