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Jackie Walker Suspended: Protest!

5th May 2016

Jackie Walker Suspended: Protest!

Please take a few moments today to protest at the suspension from the Labour Party of Jackie Walker, a leading member of Momentum and the Labour Representation Committee

LRC statement on Jackie Walker

The LRC wholeheartedly and unreservedly condemns all forms of racism. We further wholeheartedly and unreservedly condemn the suspension by the Labour Party of Jackie Walker, Vice Chair of the National Steering Committee of Momentum, a leading activist in Thanet Momentum, and an Executive Committee member of the LRC for alleged anti-Semitism.

The Party suspended Ms Walker after the Jewish Chronicle brought comments made by her in Facebook posts earlier this year to the attention of Party officials.

In her comments, Ms Walker, a black activist of Jewish heritage, said that “millions more Africans were killed in the African holocaust and their oppression continues today on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews.”

“Many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Caribbean. So who are victims and what does it mean? We are victims and perpetrators to some extent through choice,” she said.

The Jewish Chronicle itself revealed that “her comments were uncovered by the Israel Advocacy Movement, which works to counter hostility to Israel in Britain.”

A picture emerges of a leading pro-Israeli government organisation trawling through the social media posts of Labour Party activists to brand ideas anti-Semitic when they are clearly not. The targeting of Ms Walker for remarks that have no connection to anti-Semitism suggests that senior labour movement figures, such as Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey, were right when they argued that largely baseless allegations of anti-Semitism are being used by opponents to undermine and destabilise Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

The LRC welcomes Jeremy Corbyn’s initiative to hold a full enquiry into anti-Semitism in the Party. Any member who actually has made anti-Semitic comments must face immediate suspension pending an investigation. But there must be an immediate end to the suspension of members on a spurious basis, into which category Jackie Walker’s suspension clearly falls.

Jackie Walker is a long-standing anti-racism campaigner who helped organise the defeat of UKIP leader Nigel Farage in Thanet at the 2015 election. Her suspension must be lifted immediately. We call on all labour movement activists to contact Labour Party Head Office to demand this.

Please send your message of protest to the General Secretary, Iain McNicol: iain_mcnicol@labour.org.uk

and copy to
Ann Black: annblack50@btinternet.com (Chair of NEC Disputes Panel)
& Jim Kennedy: Jim.Kennedy@unitetheunion.org (Chair of NEC Organisation Committee).

Jackie Walker on Anti-semitism

On anti-Semitism in the Labour Party ......

Yes, for many outside of politics the debate on anti-semitism may be irrelevant. But those of us ‘inside’ with the knowledge and interest around the terms of the debate have the responsibility of taking into account the importance, the power of words and the way apparently small changes of vocabulary and emphasis can transform the terms of a struggle. This is a lesson black peoples have understood since slavery.

The statement by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty on anti-semitism concedes to, and is complicit in, a lie; that there is a major problem with anti-semitism in the Labour Party. Like everywhere in British society the Labour Party fails, and fails too often, to be what we would want it to be - a bastion of socialism and internationalism.

The chief victims of those failures however are not people of Jewish descent, but are the many other representatives of other minorities underrepresented in the structures of the LP and discriminated against inside and outside the LP economically, culturally and politically in contemporary Britain. To sign this statement concedes too much and reflects a lack of appreciation not just of Labour Party history and politics, but of the history of minorities in British society.