Antisemitism in Modern Society

Lord Mann Excerpts

Wednesday 20th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we are responsible for dealing with this. She will know there are procedures and committees within the national executive committee that deal with complaints and others that deal with other processes.

Let me be clear that anyone who denies the reality of antisemitism on the left, anyone who thinks that antisemitism is a legitimate part of criticising the political actions of the Israeli Government and anyone who says that complaints about antisemitism are smears on our party is wrong. They do not have the endorsement of the Labour party; they do not have the endorsement of its leader; and they need to take a long, hard look at themselves. They have adopted what Bebel labelled the “socialism of fools.”

Our party must call out this poisonous ideology, which encourages people to place the blame for society’s ills at the feet of the vulnerable and persecuted, whether they be immigrants, the unemployed, refugees or those from a different ethnic or religious background. The Labour party has long fought the dissemination of such false narratives, which we know serve only to divide us and distract us from our common cause of a fairer society.

Antisemitism, with its conspiracy theories, seeks to divide ordinary working people. The lies that it propagates about wealth, power and designs on world domination are as dangerous as they are stupid. Those on the far left who are foolish enough to believe that their antisemitism is a form of anti-elitism or anti-imperialism have no place in the Labour party or any modern political party.

Last year, a major study analysing news stories across the English-speaking world found that, according to every metric, fake news is more popular and more widely consumed than factual, accurate stories. We truly live in an era of fake news and imagined enemies, where explicit abuse hides behind anonymous avatars and where political debate is shaped by memes and viral videos. The rise of fake news is dangerous for us all, but this danger is most acute for the Jewish community and it is felt intensely. There are approximately 170,000 antisemitic online searches each year in the UK alone, but the scale of the challenge must not daunt us or deter us from what needs to be done.

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

Over the last 16 years, I have written repeatedly to every single party here today to raise specific issues, with great success across every single party. In every single instance, I have written to the relevant party leader. Does my hon. Friend accept that people are interested in the structures, in the machinations of those structures and in leadership? What leadership will the Labour shadow Cabinet specifically give to Jewish members of the Labour party and to the Jewish community?

--- Later in debate ---

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

I shall comment on one issue only—not the racists and the antisemites who have been exposed, but the enablers, because the enablers are an equally big problem and there are a lot of them, not least in the Labour party.

I will give one example from the previous debate in which I spoke. One enabler went online and put out to a lot of people the suggestion that I had exaggerated and lied about an incident relating to a dead bird that was sent to my wife by a misogynist antisemite in 2012, for which someone was prosecuted. This enabler found a press cutting from the Worksop Guardian that showed that someone was prosecuted for the misogynist crime. That is accurate, but this enabler, a journalist, did not bother to contact me before he put this out to very many people. He did not ask me whether what I had said was wrong. He therefore did not know that, when in advance of that, I had given the specific antisemitic literature from a man called Roger Dyas-Elliott to Nottinghamshire police, the police requested that the antisemitism was not included in the prosecution—as a dead bird had been sent through the post, the prosecution would be immediate and successful, and this would therefore delay things—and, on that basis, I had agreed.

Dyas-Elliott is an antisemite whom I have challenged repeatedly in my local Labour party. I banned him from my office, and through his union, the National Union of Domestic Appliances and General Operatives, had his pass taken away at the Labour party conference in 2010. This is what he said in 2010, which led to my first action against him. In a letter to the Worksop Guardian, during the general election, he called for an investigation into the motives and machinations of the Zionist fraternity and the conduct and behaviour of the Bilderberg Group. He is an antisemite who repeatedly, in letters to the press and letters to me, put out this vile stuff, and therefore I challenged him. I took him on in meetings, and I banned him, kicked him out of campaigns and stopped him being a candidate.

That is the truth of what happened with Roger Dyas-Elliott, a misogynist criminal and an antisemite, yet this enabler, Kevin Maguire—a national journalist, associate editor of the Daily Mirror and correspondent for the New Statesman, a press pass holder here and one of the people used by Labour party Front Benchers to put out their message repeatedly—puts this out, and what do I get as a response? Let us quote from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party forum the next day:

“I enjoyed the too and froing when Mann was accusing a guy of being anti-semitic and racist”,

and

“I hate this man!... I’d like to punch him in the face!”

I do not have time to go through the rest, but that one was from Joe Kelsall in a private Facebook group. He was a Labour party member in Sefton, Liverpool, and he is still a Labour party member, despite my complaints. Joe Kelsall is a man who wants to punch me in the face, following the enabling of Maguire.

The enablers of antisemitism are as big a problem as the antisemites, and they are more numerous. It is time the enablers were exposed. I have exposed one: Kevin Maguire—an enabler of racism.