Sheila Scoular (centre) with Helen Watson, Chair of Church End & Monkhams ward, and fellow Labour Party campaigners in Ilford North constituency. Trainee
NHS radiographer Syed Siddiqi, aged 30, is an east London lad with Bengali
parents. 62 year old Sheila Scoular, a former computer professional, suffers
from multiple sclerosis along with cognitive and other impairments. Glyn Secker is a white-bearded Jew in his seventies who captained the
Jewish Boat to Gaza in 2010. Three very different people with two things in
common – they have fallen foul of the Labour Party's bureaucratic discipline
machine and they are leftwing supporters of party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Hundreds, possibly
thousands, of Labour Party members are currently either suspended or under investigation for what seem to be
largely concocted misdemeanours. There is no audit of the work of the
Governance Unit which prosecutes cases. Activists suspect allegations originate
from a small pool of anonymous accusers. Since no accusers are
named and no charges published or even
made known to those complained about
at the time of their suspensions, it is difficult to
be sure of anything. It’s an unedifying spectacle.
Syed Siddiqi (right) with fellow NHS campaigners in the London Borough of Redbridge.What is
it that makes a popular young Muslim trade unionist and party activist like
Syed Siddiqi so great a threat that he has to be referred to the National
Constitutional Committee for possible expulsion? A host of breaches of party rules, according
to the dossier presented to National Executive Committee members by party staff
on Tuesday (March 6), including “intimidating, threatening and disrespectful”
behaviour. Daring to be chosen to stand as a candidate in local council
elections in May, according to his fellow party activists.
“Syed won nearly three times more votes from branch members than the next candidate, who happens to be an ally of MP Wes Streeting,” said Helen Watson, Chair of Church End & Monkhams ward
Labour Party and women’s officer in the Chingford and Woodford Green
constituency. Having given evidence for Siddiqi in a hearing
with party bureaucrats, she said the questions she was asked “were based on fabrication, tittle tattle
and politically motivated spite.”
Siddiqi,
Ilford South constituency secretary since 2016, denies all the allegations
against him. These began with an accusation on October 6, 2017 of his
having made “threatening intimidatory comments” to another party
member in a phone conversation the previous month. Siddiqi had recorded part of
this call because he claims he was
subjected to anti-Muslim abuse in the course of it. He lodged a complaint against the caller, but it is that member's counter-claim against him that is being pursued.
On October 11, a second Notice of Investigation arrived from Sam Matthews, Head of Disputes. It said, without giving
any detail, “You are alleged to have neglected your responsibilities as
Secretary of Ilford South CLP thus having a detrimental effect upon the CLP,
and to have treated members and office-holders in Ilford South CLP in an
intimidating, threatening and disrespectful manner.”
On December 7, Siddiqi received a
Notice of Administrative Suspension, throwing the CLP council election campaign in Churchfield Ward
into disarray by removing him as one of the candidates.
The notice said: “Multiple
additional allegations that you may have been involved in further breaches of
Labour Party rules have now also come to the attention of national officers of
the Party.” Again, there were no specific charges for him to refute.
Siddiqi started a petition in his defence, saying: “The allegations, who made them
and the evidence against me have not been disclosed to me nor have I had the
opportunity to defend myself.” The petition quickly gained more than 1000
signatures.
In Mid-February he was encouraged by
being given an interview date. At last, he would be able to defend himself
against specific charges and a report would go to the NEC Disputes Panel on
March 6. The hearing at Labour Party headquarters on February 22 turned out to
be a six hour inquisition which one of two people who accompanied Siddiqi
described afterwards as resembling an
interrogation. He was only allowed to have one of them in the room at a time.
The file prepared by full-time party officers and placed before NEC
members on March 6 gave only the case for the prosecution – no statements from
Siddiqi or his supporters, no reference to the anti-Muslim
bullying he had faced, nothing about the hundreds of supportive signatures
gathered from his fellow party members; or the endorsement he’d received from
an eminent Human Rights barrister with a lifetime in the Labour Party. Protests
about the proceedings from a few left NEC members were brushed aside and Siddiqi’s
bid to represent Labour in local council elections was history.
Sheila
Scoular isn’t up to standing in elections, but she appreciates going to the
occasional meeting if someone can give her a lift, taking part
in discussions and exercising her right to cast a vote on party issues. She usually
votes for the left.
Scoular was
totally unprepared for the letter from Sam Matthews, Head of Disputes, which
landed in her inbox on March 5. Passive aggressive paragraphs warned that she
was under investigation because of (anonymous) charges that “have been brought to the attention of
national officers of the Labour Party.”
The letter, from Sam
Matthews, Head of Disputes, refers to but does not cite a “definition of antisemitism adopted by the Labour
party” and suggests that she has infringed it.
The
definition of antisemitism adopted by the party in December 2016 and sent by outgoing general secretary
Iain McNicol to members who have asked for it, reads as follows:
“Antisemitism
is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.
Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward
Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community
institutions and religious facilities.”
This
may not be the most useful definition of antisemitism ever, but it has the
virtue of not mixing up attitudes to Jews with attitudes to Israel or Zionism.
The
tweets for which she is being investigated
on the other hand, one of them more than three years old, all
express Scoular’s
disapproval of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians and the failure of media
and politicians to challenge them. Is Sam Matthews suggesting that such views
are beyond the pale of political discourse? She might be better advised to
avoid a potentially upsetting reference to Nazis. She should also avoid sharing posts from David Icke’s bizarre website. But
there is no hint of “hatred towards Jews” in Scoular’s tweets.
It is hard to see
them as justification for giving her just 14 days to answer “a
series of questions which require your response.” Scoular has requested a four
week extension “in light of my physical health and also pursuant to The
Equality Act 2010.”
Murray Glickman, a support coordinator for Jewish Voice for Labour, was with Syed Siddiqi when he faced his
inquisitors from Labour’s Governance Unit. Now he’s supporting Sheila Scoular
and will be writing to the author of the letter she received, charging him with
denying her right to freedom of conscience; misapplying the concept of
antisemitism; questioning her in a biased and implicitly racist manner; and
ignoring the stipulations of the Chakrabarti Report, released on 30 June 2016.
This report, headed by the former head of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti,
now Shadow Attorney General, looked into antisemitism and other forms of racism
in the Labour party and reviewed the way members’ behaviour towards one another
was regulated.
Chakrabarti concluded that “The Labour Party is not overrun by
antisemitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism.” She said there were cases
where language used in political discussion fell below acceptable standards of
civility, but she was clear that “Labour members should be free and positively
encouraged to criticise injustice and abuse wherever they find it, including in
the Middle East.”
She stressed the need for “fair and transparent " disciplinary procedures.
The party “should seek to uphold the strongest principles of natural justice,
however difficult the circumstances.”
People complained against should be “clearly informed
of the allegation(s) made against them, their factual basis and the identity of
the complainant – unless there are good reasons not to do so.”
Not every concern needed to be addressed by setting
in train a formal investigation, Chakrabarti said. “Some members may e.g. have used
inappropriate language in complete ignorance of its potential harm. An informal
discussion may create an opportunity for resolution and learning in such
circumstances.”
On every one of these counts, Glickman said, both
Scoular and Siddiqi had been poorly treated.
We come to the last of
our three cases. Glyn Secker is a Unite trade union
delegate to Dulwich and West Norwood (DAWN) constituency general committee and
political officer for Herne Hill branch. He is one of those members of the
Momentum grassroots movement backing Jeremy Corbyn who have only recently
managed to break the stranglehold of the Blairite “Progress” faction which had
dominated DAWN for years.
Glyn Secker in 2012. Screenshot: inminds/YouTube“The media
depiction of Momentum as an unstoppable Bolshevik juggernaut riding roughshod
over a meek and defenceless moderate membership is laughably far from the
truth,” Secker said.
“What we’ve
faced in DAWN, as in hundreds of CLPs around the country, is a remorseless
battle from the incumbent party officials to obstruct new, enthusiastic party
members from working to get Corbyn into Downing Street. At our AGM on March 1,
we managed to win some semblance of democratic accountability. Then a trapdoor
opened under me – an email from the Governance Unit on March 7 telling me that
I was the subject of an ‘administrative suspension’ for ‘comments made on
social media that may be in (sic) antisemitic’.”
Under party
rules, administrative suspension is an urgent action designed to address real
threats to public order or disruption of party business. Secker sees this is an
outrageous slur: “It is designed to silence me. The
tactic is clear – if they cannot win the argument they simply remove their
adversary.”
Secker believes his suspension, and readmission five days later,
prove what many activists have long suspected – that the
Labour party’s governance unit is working in a concerted attempt
to take down Jeremy Corbyn supporters. They were trying to pin Secker’s
removal to a dirty dossier about a pro-Palestinian Facebook group, which was
released on the day of Secker’s
suspension, and is being used to smear the Labour
leader, generating headlines like this in The Sun: “ANTI-JEW SHAME – Jeremy Corbyn exposed for being a member of a
Facebook group containing anti-Semitic posts.”
Secker’s suspension was dropped when the Governance Unit realised
they couldn’t make their allegations stick because the dossier didn’t provide
the ammunition they’d been hoping for. In Matthews’s
second letter he said as much: “The
action was taken in light of the publication of the
report into the ‘Palestine Live’ Facebook group.”
The dossier came with
an accompanying blog, by self-declared anti-Palestinian activist David
Collier, containing the words: “Jewish Voice for Labour need to be thrown out
of the Labour Party.”
Secker is
secretary of Jewish Voice for Labour, an organisation for progressive Jews in
the Labour Party launched at the party conference in September 2017. JVL has
been forthright in confronting unjustified and malicious disciplinary actions
such as those against Siddiqi and Scoular. Its other main role is to clarify
the distinction between Jew, Israeli and Zionist so that people are less likely
to fall into antisemitic generalisation when talking about Israel’s role in
Palestine.
Secker is
far from the first Jew to be accused of antisemitism. This
was the original accusation levelled at Tony Greenstein,
who was suspended for two years. In Hampstead and Kilburn, Jewish party members
have had to resort to letters in the local paper to refute charges of
“obsessional Jew-baiting”. Liverpool Riverside members, including
several Jews, face relentless public denunciation. Jackie
Walker
has been suspended since September 2016.
Most
notoriously, Professor Moshe Machover, 81, founder of the
Israeli socialist organisation Matzpen, was summarily expelled in October 2017
and then hurriedly but grudgingly reinstated after a storm of protest. He is
still demanding retraction of the antisemitism allegations made against him and
an apology for his treatment. Glyn Secker will be following suit.
What unites
all these Jewish victims of the Labour purge is that they are pro-Palestinian
as well as pro-Corbyn. They are critical of the state of Israel and therefore
key targets for the pro-Israel advocates who have made common cause with the
Labour right. The right fear, and wish to destroy, the leadership of Jeremy
Corbyn because he is a socialist; the pro-Israel lobby want the same because he
is the first leader of a major western
political party to actively support the campaign for justice for
Palestine. On both counts, he is a
threat to the political establishment that preceded him and that still controls
the Labour party machine – as well as a hate figure for sections of the
mainstream media.
David Collier has a
history of collaborating with rightwing Zionists with a penchant for disrupting pro-Palestinian
gatherings. In December 2016 he and two others were barred from Warwick University campus after they had travelled to the
city intent upon denouncing “vile antisemitic slurs” at a lecture advertised by
the Palestine Society. It turned out to be an innocuous event about fertility organised
by a small group of researchers and students.
His latest dossier appears
to reveal some hateful antisemitic material on a private Facebook group, called
Palestine Live, set up around 2013. It has no organisational links with any pro-Palestinian
bodies and was established by an independent activist as a clearing house for
information about Palestine and related activities, most of it anti-racist and
human rights related. The majority of those who joined – or simply found that
they had had their names added without asking – treated the site as an
occasional source of information. As with
most sites, few users see more than a tiny proportion of the traffic on it.
This is no excuse for the fact that it has carried some
clearly unacceptable posts linked to anti-Jewish, Holocaust denial and
conspiracy theory websites. Most of those responsible, slightly more than one
per cent of the 3,200 group members – have
been removed, but not all.
This should not have been
allowed to happen. It reminds us of the danger of lax moderation by social
media admins and is a warning to casual users to check who else is frequenting seemingly
interesting platforms we dip into. But the purpose of Collier’s dossier is not to
offer helpful advice to the Labour left. It is to blacken their names – guilt
by association – by asserting that they tolerate, or even
promote, hatred of Jews. Tellingly, Collier could find nothing to say about
Glyn Secker except
to suggest guilt by association: he “has had minimal interaction on the site. He posted
rarely but was aware of his affiliation with the group.”
Journalist Asa
Winstanley, himself one of the dossier’s targets, has described how Collier infiltrated the Labour Party conference
in Brighton last year in search of an antisemitic conspiracy. He reports how
Collier turned his racism against me, suggesting that having a son with a
Muslim father disqualifies me from commenting on Israel and Palestine.
Many mainstream media have picked up Collier’s allegations in the past,
reproducing his assertions as if they were gospel truth. The Guardian was one
of those to do so this time.
Shouldn’t there have been alarm bells ringing in the
Guardian offices where staffer Jessica Elgot penned her article, quoting the
dossier without any explanation as to who wrote it or why?
It contains ample warnings of Collier’s highly partisan
agenda. This is just one of his snide comments: “We cannot have a modern Labour
voter without a little bit of Holocaust denial, can we?” Hardly the words of an
independent researcher.
Jackie Walker obliged the Guardian to correct one error in its description
of the charges against her. Even so its piece testifies to an alarming media alacrity
to accept at face value and without investigation even the most
extraordinary antisemitism charges against Corbyn and the left.
Doubly alarming, because it’s an obsession that is extending to university
campuses and council chambers, threatening free speech and open debate.
It must surely be
possible for democratic institutions to recognise an attempted purge when they
see one, and to stand against it. That applies to university vice chancellors, to
local councilors and to journalists, trade union leaders and members of the
Labour Party NEC.
Activists like Helen
Watson want an end to the victimisation of Syed Siddiqi, Sheila Scoular, Glyn
Secker and all the many others.
“We are abused, called
anti-semites, sexists, bullies and bigots – despite many of us fighting for
equality and justice all our adult lives,” Watson says. “And for what? For
challenging the entitlement of managerialist Blairites whose sole purpose is to
use the machine of the party against its members. It really has to stop.”
