One Labour candidate and one member of Labour’s NEC administered Facebook group assisting members accused of Holocaust denial
It has emerged that two senior Labour figures — one a general election candidate and the other a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) — were administrators of a Facebook group reportedly set up in order to assist Party members subject to internal disciplinary investigations, including over antisemitism.
One candidate involved in the Facebook group, which is called ‘Labour Party Compliance: Suspensions Expulsions Rejections Co-Op’, is Maria Carroll, Labour’s general election hopeful in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr in Wales. Although Ms Carroll claimed never to have seen any offensive material in the Facebook group, Welsh Labour reported her to the Labour Party, which subsequently decided that no investigation would take place as Ms Carroll did not make any antisemitic comments herself. Ms Carroll said that she would have “immediately condemned them” had she seen offensive comments.
Another administrator was Darren Williams, a member of Labour’s NEC, which oversees the Party’s disciplinary issues, including antisemitism.
Yet another figure involved in the group was Colin O’Driscoll, a co-chair of Labour International and a senior figure in the international wing of Momentum, the pro-Corbyn pressure group.
One member of the group was Alan Bull, who had shared a post on social media suggesting that the Holocaust was a hoax and other controversial material. However, it took the Labour compliance unit eight months to suspend Mr Bull in a saga that neatly illustrated Labour’s institutional antisemitism, as Mr Bull’s critics were hounded out of the Party. It is unclear whether Mr Bull’s membership of this Facebook group – and any advice he received as a member – contributed to the delay in his suspension.
This is hardly the first time the NEC has found itself embroiled in controversy over Holocacust issues. Claudia Webb, also a general election candidate for the Labour Party and the chair of the NEC’s disputes panel, which oversees the Party’s disciplinary processes, defended Ken Livingstone after he compared a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard and claimed that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is being “smeared” with “false allegations”. Ms Webb was appointed to her role after her predecessor, Christine Shawcroft, resigned from the role and then from the NEC entirely after a leaked email revealed she had sent an email backing a Party member who had been suspended over alleged Holocaust denial.
A spokesman for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “This is yet another episode illustrating Labour’s institutional antisemitism: two senior Labour figures are found to be associated with a Facebook group that helps Holocaust-denying members avoid the Party’s disciplinary processes. Those two individuals will not be investigated at all by the Party, and conveniently it transpires that one of them sits on Labour’s National Executive Committee, which oversees the Party’s investigatory and disciplinary processes. Plainly, Labour’s internal processes are not fit for purpose, regardless of what its leader and frontbenchers try to claim.”
On 28th May, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.
In recent months, thirteen MPs and three peers have resigned from the Labour Party over antisemitism, along with a large number of MEPs, councillors and members.
Over 58,000 people have now signed our petition denouncing Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite and declaring him “unfit to hold any public office.”
On 8th December, regardless of religion, race or politics, Jews and non-Jews alike will gather in Parliament Square to declare that they stand together against antisemitism in the face of Jew-hatred in politics and mounting anti-Jewish hate crime.
