Quote of the Day 19th July 2018

"… the Labour party is perceived by most Jews, thousands of party members and millions of members of the public as an antisemitic, and therefore racist, party."

"I am a secular, immigrant Jew. I have never been active in the Jewish community; my two marriages were to non-Jews. I have visited Israel a number of times and have been a vocal critic of successive Israeli governments on many counts. But I am a Jew. My grandmother and my uncle were murdered by Hitler and many cousins and other relatives were slaughtered in the gas chambers."

 "I joined the Labour party to fight racism. In the 1960s the Labour party was the natural home for Jews. To find myself 50 years later, in 2018, confronting antisemitism in my own party is completely and utterly awful."

 "Antisemitism has become a real problem in the Labour party. In the last year my colleagues and I have been subjected to a growing number of antisemitic attacks."
"On Tuesday, Labour’s national executive committee agreed its own definition of antisemitism. Instead of adopting the international definition agreed in 2016 in the wake of the rise of antisemitism across Europe, the party chose to omit key examples used in that definition and rewrote the definition to weaken and change it."
"The party thought it knew better than the Crown Prosecution Service, the government, the devolved administrations and local authorities; it thought it knew better than 31 other countries, including Austria, France and Hungary, all of which have adopted the internationally agreed definition in full."
"There was a simple and straightforward alternative that Labour could have chosen. The party could have adopted the international definition in full and it could have launched an inclusive consultation, involving Palestinians and Jews to add to that definition if further clarification of the right to criticise the Israeli government was needed. Instead it chose to offend Jews. It chose to make the party a hostile environment for Jews. It chose to entrench antisemitism."

(Dame Margaret Hodge, Labour MP for Barking, extracts from an article in the Guardian which you can read in full here, called

"I was right to confront Jeremy Corbyn over Labour's antisemitism.")

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