Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy share platform with Stop The War’s Lindsay German who denies Labour antisemitism and backed disgraced Chris Williamson
The former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, joined former Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott and fellow MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy on a platform with a controversial activist who has a history of denying antisemitism in the Labour Party and who backed the disgraced former Labour MP, Chris Williamson.
Lindsay German has repeatedly denied Labour’s institutional antisemitism, describing the allegations as a “witch-hunt”, a line often used by Mr Williamson, whom she has defended, and his allies.
Ms German is a convener of the dubious group, Stop The War Coalition, which has appeared in the past to advocate war against Israel and whose marches routinely feature antisemitic tropes.
The online event comes only days after Sir Keir Starmer failed to take any action against Ms Abbott and Ms Ribeiro-Addy for appearing on a platform with former Labour members expelled from the Party in the wake of antisemitic incidents, despite his election pledge to suspend MPs and members caught doing so. The event was a grotesque attempt to promote the disingenuous, deplorable and divisive claim that addressing Labour antisemitism is somehow racist against the BAME community.
On 28th May 2019, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.
In the first release of its Antisemitism in Political Parties research, Campaign Against Antisemitism showed that Labour Party candidates for Parliament in the 2019 general election accounted for 82 percent of all incidents of antisemitic discourse by parliamentary candidates.
Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Antisemitism Barometer 2019 showed that antisemitism on the far-left of British politics has surpassed that of the far-right.
Campaign Against Antisemitism advocates for zero tolerance of antisemitism in public life. To that end we monitor all political parties and strive to ensure that any cases of concern are properly addressed.