Labour’s Mayor of Hackney condemns suggestion by his own partner that a leading Jewish charity will select the Party’s new General Secretary

The Mayor of Hackney, from the Labour Party, has condemned a suggestion by his own partner that a leading Jewish charity will select the Party’s new General Secretary after the resignation of Jennie Formby, whose tenure was marred by the institutional antisemitism under her watch.

Craig Parr, who is the local Labour Party’s LGBT officer, tweeted the comment, as well as a further comment that the Jewish charity had lifted a fictional “gagging order” thereby permitting discussion of the leaked Labour report into how the Party dealt with antisemitism amid alleged factional infighting at Labour headquarters. Following allegations of data and privacy breaches, as well as threats to Jewish individuals mentioned in that report, the Party is investigating the leak.

Mayor Philip Glanville reacted to the tweets when asked by local media, saying: “I wholeheartedly disagree with these comments, they were completely unacceptable.”

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.