Defend Jackie Walker!

by New Worker 

correspondent

protest outside the community centre

Labour activists demonstrated their support this week for a leading activist accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ by Zionist elements within the Labour Party. Jackie Walker’s Labour Party expulsion hearing began on Tuesday at the Deptford Lounge community centre in south London – but she was forced to withdraw from the hearing when the most powerful Labour Party disciplinary committee refused to allow her the right to make a short opening statement in her own defence.

Jackie Walker, who is a black Jewish woman, was suspended from the Labour Party two and a half years ago for asking a Labour Party anti-Semitism trainer, at an anti-Semitism training event, for a definition of anti-Semitism. Since then she has been the subject of the most appalling and unrelenting racist abuse and threats, including a bomb threat.

This week Jackie attended the long overdue Labour Party disciplinary hearing. She was accompanied by her defence witnesses and legal team; she had submitted over 400 pages of evidence in her defence. The Chair advised Jackie at the beginning of the hearing that this was to be an informal hearing and that she could address him by his first name. The Chair then invited procedural questions. Jackie asked to be allowed to make a brief opening address to the Chair and Panel. The large team of Labour Party lawyers objected.

The Chair adjourned the meeting to consider Jackie’s request to speak. Despite repeated requests from Jackie’s lawyer that she be allowed to speak at the outset of her hearing, the Chair ruled that Jackie remain silent. Jackie had no alternative other than to withdraw from the hearing because it was clear to her that she would not receive a fair hearing.

Jackie Walker said: “After almost three years of racist abuse and serious threats, and of almost three years of being demonised, I was astounded that the Labour Party refused to allow me a few short moments to personally address the disciplinary panel to speak in my own defence. What is so dangerous about my voice that it is not allowed to be heard?

“All I have ever asked for is for equal treatment, due process and natural justice; it seems that this is too much to ask of the Labour Party.”

    The following day Jackie Walker was expelled for “prejudicial and grossly detrimental behaviour against the party”. The Jewish Voice for Labour movement has condemned the decision saying: “The decision to expel Jackie Walker from membership, and the whole process leading up to this shameful conclusion, are a travesty of justice.

“The Party has enabled a process in which a principled and fearless member has been persecuted by violation of trust, by media campaign, through bullying by senior members within the party, and by a seriously flawed process which has allowed racist commentary on her person to form part of the charge against her.

“Jackie Walker is not the only member to have suffered from this cavalier attitude to due process and natural justice, though hers is perhaps the most egregious case. Why have those in positions of influence within the Party who have access to the megaphone of the mass media not been reined in? Why indeed have they not been charged with bringing the Party into disrepute, which they have surely done?

“It does not bring the Party into disrepute to criticise a deeply flawed definition of antisemitism. It does not bring the Party into disrepute to call for the Party to live up to its principles and abhor all racisms without gradations of importance, all holocausts without exception. What brings the Party into disrepute is to suppress free expression in order to appease the powerful.

“JVL believes that the Party will before long come to be deeply ashamed of this passage in its history”.

Head to Head with John McDonnell

By Theo Russell

Jeremy Corbyn’s Number Two, the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, discussed the challenges facing a future Labour government with Jenny Manson at the Clayton Crown Hotel in Cricklewood last week. Jenny is a veteran Labour supporter and co-chair of the  Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) movement that was established partly in response to the  Jewish Labour Movement's profoundly Zionist orientation. But the chair made it clear that the discussion would concentrate on Brexit, Labour’s answer to the economic crisis, and would not deal with any questions relating to Israel, Palestine or anti-Semitism.

Jenny Manson is firm favourite to be Labour’s parliamentary candidate in the Finchley and Golders Green constituency at the next election, and a wide range of issues from a socialist perspective were taken up, including how a future Labour government will pay for its plans and how Jenny Manson as a future MP could help realise these.

The first question she put to McDonnell was why Labour failed to challenge the lie that the 2008 financial crisis was the caused by government over-spending.

McDonnell replied: “After the 2008 crash I called for the government to ‘nationalise and stabilise’ the banks, but when the banks were nationalised the government failed to take control of their boards of directors.

“As a result, the injection of massive amounts of quantitative easing into the banking system was to the advantage of wealthy asset holders, while the rest of the population saw their living standards slashed. Those who caused the 2008 crisis are not the ones who ended up paying for it.

“When Gordon Brown lost the election and resigned as leader there was a vacuum when the myth of the government over-spending and the deficit causing the crisis went unchallenged.”

Asked by why the Labour leadership had adopted “austerity light” under Ed Miliband, McDonnell said that this was “one of the issues that propelled JC [Jeremy Corbyn] into the leadership”.

He described Andy Burnham’s abstention in the vote on the Tory benefit reforms as “shameful” and said: “Added to that, at that time people didn’t understand the full implications of what the Tories were doing.”

McDonnell said that Britain had been starved of commercial investment, saying “corporations in Britain have funds of £700 billion which are not being invested. We plan to set up a Strategic Investment Board bringing together the Bank of England, trade unions and employers.”

He said Labour also planned to spend £49 billion on the NHS and to abolish university fees.

Speaking about the shocking levels of poverty after eight years of LibDem and Tory government, he said that in his constituency, Hayes and Harlington in West London, “there are people sleeping on the streets, families renting sheds and garages to live in, people living in abject poverty because of benefits sanctions and bans, and children are out on the streets every day getting into drugs and gangs because their parents work such long hours.

“We’ve seen an 83-year-old asylum seeker taken to hospital in handcuffs where he died, still in handcuffs, and only recently a homeless person died only yards from the Westminster parliament.

“Record numbers of children are being taken into care because of families collapsing and we have four-million children living in poverty, two-thirds of them in families that are working.”

Without an election and change of government, this situation is only going to get much worse. McDonnell warned that: “The Tories are now planning cuts of £1.7 billion in the autumn budget and the Local Government Association has said many local councils can’t go on much longer. We are now facing a situation in which the entire social fabric of our society is at risk.”