Diane Abbott’s Labour pressure group backed antisemite Louis Farrakhan’s entry into the UK in the 1980s

A Labour pressure group co-founded by Diane Abbott, the Shadow Home Secretary, is revealed to have opposed a ban on the antisemite Louis Farrakhan’s entry into the UK in 1986.

Mr Farrakhan, an extremist American hate preacher, had by that time already infamously called Judaism a “gutter religion” and had claimed that the Jews would face “God’s ovens” if they continued to oppose him, in a sick reference to the extermination camps of the Holocaust. Indeed he had also praised the Nazi leader, saying “Hitler was a very great man”.

Nevertheless, Labour Party Black Sections, a group co-founded by Ms Abbott in 1981, when she was serving as a councillor in Lewisham, opposed the ban imposed by the Home Secretary when Mr Farrakhan sought entry to the UK.

The revelation comes as Ms Abbott faces mounting opposition from the substantial Jewish community in her constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington over Labour antisemitism.

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

In recent months, thirteen MPs and three peers have resigned from the Labour Party over antisemitism, along with a large number of MEPs, councillors and members.

Over 58,000 people have now signed our petition denouncing Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite and declaring him “unfit to hold any public office.”

On 8th December, regardless of religion, race or politics, Jews and non-Jews alike will gather in Parliament Square to declare that they stand together against antisemitism in the face of Jew-hatred in politics and mounting anti-Jewish hate crime.