After watching the Labour Files I will never vote for Keir Starmer

Pic: Al Jazeera

Vaseem Ahmed says he will never vote Labour again under its current regime after watching Al Jazeera’s Labour Files documentary series.

I finally got round to completing all four episodes of Al Jazeera’s Labour Files documentary recently which is based on leaked Labour documents. It was painful but necessary viewing.

And after watching it I can safely say that I will NEVER vote for Labour under this current set up, and if you are involved in the Labour Party in ANY capacity and you are silent then you are definitely part of the problem and not the solution.

As most of us suspected, the documentary revealed that antisemitism was largely weaponised to destroy former left-wing, pro-Palestinian Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Unsurprisingly, Jews who supported justice for Palestinians were six times more likely to be investigated/suspended/expelled from Labour for antisemitism than non-Jews.

There was also a deliberate conflation between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel – a concern which many of us had with the IHRA definition of antisemitism which Labour has adopted and which has been heavily promoted by the pro-Israel lobby.

Labour leader Keir Starmer himself says he doesn’t believe Israel is an apartheid regime despite Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’tselem confirming that it is. Go figure!

And pro-Palestinian voices have pretty much been silenced inside the party, as activists in the documentary talked about “walking on eggshells.”

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Here are some other highlights (or lowlights) from the programme:

  • It revealed that Muslims in Newham, London, (where there is a large Muslim population) were accused by Labour of trying to “inflitrate” the party, which smacks of the Trojan Hoax affair in Birmingham and once again reflects the “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” role Muslims play in politics in the UK. Many of these Newham activists were suspended or expelled. And even the local press was hacked!
  • Left wing MPs and activists have and are being hounded out of the party, with a complete lack of natural justice in the way the Labour Party machinery is run. It’s like a corrupt mafia. Imagine what they would be like if they came to power! This is very much on-going with the deselection attempts of MPs on the Left and a complete lack of democracy where local parties are given long lists of hand-picked candidates from the centre rather than locally
  • There is definitely a hierarchy of racism within the Labour Party, where accusations of antisemitism even from outside the party lead to immediate suspension with questions asked later. This should be contrasted with accusations of racism and Islamophobia from BAME and Muslims which are largely ignored or not taken seriously. WhatsApp messages between Labour HQ members talk about “stabbing Corbyn” and have pictures of pickaxes when referring to Diane Abbott. And no action has been taken against anyone for this! It’s sick!
  • The Forde Inquiry was undertaken by the Labour Party and now the party itself disagrees with many of the findings. Moreover, the report has been kicked into the long grass. Published in July, it found that there is an overt and underlying culture of racism among party staff. It also found that in prioritising cases of antisemitism, the party was “in effect operating a hierarchy of racism or of discrimination” where other forms of racism were being “ignored.”

The silence from the Labour Party and the mainstream media (with very few notable exceptions) on both the Forde Inquiry and the Labour Files is deafening and sickening all at once.

Again, this smacks of the Trojan Hoax affair. One can only imagine if something similar had occurred under Corbyn, what the reaction would have been. Allahu Alim.

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