Lovejoy actor and Labour candidate Chris Jury reportedly peddled antisemitic conspiracies

Chris Jury, an actor on Lovejoy and now a Labour council candidate, has reportedly peddled antisemitic conspiracies and alleged that there is no evidence at all that the Labour Party has a particular problem with antisemitism.

Mr Jury who played the character Eric in Lovejoy, a popular British television comedy-drama-mystery series in the 1980s, has also appeared in Doctor Who and Grange Hill. He is running to be a Labour councillor on Stratford-On-Avon Council in the upcoming local elections.

According to MailOnline, in a blog entitled “I Am Not A Number”, Mr Jury posted antisemitic tropes.

In one post published in March, Mr Jury allegedly wrote: “My disgust at the cynical abuse of the memory of the 6 million [Jews murdered by the Nazis] by the right-wing of the Labour Party, aided and abetted by the Israeli Embassy, grows daily and has left me despairing for the future of the Labour Party. There is no evidence at all that the Labour Party has a particular problem with antisemitism.” He also defended Chris Williamson in that article.

The International Definition of Antisemitism adopted by the British Government and the Labour Party, states that “Manifestations [of antisemitism] might include the targeting of the State of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity…Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for ‘why things go wrong’.”

In another post from April 2017, Mr Jury concluded that: “70 years after the defeat of the Nazis their racist, colonial, Eurocentric, moral degeneracy is still playing out in the Middle-East.”

Under the International Definition of Antisemitism, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is antisemitic.

In a tweet from August last year, Mr Jury also said that British politics was being “subverted” and antisemitism was being “weaponised by the Right of the Labour Party…”

Mr Jury reportedly stood by his comments in a statement to the MailOnline. He also posted on Facebook, downplaying antisemitism in Labour, writing: “The Labour Party has 500,000 members and I know only a few hundred of them so I obviously cannot claim that there are literally no antisemites in the Labour Party, only that I have never seen any substantive evidence that it is a particularly prevalent problem in the Labour Party and certainly not a problem on a scale that could warrant the sustained level of attack on the party over the three years since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader.”

He continued that: “If the Israeli Embassy has played such a role, it is also perfectly legitimate to point that out as it may partly explain how and why this issue has come to such prominence since Corbyn was elected.”

He added that: “I do not oppose Israel or a Jewish state of Israel, I simply support the Palestinian cause. I believe that just as the Jewish people are entitled to live at peace in their traditional homeland so are the Palestinians.”

Mr Jury’s conspiracy theories about a secretive cabal of politicians in league with the Israeli government to use the Holocaust against Jeremy Corbyn and Chris Williamson are utterly repulsive. He seems to think that all of the Jewish Labour members calling for solidarity and help over the most vile antisemitic abuse are in fact part of a right-wing Israeli-run plot and worthy only of suspicion or even contempt. It is no surprise that he feels right at home in the Labour Party.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has begun pre-enforcement proceedings against the Labour Party following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant. The pre-enforcement proceedings are a precursor to opening a full statutory investigation.

In recent months, eleven MPs have resigned from the Labour Party over antisemitism, along with numerous councillors and Party members.

Almost 50,000 people have now signed our petition denouncing Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite and declaring him “unfit to hold any public office.”