“Jew process” Labour councillor Jo Bird fails in bid to join Party’s ruling NEC
The controversial Labour councillor, Jo Bird, has failed in her bid to join the Labour Party’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC).
Cllr Bird sought election to the NEC in one of the two open spots for representatives of Constituency Labour Parties. One of the spots was vacated when the controversial former chair of Labour’s Disciplinary Panel, Claudia Webb, was elected to Parliament.
With over 46,000 votes, Cllr Bird placed fourth, just over 10,000 votes short of the top two spots.
She was endorsed by antisemitism-denial group and sham Jewish representative organisation, Jewish Voice for Labour, Labour Left Alliance and Labour Representation Committee, a pro-Corbyn pressure group with a long history of belittling claims of antisemitism and publishing extremely disturbing articles. The Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, is its President.
Cllr Bird recently had her second suspension from the Labour Party lifted within days, clearing the way for her to run for the NEC and had been considered to be a frontrunner in the race.
Cllr Bird represents the Bromborough Ward on Wirral Council and has a long history of controversy relating to Jews, including renaming ‘due process’ in the Labour Party as “Jew process”, for which she was suspended; supporting the expelled Labour activist and friend of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Marc Wadsworth, who was thrown out of the Party after a confrontation with Jewish then-MP Ruth Smeeth; and worrying about the “privileging of racism against Jews, over and above — as more worthy of resources than other forms of racism.”
Elected to Wirral Council in August 2018, Cllr Bird is a member of Jewish Voice for Labour, and she has described Labour’s institutional antisemitism as based on mere “accusations, witch-huntery and allegations without evidence”.
Cllr Bird rejoined the Labour Party in 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn was running for the Party’s leadership, and last year she had previously been tipped to become a candidate to replace Dame Louise Ellman, a Jewish MP who quit Labour prior to the election due to antisemitism.
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.
