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Tag: Labour Friends of Israel

  • TWO-FIFTHS OF KEIR STARMER’S CABINET HAVE BEEN FUNDED BY PRO-ISRAEL LOBBYISTS

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    Image features the Labour Party's Keith Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting and Rupert Murdoch. Thanks to the Skwawkbox for the image.
    Image features the Labour Party’s Keith Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting and Rupert Murdoch. Thanks to the Skwawkbox for the image.

    https://www.declassifieduk.org/two-fifths-of-keir-starmers-cabinet-have-been-funded-by-pro-israel-lobbyists/

    Some 13 of the 31 members of Labour’s shadow cabinet have received donations from a prominent pro-Israel lobby group or individual funder, it can be revealed. 

    The list of recipients includes party leader Keir Starmer, his deputy Angela Rayner, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, and even the former vice-chair of Labour Friends of Palestine, Lisa Nandy, who is now shadow international development minister.

    These donations were provided by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a pro-Israel lobby group which takes MPs on “fact-finding” missions to the region, and Sir Trevor Chinn, a multi-millionaire business tycoon and long-time pro-Israel lobbyist.

    More than half of Starmer’s shadow cabinet are listed as parliamentary supporters or officers of LFI.

    …

    Pro-Israel lobbying

    Sir Trevor Chinn is a British multi-millionaire who has spent decades working in the motor industry, chairing such organisations as the AA, the RAC, and Kwikfit.

    Chinn is also a longstanding pro-Israel lobbyist. Since the 1980s, he has funded LFI and Conservative Friends of Israel and played a leading role in groups such as Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) and the Jewish Leadership Council.

    The Guardian described BICOM in 2009 as “Britain’s most active pro-Israeli lobbying organisation – which flies journalists to Israel on fact-finding trips and organises access to senior government figures”. 

    It added that the organisation had “received nearly £1.4m in two years from a billionaire donor whose father made a fortune manufacturing arms in Israel”, referring to Poju Zabludowicz, a London-based business tycoon.

    Starmer received a £50,000 donation from Chinn during his campaign for the Labour leadership in 2020 – and failed to declare this until after he’d won the election.

    Declassified has found that Chinn has donated to eight other members of the shadow cabinet, including Rayner, Lammy, Reeves, Streeting, shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson, shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall, and shadow environment secretary Steve Reed.

    …

    https://www.declassifieduk.org/two-fifths-of-keir-starmers-cabinet-have-been-funded-by-pro-israel-lobbyists/

  • State of the UK Labour Party

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    Two articles about the UK Labour Party, Craig Murray discusses the pointless Keir Starmer:

    …

    Starmer’s role has been simply to emasculate the Labour Party, and to purge it of any elements that might seek to pose a threat to rampant neo-liberalism and wealth inequality. His efforts to ban Labour MPs from supporting striking railway workers must be anathema to anybody who has the slightest feel for the history and traditions of that party and indeed the most basic understanding of its very raison d’etre.

    This Tony Benn quote from the 1980’s has come into vogue because it is prophetic, and the process appears now complete:

    If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media – having tasted blood – would demand next that it expelled all its Socialists and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.

    Starmer is in one sense the apotheosis of this process. Not only has he acted to purge the Labour Party of socialism, he also offers so very little of a meaningful alternative to the Tories that there is very little danger of the Tories being voted out of office. Not only is he a safe right-wing backstop, he is a self-redundant safe right-wing backstop.

    …

    Jeremy Corbyn Sophie Brown, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    and Jeremy Corbyn openly discusses the many parties that obstructed him. The article also discusses Julian Assange.

    …

    The Guardian has long been viewed as the voice of the liberal-left in Britain, so it surprised many during the Corbyn leadership to see it act as one of the main media vehicles through which the campaign to bring him down was fought. 

    The paper was a key part of the “anti-semitism crisis” that engulfed Corbyn’s leadership. From 2016-19, the Guardian published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-semitism, an average of around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. 

    In the same period, the Guardian published just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party’s much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example, found that nearly half of the Tory party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister. 

    The Guardian’s coverage of anti-semitism in Labour was suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggested that the issue was being used politically.

    The late Jewish anthropologist David Graeber commented after the 2019 election: “As for the Guardian, we will never forget that during the ‘Labour antisemitism controversy’, they beat even the Daily Mail to include the largest percentage of false statements, pretty much every one, mysteriously, an accidental error to Labour’s disadvantage”.

    …

    Keir Starmer says he is scrapping Labour’s manifesto and ‘starting from scratch’ on policy