Former Labour councillor and parliamentary candidate accuses Jewish MP Margaret Hodge of trading on the Holocaust and suggests former deputy leader Tom Watson was in the pay of Israel’s Likud Party

It has been revealed that a former Labour councillor and parliamentary candidate has published numerous social media comments accusing Jewish Labour MP Margaret Hodge of trading on the Holocaust and suggesting former deputy leader Tom Watson and principled Labour defector Ian Austin were in the pay of Israel’s Likud Party.

Bob Pandy, who is still a member of Kensington’s Constituency Labour Party, was Labour’s parliamentary candidate for the seat in 1979. In other posts he also referred to Labour’s antisemitism crisis as a “smear”, worried that leadership hopeful Rebecca Long Bailey might be a “Zionist”, and suggested that Mr Austin might engage in bestiality.

Mr Austin was one of a number of Labour MPs in the previous parliament who resigned from the Labour Party in disgust towards its institutional antisemitism. He is also an honorary patron of Campaign Against Antisemitism.

The revelations were made by a fellow Labour and union activist.

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.

Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Antisemitism Barometer 2019 showed that antisemitism on the far-left of British politics has surpassed that of the far-right.

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.