Jewish Voice for Labour activist who described Jewish organisations as being “in the gutter” to address Holocaust Memorial Day event organised by Socialist Workers Party

Glyn Secker, who said that Jewish organisations are “in the gutter” and “part of the problem”, will reportedly be addressing a Holocaust Memorial Day event organised by the Socialist Workers Party.

Mr Secker, who is the Secretary of the antisemitism-denial group and sham Jewish representative organisation, Jewish Voice for Labour, is one of three speakers who will participate in the event, titled “Never Again: Lessons of the Holocaust”, scheduled to take place on 27th January in East London. The event has been put together by the Tower Hamlets branch of the controversial organisation, Stand Up to Racism, which is linked to the Socialist Workers Party.

Although the event is intended to “remember the victims of the Holocaust and to commit ourselves to fight racism today,” Mr Secker has spent the last several years campaigning in support for the antisemitic leader of the institutionally antisemitic Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

Mr Secker also has a history of controversial remarks about Jews, including holding American rabbis responsible for fuelling the neo-Nazis behind recent antisemitic terrorism in the United States, including the fatal terrorist attack on a synagogue in Poway, California. Mr Secker claimed that they were “unleashing the extreme-right to win key votes in marginal states which determine the presidency”. He has also called Labour MPs who are “friends of Israel” a “fifth column in the Labour Party.”

“What on earth are Jews doing in the gutter with these rats?” Mr Secker has asked, after claiming that the “Zionist Federation embraces the [far-right] English Defence League”, which is a fabrication. He has also claimed: “Here’s a warning to the [British] Jewish leadership, while you foment your campaign of allegations of antisemitism against Corbyn and the left to silence Israel’s critics, while you cry wolf month after month, year after year in the Labour Party and remain blind to the explosion of the far-right and Islamophobia, you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem…You serve to protect the poison that would destroy both our freedom and yours. Well brothers and sisters, we are on the side of the Palestinians. We are on the side of the freedom marchers of ghetto Gaza.”

Mr Secker has also defended Ken Livingstone’s conspiratorial remarks about Adolf Hitler’s supposed support for Zionism, and told Labour activists at a Dulwich and West Norwood branch meeting in February 2019 that claims of antisemitism in the Party had been “made up in order to discredit the leadership.”

Mr Secker, who has reportedly admitted to having previously been a member of the Socialist Workers Party, was briefly suspended from the Labour Party, but it was revealed last March that Mr Corbyn’s key aide, Andrew Murray, intervened in the case, reportedly writing an e-mail saying that Mr Corbyn was “interested in this one”. Mr Secker’s suspension was lifted.

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

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.