Claudia Webbe says it is racist to remind the public that she defended Ken Livingstone, after Twitter user posts past CAA articles documenting her record
The controversial Labour MP Claudia Webbe has made the extraordinary and demeaning claim that scrutiny of her past defence of Ken Livingstone is racist.
Twitter user @Never_Again2000 posted an article by Campaign Against Antisemitism recalling how Claudia Webbe MP had written a letter of support for Ken Livingstone after he compared a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard and detailing how she had more recently taken to Twitter to claim – while she was the Chair of the Labour Party’s Disciplinary Panel overseeing antisemitism cases – that the “combined machinery of state, political and mainstream elite” are conspiring to smear Jeremy Corbyn with “false allegations.”
Ms Webbe claimed that it is due to “ingrained racism” that Twitter users were commenting on the role that she – now a prominent political figure – played in that Livingstone episode rather than the judge who overturned Mr Livingstone’s suspension, even though the judgment was a matter of law and her letter was a defence of his anti-racist credentials from her perspective as one of “full-time advisers” (in the Twitter feed she seemed to imply that she had opposed Mr Livingstone’s suspension on the basis that it was anti-democratic, but the thrust of her letter in fact relied on his supposed anti-racist credentials). Nevertheless she complained that she is the target of “racist victimisation” and equated scrutiny of her past record with the racist killing of George Floyd, ordering other Twitter users to “get your knee off my neck”.
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.
In the first release of its Antisemitism in Political Parties research, Campaign Against Antisemitism showed that Labour Party candidates for Parliament in the 2019 general election accounted for 82 percent of all incidents of antisemitic discourse by parliamentary candidates.
Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Antisemitism Barometer 2019 showed that antisemitism on the far-left of British politics has surpassed that of the far-right.
Campaign Against Antisemitism advocates for zero tolerance of antisemitism in public life. To that end we monitor all political parties and strive to ensure that any cases of concern are properly addressed.