Open Letter to Jenny Formby of UNITE - Prospective General Secretary of The Labour Party

Jenny Formby - Labour's next General Secretary - will she continue with the McNicol regime?

Dear Jenny,

I readtoday that you are set to become Labour’s new General Secretary. I welcome your appointment but I do so with some apprehension as to whether you are going to prove to be a new broom or someone who upholds the ancien régime.  Labour’s long nightmare of Iain McNicol’s corrupt and autocratic rule must end.  

Corrupt because it led to the suspension and auto-exclusion of thousands of members for no other reason than that they supported Jeremy Corbyn.  We had the obscenity of peoples’ votes being fished out of the electronic ballot box. On the flimsiest of pretexts, such as calling the 172 MPs who stabbed Jeremy Corbyn in the back ‘traitors’, they were suspended as were parties such as Wallasey and Brighton & Hove on the basis of wholly fabricated evidence.

Ruthless because Labour Party regional officials saw their role as defending incumbent MPs and councillors and stemming the Left tide. For example numerous members of Liverpool Riverside CLP were ‘investigated’ in order to defend an unpopular local MP, Louise Ellman, who had been parachuted in during the Blair years.

It is strange how the racist tabloid press gets so worked up about 'anti-Semitism'

The Chair of the Disputes Committee and long-standing NEC member, Christine Shawcroft recently declaredthat ‘Nothing would induce me to support a candidate from a major trade union, they stick it to the rank and file members time after time after time’.  The reason for this statement was the passive acquiescence by NEC trade union representatives, yourself included, over the witchhunt of socialists and supporters of Palestine. 

Professor Moshe Machover & Glyn Secker - one expelled, one suspended, both reinstated

In the past week the Secretary of Jewish Voice for Labour, Glyn Secker, has been suspendedand reinstatedby Sam Matthews, Labour’s Witchfinder General.  Before him, Israeli anti-Zionist, Professor Moshe Machover, the honorary President of Labour Against the Witchhunt, was expelledbefore a wave of protest led to his reinstatement.  In both cases Matthews didn’t even offer so much as an apology to these members. 

I was expelledlast month after having been suspended for nearly two years.  The process was so unfair that I had to obtain a High Court Injunction when after 17 months suspension I was refused an extension to the 4 weeks I had been given to respond to the Labour Party’s dossier. The Labour Party’s barrister openly admittedthat none of the charges against me predated my suspension  In other words, I was suspended first and then they looked for evidence.  Despite being an anti-racist activist and the author of the only book on fighting fascism in Brighton and the South Coast I was expelled as part of the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.

On March 20 a similar miscarriage of justice is due to take place in Oxford.  Israeli born Cyril Chilsom is also accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. He is the child of parents who survived the Nazi concentration camps. This is what Labour has come to under McNicol.

Other cases due to be heard include that of longstanding Black anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth, who was framed by pro-Israel MP Ruth Smeeth at the Chakrabarti press conference.   Her allegations of anti-Semitic abuse have been shown to be a tissue of lies.

Another Jewish member of the Labour Party whose case is pending is Jackie Walker, who has been the target of a political lynching by the racist Jewish Labour Movement.  Jackie has produced in response a play The Lynchingwhich deals with the Black experience of racism in this country, including at the hands of McNicol’s regime.

Jackie has been the target of a campaign of demonization by the JLM, a group which refuses to condemn the supportof its ‘sister’party, the Israeli Labour Party for the forcible deportation of 40,000 African refugees from Israel because they are Black.

Historically there has always been a division in the labour movement between the political/ intellectual and trade union wings.  That should not however be the excuse for the failure of trade union representatives on the NEC to challenge the false allegations of anti-Semitism. Nearly all trade unions, such as UNISON and UNITE, have good policy on the Palestinians including support for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions on Israel.  In the eyes of the supporters of Israeli apartheid  BDS is anti-Semitic just as supporters of the Boycott of Apartheid South Africa were also accused of anti-White racism.  False allegations of anti-Semitism are being consciously used to deflect support away from the Palestinians.

Ms Oldknow featured in this document in my Subject Access Request

Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism is a constant theme of Zionist propagandists.

There seems to be a belief among the NEC’s trade union members that if Labour expels a few anti-Zionists then the false anti-Semitism campaign will go away. On the contrary, everytime you suspend or expel someone you give credence to the nonsense that Labour is an anti-Semitic party.  Instead of facing these allegations down and calling out the real racists, the people who support the demolition of homes, theft of land and the detention and abuse of Palestinian children you have doffed your cap to the Israeli Embassy.

This week’s ‘revelations’ of anti-Semitism on the Facebook group Palestine Live proves that appeasement of Zionists doesn’t work.  The more you feed an appeaser the more his appetite grows.  The ‘researcher’ behind these latest revelations has linksto the far-Right including Britain First and the EDL.  The fact that the so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has made a complaint of anti-Semitism against Corbyn this week demonstrates their real agenda.

The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign has one purpose and it isn’t to oppose anti-Semitism but to give support to Israel’s apartheid state.  The fact that Jewish anti-Zionists have been the most prominent victims of this campaign is in itself proof of its real motives.

We hope that one of your first actions as the new General Secretary will be to put an end to this nonsense.  That means removing Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth’s suspensions, reinstating George Galloway and myself and all those who have been autoexcluded.  In addition the Chakrabarti Report’s recommendations on natural justice and due process should be implemented without further delay.

The time has come to put the McNicol era behind us and move ahead.

Kind regards

Tony Greenstein