Disgraced former MP Chris Williamson to launch new ‘grassroots movement’ with inaugural ‘Resist Festival’ featuring Lowkey and Noam Chomsky

The disgraced former MP, Chris Williamson, has floated the idea of launching a new ‘grassroots movement’.

Mr Williamson, who was embroiled in scandals over antisemitism when he was in the Labour Party, has said that with the election of Sir Keir Starmer to the Labour leadership, many feel “politically homeless”.

He intends the new movement to use “culture, alternative media and street protest” to achieve its aims, with a ‘Resist Festival’ originally planned for June but now postponed to October due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Resist Festival is due to feature controversial speakers including the rapper Lowkey, the outspoken academic Noam Chomsky, the activist Max Blumenthal and representatives from the ‘yellow vest’ protests in France.

Mr Williamson resigned from the Labour Party in late 2019 after learning that he would not be allowed to stand for the Party in the general election. His extraordinary letter of resignation from the Party read like a manifesto against Jews. He ran in the general election as an independent and, in a rarity for an incumbent MP that demonstrates the depth of his rejection by his Derby North constituents, got so few votes that he lost his deposit.

He has described his erstwhile Party’s institutional antisemitism as “manufactured” and part of an “assault on our democracy” by a “hostile foreign government” to “normalise Zionism in the Labour Party”.

Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Antisemitism Barometer 2019 showed that antisemitism on the far-left of British politics has surpassed that of the far-right, and that 17% of British people believe, like Mr Williamson, that Israel and those who support it do damage to British democracy.