Posts Tagged ‘Naz Shah’

If the Labour leadership won’t stand against anti-Semitism, who will?

30/05/2016, 08:53:40 PM

by Frazer Loveman

Two days ago the Labour party lifted the suspension of Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of Thanet Labour and also vice-chair of Momentum’s steering committee. Her comments regarding the African holocaust on Facebook, where she had suggested that Jews had been “chief financiers” of the slave and sugar trade have now seemingly been deemed by the Labour party leadership to have been perfectly acceptable, with no further action necessary.

Now, I don’t know Ms Walker, I don’t want to judge whether or not she is actually an anti-Semite, but her remarks were at the very least misguided and distasteful. What is more offensive is that she refuses to recognise or accept this, posting a blog on May 26th in which she does not offer contrition, or an apology, but instead doubling down suggesting “anti-Semitism is not a major problem” before going on to discuss the “increasing convergence between Zionists, the right of the Labour Party, the Tories and our right wing media”. This has been her stance all along, as characterised by her response on Russia Today when she again claimed the issue was not anti-Semitism, but the restriction of free speech (as she misappropriated the Martin Niemöller poem First They Came) within the Labour party, comparing her suspension to McCarthysim.

This inability to even countenance that she may have made remarks that could be considered anti-Semitic is almost worse than making the remarks in the first place. When it was revealed that Bradford West MP Naz Shah had shared anti-Semitic images on Facebook she showed nothing but remorse, apologising for the posts and actively reaching out to the Jewish community, culminating in her appearance yesterday at a Synagogue in Leeds where she once again fully apologised and said that she had been “ignorant”, but now “understood” more about the situation in Israel and how the BDS movement effects normal Israeli citizens.

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Week 3 of the campaign: the good, the bad and the ugly

19/04/2015, 01:07:23 PM

In our second installment, Uncut’s weekly review of the campaign looks at the events of week 3.

The good

Labour’s costed policies

Sunday 12 April – Marr and Osborne. The core Tory strength is a reputation for fiscal probity. Yet here was prime time Osborne appearing anything but.

After more than five years when it has usually seemed that only one party, the Tories, know how to make their sums add up, Marr suddenly left the impression that this party is Labour, not the Tories.

Sam Dale has previously argued on Uncut that the Tory advantage on fiscal credibility is so well established that they can afford, as they certainly now are, to play fast and loose with it. In doing so, though, they deepen a theme of the Tory campaign identified by Jonathan Todd: taking people for idiots.

If Labour keeps showing how our policies are costed, the Tories might just find a trump card slipping away at the last, crucial moment.

The manifesto launch event

The team managing Labour’s events deserve some recognition. Often overlooked as the plaudits go to the more flashy spinners, events folk only tend to get mentioned when something has gone wrong.

But for Labour, trying to shift some pretty entrenched pre-campaign stereotypes, the backdrop and staging of the set-piece events needs to provide the pictures that validate the message.

If anything were to go wrong – as at Ukip’s campaign launch when the blu tak came unstuck and the backdrop fell down – then it’s a lock for the news bulletins as a metaphor for a campaign in trouble.

This week’s manifesto launch was another in a growing list of impressive events.

The message was about responsibility and fiscal discipline and the pictures of Ed Miliband at the event reflected this exactly.

Ed M

 

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