CAA congratulates Ian Austin on winning “Backbencher of the Year” award

The former Labour MP Ian Austin, who resigned from the Party over antisemitism, has won a “Backbencher of the Year award” at The Spectator’s annual Parliamentarian of the Year awards last night.

As the son of a Holocaust refugee whose entire family was slaughtered by the Nazis in the Treblinka extermination camp, Mr Austin’s upbringing instilled in him a firm sense of justice and the determination to fight bigotry wherever he saw it. As an MP, he led a successful campaign to drive the far-right British National Party out of his Dudley North constituency, and then served as a leading figure in the fight against antisemitism that has taken hold in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, ultimately resigning from the Party in disgust earlier this year.

During this year, Mr Austin also helped found a new campaign called Mainstream, which is “designed to encourage a return to respectable and responsible politics, and to banish extremism from British politics once and for all.”

CAA congratulates Mr Austin, whom we are proud to have as one of our honorary patrons, on this highly deserved accolade.

On 28th May 2019, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.