• THANKS to the CNJ for the recent extensive coverage of the Labour leader’s views about the party’s councillor selection / deselection process and the warnings / suspensions / exclusions of party members.

Sir Keir Starmer apparently believes (CNJ, March 24; and Simon Pearson’s letter, March 31) that (a) the selection process was fair and “the same for everybody” and (b) that “most of the party suspensions were to do with anti-Semitism”. Both these assertions are simply wrong.

From 2020 the annual Labour Party rule books have stated that councillor selection should be made by Local Government Committees democratically composed, as both Bernard Miller and Linda Lefevre have indicated in these pages, of members elected by trade unions, by constituency Labour Party members, and by the Labour group.

Yet Sir Keir’s constituency party chose to run the process under a “Local Campaign Forum” (LCF) led by Mike Katz, chair of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). In adopting an institution ditched by the 2019 Labour conference, the constituency party has broken party rules.

As to anti-Semitism it is literally impossible to believe that the 50+ Jewish party members in the UK (including many in London and in this constituency) who have been served warnings / suspensions / expulsions for alleged anti-Semitism are remotely anti-Semitic.

They may be critical of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, question the notion that the Labour Party was ever “over-run” by anti-Semitism, or support the idea of an Israel / Palestine region founded upon equal human rights of all its citizens. It is absurd to associate these positions with anti-Semitism.

Sir Keir and colleagues seem either unaware, or in denial, of the increasing number of Israeli organisations (Bereaved Parents Circle, Combatants for Peace, Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, Breaking the Silence, Check Point Watch and many more) that strive to combat what B’tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, has described as “Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation”.

These associations oppose “mainstream” Israeli government-speak about the occupation and related issues. Echoes of their struggles are found here in the UK in the relation between the two major Jewish community organisations, the JLM and Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), the group generally sympathetic to the above-mentioned movements in Israel.

The constituency’s LCF manoeuvres have effectively been part of a wider process designed to elevate ranking members of the JLM within the party and its councillor representatives while rejecting all likely to be sympathetic to JVL.

In sum, the constituency’s selection process has broken decent party rules. One consequence has been that the party has also become engaged by proxy, in a decidedly one-sided way, with struggles about the nature of the Israeli state and its immediate region. This has involved raising discrimination to new heights and is very far from being fair.

TOM SELWYN,
Address supplied