Anti-racism campaign Labour Against Anti-Semitism (LAAS) has today issued its position on the General Election. LAAS, responsible for exposing a litany of anti-Semites in Labour’s ranks, warns party members that ‘Jeremy Corbyn is unfit to be Prime Minister and that the Labour Party is unfit to be in government’. It says Labour poses ‘the greatest risk to our democracy and to the safety and security of the British Jewish community’. As such, they urge the general public to vote ABC: ‘Anyone but Corbyn’.
Other positions are available, most notably from Labour MPs who once spoke of Corbyn in the same terms as LAAS. But where are they now?
Stephen Kinnock said in 2018 that Labour anti-Semitism was ‘a full-blown crisis’. He also attended the Enough is Enough rally at Westminster and earlier this year urged an investigation into a senior Welsh Labour figure who backed suspended MP Chris Williamson.
Where is he now?
Where is she now?
McGovern, chair of the formerly moderate pressure group Progress, once became emotional during an LBC interview on the subject. In a speech last year, she said:‘Inaction in the face of this racism is not an option.’
‘A party that cannot demonstrate it can deal with vile anti-Semitism can’t govern and nor will it deserve to.’
Where is she now?
Earlier this year, he called on Labour to ‘adopt a completely zero-tolerance approach to anti-Semitism’ and admitted ‘[w]e wouldn’t tolerate racism of any other kind in the party’.‘It is inexplicable to most decent Labour members and voters that the Labour Party, the party of equality and anti-racism, can have allowed such a damaging row to carry on for more than two years.’
Where is he now?
Where is she now?
‘I also genuinely fear how a Labour government in the present circumstances would treat the concerns of the majority of Britain’s Jews’
What about Jess Phillips? In 2016, she called for Ken Livingstone to be expelled. In 2018, she was one of a phalanx of Labour MPs to escort Jewish colleague Ruth Smeeth to the hearing of an activist who accused her of working ‘hand in hand’ with the Daily Telegraph against Corbyn at the launch of Labour’s 2016 anti-Semitism report. She said Labour’s victory in the Peterborough by-election, where their candidate had liked a Facebook post saying Theresa May had a ‘Zionist Slave Master’s agenda’, ‘shows that anti-Semitism is becoming normal in the party’.
Watson, Streeting and Phillips, like many more Labour MPs, activists and members, once swore solidarity with British Jews, said they must be heard, warned the party didn’t deserve government until it stamped out anti-Semitism.
Finally, an election has been called and they will be able to give substance to all their words and tweets and tears.
Where will they stand? Where are they now?
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