by Rob Marchant
Following the abrupt resignation of Iain McNicol – apparently not fallen on his sword but pushed under a bus by the party leadership (£) – there are currently two candidates to be Labour’s General Secretary: Unite’s Jennie Formby and Momentum’s Jon Lansman.
While this might be reasonably likened to choosing for your leader between Ghengis Khan and Pol Pot, there is always a least worst option and, in these difficult times, it is important to take note which it is.
Here’s why Formby should not be General Secretary.
One. Jennie Formby is not so much a supporter of the Palestinian cause, as a fully-fledged anti-Israel campaigner who has been demonstrated to have, let’s say, controversial views.
To explain: two years ago, she “outraged” an NEC meeting by questioning Baroness Royall’s suitability to lead the party’s investigation into anti-Semitism at Oxford University Labour Club (later suppressed from publication), on the grounds that she had previously visited Israel. It seems remarkably close to the 2011 questioning by Paul Flynn MP whether it was right for a British Ambassador to Israel to be Jewish, for which he was rightly vilified.
The logic of the first is a mirror image of the second: if you are Jewish, you cannot be trusted to be objective with subjects involving Israel. If you are pro-Israel, you cannot be trusted with to be objective with subjects involving Jewishness. In either case, it plays to the old trope about Jews and untrustworthiness.
Given that the usual criticism from the anti-Israel lobby is that of conflating Jewishness with Zionism, it seems strangely ironic that Formby should here be doing precisely that. Anti-Semitism, quite obviously, is a wholly separate phenomenon from whether or not a person supports Israel.
Then there was the 2015 NEC meeting where, the Times of Israel reported, she promoted the idea that G4S should be boycotted for conference security on account of its Israel links, a vote which was passed with only around half the NEC present. She then stated that it was not a boycott of Israel, which the minutes later showed it clearly was, according to the newspaper.
Finally, we might note that, although Momentum has been extremely slow to take action against anti-Semites in its own ranks, Lansman is, after all, Jewish himself and has acknowledged there is a problem to be solved within Labour. Rather cleverly, Formby has of course recently condemned anti-Semitic attacks on Lansman, thereby conveniently diverting attention away from any criticism of her in that respect.
